“One of the streams under the floorboards of Western culture is antisemitism. When people need it, they just dig it up. We don’t want to repeat it. And we do, over and over again.”—Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
When Jews are targeted by racists, how is trying to whitewash that racism by decrying prejudice against all “non-Christian religious faiths” not a form of erasure of Jews? Why is it so hard for some people to say the word “Jew” or “Jewish”? In 2021, can’t we at least all agree that if you hate Jews, you’re an antisemite, or even more accurately, a Jew-hater?
It’s hard to understand what would motivate someone to trivialize or whitewash Jew-hatred, also commonly referred to as “antisemitism,” which is a misnomer given that the term technically refers to discrimination of those with Semitic characteristics and hearkens back to the “scientific racism” of the 19th century. But there’s nothing scientific about Jew-hatred: it is an ancient, ongoing, virulent and mutating form of bigotry.
But there’s nothing scientific about Jew-hatred: it is an ancient, ongoing, virulent and mutating form of bigotry.
The virus of Jew-hatred is strong. Jews are Communists, they say. They are money-grubbing capitalists. They are tribal. They are globalists. They are the beneficiaries of “white privilege.” They pollute the bloodlines of “white Caucasians.”
The very first step of any attempt at curing and inoculating people against this pathological disease is to call out Jew-hatred by name. Pointing out the existence and presence of Jew-hatred is not, of course, in and of itself a remedy for the bigotry and persecution associated with antisemitism.
But it’s really the only place to start.
This June the Culver City City Council passed a resolution “acknowledging the racial history of Culver City.”
The resolution mentions the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacist organizations that met in Culver City. It calls out the discrimination suffered by “African Americans” and “other people of color.”
It talks about teaching “the United States’ white supremacist origins” in Culver City schools.
It talks about racially restrictive covenants and deed restrictions that “restricted African Americans, other people of color and those of non-Christian religious faiths from housing and land ownership within Culver City.”
While the Culver City council is to be commended for trying to tackle the thorny subject of the City’s racial history, not mentioning Jew-hatred by name effectively whitewashes the history of Jew-hatred in Culver City and erases the lived experiences of Jewish people, as I pointed out before the resolution was adopted in a letter to the Council.
The fix would have been a relatively simple one. Leaving aside the fact that Jews are a people (sui generis, constituting a class in itself, I would suggest) not just members of a “religious faith,” the Culver City Council majority could have directly acknowledged and called out the city’s history of anti-Jewish racism by inserting two words. When listing those impacted by racism in Culver City, it could have and should have talked about “African Americans, other people of color, Jews and those of other non-Christian religious faiths.”
Culver City has a history of bigotry, including specifically toward Jews, from a cross-burning on the lawn of Jewish resident in the 1950s after Jews resolved to build a synagogue, to antisemitic vandalism last month.
Culver City has a history of bigotry, including specifically toward Jews, from a cross-burning on the lawn of Jewish resident in the 1950s after Jews resolved to build a synagogue, to antisemitic vandalism last month.
Perhaps the reluctance of the Culver City Council majority to specifically acknowledge the city’s unwelcoming history when it comes to Jews has to do with the fact that some don’t consider light-skinned Jews to be “people of color” or an oppressed people.
Many Jews, even those who may have lighter skin and could “pass” (if we remove our kippot), do not consider ourselves to be “white.” We know history all too well. We remember the “Jews won’t replace us” chants of white supremacists. We are aware of anti-religious prejudice that has hounded Jews through the millennia because we were not willing to give up our faith or Peoplehood, and we know the history of the race-based prejudice toward Jews that gained traction in the 19th century.
The skin color of Jews didn’t help us in Germany. The skin color of Jews offered us no privileges wherever and however we were subjected to anti-Jewish violence and pogroms around the world.
After my letter was published in the Jewish Journal, I received a note from an individual who shared his own experience in Culver City. He wrote that in 1947 he was a five-year-old child and his parents were looking to buy their first home. They found a house in Culver City and were playing outside with some children on the block, when the father of the children came out and grabbed his two sons where were playing with the Jewish five-year-old and his older brother. As they walked away, his brother heard the father say “Don’t ever play with those Jews again.” The nine-year-old brother told his parents and the parents did not buy the house, but instead built one in Beverlywood, where the family made a home and thrived.
Just as other groups experiencing housing discrimination were pushed into certain neighborhoods, many Jewish people congregated in Beverlywood, which was more welcoming to Jews than Culver City. The community they formed in Beverlywood, in which they could live together as Jews, exists to this day, as does the Jewish character of the neighboring Pico-Robertson area, which is also adjacent to the part of Beverly Hills where I live.
Interestingly, the same Culver City Council majority that could not bring themselves to call out anti-Jewish discrimination by name is in the process of outlawing single-family neighborhoods in Culver City because of the city’s “history and legacy of racism.”
Yet their refusal to acknowledge anti-Jewish discrimination and call out Jew-hatred by name in their resolution simply perpetuates the hurt felt by many Jewish people at the ongoing trivialization of antisemitism within our society. Not calling it out by name only increases the sense of insecurity felt by many Jews throughout the world because our unique history of discrimination, persecution and suffering has not been acknowledged.
Within Jewish culture, the traditional greeting of “Shalom aleichem” (“peace be upon you”) is answered by “Aleichem shalom” (“to you, peace”). Not responding intentionally to the greeting is considered to be a fairly grievous insult within Jewish culture. Sadly—though perhaps not unsurprisingly in this day and age—it feels like the Culver City Council majority has made a conscious decision to snub the Jewish community in its unwillingness to call Jew-hatred out by name and not to answer, as it were, “Aleichem shalom.”
Instead, in response to bigotry toward Jewish people, we’re left with a whitewashing version of “All lives matter.”
And that’s just not good enough. Jew-hatred. Antisemitism. Anti-Jewish racism. Say its name.
John Mirisch has served on the Beverly Hills City Council since 2009, including three terms as mayor. He is currently a garden-variety councilmember.
