in elementary school i had a Jewish teacher. he taught me way back in 1998 that Israel was something called "fascist." he told me he didn't want to burden me too much before i was ready to know what that meant. but he told me no Jewish person could ever support fascism and remain Jewish at their core.
years later he showed me why he always wore long sleeves when teaching elementary school. it was to cover a tattoo on his arm. it was a number the nazis had assigned him when he was the age i was when we met (3). "this is why fascism is bad," was the message. "it almost killed me and my entire family," was the spoken justification for why no Jewish person could ever be fascist and remain linked to their Jewish identity.
he told me about some of the people who didn't make it out of auschwitz he had loved. his mother. his father. his sister. another little boy he made friends with at the death camp. countless people he never learned the names of but who always took a moment when they saw him to hug him and tell him they loved him, and that they envisioned a future for him where he told their stories to children so that no one would ever enact this kind of evil again.
i grew up in the south. while i was in school he introduced me to some of his friends in Appalachia.
- a cherokee man who wanted us to know his culture wasn't backwards, outdated, or novel. it was just his life
- an old man who had trouble writing because he'd been shot on blair mountain
- a gay woman who wasn't sure she believed there truly is such a thing as a "man" or a "woman" at birth, but rather that these are things our society we're supposed to be
These are just a few examples. there was always some marginalized person at his place teaching him how to make a recipe that he'd introduce to us before they moved on.
he told me in 2016 shortly before his death that his only regret in life was being a hypocrite. he told every person he ever imparted wisdom to to never hate, and to never let someone convince you to hate someone you never met. within the camp, there was a schism between people who blamed Poles and Ukrainians alongside nazi Germans for theis presence there. he told me the person who held his hand and walked him out of auschwitz was a Ukrainian man. my teacher didn't speak Ukrainan, not yet anyway. but he led him to a stew pot, hugged him, and gave him a bowl of borscht, made in the jewish style rather than the Ukrainian style. he learned in that moment that no one is ever simply part of a group, or that any group is simply represented any individual in it. people are complicated and groups are complicated.
but what made him feel like a hypocrite ever since the 1960s was that he couldn't find it in his heart not to hate israelis. he felt so deeply offended and betrayed by the usage of symbols he identified himself with to implement the very things that had taken from him nearly everything that it made him hate. i knew this man for the last 21 years of his life. the idea that he could hate anyone was… shocking. it… kind of shifted my world view forever because like… he never allowed himself to share this hate with anyone. he would criticize israel in action, he would tell us the star of david was not meant to represent what they used it for, he would explain to us their recontextualize the menorah to mean something it oughtn't was hurtful, but the idea that there were people on earth he didn't have the patience to listen to because he found them so wretched and vile that it twisted his soul in a knot was new to me.
i don't hate the israelis the way he hated them. i don't think i'm capable. not without the pain he suffered. but i do find them offensive on his behalf. i do think often about how wretched a person must be to wound the soul of someone so unfailingly patient and kind. i think about the crises of faith their re-contextualizing of his symbols gave him. but most of all i think about what he told me (paraphrased because this is a memory and memories change a little bit every time you access them)
"Some of my elders tried to teach me to hate the Ukrainian and make my way to Israel when everything was over. A few considered themselves Ukrainian in addition to being Jewish and told me that the way to make the world safe for Jews wasn't to go to Israel, but to go anywhere the poor and downtrodden are and help them resist their pharaoh. The soldiers who freed us were mostly Ukrainian. They fed us borscht because they knew from first hand experience that a starving belly can eat borscht without vomiting. Borscht makes you strong. It gives you power. The russian commanders wanted to send us to reeducation centers and bring us into the fold of authoritarian communism. One of the Ukrainian soldiers falsified documents for me and my Uncle to come to the United states to stay with 'our family' (his family) in hopes that we were more likely to be allowed to be ourselves here.
"Here in the United States, that soldier's cousins would tell me that under nazi occupation, Ukrainians were offered, in effect, 3 choices for survival. Collaborate with the Nazis, work with the antisemitic underground movement, or join the red army. Many like that soldier chose the red army even though it meant giving up on the dream of an independent Ukraine for a long time because Jews had been their friends and neighbors for 1600 years. They chose when faced with their burning home to save their friends rather than any of their own possessions. It was a grand act of kindness given to us by an entire group of people who had already suffered immensely under Bolshevism.
"Israel does not represent to me any future for the Jewish people. They are the same death cult that tried to kill me as a child for the unforgivable crime of existence. Every day, I work to make the world a better and safer place. Everyday it is made harder by people who claim that they do it in my honor. It hurts me in ways I cannot describe. Someday a time will come you will need to assemble a coalition of misfits. People will despise every member of your group. If you do it right, you will find at least one Ukrainian who will find you. They will be building their own band of misfits. Our people lived together for 1500 years before the Time of Separation started in the 1880s. We work the same way in times of desperation. We learned it from each other. It will be okay in that time to be selfish in your help. It will be okay to see someone in need and and feed them some soup for the selfish reason that the world will get safer for you when people in more danger than yourself are made safe."
i have spent the decade since his passing at the age of 76 trying to become the person he always hoped i'd be. he spent a lifetime trying to figure out his religious identity. i find myself on a similar journey, having started my political life as a democratic socialist, then moving into the space of anachocommunism and now operating in a space somewhat between anarchocommunism and religious anarchism. but the one thing that has never changed about my politics is the core of what drove his religious practices. it's basically the following principles:
- if you are hungry, i will feed you
- if you are thirsty, i will water you
- the only people who will be denied either of these gifts will be racists
- racists in hunger will be offered food, but not water
edit i math bad from 2016-1940 and missed my teacher's age by a decade
