Not just neo-Nazis with tiki torches: Why Jewish students say they also fear cloaked anti-Semitismhttps://www.cnn.com/2021/06/30/us/american-anti-semitism-students-soh/index.html(CNN)As Julia Jassey packed up her things before flying off to college in Chicago, she had the usual concerns -- beginning her life as an adult, making friends and getting her work done. It never occurred to her to be nervous about being Jewish.
She's born and raised in New York, the eldest daughter in her family, captain of her high school fencing team. She was looking forward to becoming more active in the progressive causes she cared about -- ending inequalities among Americans, supporting those who looked or believed differently from her to live their best lives.
But Jassey found herself excluded or even targeted as soon as her heritage was known.
There were the casual jokes -- calling the Holocaust an extended vacation for Jews who never came back.
Then there were the anti-Semitic slurs yelled at an acquaintance wearing a yarmulke, the traditional Jewish head covering. Jassey sometimes became nervous that she, too, could be targeted if anyone saw her Star of David necklace that she had worn proudly and without hesitation for years.
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For Jassey and Blake Flayton, a 20-year-old senior at The George Washington University, in Washington, DC, the greatest concern is the more insidious, seemingly regular and casual anti-Semitism, the cloaked language being used -- whether knowingly or not -- in progressive circles they once considered themselves integral parts of.
"An American Jew is only used to perceiving anti-Semitism as Nazis in Charlottesville carrying tiki torches, or a swastika being spray-painted onto a synagogue wall, or the Christian right saying that Jews killed Jesus Christ. We're not very attuned to and good at recognizing anti-Semitism when it doesn't come from that extreme side of the political spectrum," Flayton says. "But we are going to have to get used to it, because that's what's coming here. It's already here."
How "nice" of
BMM to notice the crescendo of
Prog antisemitism
that's been going on for at least 20 or 30 years!
