[lbo-talk] America's Anti-Muslim Prejudice

Gar Lipow the.typo.boy at gmail.com
Sun May 7 19:17:51 PDT 2006


On 5/7/06, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> Jim Devine wrote:
>
> >>When I moved to Oregon at the age of 16, I experienced recurring
> >>bouts of discrimination that was a lot different than anything I ever
> >>heard about racism from right-wing Jews. I got turned down for jobs
> >>during the summer (both in high school, and in college) based on my
> >>ethnicity, and frequently got ruled out as boyfriend material by the
> >>parents of folks I would try and date....
> >
> >Alas, in high school in Illinois, I was ruled out as boyfriend
> >material by the parents of the girl I had a crush on because I
> >_wasn't_ Jewish. Her parents (or was it grandparents?) were going to
> >sit shiva for her if she dated me. (This was in a North Chicago
> >suburbs area where most or much of the population was Jewish.) No hard
> >feelings, though.
>
> Don't forget Kitty Kelley's report that Barbara Bush disapproved when
> W brought a Jewish girl home from Yale (well, she wasn't from Yale,
> but he was). We won't have any Jews in the family, she said. Of
> course that was 35 years ago.
>

I think as Jew is the distinction to be made is between prejudice and oppression. I have encountered anti-Jewish predjudice occassionally in my life - probably over my lifetime as much as a person of color encounters in a week if they have to interact significantly with white people. But at 46 I've been turned down for an apartment once - based on my last name. (They got away with because it my antenna were not up for it and I had been living in a different and nicer apartment for a week before I figured out what had happened.) But could anti-semitism as a real represseive force rise in the U.S. again? Sure it could, and has been pointed out the people most likely to do this are the extreme rightists a lot of conservative Jewish zionists have aligned themselves with. This whole business with the War on Christmas and the War on Easter are directly out of the Henry Fords old anti-semitic propaganda.

A lot of right-Zionists are amazingly blase about this. A local fellow Jew managed to publicly make an insulting remark about Rachel Corrie to her parents face. (He did apologize.) A few weeks later when "Passion of the Christ" came out, he was interviewed in the local paper as saying that film was "not neccesarily anti-Semitic". Rachels parents forgave him, so I had to also. As you can tell, the incident did not continue to stick in my mind at all :)



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