Daniel calls it by its name - Jew-hatred. Not "anti-Zionism," not "criticism of Israel," not "structural analysis." Jew-hatred. The same hatred as in Poland 1941, Russia 1903, Germany 1938, only with a graduate degree and a keffiyeh.
It stands outside synagogues and shouts. It tears posters of kidnapped children off the walls. It chases Jewish students into libraries. And around it stand universities, journalists, culture ministers, bishops, all saying "one must understand both sides."
F*** ***
They are the same type of human that looked on in 1938. Literally the same. Man has not changed. Only the props have.
Anyone who can write this calmly, this precisely, this fearlessly, deserves a platform. Go read the post. Like it. Follow Daniel.
English translation of the post below.
…
THROUGH THE HOLE IN A BAGEL
I have always held that New York's greatest civilizational achievement was making neurosis into a practical livelihood. And by "always" I mean since I moved there.
It was a boyhood dream of mine, from the age of six or so, that Daniel Direktor and I would move to New York, find an apartment in the Village, and live happily ever after, right up until we had to pay our first month's rent.
It is seven years today since I bought the apartment in Frederiksstaden, and with that returned home for good. A final period at the end of a ten-year sentence.
"Pretend it's a city," said Fran Lebowitz.
In other parts of the world, if you stand on a street corner discussing your childhood with a sandwich, someone will come over and ask if you need help, spit at you, or tell you to shout somewhere else. In New York, they ask where you bought the sandwich, and whether it is better than the one on 28th Street.
I moved to New York just as Obama was elected. It was a particularly dangerous time to move to the United States, because everyone suddenly believed that history had undergone character development. People spoke of hope with a gravity normally reserved for cancer diagnoses and apartments with in-unit washing machines.
Everything was to be redefined.
Politics was to be redefined. The United States was to be redefined. Capitalism was to be redefined. Philanthropy was to be redefined. The media was to be redefined. The internet was to be redefined. The financial markets were to be redefined. Young people were going to redefine global relations, preferably before lunch, and entrepreneurship was, of course, also to be redefined, because nothing says "rebellion against the system" like a name tag, a security check, and a sandwich wrapped in plastic. A time after the Tea Party, but before Occupy.
I myself arrived in the city with the kind of serious ideas one can only entertain before paying a first month's rent in New York. I started NEXUS, and was going to help redefine philanthropy. At The Economist, I was going to help redefine media, information, and "audience." With Sandbox, we were going to redefine global relations among young misfits, artists, writers, entrepreneurs. And later, at the White House, I was going to redefine entrepreneurship.
After a while I began to think that perhaps it was the redefinition itself that needed redefining.
Because that is how human beings are. They love to redefine things. It sounds much better than admitting that one doesn't really know what one is doing. No one says, "I am confused, anxious, ambitious, and possibly driven by a mix of idealism and the need to be invited to better dinners."
One says, "I work with systemic transformation."
It is more polite.
New York was the perfect city for that sort of thing. It receives any new definition, provided you can pay for your own coffee. New York is not a city one moves to. It is a city one consents to be humiliated by, for a fee. It takes your money, your sleep, your sense of human dignity, and occasionally your dryer in the basement, and in return it gives you the full illusion that you are living more intensely than everyone else. This is, of course, not true. You are simply suffering at greater expense.
But I loved it. I really did.
As a now-sadly-departed friend, Michael, who kept a secret bookshop in his apartment because his old antiquarian store had closed thirty years earlier and he was "still looking for a new space," once said to me: "New York is the best lover you can have, except that you have to pay for her, and she mostly consists of venereal diseases."
I loved that one could wake up in the morning with an existential crisis and a new idea, and discover that the whole city was already in the middle of the same crisis, only with better shoes, but that the idea might gather some of the world's most talented minds behind it. I loved the old Jewish men who could turn a bagel into a theological event. I loved the deli counters, where a man could ask whether you wanted lox as if what he were really asking was whether you had made your peace with death.
Because that is how bagels are. They are round, but something is missing in the middle. That is, essentially, the whole of human life. You spend half of it filling the hole, and the other half explaining to your mother why you have not done it properly.
When I think of New York, I do not see skyscrapers first. I see the hole in a bagel.
That small emptiness one stares through, while trying to understand how a civilization that has produced Bernstein, Gershwin, pastrami, Ellis Island, Economist events, young idealists in shirts that are far too neat, and entrepreneurship conferences with more badges than ideas, can simultaneously produce people who stand outside a synagogue shouting slogans with the emotional maturity of a cat denied access to a sofa.
I mostly see it online now. That is an important difference. When I lived in New York, the city came to me physically. It came through the steam of the radiator, through the ceiling, through the neighbors' marriage, through a cab accelerating as if the driver had seen God and was displeased. Now New York comes through little clips. Small cutouts. Demonstrations. Shouting. Faces. Students who look as though they have just discovered the evil of the world and have yet to discover their own rent.
And there they stand. Outside synagogues. With signs. With anger. With that peculiar moral self-assurance which usually belongs only to people under thirty and to dictators.
Two spits from my first apartment in Crown Heights.
They say it isn't about Jews.
It never is.
Antisemitism has always had the courtesy to explain that it is not antisemitism. That is one of its most exhausting traits. It shows up to dinner, eats all the salmon, insults your grandmother, and then says afterwards that you have misread the tone.
In the old days, antisemitism was at least more economical in its language. It said: "We hate you." It was unpleasant, but clear. You knew where you stood. You could pack a bag, move to another city, or at least avoid certain neighborhoods. In New York, the other side of the street.
Now it says: "We are not against Jews, we are against Zionism."
That is more refined. It is like telling your partner: "I have nothing against you personally, I am simply against your body, your name, your home, your memories, your children, and the fact that you continue to breathe in my apartment."
I know that kind of phrasing. New York was full of it. People in New York could turn a breakup into a political resolution. "I feel our relationship reproduces certain inadequate power structures," I was once informed. Which meant she had met a man with better hair and a better job.
It is the same with modern antisemitism. It will not admit what it feels, so it goes to therapy with Marx, Fanon, Foucault, and a graduate student in a headscarf, with a ring binder and a serious lack of grandparents capable of interrupting her.
But beneath it all lies the old thing. The primitive. The unimaginative. The Jew as problem. The Jew as obstacle. The Jew as the explanation for the world's pain.
It is strange, because Jews are not even any good at explaining our own pain. We are still arguing about why Aunt Ruth was not invited to a certain dinner, or why she was at the bar mitzvah.
The notion that we should somehow have organized world history is flattering, but vastly overrated. Most Jewish families cannot organize a birthday party without four insults, two silences, and one person showing up with latkes that no one asked for.
I think that is why antisemitism has always struck me as so stupid. Not harmless. Never harmless. But stupid. Grandiose stupidity. Operatic, epic stupidity. Stupidity with banners.
It looks at a people who have survived pharaohs, empires, pogroms, Nazis, communists, assimilation, bad rabbis, good rabbis, family dinners, and gefilte fish, and concludes: "There must be a secret plan."
There is no secret plan. There is only survival, a bad back, heartburn, strong opinions, and an unhealthy quantity of smoked fish.
When I lived in New York, Jewish life was not an idea. It was a sound. A rhythm. A man shouting into a phone in Hebrew, Yiddish, English, and pure disappointment. A woman who could make a baker feel ashamed of a slice of rye bread. An elderly gentleman walking slowly, not because he was frail, but because he was carrying three thousand years of history and a coat far too heavy for the weather.
It was synagogues nestled between shops. Chabad men on the street. Boys with kippot. Girls with books. Families on their way home. People living, not as argument, but as people.
And perhaps that is precisely why the age of redefinition was so seductive. Because when you stand in New York, young enough still to believe that meetings change the world, and old enough to order the same coffee every day, it actually does seem possible. The photograph of me is from that time. You meet people who intend to transform technology, philanthropy, information, diplomacy, culture, film, literature, art, entrepreneurship, and human nature itself, preferably in that order and before the next fundraising round.
But then Jew-hatred too entered the age of redefinition.
It too was redefined.
Again.
The old hatred was given a new language. It was given a new morality. It put on academic spectacles and began placing the word "structural" before all its nouns. It stopped sounding like a brown shirt and began sounding like a panel discussion. It was, one must admit, an elegant and refined rebranding.
That is probably why it strikes me so hard to see the hatred return with new manners. Not because I am naïve. I have never believed that human beings were fundamentally reasonable. That is an idea invented by people who have never been stuck in line at Zabar's behind a man who needs to taste eight different cream cheeses only to conclude that he does not, in fact, care for cream cheese.
Human beings are not reasonable. They are anxious. Hungry. Vain. Mortal. They want to be loved, but preferably without having to change. They want to save the world, but cannot find their keys. They want to be good, but they also want to be right. And when they cannot bear their own inadequacy, they find someone to lay it on.
That is where Jews, unfortunately, often come in.
We have historically served as humanity's emotional storage facility. When Europe felt guilty, we became the problem. When Russia turned paranoid, we became the problem. When the Middle East suffered defeats, we became the problem. When university students suffer moral caffeine poisoning, we become the problem once again.
In a way, it is grotesquely flattering how useful we are.
And then there are the polite people. They are the ones I fear most.
Not the bullies. Not the screamers. Not the ones with signs. Those you can see. They are obvious. They generally look the part.
No, the polite ones. The ones who say: "One must understand both sides." It is a phrase that in many contexts is entirely right. In marriages. Neighbor disputes. The question of whether salmon ought to be smoked or cured. But when someone stands outside a synagogue shouting about intifada, I do not need to read a commission report first to know that something is wrong.
There is a point at which "nuance" becomes a way of hiding, of disarming one's opponent, while keeping for oneself the unearned right to be wrong.
New York taught me the difference. The city was full of nuance, but it was also full of judgment. A cab driver could, in three seconds, assess your character, your destination, and your entire family history. A deli man could see at a glance whether you were the sort of person who deserved extra capers. An older lady on the Upper West Side could demolish your self-image with a single sentence and afterwards ask if you had eaten.
It was brutal, but it was clear.
Now everything is wrapped up. Hatred arrives with academic apologies. Cowardice arrives with a worried brow. Stupidity arrives with a reading list.
I almost miss the old New York lunatic. The one who shouted that the end of the world was coming on Thursday, but who at least had the decency not to call it a seminar.
Because it is not the existence of hatred that surprises me. It is the human capacity to make hatred respectable. To polish it. To put a jacket on it. To send it to university. To teach it to say "liberation" while pointing at a synagogue.
It is the strangest of human talents: we can take something ugly and make it sound like a moral duty.
I do not know whether New York has changed, or whether I am simply seeing it from a distance, through the worry of an older(?) man and an internet connection. Perhaps the city was always this way. Perhaps one only sees things clearly when one no longer has to pay rent for them.
But I do know that the New York I lived in, for all its faults, possessed a kind of comic grace. It could be coarse, dirty, unfair, and insane, but it knew that it was insane. That was an important quality. There is nothing more dangerous than insane people who believe they are the conscience of history.
I survived New York.
I survived Obama hope, New York rent, the redefinition of philanthropy, the redefinition of media, the redefinition of entrepreneurship, the subway, the rats, the apartments, the August heat, the January cold, the therapy sessions that were not my own (which I also survived), but which I nevertheless had to overhear through the wall. I survived the permanent feeling of being behind, poorer than expected, older than wished, and more Jewish than I had quite planned for that morning.
But New York may not have survived itself.
Or perhaps it did not survive us. Humanity. The species capable of inventing penicillin, Mahler, pastrami, The Economist, the White House's entrepreneurship programs, while also concluding that the problem with the world is the small family on its way into a synagogue.
It is hard to remain optimistic. But I make an attempt. Not a large attempt. I am not a fanatic. I am a Jew. We prefer hope in small portions, preferably with something on the side.
So I say it like this:
When they shout that it isn't about Jews, I listen for whom they are shouting it at.
When they say they merely want justice, I look to see whether the justice also extends to those they are shouting at.
When they say history is complicated, I ask why their anger is always shouted at the same people.
And when I grow tired, which I often do, though not as often as when I lived on 29th, I think of New York. Of bagels. Of the hole in the middle. Of the human being, who always lacks something and therefore always looks for someone to blame.
I survived New York.
New York did not survive me.
Or perhaps it did. Perhaps the city is still in there somewhere, beneath the slogans, the foolishness, the price of coffee, the panel discussions, and the eternal redefinition of things we ought to have understood the first time.
Perhaps it is still the same old city, which, in a gravelly voice and with poor posture, says: Eat something first. Then we can discuss the end of the world.
