A young Jew’s education in anti-Semitism
When I headed off to university in the fall of 1980 — a hairy facsimile of the middle Bee Gee — it was with a sense of security about my place in the world.
I grew up, after all, in suburban North York, an inclusive, Jew-friendly enclave where, by the 1970s, antiSemitism — at least toward those not dressed in traditional religious garb — no longer seemed to exist in any tangible way.
The idea of a cultural mosaic in Canada was gaining ground, fostered by Pierre Trudeau’s multiculturalism initiatives, and a new generation — my generation — had no direct exposure to the visceral hatred of the past.
It wasn’t the Shangri-La of TV’s Happy Days (although I sometimes woke up thinking Tom Bosley was my dad and the Fonz lived next door).
But when I think about it now, I can’t recall a single incident of anyone treating me in a negative way based on my religion. I knew anti-Semitism existed, of course. My parents, like most Jews of their generation, were scrupulous about instilling a sense of recent history.
By the time I came of age in the ’70s, The Holocaust — in which six million Jews were systematically murdered by Nazis — was less than 30 years in the past, a living memory for a tiny, interconnected community that make up only 1 per cent of the Canadian population.
Never mind the fear and paranoia that dogged them during those intolerant postwar years, the signs that read “no Jews or dogs allowed” on Toronto beaches, the restrictive quotas at institutions of higher learning.
Never mind that Canada turned away a ship of German Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis in 1939, relegating many of its 900 passengers to the horrors of the concentration camps, a decision Prime Minister Justin Trudeau formally apologized for this month.
My parents — aware the world could be an unkind place — made a pact with the past, which meant that every Tuesday and Thursday, after regular school, my four siblings and I would pile dutifully into my mom’s beige Datsun and head off for two hours of Hebrew classes.
Oh, man, it’s impossible for me, looking back, to describe the unpleasantness of listening to irritable Israeli instructors with no teaching experience lecture us spoiled suburban brats about the origins of our Jewish faith and the dangers of anti-Semitism.
In the midst of a post-’60s hangover, mired in disco and a laid-back “let it all hang out” ethos, the subject matter didn’t connect to my life, even remotely.
Which is why I tucked a copy of MAD magazine inside my prayer book, a reliable distraction until my temperamental overlords — vocal inflections reaching a thundering crescendo — gesticulated wildly and banished me to the hallway. Not that their efforts were in vain. It was in that musty, dog-eared classroom, I recall, where I first glimpsed the chilling black and white newsreel footage of emaciated Holocaust survivors emerging from liberated concentration camps and learned the tragic history of Jewish persecution.
I was haunted by those glassy-eyed survivors. I knew they had a connection to me. I knew that no matter how unmoored I was from tradition, some small part of my DNA was irrevocably linked with their fate.
Still, I was 13. When I had my bar mitzvah and was formally declared a “man,” I promptly informed my teachers I would no longer be attending Hebrew classes because it interfered with my TV schedule, and that was that.
At which point I became the thing my parents feared most: the Assimilated Jew.
It wasn’t until my arrival in sleepy, white-bread London, Ont., a few years later when — like a boot to the head — the idyllic bubble I lived in exploded with a resounding POP!
“Hey, there’s a penny on the ground — pick it up!” yukked one of my university floor-mates, a blinkered throwback who had never met a Jew in his life. What, really? You’re saying this out loud? With the assurance of someone not attuned to such cultural stupidity, I approached him privately and told him to kindly knock it off, which he did grudgingly, if uncomprehendingly. Mission accomplished.
But that, I was to learn, was the tip of the iceberg. “I got Jewed out of this!” The first time I heard that expression it took me a minute to understand the implication — that Jews, historical moneylenders that we were, would try to cheat you and steal your money.
It was a crass declaration, sprinkled with small town ignorance, and to my great surprise it was on the lips of almost everyone: swimming instructors, shopkeepers, fellow students — always stated with wide-eyed sincerity, like “How do you do?”
After a few months, I began to wonder if, by travelling two hours west on the 401, I had somehow landed on Planet of the Apes?
When I arrived in Kitchener a decade later as film critic for the Record, I figured all that was behind me.
Come on, this was a wholesome community with a rich cultural heritage and inspiring down-to-earth values.
It wasn’t until I came face to face with a cabal of white supremacists holed up in a downtown stereo store that it occurred to me there might be another side.
Why, I wondered, were neo-Nazis preaching hate, shouting “Sieg Heil!” and bringing in speakers like British Holocaust denier David Irving to rally the troops?
I was relieved when, after much soul searching, the community rose as one to stomp out the infestation and formed an intercultural alliance that carries on to this day. But I was also vaguely outraged. Why had it taken seven months for the Kitchener Downtown Business Association to speak out? How could this have been allowed to happen in the first place?
And now — I’m cutting to the chase — there’s Pittsburgh, site of the deadliest attack on Jews in U.S. history, an affirmation, even for secular beings like me, that while old resentments may go underground, they never really disappear.
That it took place almost in tandem with the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) — the pivotal moment when the Nazis declared open war on Germany’s Jewish population — is as sadly ironic as the fact antiSemitic incidents in the U.S. skyrocketed a staggering 57 per cent last year alone. Don’t get too smug, Canada. Embroiled in the toxic shadow of our U.S. master, Statistics Canada report that Jews are still the most frequent targets of religiously motivated hate crimes in this country.
Am I horrified? Of course. Am I surprised? Sadly, no.
Anyone familiar with history knows that Jews — along with Black, brown, Indigenous, LGBTQ people and every other minority group — make great scapegoats when times get tough.
In the aftermath of the devastating Pittsburgh attack, as spiritual leaders quoted piously from the Marvin Gaye songbook — “only love can conquer hate” — I shook my head in disbelief.
You know what conquers hate? Stronger anti-hate laws, rigid enforcement and political leaders who don’t stoke the fires of intolerance with bleating, reality show rhetoric.
And so it goes. My parents are in their 80s now, my dad with Alzheimer’s in a retirement home. They see what’s going on, but their era is over. The torch has been handed to my generation, shocked that our cloak of invulnerability has been so casually punctured, with so little consequence.
If there’s an upside, it’s that as I come to terms with this existential reality check, I feel a surprising debt of gratitude to the perpetually outraged Hebrew instructors who swiped my MAD magazines, determined to cut through my teenaged Canadian lethargy.
Go forth in the world, they said. Embrace life. But understand your past, the ties that bind. Never forget.
I haven’t forgotten and, as dad to two young boys of my own, I’ll make sure that when the time comes, they don’t either.