Jews are being physically assaulted in London, Toronto, Belgium, Montreal, NYC, Florida, and here in LA.
Synagogues are being vandalized all over the west.
Chants of “Rape Jewish daughters!” “Who here is a Jew?” (Before beating random diners at a restaurant). Blood libel in our media, the mouths of colleagues, the well of the US Congress.
I have been branded guilty of the worst crimes known to humanity — infanticide, ethnic cleansing, genocide — and lost friends, and fans, simply for pointing to inarguable facts mitigating this latest iteration of an old, dangerous and false narrative.
To be a Jew is to be complicit in crimes neither of my personal doing, nor of fact, and then be punished for the same. Made to stand trial in a fixed courtroom born from some moloch’s fever dream, with the most severe punishments handed down — banishment, random beatings, sacred spaces defiled, deaths.
And where are our liberal, progressive friends? Where are the marginalized people we’ve stood with proudly as firm allies for decades? They are silent, except, of course, when flattering that same hothouse narrative, encouraging the violence from their keyboards, bullhorns, stages, lecterns, mastheads, or removing us from unrelated marches and movements. Violence committed against us apparently only matters when perpetrated by right wing bigots.
We are always the excepted case; every other targeted group finds solidarity, “I Stand With”-memes, marches in support, loud denunciations, legislation written. Us? Silence, or.
Look closely.
When Trump was elected, we were soothingly told how our allies would fight by our side. Worse than the yawning silence, we see them with their pitchfork tweets and manipulated rage, assenting, goading, participating.
I will neither go quietly nor abandon this core belief:
None are truly free until all are free.
—
(Actor, writer and musician Rob Shapiro has written and sung about violence and bigotry when troubling circumstances have demanded a response.)
