‘You’re Better Off Sleeping, Herschel’

For most Jews, regardless of denomination or lack thereof, watching the raucous supposedly “Free Palestine” demonstrations, teeming with antisemitic tropes and disingenuous attempts to not conflate antizionism with modern Judaism, is like a stab through the heart.

“Scratch a gentile and you get an antisemite,” was one cynical saying I heard intoned among the Holocaust survivors I knew (my father among them) when I was growing up. Thankfully, that didn’t turn out to be true when it came to my circle of friends and associates. But sadly, I have borne witness to more than a handful of antisemitic slights, slurs and jokes at my expense over the years and usually from people I would least expect.

There’s the father of an elementary school classmate/friend who, after I declined an invitation for a family dinner on account of rushing home for the first Passover seder, cracked “The only good Jew is a dead Jew.” My friend, not knowing what to do, burst into gales of laughter. Though I was probably 10 at the time, I didn’t laugh.

I did share this “joke” with my father, a child survivor of the Holocaust and my mother, a first-generation Israeli, the daughter of a fervent Zionist and member of the Haganah (an early Israeli paramilitary organization that would later morph into the IDF). Her father had smuggled Jewish refugees into Palestine past the British blockade and later died of complications from a fall he sustained while he and his colleagues were hiding from British police. Neither of them laughed (and no, I never went back to my classmate’s home).

There’s the college roommate who told me with a straight face that my problem was that I was Jewish. She also used to make numerous cracks about how certain Jews should have been “Auschwitzed.”

Then there was the old boyfriend who told me that because he grew up in a predominantly gentile community in the South, I was the third Jew he ever met. I remember him telling me that antisemitism was so pervasive in his hometown that it was standard for residents to use “Jew” in a derogatory context, usually as a verb meaning to fleece or steal money from someone.

“I jewed him out of 10 dollars,” he would recount.

Ever since the Oct. 7 Hamas-led pogrom, antisemitism has intensified to such a degree I’ve noticed I’m no longer so amenable to spending time with people whom I suspect freely support such sentiment. Work obligations are one thing but when I’m off the clock, I’m off the grid — with them. And so many of them. That includes fellow Jews who also like to join the Israel-hating brigade for fear of being ostracized by the cool kids. They break my heart the most because when I see them I remember how assimilation and a love for all things German didn’t prevent the majority of my father’s family from being rounded up and shot on a Latvian beach or in a forest. The peer approval they crave will end up biting them in the face and it won’t be pretty.

Last weekend, my mother and I visited my father’s grave. We were initially planning to do so on Father’s Day but Mom wasn’t feeling well, so we postponed it. Usually, when we pay our respects to his final resting place, we always talk aloud as though he was still here, still alive in the flesh, ready to answer. This time, we both felt an overpowering weariness that we haven’t felt in ages — a resignation that as things seemingly evolve and change, they also revert back to a familiar, depressing cycle. In this case, it’s the noxious contagion of antisemitism.

“Thank goodness, you’re not here Herschel,” Mom said to the headstone where the words “Shoah Survivor” are delicately inscribed for posterity. “You’re better off sleeping.”

It was the first time we didn’t long for him to be alive again.

Iris Dorbian is a journalist and author. Her upcoming third edition of “An Epiphany in Lilacs,” a coming-of-age story set in a displaced persons camp in post-WWII Germany and loosely inspired by her father’s experiences as a 14-year-old Holocaust survivor, will be published by Sunbury Press.