By Sidney Stock, , Bellevue
With my first step onto Israeli soil, my initial thought was of finally being home — but in a surprising way. This thought was: “Now, in Israel, if I commit some illegal act, for the first time in my life I’ll be judged on the evidence rather than as a Jew.” I had no idea that I harbored such a fear.
I was reminded of this experience by the recent tragedy of the rabbi who killed the young man with inattentive driving and a letter writer to the JTNews and a thoughtful article by editor Joel Magalnick. Specifically, it was their concerns of any possible effect of this tragedy on the Jewish community.
Whenever an identifiable Jew is publicly suspected of any malfeasance, I cringe. I suspect that I’m not the only Jew who reacts this way. Yet in a critical sense, such reaction is inappropriate. In a fundamental sense, when a Jew behaves inappropriately or illegally and any non-Jews feel negatively towards the Jewish community, it isn’t our problem. It’s anti-Jewishness in the non-Jewish community.
Anti-Semitism gets stirred up when scapegoats are needed to distract susceptible people from real problems, not when Jews misbehave. And when anti-Semitism is stirred up, being a model community doesn’t help. Anti-Semitism stereotypes us, whether we’re model or not. An extreme example of this is anti-Semitism without Jews. Few Jews survived and remained in post-Shoah Poland, and for 400 years in medieval England and France, all Jews had been expelled. But anti-Semitism has been freely exploited in post-Soviet Polish elections, and no Jews in Britain and France didn’t mean no anti-Semitism, by any means.
Israel is seen as a “normal” society because there is no pretense of it being a model society. Every societal problem is found in Israel. Expecting exemplary behavior is internalized anti-Semitism and it’s better to challenge the anti-Semitism than trying to avoid it.