Overheard on the 6 train

This morning, as I was riding to work, there were two Sephardic Jews, one Israeli, one from Brooklyn, flirting. It was interesting to see them talk about their shared culture. She didn't know the name of his hometown (just north of Haifa), but she knew she could drop the name of her father's hometown and he'd understand immediately. And she kept mentioning food, confident he'd understand what she meant when she simply said that Brooklyn has good food. Hummus and falafel, rather than latkes and kugel. In other words, they shared an ethnic identification. (There are other ways, probably more significant, in which Jewish cultures differ from the dominant, white culture of the US, but don't we always start with food and geography?) Many of us, without much interaction with the organized Jewish community, may find it easy to forget what that means. But Jews are not, as too often portrayed, simply white (or sometimes, whiter than white). The understanding that Jews are white needs to be problematized.

I'm white, but I don't know that either of them could be appropriately said to be. And if they are, there are other Jews -see Y Love; Rebel Sun; or Sammy Davis, Jr; but also consider the Ethiopian Jews, Beta Israel; or the Chinese Kaifeng Jews; or Jews of India (here's some Indian Jews in Brooklyn). Yet we all (even me) share pieces of a broader Jewish identity that is different from the dominant culture of the US that is understood as defining whiteness. The guy who spoke up to say that his mother's family was also Sephardic, from Syria and Egypt -though he looked more like me- him, too.

Of course, such diversity within Jewish society produces conflict. We're not necessarily less racist than other groups (why would anyone expect otherwise?), and it's a shame to see "anti-Zionists" exploit that to tar all Jews/Zionists/Israeli Jews for the racism of some Jews. Yet she noted that in Brooklyn, there's respect for the diversity of styles of worship among Jews. And he noted that in Israel, his generation is leaving behind the racial divide between Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews.

More news of violence

via Bintel Blog, this story about a rise in antisemitic hate crimes in Brooklyn.

law enforcement officials acknowledge that there has been a 25 percent spike in bias crimes in the city since September, Crown Heights community activists claim the figures would be higher if not for a police cover-up.

And, yes, they include violence.

The press conference and Kelly’s meeting were triggered by the attack Friday night by five teenagers on Shmuel Balkany, 16, as he walked to a friend’s house on the Jewish side of Crown Heights.
“I was viciously beaten and clobbered all over my body,” he said, adding that the attack lasted between three to five minutes and left him with a deep gash in his head.
Balkany said the teens yelled, “F— Jew. It’s our neighborhood. We’re going to kill you.”
“I didn’t understand what was happening, and once I did I yelled for help but no one was around,” he added. “I had nothing in my pockets and I think they knew that.”

More hate crimes in Brooklyn

The NYT piece is a mess, so here's the news from The Brooklyn Eagle.

When police searched the apartment, they found a stockpile of weapons, including explosives and a crossbow. Police sent the bomb squad in, and building residents were evacuated for nearly a full day, from 3 a.m. Sunday to late evening, witnesses said. Remsen Street was also closed from early morning until nearly 8 p.m., and worshipers at Grace Church had to enter via a rectory building rather than via the main entrance.

According to the New York Post, Ivanov had been a closely watched subject in relation to the Sept. 24 hate graffiti – swastikas as well as racial slurs like “kill the Jews.” The graffiti was found spray-painted on the Brooklyn Heights Synagogue and the B’nai Avraham synagogue, both less than two blocks away from Ivanov’s home, as well as on several buildings on Columbia Place.

The graffiti appeared just after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a well-known Holocaust denier, gave a controversial lecture at Columbia University. The lecture was heavily protested and almost universally condemned by local and national Jewish leaders.

I'm curious about why the NYT piece is such a mess. It seems to be pushing a view of antisemitism as fringe craziness rather than a real threat. Here we have a story about someone amassing weapons and the likely intent of bombing synagogues, but they feel the need to quote a rabbi on who's Jewish?

I have a better idea of what bothered me about the reporting on the attack on the Q train recently. It was quite a feel good story, which made it a great alibi for journalists and readers to avoid challenging any of the assumptions they hold about Jews. Meanwhile, the vandalism of a cemetery in Chicago seems underreported. After recent vandalism of a cemetary in New Jersey, police were "initially reluctant to label the damage a hate crime." And Jews who talk about rising antisemitism get marginalized, ignored, or even banned from spaces of debate. In Tricia Rose's speech, which I highlighted from a WNYC radio show yesterday, she spoke of people with "an incredibly passionate rhetoric for the ideal of equality and no tolerance for the sacrifice that it takes to make it happen." Once again, thanks to Hassan Askari who joined the fight against antisemitic violence. But when will people join the fight against the racist logic that underlies such violence?