By Bill Berlow
Growing up in a South Florida secular Jewish family in the 1960s, I was lucky. Unlike my parents, who were from New Jersey and remembered antisemitic restrictions and slurs in their younger years, I was confronted with naked antisemitism only once in my youth.
I was 15 and playing on a summer league baseball team. One of my teammates invited me to his house on a day we weren’t practicing. I had started my first part-time job as a bag boy at a Publix a few miles from his house in a neighborhood where many Jewish retirees lived.
My new job came up in conversation in the presence of my friend’s mother. She immediately went on a full-scale rant, complaining about the supermarket shoppers and using almost every anti-Jewish stereotype one could imagine. Her son tried a few times to interrupt. Finally, he raised his voice.
“Mom! Mom!” She finally stopped. “Bill is Jewish.”
Her jaw dropped. She stammered. “Well . . . You’re not like the rest of them,” she said, as if she were paying me a compliment.
I was too polite. I didn’t reply.
During the past several years, with the sharp rise in this country of antisemitic intimidation and violence, I’ve reflected on that relatively insignificant incident, which left a lasting impression. What, I’ve wondered, made my friend’s mother such a Jew hater? My friend certainly never revealed such ugly prejudice in my presence, but I can’t honestly say that I know whether he absorbed any of the hate that his mother spewed.
Jewish-American baby boomers were, by and large, insulated from the antisemitism that our parents and Jews in other countries faced. It was almost an abstraction, something that, while horrible and, in the case of the Holocaust unimaginable, didn’t affect our everyday lives.
How naive we were.
At some point in my adulthood, I realized that the only effective weapon against antisemitism-and, for that matter, all racism and fear of “the other” regardless of who they are — was education. This is where HERC comes in and is so vital today.
In a country where too many of us, Jews and non-Jews alike, were lulled into complacency for so many years, we can no longer afford to be passive.
Antisemitic violence — and such shocking displays as the candlelight march of White nationalists in Charlottesville, Va., chanting “Jews will not replace us!” — can be fought most effectively with the weapon that Jew haters and all bigots fear the most: teaching young people to appreciate religions and cultures that aren’t theirs.
I have thought that my failure to reply to my friend’s mother 52 years ago was a missed opportunity. It would have been counterproductive to attempt to embarrass her further. But maybe she would have reconsidered her prejudice had I said something like this:
“I’m sorry that you feel the way you do, ma’am. But I am like the rest of them.”