My answer for why I moved to Israel used to be that I didn’t want my children to be called kikes. That was the truest answer, but it created awkward silences and uncomfortable smiles, so I stopped saying it most of the time. You see, 18 years ago, when I started my freshman year of high school, a new black friend nervously explained to me the terrible meaning of the word I had just been called. It had been said in passing. It had been said as a joke. I had to look up the full explanation of word. My high school, unlike the public high school my friends in Squirrel Hill went to, didn’t feed from the Jewish neighborhood and the African American ones; it fed from every Pittsburgh neighborhood — including those that had active branches of the KKK (under another name). I went to school with kids who had never met a Jew before they met me, and all they knew of Jews were the bigoted rumors or jokes they had heard.
Before I go on, I want to point out that I never felt anti-Semitism in any form from any black/African American students in my school. In fact, quite the opposite. They were the ones who taught me to stand up for my identity, and what was unacceptable to say. They were the ones to tell me that it was not okay when a teacher called me “JEW” instead of my name, and that other students could not put bacon on me during assemblies (!). They were the ones who encouraged me to go to the guidance counselor when I felt a fellow student was pressuring me about Christianity. Most incidents — aside from the student who vandalized the cemetery and the teacher who went on a tirade starting with, “You Jews think you are better than everyone else,” and ending with “I cannot be an anti-Semite I have A JEWISH FRIEND” — were what are currently called microaggressions. They were small incidents that I never reported, and that the perpetrators of which would never have thought inappropriate to say or do. I should add that I do not think these incidents held me back, I had a big group of friends; I loved my high school. It was just something that happened that most people didn’t even blink an eye about.
I used to joke that being 15 minutes from the Mason-Dixon Line, Pittsburgh was half deep south and half liberal north. I learned about Second Temple Commonwealth history, not the most popular interest for a 15-year-old girl, so I could have a solid response to, “Well, your people killed our lord.” I became a joker. I became very vocal about being Jewish, and I developed my Jewish identity. I’m not saying every white person I went to high school with was anti-Semitic. Not everyone thought that male Jews wore “those beanies” to hide the holes where their horns had been cut off. But enough of them did.
Everyone is in shock that an anti-Semitic attack happened in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, but I am not. Because a few neighborhoods over from where I grew up, there lived people who still burned crosses on their lawns. I have also not heard mention of that last time a Jew was shot in Pittsburgh for being a Jew on his way home from learning in a synagogue, in 1986. Neal (Nati) Rosenblum’s murder took 14 years to solve, despite the fact that his murderer bragged to everyone who would listen that he had killed a “Jew-boy.”
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