By Jonah S. Boyarin & Dania Rajendra

Originally published on Everyday Feminism.

Authors’ Note: The title of this piece — and much of its content — is inspired by April Rosenblum’s zine, “The past didn’t go anywhere: making resistance to antisemitism part of all of our movements.” The title is used with her explicit permission.

Do you want to fight white supremacy? We do. Do you want to fight systemic wealth and income inequality! Us, too.

Well, resisting antisemitism is one more way to make our feminist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist movement organizing stronger.

Antisemitism is real, it’s here, and it is a crucial and often invisible part of the interlocking network of oppressions with which we’re more familiar.

Resisting antisemitism strengthens our commitment to collective liberation — that we will all get free, together, including Jewish people.

Who are we? We’re Dania and Jonah, two members of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice. One of us is a brown cis-woman and one of us is a white cis-man — and oh boy, people have been asking us a lot more about antisemitism lately now that it’s been in the news so often.

Some background on Antisemitism

Antisemitism is broadly understood as violent hatred of Jews, or hatred that bears the threat of such violence.

It coexists with Christian hegemony, which normalizes and rewards Christian ideas, people, and power structures, and devalues and attacks non-Christian ones.

Sometimes, antisemitism shows up as ugly microaggressions like when we’ve been called a “dirty Jew,” or asking for a bottle of wine to buy for our seder (a Jewish ritual meal) and getting handed a bottle named “The Velvet Devil.”

Or they can sound nice but actually be quite dangerous, like when we’ve been told, “All the Jews I know are rich,” (pro-tip: lots of Jews are poor) or when people shout “Jesus loves you!” at us.

But antisemitism, like other systemic “isms,” goes beyond just prejudice: it carries material power and it helps other systems of oppression function smoothly.

Antisemitism, like other systemic ‘isms,’ goes beyond just prejudice.
Click To Tweet

Antisemitism is nothing new. Christian killing and expulsions of Jews for being variously racially or religiously foreign, greedy, “unsaved,” or subversive, was a feature of European life from medieval times through the Stalinist purges of the 1950s.

During the Holocaust, a third of our people were murdered by the Nazi regime, aided and abetted by their neighbors. It wasn’t just Hitler’s personal prejudice: Jews made a handy scapegoat for Germany’s interwar economic problems and the cultural and global shifts associated with the end of World War I.

Antisemitism is a dangerous fantasy of secretive, disproportionate Jewish power, a conspiratorial claim that a cabal of (Jewish) people control our economy and society.

Antisemitism distracts us from addressing oppressive systems like racialized, sexist capitalism that are the real root cause of great suffering for working and poor people of color.

It relies on a perception of Jews as being essentially foreign, religiously/racially other, “unsaved,” and having different economic, political, and cultural interests than the white, Christian, nationalist “us.”

What Everyone Gets Wrong About Anti-Semitic Twitter Trolls

Antisemitism redirects the blame for the injustices caused by systems of oppression onto individuals or a small group, onto people in highly visible middleman or “new money” roles, such as Jewish landlords, Jewish attorneys, Jewish film producers, Jewish shop owners, Jewish tax collectors, and Jewish teachers.

This dynamic of scapegoating is a pattern common in the oppression of middleman or “model minorities” (i.e., Koreans in the 1992 L.A. Uprising; or white backlash against South and East Asian enrollment in universities).

It coexists alongside vicious anti-Black, anti-poor racism that is different from the experience of those in the middle (though, to be clear, people can have multiple, intersecting identities and experiences, such as being Black and Jewish).

The effect of this redirection on collective liberation movements is to distract us from fighting systems of oppression by redirecting our blame on individuals or small groups.

Right-wing, antisemitic conspiratorial thinking has also portrayed Jews as the secret, subversive (“Communist”) power behind the Black-led Civil Rights movement, women-led feminist movements.

Today, the right absurdly insinuates that the Black Lives Matter movement consists of paid protesters stirred up by Jewish billionaire George Soros. Such false claims undermine the political power and accomplishments of people of color.

So, why do a lot of people falsely believe that Jews are clannish, rich, essentially foreign, and own the banks, Hollywood, and the media? Lots of reasons!

Some reasons include anti-communism, the G.I. Bill, antisemitic job markets, Henry Ford, racialized housing markets — you can read about this for days, but one excellent place to start is the paper that Jews for Racial and Economic Justice released this November, “Understanding Antisemitism.”

In short, antisemitism is bad for non-Jews working to get free as well as for Jews. We, Dania and Jonah, are trying to get free and we hope you are, too.

Here are 6 ways to make our collective liberation movements stronger by resisting antisemitism:

1. See, name, and organize against antisemitism on the right.

Leftist Jews looked on with fear as tiki torch-wielding white supremacists converged in Charlottesville to defend the memory of the Confederacy/white supremacy, chanting “Jews will not replace us” and brandishing assault rifles outside the local synagogue.

Terrified Jews were alienated from our leftist movements when some of our leftist friends failed to notice, comment, or check in on us after the biggest public display of murderous antisemitism in our lifetimes.

Those of us on the Jewish left are working hard to get more Jews to effectively show up for racial justice.

The dynamic of scapegoating is a pattern common in the oppression of ‘model minorities.’
Click To Tweet

Our non-Jewish allies can help us build Jewish trust in anti-racist movements by seeing, naming, and resisting antisemitism when it happens and by organizing to militantly resist violent white supremacist incursions on our communities. In order to do that effectively, we must…

2. Study the far right’s analyses, strategies, and organizing tactics and notice how they infiltrate the center.

Eric Ward (a Black, non-Jewish writer) offers some helpful framing in his widely-shared piece, “Skin in the Game” from Political Research Associates (PRA): “Antisemitism is not a sideshow to racism within White nationalist thought, [it is] the fuel that White nationalist ideology uses to power its anti-Black racism, its contempt for other people of color, and its xenophobia — as well as the misogyny and other forms of hatred it holds dear.”

PRA offers a bunch of other helpful resources for people new to looking at the right from the left. (Full disclosure, Dania is on the board of PRA.)

3. Name and interrupt antisemitism on the left.

Know your 1%! The 1% is not Jewish — only 1.7% of them are Jewish. By far and away, the 1% is white, cis-male and Christian. But that’s not the problem — the system (capitalism, the patriarchy, white supremacy, etc.) is.

So, the next time you see an article listing “NYC’s Worst 100 Landlords,” which focuses the blame for very real and horrible landlord abuses on individual landlords, many of them visibly Jewish, you might choose to respond, “Let’s organize to address the real problem, which is that the systemic structure of the landlord-tenant relationship is inherently abusive because it violates housing as a human right — housing shouldn’t be bought and sold, it should be a right.”

Trumpian Conspiracy Theories And Anti-Semitism Are Intimately Connected

Or you might object the next time someone spouts a conspiracy theory blaming “the Jews” for 9/11. Or maybe, when you write a post about Jay-Z’s latest album, you will point out the dangerous nature of his “compliments” about how Jews are good with money.

Name antisemitism when you see it — doing so protects Jews from violence and refocuses the left on resisting systems.

4. Don’t highlight someone’s Jewishness if you wouldn’t highlight their ethnicity or religion otherwise.

You know that maddening hypocrisy that happens every time a white Christian cis dude kills a bunch of people but he’s somehow not a “terrorist”? Yeah.

When people subtly highlight the Jewishness of someone who is abusing their power, that’s almost always about scapegoating.

5. Distinguish between anti-Zionism and antisemitism; distinguish between Jews, Zionists, and Israel.

Israel and its head of state, Benjamin Netanyahu, often claim to speak and act on behalf of all Jews, but that is simply not true.

Many Jews are not Zionist, not nationalist, not militarist, and/or stand in solidarity with Palestine. Want to criticize Israel while also resisting antisemitism? No problem (also, us, too!): Address imperialism and colonialism everywhere.

As Indigenous leader Winona Duke has said, “We [the U.S.] can’t talk about Israel because we can’t talk about Wounded Knee.. Because we have Andrew Jackson on our twenty dollar bill. Because we are one huge settlement on stolen land. We can’t talk about Israel because we are Israel.”

Many Jews are not Zionist, not nationalist, not militarist, and/or stand in solidarity with Palestine.
Click To Tweet

And the Israel lobby (which does not represent all Jews!) is simply not the most powerful player in U.S. foreign policy — it’s systemic U.S. imperialism, which supports Israel in order to promote U.S. military and economic interests in the Middle East, not because it’s trying to do Jews any favors.

(And because Christian Zionists want to use Jews and Israel as part of their end-times theology — um, no thanks!)

6. Look out for the vulnerable, and recognize Jews’ vulnerability in this moment.

In the last month, I (Jonah), have had three people in public spaces approach me because they see me wearing a yarmulke (religious skullcap), ask me about being Jewish and then ask me about how Jews control the banks, own the real estate, and are good with money — I kid you not.

What I don’t think my non-Jewish friends realize is how scary this is — not just in the moment but more as contributing to an ongoing, existential dread that we might yet again be violently scapegoated because we’re seen as being all-powerful.

This dread carries real weight given that the Nazis murdered my great-great-grandfather and entire branches of my family.

In short, don’t assume. We’re in this work for everyone’s freedom, guided by and inspired by — and proud of — our Jewishness.

When you see a Jewish person — a woman with a star of David necklace or a man with a skullcap — you might be looking at us: two people on our way to do our justice work.

When we get on a subway car, we’re looking around to make sure everyone’s okay — we hope you’re looking out for us, too. After all, that’s the only way we are gonna make it through this administration, and the only way we’re all gonna get free.

*For deeper study, please consult JFREJ’s recent paper, “Understanding Antisemitism.”

This May, white nationalists found cause to rejoice. The culprit behind many of the bomb threats plaguing JCCs and Jewish schools around the country — a young American-Israeli man living in Ashkelon, in the south of Israel — was arrested. The teenager, apparently utilizing sophisticated identity-masking methods, was responsible for a yet-unknown but apparently large proportion of the bomb threats terrorizing toddlers, schoolchildren, and Jews at prayer, according to Israeli police.

For white nationalists like David Duke, the suspect’s religion was proof of a theory they had championed: that Jews, in a coordinated plot, had created the attacks to “get sympathy to push their ethnic agenda.” A popular meme, “Hey rabbi…watcha doin’?,” resurfaced: It depicts a hook-nosed Jewish stereotype spray-painting a swastika onto the wall of a synagogue. Reactions to the unlikely arrest further proved the durability, in a conspiratorial age, of the oldest conspiracy theory of all: anti-Semitism.

Defenders of Donald Trump viewed the arrest as a vindication of the president, whose few months in office have coincided with a striking rise in hate crimes. In a press briefing last week, Sean Spicer used the JCC bomb threat arrest to dismiss a question about an unrelated offense, urging the public not to “jump to conclusions” about the perpetrators of hate crimes — and stating that “the president was right.”

When asked in February about the steadily climbing number of anti-Semitic incidents during his time in office, including the bomb threats, President Trump had reportedly suggested that the Jewish community at large was behind the incidents.

10 Questions For My Anti-Semitic Trolls

“Sometimes it’s the reverse, to make people — or to make others — look bad,” Trump said, according to Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, who was present at a meeting between Trump and state attorneys general.

It was this insinuation that Spicer claimed the arrest of a 19-year-old in Ashkelon had vindicated. But in his conversation with the attorneys general, Trump did not cite evidence from a months-long joint investigation between the F.B.I. and Israeli authorities that led to Ashkelon’s arrest. Nor would it be right to draw conclusions about the political motivations of a single, warped individual whose lawyer has stated that a brain tumor may have contributed to his alarming behavior. Moreover, most of the 330 incidents of anti-Semitic hate crime ProPublica has documented since January have been impossible to conduct remotely, such as the swastikas daubed on sidewalks and synagogues. The NYPD cites a 94% increase in anti-Semitic hate crime compared to this time last year; meanwhile, several high-profile incidents of cemetery vandalism — resulting in the toppling of hundreds of Jewish gravestones in Philadelphia and St. Louis — as yet have no confirmed culprits.

The NYPD cites a 94% increase in anti-Semitic hate crime compared to this time last year.
Click To Tweet

What is certain, however, is that Trump’s answer on anti-Semitism — positing, without citing evidence, a political plot — encapsulates his tendency to think conspiratorially. It’s a tendency he’s shown for years, before and throughout his presidential campaign and ascent to power, from birtherism to phantom wiretaps. But it manifests most clearly in the way he clings to falsehood, no matter how many times he is presented with fact. Trump has been a guest on InfoWars, Alex Jones’ notorious conspiracy-peddling radio show; he prefers the expostulations of 9/11 truther and ousted Fox News contributor Andrew Napolitano to those of his own Department of Justice. In the President’s mind, Ted Cruz’s dad helped kill JFK, Barack Obama literally founded ISIS, and the Jews, as a whole, are threatening their own kindergartens. (The tenacity of these beliefs was put on astonishing display in a recent interview with Time magazine.)

The mainstreaming of conspiratorial thinking and the rise in overt hostility towards Jews are intimately connected. As Alana Newhouse put it in Tablet Magazine, anti-Semitism is not a social prejudice against Jews. It has very little to do, Newhouse writes, with any individual’s distaste for perceived Jewish traits, or even antipathy towards specific Jews. Anti-Semitism in its classic sense is the belief that there is a malevolent entity behind the curtain, pulling the strings, and that that entity is a Jew.

The mainstreaming of conspiratorial thinking and the rise in overt hostility towards Jews are intimately connected.
Click To Tweet

“Racism is a prejudice, but it’s not rooted in conspiracy theory, as anti-Semitism is,” Deborah Lipstadt, a prominent scholar of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, told me in an interview last September. Anti-Semitism is present, too, in nearly every conspiracy-theory community; Lipstadt noted, for example, the outsize presence of the Mossad in “alternate” theories of 9/11. Even people from deeply marginal movements, like those who embrace Flat Earth Theory — the belief, as the name suggests, that the earth is really flat and NASA is a sinister fraud — frequently blame the Jews for their role in the “cover-up” of earth’s flatness. As one poster on the Flat Earth Society message board put it, space missions are “all lies…as you’d expect from a media/government/academia totally controlled by jews[sic].”

Trump’s campaign — and presidency — have played repeatedly into the hands of anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists. One infamous tweet juxtaposed Hillary Clinton, a Jewish star, and piles of cash. And a late-stage campaign ad depicted American Jews like Janet Yellen and George Soros as a narrator solemnly intoned about “trillions of dollars” in the hands of “global special interests.” Behind the anti-Semitic dog whistles lurked a braying pack of alt-right hounds who did not hesitate to savage Jewish critics and their supporters alike.

Trump’s campaign — and presidency — have played repeatedly into the hands of anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists.
Click To Tweet

The notion that some malevolence lurks in Jewish singularity, that a refusal to assimilate is a cover for darker impulses, is an ancient one. In the Medieval era, Jews were said to have poisoned wells, to bake the blood of Christian children into matzahs. With the advent of industrialization, theories of Jewish malevolence grew broader and darker: 19th-century nationalists depicted Jews as inherently disloyal to their countries, their purported loyalty to the nebulous entity of “world Jewry” supplanting their loyalty to their own homelands. In the last century, Nazi cartoons depicted the Jew as an octopus encircling the globe, slimy tentacles smothering every continent. A 1940 Nazi film sought to cast this characterization as a timeless truth: It was called “The Eternal Jew.”

Last year, the term “fake news” came into prominence to describe a rash of false accounts, of dubious and possibly Russian origin, promulgated in the lead-up to the Presidential election. Since then, the term has boomeranged against its makers — and is frequently to be heard from a President openly hostile to the media. For Jews, however, the original “fake news” (also, incidentally, of Russian origin), dates back more than a century, to the 1903 publication of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the principal modern text of anti-Semitic conspiracy — and an object lesson in how difficult it is to debunk appealing falsehoods.

The Protocols purported to be a record of a meeting between Jewish leaders, and was initially presented as the minutes of the first World Zionist Congress in Basel, in 1897. The text listed arenas of the modern world over which Jews sought to establish control — from banks to the press to modern states themselves, and their wars; the Elders’ plan would culminate in a totalistic Jewish domination of the world. After its original appearance in the Russian newspaper Znamya in 1903, it was translated into German and widely disseminated in 1920; it was presented to American audiences as The International Jew the same year. What is remarkable — and sadly illustrative — about the text was that its debunking was nearly simultaneous with its promulgation. In 1920 the Protocols were revealed to be a clumsy fake, largely plagiarized from a 19th-century French work of political satire, Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu. The Times of London ran a 1921 exposé; in 1924, a German-language debunking was published by journalist Benjamin Segel.

And yet Hitler used it extensively in his campaign to illustrate Jewish malevolence; so, too, did Henry Ford and Father Charles Coughlin, in the United States. Forty-three years after the New York Herald first published its takedown of the Protocols, “The History of a Lie,” the Senate Judiciary Committee felt compelled to publish its own report, calling the work “A Fabricated ‘Historic’ Document” in 1964. But the work continues to be published all over the world, and is readily available online, to astound first-time readers who may feel as if the curtain is finally being lifted — the dark plot undergirding their unhappiness at last unveiled. The continual success of the Protocols is a stark illustration of the swift spread of alluring untruths, and the ways in which debunking fake news cannot curb its continual appeal.

Fake news — like conspiracy theories — can be immune to fact-based reproach. They resonate with devotees precisely because they contradict the consensus view of reality with which they are unhappy, and purport to vanquish defenders of the status quo.

Anti-Semitism is non-partisan. It exists both on the right and on the left (though leftist anti-Semites often sub in “Zionists” for “Jews”) lurking on the fringes, wherever counter-narratives to established truth are offered to eager listeners. (I am not conflating anti-Zionism, or harsh criticism of the Israeli government, with anti-Semitism; rather, I refer to those on the far left who are eager to explain how Zionists rig elections worldwide, and how global capitalism is shaped by Jewish greed and Rothschild gold.) In times that feel profoundly unstable, and in which the nature of reality is drawn into question by the executive branch of the American government itself, alternative explanations, with their sinister Soroses, are more appealing than ever.

For American Jews, many of whom have felt profound comfort and inclusion in the past half-century — and who have, in turn, shaped American culture in profound ways — the events of the past few months have been deeply unsettling. Warning knells sounded throughout a conspiracy-laced campaign, as Jewish journalists covering Trump faced unprecedented volumes of anti-Semitic abuse. But the two-fronted attack on preschools and cemeteries, children and the dead, coupled with swastika graffiti cropping up on street corners and synagogues, have left a sense of profound unease in their wake. (“Are Jews White?” asked a December headline in the Atlantic, a potent summation of these fears.)

In times that feel profoundly unstable, alternative explanations, with their sinister Soroses, are more appealing than ever.
Click To Tweet

A popular European story in the 15th century told the tale of the “Wandering Jew,” an immortal Jerusalem shoemaker cursed to wander from place to place for eternity. The term became a metonym for the Jewish people themselves— illustrative of both their immortality and the impermanence of their residence in any one country. While this was — and continues to be — cast as a malevolent Jewish trait, the central irony is that that impermanence is caused by the rise of prejudice against a minority that has retained its separateness, and its traditions, for millennia. The postwar embrace of Jews in America felt giddy, complete, perhaps eternal. And yet thousands of Jews facing hate crimes across the country have been driven to question that permanence this year.

In an era in which reality itself is in dispute, can America’s Jews dodge the rise of the most enduring conspiracy theory of all?

By Emma Tessler

Content warning: Anti-semitism

Once upon a time, on October 30, 2015, The Establishment published a piece I wrote. Time went on, people changed, I cut my hair, life was simple and good. On September 10, 2016, the New York Times published my wedding announcement. My mother cried, my father didn’t care, and neither did anyone else. Then, on December 3, 2016, apropos of LITERALLY NOTHING, someone on Twitter got ahold of these two publications and the trolling began.

I remember the date because I was visiting my parents to see the annual children’s Christmas ballet that my 75-year-old father dances in and my phone kept vibrating. Was it someone who wanted to send my dad well wishes? Ask me to Instagram another photo of this holiday extravaganza? NOPE IT WAS ANTI-SEMITISM CALLING. GUESS IT’S NOT AS ANTIQUATED AS WE ALL THOUGHT.

For the next few days, I got notifications every minute from people whose takeaway from those two articles was basically that Jews are the worst, and they wanted to make sure I knew it. They took clips from interviews I’d done and made a video of me. They found my Instagram. They emailed my company.

What Everyone Gets Wrong About Anti-Semitic Twitter Trolls

And, well . . . it turns out that getting trolled on Twitter really makes a gal think. I have a few questions for my beloved trolls.

1. When you say that Hitler is “to your left,” what do you mean by that? What was too liberal about Hitler? Did the gas chambers somehow help the environment? This is a serious question.

2. When you photoshop a picture of me wearing a pizza necklace, what message are you trying to send? At first glance, it doesn’t seem like it fits into your greater message of anti-semitism and hate, but maybe it’s something about pizza ovens and those ovens you keep offering to fire up for me? Either way, I sure do love pizza. Thanks, trolls!

3. Speaking of ovens, when you say “she’s going to love my ovens” and “fire up the hottest ovens,” are you referring to your home kitchen? I personally have a very old oven in my apartment and I have not been loving it. However, my mother recently got a stainless steel oven and it is glorious. Is that the kind of oven you have? I don’t know that I’d get too excited about anything less than a stainless steel oven, but if you have one, then you’re right! I will love it!! Thanks for preheating it for me!

When you tell me I'm going to love your oven are you referring to your home kitchen? I personally have a very old oven in my apartment and I have *not* been loving it.
Click To Tweet

4. I noticed that you’ve been tagging me in photos and cartoons of overtly semitic looking people. Nice move. But then you tagged me in a picture of Steve Buscemi. Isn’t Steve Buscemi Italian? Do you think I look like Steve Buscemi? Again, serious question.

(Side note: One time I pulled Steve Buscemi in a game of charades, and he is REALLY hard to act out.)

5. You keep calling my husband a “merchant.” Is this a reference to The Merchant of Venice? What a play! What a work of art! My husband would be honored to be cast in the titular role, but unfortunately, he’s not an actor. Do you think you’d be willing to cast him anyway? Or did you not mean the play . . . ? Maybe you meant an actual merchant? Like the guys who sell pickles at the Brooklyn Flea? God, I wish my husband sold pickles. Specifically Bread and Butter pickles. Those are my favorites.

What were we talking about?

6. And while we’re on the subject of my husband, his last name is Jacoff. Jacoff. And I feel like you guys haven’t done enough with that. Sure, you’ve mentioned it a couple of times, but that’s it! You haven’t made any puns, any limericks, nothing! I thought you were supposed to be professionals. I mean, judging by how many hours you’ve been spending on your computer over the last two days saying offensive things to me, I would think you could have come up with some great stuff by now.

Our wedding hashtag was #whatacoupleofJacoffs! Okay, that was a freebie, but I hope it’s enough to get you started. Raise the bar, guys. Demand more of yourselves.

Trumpian Conspiracy Theories And Anti-Semitism Are Intimately Connected

7. When you made a video of me that got retweeted over 600 times, I was so flattered! But I watched it and I was a leeeeetle confused. I know, I know. Me and my small Jewish brain. (Or wait . . . do you think we have small brains? Big brains? Brains shaped like the numbers 666?) Anyway! You took a picture of me and my merchant husband and overlapped it with a video of some Hasidic men dancing . . . and it looked like a real fun party! Is the video an elaborate evite? And is the party still happening, because I don’t know, I’m just feeling like I could really dance it out right now, you know?

8. Now, about Donald Trump . . . I don’t think that he invented anti-semitism. People have hated that I’m Jewish for years now! But I couldn’t help but notice that a lot of your Twitter handles are Donald Trump themed. And you guys have got some good stuff there. EmperorTrump, PresidentElectTrump, ProTrump, SirCumsalot, I could go on and on.

My question is: Did you know that Donald Trump’s very own favorite daughter Ivanka is Jewish? And his little Trumplet grandchildren are also Orthodox Jews! Now I’m not questioning your hate (I would never do that), but I am a little confused about your logic. Do you also hate Donald Trump’s daughter? Do you hate his little wee grandchildren? I know, I know, Ivanka is blonde and that makes the whole thing very confusing, but I promise, she is Jewish! Again, just looking for your thoughts here.

When you made a video of me that got retweeted over 600 times, I was so flattered!
Click To Tweet

9. One of you called me a “7/10, for a Jewess.” I don’t have a question for you. Just wanted to say heyyyyyyyyy.

10. Now, since I promised to only ask 10 questions, we’ll have to leave the white genocide I’m organizing, your proposed “blitzkrieg” on my business, your desire to watch me burn, the fact that “sixty-million Germans weren’t wrong,” the fact that you think I got “bitten by a radioactive r*tarded spider,” the theory that I just took a break from smoking crack, and the awesome pun “just a COHENcidence” until next time.

I know, I’m just as bummed as you are. What I really wanted to ask you about was when you said that if “she had as many sticking out of her as she had stuck in her, she’d look like a porcupine.” . . . I assume you mean penises, yes? The scenario here is that I would have a lot of penises sticking out of me? Making me look like some kind of penis porcupine? I guess this is not so much a question as it is a request — but could the guy who photoshopped the pizza necklace make me a mockup of what this would look like? I need a new profile picture because I’m worried my Hillary “H” might make me a target for some unsavory characters.

You’ll help me out, right?

By Stephanie Watson

Anne Frank’s diary, published after its author died in a German concentration camp at age 15, is for many people the defining document of the Holocaust. The diary, originally titled Het Achterhuis, is a national treasure to Jewish women and girls throughout the world, and many Holocaust survivors and historians, such as Primo Levi, have said that it serves as a solid representation of the millions of Jews and other oppressed people who suffered at the hands of the Nazi party. But not everyone realizes that the book published under the title The Diary Of A Young Girl is an abridged, reworked, and redacted version of the diary Anne actually wrote. For me, that knowledge was almost enough to make me boycott the book.

I had managed to avoid reading Anne’s diary for most of my life, but not too long ago I decided to give it a go in audiobook form. The narrator, Helena Bonham Carter, started with the forward of the Penguin edition. She set the scene, described the book’s importance, discussed the war — and then explained that the book had been heavily edited:

“To begin with, the book had to be kept short so that it would fit in with a series put out by the Dutch publisher. In addition, several passages dealing with Anne’s sexuality were omitted; at the time of the diary’s initial publication, in 1947, it was not customary to write openly about sex, and certainly not in books for young adults. Out of respect for the dead, Otto Frank also omitted a number of unflattering passages about his wife and the other residents of the Secret Annex.”

That’s when I turned it off.

There’s something very unsettling about the idea of editing someone’s personal and autobiographical journal. After all, it’s supposed to be a portal into the past: Anne’s experience in the annex, exactly what happened exactly as it happened. To omit important facts and attitudes from its pages just seemed wrong. So I couldn’t continue listening to it, particularly after learning that many omitted sections were on gender-specific topics like sexuality and a young woman’s relationship to her mother.

As it turns out, there are actually three versions of Anne’s diary. Version A is the original journal, the actual words she wrote while in hiding. Version B is Anne’s rewrite in novel form, after she heard on the radio that Minister Bolkestein — the minister for Education, Art and Science during World War II — had requested that all diaries during the German occupation were to be kept and studied for years to come. But version C is the one that most schools handed out in English class, and Anne had no control over that version at all.

‘The Diary Of A Young Girl’ is an abridged, reworked, and redacted version of the diary Anne actually wrote.
Click To Tweet

After her father was given the remains of both versions by Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl, who hid the Franks, he and the publishing house edited them into a version that combined the original diary and the rewritten version, with some additional redactions. I considered this blend offensive to Anne’s privacy — since in the diary itself she stated that she didn’t want anyone to read her unfiltered thoughts. Moreover, it omits things that she surely would have wanted kept in version B, since she put them there in the first place.

According to the forward of Penguin’s Definitive Edition (the audiobook I began listening to), several paragraphs on Anne’s personal attitudes and experiences were edited or completely removed from version C. Anne’s opinions on her parents were edited to seem less harsh — for instance, this version removes the line “Father’s fondness for talking about farting and going to the lavatory is disgusting.”

Anne’s thoughts and observations about her body were also cut in version C. Take a look at this section in which she talks about her vagina: “Until I was 11 or 12, I didn’t realize there was a second set of labia on the inside [of the vagina], though you couldn’t see them. What’s even funnier is that I thought urine came out of the clitoris.”

The edited version is scoured of references to Anne’s adolescent sexuality. “I told him [Peter] all about girls, without hesitating to discuss the most intimate matters,” Anne wrote in the diary, about her potential boyfriend in the annex. “I found it rather amusing that he thought the opening in a woman’s body was simply left out of illustrations. He couldn’t imagine it was actually located between a woman’s legs. The evening ended with a mutual kiss, near the mouth . . . “ The edited version also removes Anne’s references to her period: “PS. I forgot to mention the important news that I’m probably going to get my period soon. I can tell because I keep finding a whitish smear in my panties.”

I already worried that heavy editing of Anne’s diary was disrespectful to her memory. But seeing the content of the changes, it seemed that the edits were also an act of misogyny. The redacted sections dealt with love, sex, and body changes, all topics that women were discouraged from talking about in the 1940s and are still discouraged from talking about today. If Anne had been a boy, would the publication house have deleted sections on discovering his body? On his thoughts about a girl? Would his thoughts about his parents be written off as just a “boy being a boy”?

This is what made me uncomfortable enough to boycott the book.

Anne’s father, Otto Frank, was on board for some of the edits, and according to Otto himself, he made these changes with Anne’s own desires in mind: “Of course Anne didn’t want certain things to be published. I have evidence of it . . . Anne’s diary is for me a testament. I must work in her sense. So I decided how to do it through thinking how Anne would have done it. Probably she would have completed it as I did for a publisher.”

But if she wouldn’t have wanted those entries published, then why did she include them in version B at all? Version B was her own re-working, after all, so everything in that version is what she wanted people to see. What evidence did Anne’s father have that she would want her work sanitized?

With these questions in mind, I asked several writers and readers about their opinion on the editing of Anne Frank’s diary. Did the changes and redactions dilute its value? Did they justify simply not reading the book at all?

Some people I talked to agreed with me: “The idea of censoring Anne Frank goes completely against that important principle of telling the truth through the eyes of direct witnesses,” said Erin Stewart, a journalist. “Especially since I think some of the more powerful aspects of her diary (at least for me) are the minutiae, the fact that even trapped in this dank, cramped, precarious place, she had normal feelings about her relationships and life generally. She was still herself. There’s something really moving about the endurance of identity in those times and something terribly heartbreaking about diluting that.”

But the Jewish writers and readers I spoke to emphasized the significance of the diary, in whatever form it’s available. “As a Jewish reader who has read this book since childhood, I don’t agree with not reading it at all because it’s been edited,” said Alana Saltz, a Jewish writer and avid reader. “I do understand your frustration, and I think it’s unfortunate that the book was censored that way. However, you can’t dispute the power and historical impact it’s had in bringing awareness to the Holocaust, and so even if it’s not ideal and should be challenged in the future and questioned now, not reading it seems too extreme.”

After talking to Alana, I started to realize that the bigger picture was more important than any editing shadiness. The edits may be sexist, but fighting anti-Semitism — including by facing and examining what happened during the Holocaust — is more important.

But it doesn’t have to be a choice between accepting the bowdlerized diary and ignoring it altogether. I discovered that there is apparently an unabridged version of the diary that has not been altered the way other versions have, published under the name The Critical Edition. This edition offers side-by-side looks at the three versions, so readers can understand what’s been changed. In my opinion, this is the version that should be available in schools. This would allow us to critique the edits, and acknowledge the misogyny that fueled them, without boycotting the book.

While the edits are offensive, we can’t let that hold us back from learning more about what Anne, and millions of other Jewish people, went through during those painful years. If like myself, you’ve been putting off reading the book, I urge you to join me in giving it a chance. And if you’ve already read it, maybe pick up the Critical Edition and take another look.

By Cade Leebron

The Season

It is tourist season in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Currently, the town is preparing for the yearly Reenactment, during which (at last count) almost 400 people will reenact the Battle of Gettysburg on the same dates as the original battle, July 1–3. The reenactors will dress in authentic uniforms, sleep in tents, and carry rifles. I hear it is quite something to witness. I’ve never been.

When my friends in Ohio, where I now live, comment on their fond memories of visits to Gettysburg, or express a wish to visit Gettysburg sometime in the future, I am mostly confused. This confusion is, in some ways, a privilege. I was not born in Gettysburg, nor do I live there now. I don’t have to maintain a positive outlook about the town, about the battlefield tour buses and overpriced motels. I’ve never had to work a job that was dependent on the tourist industry. But I did have to grow up there.

Summer’s flood of tourists swells the town. For the rest of the year, Gettysburg is small, with fewer than 8,000 residents. Only 28% of residents over the age of 25 have a college degree. The tourists are more educated than the people of the town they visit, clocking in around 57%. During tourist season, locals get frustrated with the tourists’ inability to navigate the traffic circle (known as the Square) in the middle of town, make jokes about why tourist season doesn’t work the same as deer season, and profit significantly from the tourist industry, which brings 1.2 million people per year through Gettysburg, 3.4 million through Adams County.

The tourists are more educated than the people of the town they visit.
Click To Tweet

It is summer, warm and crowded in Gettysburg. It is summer and I am not there. Instead I am visiting my parents in their new home, about 45 minutes away. They live on a hill above the Susquehanna River, and in the evenings we walk the dog and look at the lights of Harrisburg, the mountains, the sunset.

36/100

The other night, I took the BuzzFeed privilege quiz, designed to help users notice the ways in which they are privileged in Western culture. I take a lot of BuzzFeed quizzes, and am generally fascinated with them; why is it so compelling to have a website tell you which Bachelorette contestant you would end up with, how long you would last in the zombie apocalypse, how much you know about European foods? The questions on the privilege quiz are more serious, asking the quiz-taker to check a box for types of privilege they’ve benefited from. Some boxes I checked: “I still identify as the gender I was born in,” “I am white,” “I went to an elite college,” “My parents are still married.” Overall, I selected 36 out of 100, and BuzzFeed told me “You’re not privileged at all. You grew up with an intersectional, complicated identity, and life never let you forget it.”

Privilege is not measured as a checklist.
Click To Tweet

This felt hilariously untrue. I am a white woman who presents as cis, straight, and able-bodied (I have an invisible disability). So okay, yes, it is just a BuzzFeed quiz and means nothing about how I move through the world and am viewed and treated. Privilege is not measured as a checklist, and not all types of privilege are created equal. It seems odd to weigh white privilege at the same level as not having divorced parents, for example. But even so, having taken the quiz honestly, how could I have only accrued 36 points on this privilege scale? Some of the reasons were from my adult life (my disability, living as a woman in the world) but many were hanging out in my past, in my hometown.

Things I Say When You Comment On My Hometown

America’s smallest town you’ve heard of! Yes, people actually live there. Yes, people are actually from there. No, I don’t believe in ghosts. We used to harass ghost tours when I was a teenager. Yes, really. More dead people than alive! It was okay. Small. Racist, you know? Very conservative. Issues with drugs. Issues with teen pregnancy. A lot of antisemitism. Addiction. No, I would not move back. Oh, yes, I suppose it is beautiful.

What You Know

You have heard of it because of the Gettysburg Address, because of the Civil War. The Battle of Gettysburg, which made us America’s bloodiest little town. Various politicians stop by to bumble through their own Gettysburg Addresses. After his attempt, Rick Santorum confusingly shook my hand while I protested him at the Gettysburg Hotel (with pink streaks in my hair and wearing a crop top, no less). There are battlefield audio tours, ghost tours led by women in hoop skirts, hotels and motels full of tourists. Barely above the Mason-Dixon line, this is the town that helped the North to win.

If you have come here, you have probably been to terrible restaurants, stayed in a hotel on a side of town locals refer to as the tourist end. You have perhaps heard of Gettysburg College, a small liberal arts college where my parents teach. You have seen the battlefields which are protected land and remain undeveloped. Maybe you’ve noticed how this keeps the town small within the donut of the battlefields. You’ve marveled at the eternal flame monument which burns at all hours, symbolizing peace.

You have not heard of: the nursery in our high school, which closed a few years ago not for lack of need but for lack of funding. The difficulty of buying condoms when you are a teenager and the grocery store clerks know your parents. The rampant racism, the fact that the gifted education class I attended from first grade through middle school was all white every year except fifth grade, when a Black girl joined us for one semester. The incidents of antisemitism I experienced as one of very few Jewish kids.

You don’t know that there were no minority students at my cafeteria table most years, that I barely saw the Latin@ or Black students who shared my small public schools for eleven years; they were not placed into upper level math classes, they did not come to chess club. You didn’t hear girls at high school sleepovers confess their fathers told them they could never date men who weren’t white.

Probably if you’ve visited, you’ve seen all the Confederate flags (as bumper stickers, waving on cars, splashed on t-shirts, magnets, mugs), but maybe you thought that just had something to do with authenticity. History. You haven’t noticed that some faculty members at the college choose to live elsewhere and commute to work, because they are LGBTQ or Black or because their spouses need jobs and those jobs don’t exist for them in Gettysburg.

You haven’t entered into the bitter battles (on social media and in local publications) over changing the school’s mascot, which remains the Warrior, symbolized by the head of a Native American man. And the struggles with heroin and meth, the news that two people I went to school with just went to jail for shooting up heroin in a car while the woman’s child sat in the backseat, watching? You didn’t hear about that. Just like you haven’t heard the rumors about the public pool, that we don’t have one because the most logical place to put it was in the Black neighborhood, and nobody, nobody in power, wanted that. And yes, in the Pennsylvania primary, 56.91% of registered Republicans in Adams County voted for Donald Trump.

Incidents

When I say “incidents of antisemitism,” what do I mean? I mean a lot of things. I mean the girl who told me in second grade she forgave me for my grandparents killing Jesus. (When she later made a tasteless joke about concentration camps in tenth grade history class, it did not seem like a coincidence.) I mean the boys who drew swastikas on my test papers in seventh grade, the girl who called me fat Jew bitch on the playground in fifth grade. The man who I hooked up with at a party the summer after my sophomore year of college who called me my sexy Jew.

In second grade, a girl told me she forgave me for my grandparents killing Jesus.
Click To Tweet

Every single joke about where my horns were or how greedy I must be. The teacher who said it would be interesting to have the Jewish perspective in history class, sixth grade. Each year in elementary school when my teacher had the bright idea to ask me to bring in a menorah and explain Hanukkah in December. When my ninth grade English class spent maybe 20 minutes talking about how exactly one might extract a pound of flesh from a Jew (not from just any person, from a Jew) and decided a cheese grater would be most effective. When boys from that class then gave me a cheese grater as a Christmas present. When kick a Jew day was a fun joke in high school and there weren’t too many of us to celebrate on.

46/100

I retook the BuzzFeed quiz as if I grew up somewhere else, somewhere in America where being Jewish is not an issue. Most of America, then. I got 46 out of 100, which BuzzFeed insisted still made me not privileged. I think they might not be asking all the right questions. Then I took a quiz about my knowledge of Disney Channel Original Movies and got 6/8.

Where I’m From

If you look me up on Facebook, you might notice my hometown is listed as San Francisco, California. This is, at worst, aspirational liberal wishful thinking. At best, it is based in fact: I was born in San Francisco, though I spent my entire childhood and much of my young adulthood in Gettysburg. We moved there the summer I turned five, and we only lived in San Francisco until I was two. If there is a place that should be listed as my hometown on Facebook, it is Gettysburg. But how do you claim a place that was never willing to let you feel at home there?

I don’t mean to insult the people who were my friends, teachers, and mentors in childhood. I don’t mean to insult the people who provided the moments that felt the closest to belonging, because it would have been unbearable without them. I don’t mean to be insulting at all, or ungrateful, or greedy. (I hear people like me tend to be that way.)

But I do mean to call out a town that has been unwilling to change or self-critique, a town that as a whole made me feel my outsiderness. A town that made outsiders out of anyone who did not fit the prescribed mold, regardless of how long they had lived there and how long they had tried. I’m sure that there are people who would take issue with my daring to critique Gettysburg, mostly because my parents teach at the college, which is seen as an elitist occupation. Or because I was in that gifted education class, which some parents in the school district don’t even let their kids get tested for because they would prefer their child not be seen as weird, nerdy, snobby. And also because I went to a fancy college, Wesleyan University.

I do mean to call out a town that has been unwilling to change or self-critique, a town that as a whole made me feel my outsiderness.
Click To Tweet

The thing they don’t know about the fancy college is that I got there and was surprised to be suddenly surrounded by Jews. Wesleyan has a significant population of Jewish students, a rabbi on campus, a Jewish program house. The Jews at Wesleyan seemed to be mostly from big cities, where they grew up in vibrant Jewish communities, attended synagogues, and were not ever told that their grandparents had personally murdered someone else’s lord and savior. My friends there were shocked when I told them about my experiences growing up in Gettysburg. I was shocked to find that these were not stories they could relate to, that my stories were stories they thought had been left in the past.

Gettysburg Restaurant Recommendations

Definitely the Ragged Edge — great smoothies and sandwiches. Tito’s Tacos. The Blue Parrot or Sidney’s if you’re looking for something fancier. Ping’s Cafe. Hunt’s Battlefield Fries, trust me on this one. Sweeet! has a great collection of vintage candy. Gettysburg Baking Co. The Lincoln Diner if you want breakfast or milkshakes, or if it’s late and nothing else is open. Pizza House.

Questions BuzzFeed Didn’t Ask

What percentage of people from your high school go to college? Were your parents professors? Could they help you find good colleges to apply to? Did your school have abstinence-only sex education? Follow-up question: did your parents tell you about birth control, did they make sure you knew how to avoid getting pregnant in your teen years? Did your parents go to good colleges?

Would you have had access to an abortion? Did your parents help you with your college applications, did they let you attend an out-of-state school, did they save for years for your college education? Did they help you apply for financial aid to cover the rest?

Did your dad take you shopping at King of Prussia mall for college interview clothes? How many kids do you have right now compared to other women from your graduating class? What I mean is: did you have an escape route?

The Escape Route

My last two years of high school, I lived in Barcelona, Spain. Moving to Spain in many ways felt like a revelation. I fit in at school. My religion wasn’t a constant source of jokes. At the international high school, there were kids from all over, from so many different backgrounds. It was more interesting that I grew up in such a rural area than that I was a Jew. So it came as a shock the day I exited my apartment with two friends and we found ourselves in the middle of a massive anti-Israel protest, where participants were burning the Israeli flag and chanting death to Israel.

The Ugly Hypocrisy And Islamophobia Of My Birthright Trip To Israel

One of my friends looked at my mass of dark curls, my pale skin, and told me it might be a good idea to put my hood up. I did. We went to KFC and watched the action from the window, and I felt more afraid than perhaps I should have. I wondered later about how I would have reacted if I grew up in a city somewhere, maybe in Philadelphia with my cousins who went to endless bar and bat mitzvahs in middle school and had tons of Jewish friends. Would I have felt more angry than afraid, would I have felt less of a need to hide? Which thing is more naive? Antisemitism is on the rise in Europe, and in America too, though I imagine what I experienced growing up in Gettysburg is still viewed as anomalous. Perhaps in some ways I am glad to have known it, to have had to face adversity in this small and unexpected way. And the ability to be somewhat grateful? That too, of course, is a privilege.

Honor Roll

Why talk about Spain, Wesleyan, why talk about San Francisco? Mostly as some sort of apology or acknowledgement, I think. I’m trying to say to the people in my hometown, you’re right, I didn’t belong there. Because that’s what they’ll say. When I’ve critiqued the town on social media, that’s what they’ve said: You’re not from here.

Growing Up At Guantanamo Bay

What do I have to do to be from here? It was not enough to have lived there since I was five years old; it was not enough to go to the local public schools, play field hockey, belong to the drama club, the chess club, the ultimate frisbee team, the literary magazine, the chorus and orchestra, the quiz team, the gay-straight alliance, to found a knitting club, to get straight A’s, to volunteer in the soup kitchen and the tutoring center. To host birthday parties, to go to birthday parties, to babysit neighborhood kids, to make craft projects and tag along to Lutheran Sunday School and youth group and sleep-away camp. To try to blend in.

But now I have moved away. With no plans to go back, I am now even more of an outsider. The striving is over. Why bother, now, to reckon with it all?

Visitor

My parents have not yet sold their old house in Gettysburg. So a few weeks ago, I returned, alone, to camp out in the house for a night. All the furniture has been moved out; I brought a sleeping bag and pillow, slept on the floor. I thought it might be good writing material: what is it like to return to your empty childhood home? But it didn’t hurt the way I wanted it to. I wanted to miss the town, to be nostalgic or maybe even angry at my parents for leaving. Instead I thought about how much I didn’t want to run into people who I knew, how I was glad I wouldn’t need to return here for holidays anymore. I felt happy for my youngest brother, who is 12. He gets to go to a different school, with kids who won’t speculate on the best way to remove a pound of his specifically Jewish flesh. And I was angry, but not about leaving. I was angry at the town, for the way it treats the people who don’t fit in the mold it has decided, partly by necessity, to privilege: those who are white, Christian, uneducated, straight.

I was angry at the town, for the way it treats the people who don’t fit in the mold it has decided to privilege.
Click To Tweet

I think a lot about how this is possible, why it is seen as better to not learn. To not accept. To remain small. This mindset might look like the geography of the town, the donut hole that won’t expand outwards, caught in an untouchable bubble of history. Haven’t we figured out yet that this — the reenactment, the constant return to the past — isn’t why the tourists come to clog the Square, why the politicians want to be seen speaking here? They come because we’re supposed to symbolize progress. The Reenactment is something to witness, but that’s something to believe in. Am I being too idealistic? Perhaps. But I think we’re supposed to be the place where America fought to be better, where the right side won.

I’m sorry, I’m saying we again. You’re right. It was never my town.