An elderly Jewish man and a Jewish college professor almost got into a fistfight at a Kosher BBQ buffet dinner and I missed it.
It was a few days after Trump was elected, and I was invited to attend a meeting of the “Jewish men’s club speakers’ series” held at the Austin JCC. After the meal, a Jewish history professor from UT gave a lecture on the “Rise and Decline of the American Presidency,” which had been planned months earlier, but in light of the election was a very timely punch to the stomach. The atmosphere felt a bit charged, probably more so than the previous lecture in the series – “(Jewish?) men’s sexuality through the lifecycle.”
I left early, and later reports from the social hall revealed that one older man became enraged at the speaker, who was describing the racist rhetoric that drove Trump’s presidential campaign. The older congregant cited Ivanka’s marriage to a Jew (Mideast peace broker Jared Kushner) and professed “how great Trump was and that the speaker should shut up,” according to a source from summer camp. Another older gentleman stormed out in protest at the speaker’s allegation that the Trump campaign stoked anti-Semitism and in the waning moments of the lecture, a security guard had to stand next to the speaker so he wouldn’t get slugged by a Jewish guy old enough to be his father.
Angry that I missed the spectacle, I sat at my laptop that night and poured out my thoughts about the election and the country I’d just moved back to after almost 15 years in Israel, and what it all meant for the Jews. It was angry, heartfelt, alarmist, and I buried it. I thought let’s wait and see, so many awful things are about to happen there’s no sense in doing this prematurely, lest you be like one of those people who wrote really confident op-eds in the first weeks of the Arab Spring.
On Monday, two days after the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, after 48 hours of mainlining news about the worst anti-Semitic attack in American history, I found the blog post I’d kept in my email inbox. At the time, I was less afraid of anti-Semites riled up on Gab about migrant caravans and George Soros, and more about official state actions by a fascist Trump regime. Looking back, while I may sound a bit like the father in “The Plot Against America,” most of what I wrote in mid-November 2016 still checks out:
“This is where we are now – separated into Jews who are willing to speak out against the coming wave, and those who – perhaps because of their own partisanship and ideology (and hatred of progressives) – are unable to admit that America has now elected a president who even the most forgiving observer can’t reasonably deny fits the definition of a fascist.
I’ve seen these friends post about how labeling Steve Bannon an anti-Semite is “unfair” and “hysterical”, including ones who spent 8 years describing Obama as a “Jew-hating piece of shit”, not merely a politician to disagree with. They’ve called for civility that they never showed, and have defended Bannon – and Breitbart.com – by highlighting the Jewish friends (and employees) who have spoken out on his behalf. I don’t recall these friends being convinced of Obama’s benevolence by his naming Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff or David Axelrod as his senior adviser.
To be a Jew in America (and anywhere but Israel) has always been to be a minority, though this election may have changed the equation somewhat. If we are seen as white, then we are with the (electoral) majority that brought a racist, demagogue strongman to the helm of the world’s most-powerful country. If we identify politically as Jewish Americans – 72% of which voted for Hillary – then we are in the political minority that voted to stave off the specter of Trumpism, along with the minorities who now feel targeted.
When expressing my concerns about the anti-Semitic whispers around the campaigns and the literal Nazis among Trump’s supporters, I’ve heard the not-very-calming assertion that “well, Jews aren’t really the target. They’re way down the list after Muslims, Mexicans, black people, if at all.”
This is what passes for comfort. The strongman and his supporters will target others, and we, with our success and our privilege do not need to worry, and should revel in the coming horror show. And now that Americans (including many Jews) have their Golem, what happens when he runs berserk and turns on his creators, on all of us?
We are entering an era of great uncertainty where everything we thought we knew must be questioned (like that the demographics were on the Democrats’ side or that Donald Trump would never be president), including our place in American society.
There will always be those who because of their own politics will side with a menace like Trump. The rest of us though, may find ourselves with no choice but to decide, to embrace our otherness and know, that in the coming tide we are with the marginalized and the minorities, and all those who feel themselves threatened and fear for their future in America.”
The rest of the piece was about the Hartman family and our history as Jews in America, almost all of which was spent in the Deep South and Texas. I described how I’d always imagined that this existence was something of a bargain, a calculation to be made. You were a minority in the most violently-segregated part of a Christian country, but for the most part seen as white. You lived as a white family and keep your head down and things should be fine.
In the wake of the attack in Pittsburgh on Shabbat, I’ve thought deeply about the America of Trump and what it means for Jews (and everyone else), but I’ve also come back to my own childhood, and what it was like growing up somewhere that I don’t think was much different than the Tree of Life synagogue.
-The shul on Bull Creek
I think about how at our conservative shul on High Holy Days there was this spot at the very back of the assembly hall where the teenagers would stand and hang out during the service. It was next to the kitchen, where as kids we’d snoop around and get chased out, and where our confirmation class made kugels to sell to pay for our trip to New York. Down the hall from the kitchen was the door to the playground and the pergola/once-a-year sukkah that backed up to Mopac.
There were countless days carpooling to Hebrew school during the week and getting dropped off at Sunday school on the weekend, the blue JNF box you’d put change in, youth group meetings, and countless hours bored out of your mind at Friday night or Saturday morning services.
There was also the old sanctuary on the grounds, which was repurposed into the religious school when the new synagogue opened on the lot, around….1989? I have a vague memory of what it looked like in there in the early 80s, and that they threw Hershey’s Kisses during Bar/Bat Mitzvahs before switching to marshmallows (safer). I remember the way the carpets looked and the windows, the smell, the ark with the two lions on top standing on both sides of the Ten Commandments. There was the sefer torah saved from the Holocaust, the Yahrzeit boards with the lights and the yiddische/Eastern European names of the old-timers, the framed black and white photos of former heads of the congregation. There was the closet (later a rack) where you’d get a tallis, and I remember feeling it was a really big deal that after your Bar Mitzvah you’d be wearing one from then on. There was “this kiddush cup is from the Sisterhood and this spice box is from the Men’s Club” at Bar/Bat Mitzvahs.
And like the two brothers who greeted visitors at Tree of Life and were murdered in the attack, I feel like there was always some regular, often but not always an older congregant, who would greet people and show them where the kippas and tallises were. Unlike Tree of Life, there was also the framed, signed photo of then-Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who was to attend the dedication of the new shul in November 1963 after a visit with JFK to Dallas, but had to cancel.
Other than school and my house, there was nowhere I spent more time as a kid than the synagogue and religious school on Bull Creek Drive in Austin, which moved to the campus of the new JCC when it opened in 2000. I never would have thought it at the time, but I realize as a grown man that one of the greatest gifts my parents (in particular my mom) ever gave me was to raise me at a synagogue, to give me a childhood in which being part of an active Jewish communal life was so central.
The term wasn’t used then – and this isn’t what it means now – but for lack of a better word, the synagogue was a safe space. It was a place where you weren’t one of the only Jewish kids in school, you were in the majority. It was a place where even if you grew up on the East Coast, or England, or Israel, and by some twist of fate you had somehow ended up in Texas, you could still be in familiar surroundings. The type of place that smells, looks, and feels the same as countless shuls like it all over the country. It was also literally safe – the only time we had security was during the High Holy Days, and I think it was just a State Trooper who mainly directed traffic.
At the JCC there’s a gate and a guard station, plus a long, meandering approach road that could slow an attacker down a bit if need be. My daughters attended day care there during the year in Austin, and other than the spate of bomb threats against Jewish institutions in the US (by some kid in Ashkelon, it turns out) I don’t recall ever thinking much about safety.
I’m pretty sure that even after Pittsburgh safety would be a somewhat distant worry tempered by the astronomical odds of being a victim. Instead, I would be beset by fear for the country, and the rest of the Western world, which seem hell bent to continue on a terrible course from which there may be no return.