On Anti-Semitism and Recent Events at Brown University

[For context: “Janet Mock, trans activist, cancels lecture at Brown RISD Hillel”.]

Look, I don’t even know where to begin. Ever since the petition started circulating, I’ve told myself that I wouldn’t write about this. I wouldn’t like people’s statuses, I wouldn’t reply to comments, I wouldn’t even really discuss it with my friends — I was actively planning to not contribute to the conversation in any way. Not because I don’t have opinions about every aspect of this situation, but because I knew that emotionally investing myself in this discussion would be exhausting. Yet here I am, having done exactly what I planned to do, and I’m still exhausted.

I’m exhausted because, during a conversation over dinner in the Ratty my senior year at Brown, a young woman whom I greatly admire for her courage and activism said to the group at large, “Well, fuck Hillel, the Jews control everything at this school. They own the Corporation. They pressured Brown into giving them their own buildling for free when LGBTQIA students can’t even get more than a room in Faunce.” I’m exhausted because I had to respond calmly and say, “I’m pretty sure Hillel actually bought and paid for the building by itself — Brown doesn’t own or control it at all,” and I’m exhausted because she replied, “Oh, of course Jews have that much money.”

I’m exhausted because one morning my junior fall, sitting down with a group of mostly-strangers in the Blue Room, the group got to talking about religion and I was told that “Jews have it good on this campus because they’re not Christian.” I must not have been able to conceal my confusion, because the speaker continued, “Everybody knows what Hillel is on campus! That’s for Jews! And like, nobody shits on Jews for having their beliefs! But us Christians are all associated with crazy Republicans so we can’t even tell people on campus we’re Christian.” I let the conversation continue without me because I didn’t even know what to say.

I’m exhausted because since day one of my freshman year, when I told someone at Brown that I was Jewish, I had to follow it up with, “But I promise I’m not anti-Palestine” or “I think what’s happening in Israel is fucked up”. And because when professors made announcements saying that missing class for the High Holy Days would be excused absences, many of my peers would sneer or scoff or say “damn, lucky,” as if me being born into this religion that has become assimilated into whiteness and tangled up with the deplorable human rights violations that, unfortunately, the only Jewish country in the world is committing was some stroke of luck and not just a fact of my life.

I didn’t use Hillel as much as I maybe could have when I was on campus. Several of my close friends spent huge swaths of time there, in and out of meetings and study sessions and 305 Fitness Classes and Swing Dances and yoga sessions and a capella practices. I did use Hillel, though, because it was the one god damned place on campus where I wasn’t exhausted. Where nobody was going to make a “Jews rule the world” joke at me (wow! so original! The Dreyfus Affair called, it wants credit for your anti-Semitism), where nobody was going to ask my opinion on a conflict that I am one hundred percent unqualified to talk about, where I could tell people about my anxiety and my bisexuality and not flinch away immediately because it was already a space of no judgement. A — conservative thinkpiece authors strike me down — safe space.

And that’s why I’m exhausted now. With the cancellation of Janet Mock’s speaking engagement at Brown-RISD Hillel, the ever-pervasive and yet never-quite-visible anti-Semitism that runs through Brown’s campus as strongly as racism and classism has impacted the one place on campus where Jews of all identities, especially queer Jews like myself, were allowed to not be exhausted. To not have to have walls up, to not have to fake-laugh whenever someone commented on our noses, to not have to constantly have answers when engaging in a debate about a tiny strip of land that is not the be-all end-all of our religious beliefs.

Because that’s what this is, I’m sorry to say. It’s anti-Semitism. I know, or at least hope in the tiny part of my shriveled young heart that believes in the inherent goodness of people, that the authors of the petition were not actively intending to be anti-Semitic. I know they wanted to protest Israel, Netanyahu, pinkwashing, and the abuse and murder of Palestinians. But conflating Brown-RISD Hillel with the kind of militaristic Zionism that censors all speech critical of Israel is, at the end of the day, anti-Semitic. Conflating Jews and Judaism and Jewish spaces on the whole with Zionism is anti-Semitic.

This is not to say that there are not pro-Israel Jewish spaces that are hostile toward Palestinians and their allies; this is not to say that there are not Jews who would defend Israel until their dying breath and would never stop to think about the other side. This is, however, to say that you can practice Judaism and be pro-Palestine; you can practice Judaism and be anti-colonization; you can practice Judaism and be queer and trans and maybe need to hear Janet Mock’s voice affirm your identity in a country that’s just as anti-Semitic today as it was when it turned away boatfuls of Jewish refugees during the Holocaust (yes, I said it, the boogeyman word that Zionists love to abuse but that no Jew can ever truly shake).

The anti-Semitism is just more insidious now, less overt. And maybe that’s why I’m exhausted — I’m dealing with microaggressions every day (my coworkers thought it was funny that I wanted to be home for Hanukkah!) despite having massive amounts of privilege, heaps and gobs of it compared to so many that I know. But they’re there. The anti-Semitism is there, the way it was at Brown and in Arlington and anywhere that wasn’t a space created by Jews for other Jews. I have to stop writing this now because I think I’m about to throw up. But… my god. When when one takes the only safe space for Brown’s Jewish population and ascribes a specific, violent viewpoint (one of censorship and colonialism) to that entire space and, by extension, its population, it’s damaging. Please, you have to recognize how it’s damaging. For the whole Brown Jewish population but, more importantly, its queer Jewish population, whose voices are doubly marginalized and whose words are doubly scrutinized every single day. I wish this hadn’t happened. I’m just so tired.