Rejecting My Jewish Heritage In The Face Of Antisemitism Will Work *This* Time (PreOccupied Territory)

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Rejecting My Jewish Heritage In The Face Of Antisemitism Will Work *This* Time

by Simone Sheodlo-Higanu

New York, October 14 - An aphorism attributed (wrongly) to Albert Einstein characterizes insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. With all due respect to the professor, I believe my current course will defy that pattern: unlike all the efforts of my ancestors who sought to relieve themselves of anti-Jewish persecution and discrimination by assimilating into the wider culture, only to find that the wider culture still considered them Jewish and therefore ripe for discrimination, in my case the effort to jettison everything of substance in my Judaism will engender only acceptance and approval from those whom I seek to join. I just know it.

I certainly will fare better than the hundreds of thousands of Jews who decided to convert to Catholicism rather than leave Spain in 1492, only to discover over the next several hundred years that their loving, tolerant neighbors and the Office of the Inquisition continued to suspect them of heresy and clinging to Jewish beliefs and practice, no matter how loudly or publicly the protestations of adherence to good Christian doctrine.

Nor will I face the fate of my predecessors in eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century Germany, where acculturation of Jews into every echelon of society proceeded with more thoroughness than anywhere else in history, but whose ancestry became subject to examination when Nazi racial purity laws went into effect in the 1930's.

Similarly, my path will prove other than that of the Yevsektsia, those proudly Communist Jews of the early Soviet Union who made it their mission to discredit, harass, and destroy all vestiges of Jewish life and culture so as to spare themselves the wrath of Lenin, Stalin, et al., and to prove themselves proper, loyal Soviet citizens. Then they were purged and executed when Stalin decided he no longer needed them.

That means my ongoing efforts to gain approbation from prominent progressive figures by disparaging the nine-out-of-ten Jews who profess support for Israel, and the rich tradition they preserve of longing for Zion through millennia of exile and outsider status, will end differently. I cannot explain why or how, exactly, that difference will manifest, but I can just feel it, just as I feel genocide happening in Palestine. Your efforts to explain to me that Jews who respect their Jewish heritage command respect, while those who do not, achieve the opposite result, will amount to nothing. I have already redefined my "Jewish heritage" to mean divorcing myself from anything authentically Jewish except where I can cherry-pick it to support my politics.

There's no way this goes sideways.