Drinking the Manishewitz
Mon Sep 24, 2007 at 07:14:36 AM PDT
WOID XVII-46. Drinking the Manishewitz
In 1183 – or was it 1216, or 1445? – At the conclusion of the Easter sermon, crowds of Christians ran through the streets of Toledo (or York, or Mainz), shouting "Death to the Jews!" I suppose it was a coincidence that the crowds had just stood through a long sermon in the Christian church in which the topic of the evils of Jewry played a prominent part.
So perhaps it’s just a coincidence that in the days immediately following Yom Kippur the streets of New York are filled with rage – against Iran, this time. I’m sitting in a Starbucks, half a mile from the UN, and there’s a young man shouting on his cell-phone, gliding from a conversation about his fast the day before to the size of the tits on his latest date to the casual statement that the CIA should send an undercover agent to murder the President of Iran and maybe he’ll murder Ahmadinejad himself when he comes to Columbia.
I wonder how long that conversation would have lasted if the man had been a Muslim. It’s likely any sermon in any mosque on any Friday in New York has a couple of undercovers in the audience; how many cops were present when that young man attended the sermon at the synagogue down the street? Because (I can tell you from experience), this is the kind of homicidal ranting you’ll hear every day wherever certain classes of observant Jews get together, but, as in a Medieval pogrom, it takes an extra something to fan the flames.
Twenty-five years ago it was, I think, almost to the day, a small group of Jewish activists decided to go picket, first the Israeli Embassy, then the PLO Mission to the UN. It was a Saturday, and the streets in Midtown were deserted except for the dozen of us and a couple of dozen cops. So we’re standing there blowing our shofar, and then who should pull up but Meir Kahane and his gang. Kahane jumps on top of the hood of his caddy and starts to scream at us through a bullhorn. Then, out of nowhere comes the Mitzvah Tank, and the Hasidim pour out with the tefillin: "Are you Jewish?" they say - to us, not to Kahane. And the cops are splitting their sides, laughing.
Karl Marx, in famous, contentious essay, pointed out that Judaism had not survived in spite of Christianity but because it complemented Christianity. Jews had been reduced to doing the dirty work for Christians. Christian pogroms and Jewish rage, in this reading, are two sides of the same instrumental coin. But I’m sorry to say right now the Christians seem to be ahead in this game. I’ve long thought the revulsion of many Christians (meaning ethnic, not practicing Christians) against the Fundamentalists was overblown: there has to be something good in Christian faith, even after the bigots are done with it. Jews, for their part, seem to believe it’s enough, when you’re confronted with Jewish hate-speech, to shrug and say that, well, this doesn’t represent all Jews. I have to respect those Christians who respond, "If this is a Christian, then I’m no Christian." If these are Jews I want my foreskin back.
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