autoethno_td_carpenter

This past summer, I went back to my hometown in Tennessee. It’s a little city called Maryville with no more than forty thousand inhabitants. You can always tell the difference between a native and visitor of the southern town by the pronunciation of the city’s name. While Maryville is technically three syllables, the locals only pronounce two of them. Phonetically, it would look like this: ˈmərvil. There isn’t a lot to do in Maryville at all, really. Corporate America killed off most of the local businesses a long time ago, and those that remain are mainly for an older clientele. So, there are a lot of parties that happen in cabins near the Foothills of the Smokey Mountains.

One gathering of the “Toga” variety was lucky enough to have myself attend. I didn’t see a lot of people I knew at this party, but I had my two best friends by my side to make up for the lack of social connection. There was one boy there, Phil, and he and I had a mutual friend that brought us into the same circle to strike up a conversation. We got a couple of drinks and…he was nice! He was intelligent and witty and a pleasure all around. At one point, we somehow got onto the topic of how his extended family is of Germanic origin. Out of a desire to coin yet another commonality between the two of us, I asked if he was Jewish.

This inquiry is perhaps a little odd to ask, I know. So I think it’s important to take you on the journey that I went on not too long ago. Growing up, I was raised as a Methodist Christian, and in Tennessee that denomination is pretty common. Christianity in Maryville is like a designer brand that everyone has to have in order to be considered normal or in the in crowd. It’s less of a religion and more of a cool club, which caused me to be skeptical of Christianity and religion as a whole. A couple of years ago, my mom and I were going through my grandmother’s belongings when we found immigration documents from my Russian and Canadian ancestors. In one of the photos, there was a man wearing a yarmulke. Upon further questioning of my mother, she revealed that she grew up in a Jewish household, but converted to Catholicism in order to marry my father. She kept on telling me about our ancestors and how they left Russia to flee the Nazi movement. The fact that they couldn’t practice their religion in their home sparked me to start investigating Judaism. I’m Jewish by blood, so why not see what’s going on?

As it turns out, it’s beautiful. The teachings are non-evangelical. Your goal in life is not to shove your religion down everybody else’s throats, but it is instead to put as much good into the world as you can. Each day I find something out about being Jewish that I didn’t know the day before, and it helps that there are a lot of Jewish students here at Chapman. Before Chapman, I never knew anybody who was Jewish, so the fact that I thought there was another person like me at a party gave me a jolt of excitement.

So, back to the party. When I asked Phil if he was Jewish, his reaction was the opposite of what I thought it would be. His face turned to mirror mine, his blue eyes trying to shatter my own, and opened his mouth to utter, “Fuck. No.” After this answer, he turned to his friend to start a conversation about the Jews and how they deserved everything that happened during the holocaust, and they began to praise Adolf Hitler. This was my first direct experience with modern anti-Semitism. In order to understand modern anti-Semitism, it is imperative to understand where it originates.

The Holocaust is the most notorious genocide in history, with some six million European Jews being murdered. The basis of this genocide was that a national identity (i.e. being a pure German) was superior to an ethnic/religious identity. When written, it has no logic whatsoever. “Germans are better than Jews just because.” It sounds like a statement a child would make on a playground. The only thing that validated this statement to the Nazi regime and made it into one of the worst genocides in the history of mankind was fear. The fear that the Jews would take over the country if not dealt with accordingly. In fact, fear was the majority of the anti-Semitic movement in Germany, only using race to validate this fear.

Fear will always be a part of mankind, thus making it something that is very easy to manipulate. There are entire industries built off of fear. Take insurance companies for example. It is one of the biggest insurance providers in the United States. Every advertisement for the company ends in the question, “Are you in good hands?” in order to make its target audience–consumers who have chosen a different insurance provider–ponder their safety with their current provider. Their innate fear produces a list of what-if questions that soon becomes to much for them to bear, causing them to get online and see a quote.

We all have that innate fear. It’s instinctual and it’s the reason that we are all alive today. But what brings people to act on these urges? Vice News cites the data released by the FBI, which shows a rapid increase of 17% among hate crimes, with a 37% increase in anti-Semitic motivations, in the first year of the Trump administration. When one has a fear that translates into anti-Semitism, an official of high public regard has a lot of responsibility in their rhetoric. President Trump’s rhetoric offers validation to those who fear non-white/non-Christian people, but, more devastatingly, he offers motivation to act on those fears through violence.