Illegal to be Jewish?
1. “Massachusetts Lawmakers Asked to Ban Infant Male Circumcision.” What the %&$*#! Thank goodness not a single Massachusetts Lawmaker has signed on to co-sponsor this bill that would, um, make being a Jew illegal. Read the bill if you think you can handle it – warning, it’s not for queasy stomachs or small children.
2. “Home Valu: New Criminal Investigation.” Uh oh. Former Senator (and MOT) Rudy Boschwitz is in trouble. The home improvement chain he founded is being sued by dozens of subcontractors accusing the company of collecting thousands of dollars from customers and then not paying the subs that completed the jobs. Great. Another Jew making the news for accusations of swindling. Folks – this doesn’t help our reputation! Seriously.
3. “IDF Operation Canceled Due to Facebook Status.” Think all Jews are smart? Check out this now-imprisoned bozo. An Israeli soldier informs his friends on FB that his secret battalion is headed towards a specific Palestinian village. Luckily somehow the IDF got wind of this (they know everything, really), called off the operation and locked up the soldier. Supposedly this isn’t the first time one of their soldiers has put his comrades at risk by FBing or tweeting. Fabulous.
4. Smut for Smut: College Students Trading Bibles for Porn. Hmmm… College students equating the story of Moses with Playboy? Not really sure I get the point of doing so, other than really pissing people off, but you have to admit it’s ballsy. And makes for a great news headline.
5. Hate Crime on Campus. A Jewish student at UC Davis gets a swastika carved into their dorm room door. Excuse me? Who the F— carves a swastika into someone’s door? Another reason – after the glorious, sunny, wonderful weather they’re having while we’re freezing our tushes off – to hate Californians.
(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
Sadly, the news on the swastika in the UC Davis dorms didn’t even surprise me.
Just in the 3 years that I was in college at UC Berkeley, we had a cinder block thrown through the Berkeley Hillel windows, eggs thrown at people existing Yom Kippur services, and 2 instances of serious beatings of Jews around campus, both ending people up at the hospital, and at least one accompanied by Nazi salutes. The antisemitic graffity around town, both in Berkeley and at UC Santa Barbara, wasn’t even worth talking about. In 2001, I remember the UC Davis Hillel roof being set on fire.
It was extremely common for guys leaving Shabbat services to walk to their dorms or frat houses, to very conspicuously remove their yarmulkas, saying they weren’t brave enough to walk around campus with them in the evenings.
I know many of us think that all that stuff is over and done for, and never happens in the United States anymore, and maybe that’s even true in Minnesota (although I wonder about the police protection at every large Jewish community event), but it certainly isn’t true in liberal, open-minded Northern California, at least on the college campuses.
Jenna, I’ve *literally* been thinking about your comment all day. As a UCD alum, that was the Jewish news that struck a chord with me. So sad, and to me so unexpected! I haven’t lived in CA in over a decade now and I have to say that my image/ memory of it was a lot more “rose tinted” than you described. Thanks for opening my eyes a bit. As you eluded to, kind of odd for such a liberal place, right?
Galit,
I think you’re right that things used to be better in California. It started getting worse toward the late 90’s, and things got really bad after 2000. For the past decade, San Francisco, Berkeley, and all the other California colleges that tend to be heavily inspired by them, have become very unpleasant places in some ways. It might have started out being about politics in some way, but it crossed the line a long time ago into just being about Jews.
You’re absolutely right to call out that for some reason, this does seem to happen in the most open minded, liberal, freedom- and equality-oriented places. Somehow, in San Francisco and its environs, people seem to have somehow forgotten that freedom of speech and religion are supposed to mean the freedom to say and be things that other people don’t like, free of violence, threat, or fear.