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Opinion: Making a Choice to Fight Antisemitism [1]
['Edward Strickler Jr.', 'The Daily Yonder']
Date: 2023-11-28
My family lived on a small working farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Father had a job off the farm and he came home to hard work every evening and every weekend. Mother was a homemaker; she sold cream from the milk cow. I milked the cow after father taught me how, and all children hand churned the butter out of the milk. I chopped wood for the stove that heated much of the house (and before we had an electric stove, mother cooked and baked with a wood-fired stove and oven).
Eventually we had a television – with a huge tube in a huge standing box, not a flat screen on a wall, or in your hand, if you think of video that way. The TV’s big body and its ability to bring different worlds into the house conveyed both power and authority; it was a presence.
We received two, and sometimes a third, broadcast station. We all watched what Father or Mother selected. We all had dinner together at 5:30 p.m., and some TV show followed.
Once we watched a series about World War II that included vivid discussion of Germany’s National Socialist “Final Solution.” As that episode concluded Mother said: “One day you children will hear someone say: ‘That didn’t happen’ or ‘that doesn’t matter anymore.’ You tell them: Yes, it did, and yes it does.’” Mother would often scold and sometimes would preach. This, from her, was something different: not preaching or scolding. It was prophesying. I remember it as an unusual and special communication.
Jews were part of my rural region’s history. Rockingham County, Virginia, had once been the frontier of both the colonies and the new nation, and Jews arrived earlier than many people assume. Jews live in largely rural areas across the country, contrary to other assumptions and stereotypes.
Antisemitism was also part of that history. My brother once showed me an old photograph of a local church revival meeting. Some people in the photo were dressed in Ku Klux Klan regalia, indicating that they were an accepted part of the community. The photograph would have been from the period of the “Second Klan” in the early 20th century. Encyclopedia Virginia says the Klan operated “in the name of white supremacy and the protection of ‘one-hundred percent Americanism.’” Through political rhetoric and violence, it targeted “African Americans, immigrants, Catholics, Jews, and organized labor, as well as prostitution and the alcohol industry.” Our family stories included that the local Klan once met in the old farm house where we later lived. It’s not unlikely that your state has a similar history with the Klan.
I had academic talent and the privilege of studying at Swarthmore College. A very different experience from a working-class farm in Virginia. I’m sure I was a novelty to many as they were novelties to me, among them my first Jewish friends, first Buddhist acquaintances, and, since it was Swarthmore, many from the Society of Friends (a.k.a. Quakers). A Jewish friend invited me to Shabbat and synagogue in the city; I took it as a great privilege to be invited to both.
Experiences like this, and the study of many different religious histories, began to show me moral values and action guides that are similar within Abrahamic faith traditions – Judaism, Christianity, Islam – and shared by humanity across the centuries and continents.
A seminar on Midrash (Jewish writings that explain Hebrew scriptures through ethical reflection, fascinating narratives, and other means), for example, was instructive. For example: who braided Eve’s hair for her marriage to Adam? God did. The scriptures tell that God built Adam from the soil and built Eve from Adam. “Built” and “braid” are similar words in Hebrew. God braided Eve’s hair to show that mere physical development is not enough to be fully human; a spirituality of caring for oneself and for others is necessary to be fully human. Another example: what does the origin of humankind from a single person, Adam, teach us? That sustaining one soul may be like sustaining all people, and that killing one soul may be like killing all people (paraphrased from Jerusalem Talmud, Sanhedrin 4:1 (22a).
A similar teaching is found in the Quran (Surah Al-Ma’idah-32). Not the same but nearly so, with a different rhetorical approach, is the Christian New Testament instruction to “love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus describes that act as the same as loving God, the Creator of all things, including all people (Mark 12.30-31).
Antisemitism, and other racism, in its many varieties, promote antagonism toward these common threads woven through the diverse histories of our shared humanity. KKK members posed with everyone else at church meetings from Virginia to Oregon. Proud Boys, legitimated by political partisanship and media attention, marched with torches on the grounds of the University of Virginia – which has many Jewish students and employees — chanting “Jews will not replace us.” The campus Left and other cultural elites – including from my schools, Swarthmore and University of Virginia, motivated by reductionistic political-economic theories that demonize Jews are marching in support of Hamas, an anti-democratic, authoritarian militant terrorist organization. Jewish students and community members have been assaulted and killed. Muslims too are threatened by theories that demonize them. Antagonism toward common threads of humanity and ideological explanations and political justifications underlie all these manifestations of wickedness. How do we resist their wicked power?
Not forgetting the common threads that weave humanity together is one part of Mother’s prophecy. I won’t forget conversations I’ve had with survivors, and families of survivors, of Germany’s National Socialist “Judenrein” ideology to “cleanse” the German people of Jews (also targeting Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, gay men, political opponents, and others). I won’t forget praying with a young Palestinian woman who I began to notice from my apartment window coming regularly to early Morning Prayer in the Episcopal Church next door at the time of the First Intifada. I remember the fear and hope in her prayers. I won’t forget that a new Jewish friend invited me to Shabbat and synagogue, where I wore my first kippah. I won’t forget being invited to Iftar during Ramadan. I won’t forget being in retreat with Buddhists, rising very early to meditate, before a simple single meal of the day, and returning to silent study and meditation. I won’t forget celebrating Juneteenth in my local rural community, most recently as part of our public health Medical Reserve Corps. I won’t forget that sustaining one soul may be like sustaining all people when I deliver food pantry to housebound rural folks.
Speaking out is another part of Mother’s prophecy. Once I spoke out in a local newspaper opinion page about the human dignity of persons with HIV (in the very early years of that pandemic) for which I received anonymous mail contradicting my point of view from a local white supremacist/KKK organization. I’ve co-facilitated many dialogues and roundtables about destructive beliefs and ideologies. In the current crisis of rising antisemitism I wrote to my schools, Swarthmore College and University of Virginia, about antisemitic ideologies proclaimed by students at those schools. I’m volunteering with a national civil society organization, Braver Angels to work more closely with different Americans concerned to overcome hateful political partisanship. I wrote this piece.
You can do something. What will you do?
Edward Strickler Jr. lives with his husband in retirement, in Farmville, Virginia, with seven state parks nearby, two historic colleges (1776, 1839), a thriving Amish community, a large Roman Catholic seminary, a Hindu ashram, and sites important to American civil rights history.
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