WASN'T IT ODD OF GOD...

...TO CHOOSE THE JEWS?

Apologies—I should have noted that this was written two years ago.

Of course, things haven’t changed all that much, and, although much of what was said here is going to be stated again in a new piece in progress, I’ll go forward with that piece as well, because we live, as noted, in a culture in which all too many sequels are remakes.

Regrets for the omission.

Not quite the same omission made by modern culture in regard to systemic Jew hate, but omission nonetheless.

Now that Jew baiting and Jew hating are back in vogue(I hesitate to use the term “anti-Semitism” since so much of that baiting and hating comes from Semites and their morally perfomative mouthpieces these days), which is not to say that it’s ever really gone out fashion, we’ve been surfeited of late by waves of anti-Jewish rhetoric, frequently posing as criticism of Israel.

The Nazi right makes no bones about their loathing for the Chosen People.  On the progressive left, we are treated on a nearly daily basis to outright Jew baiting, frequently based on libelous nonsense dating back centuries, as well as to explanations from those outside the faith as to what is and isn’t Jew hate. 

This is of a piece with the behavior of that side of the aisle, which will frequently attempt to intellectually justify arrant bigoted nonsense with patronizing ersatz rationality…until, of course, it starts foaming at the mouth when one responds just as rationally and refuses to agree with its bullshit.

Sorry.  If, by the identity imposed on me by modern culture, I’m not entitled to define sexism, or racism, or any other social tribal attack experienced by those other than me and members of my claque, the reverse is equally true.  It’s not in the purview of non-Jews to decide and define what is or isn’t Jew hate, or as the socially preferred term has it, anti-Semitic.

As I’ve noted elsewhere, Jews—aside from their reputations among the moronic, bigoted or simply miseducated for being so damned good with money, controlling the world economy, et al—are conveniently white (devils!) for black Jew haters, and conveniently not white((Satan’s spawn!)), for White supremacist Jew baiters.

This is, to be sure, exhausting, believe you me.  Not only are we regarded as godless Bolsheviks, we’re also ruthless capitalists, crypto-fascists, shrewd swindlers, crafty lawyers, slavers, apartheidists, Satan’s offspring-the list goes on and fucking on.

Clearly, Jews are one truly busy minority, apparently universally available to cover every possible base—hated from every side—and potentially, as any memory of history fades from willful ignorance, historical and cultural amnesia, not to mention guilelessly self-regarding mass distraction, there’ll be plenty more to loathe us in the future once all that mid twentieth century mass murder has slipped from collective recollection.

Count on it.

Significantly, the one canard we as Jews seem to have shed, to have put behind us in that fabled dustbin of history, is victim. 

Despite the fact that there are those who have absurdly stated, in all seriousness, that had they been armed, the Jews of Europe could and should have defended themselves effectively against the depredations of the Third Reich…or those who regard those slaughtered millions as born weaklings who got what was coming to them…or even that pack of perverse interpreters of Christianity who truly regard Members of the Tribe as subhuman vermin, the descendants of Satan who needed to be exterminated for the good of (white) mankind…

…There came a sea change in the years that occurred shortly after the mass murder of those benighted mid-twentieth century decades came to light…a sea change defined by two words…

…NEVER AGAIN. 

We all saw the film and photos of our European relatives, murdered and stacked like cordwood. Or the survivors, starved, brutalized and deprived of everything defining human value by men and women they’d once lived alongside as neighbors, and with whom they’d once identified as fellow countrymen. 

For my generation, this was scorching and terrifying evidence of what awaited American Jews had the war gone the other way—despite all those nihilist shitstains on all strata of society, not to say civilization, who either diminished the reality of this genocide or even outright denied the slaughter of millions.

You know how Jews are—they exaggerate everything, am I right?

And of course, among those of us with Popular Front leftists in the family, it wasn’t until years later that we learned how close we’d come to a second mass murder in Stalin’s intended pogrom of the early 1950s.  Even then, Jews were utterly fucked from both sides of the political aisle.

That said, Jewish kids of my generation were born into an America in which Israel was perceived as a scrappy little bastard, a take no shit tough guy, more John Garfield than Mischa Auer, more Paulette Goddard than Gertrude Berg.  Lots of us—not me, significantly or not, take your pick—made pilgrimages there, to work on a kibbutz, or even, in more extreme cases, to serve in Israel’s armed forces.

I never identified as a Zionist, nor with Israel or Israelis, for that matter—and frankly, push come to shove, I still don’t.  I was, as a kid, as a result of my mother’s insistent terminology, a hyphenate—a Jewish-American.  That went away in my teens, and I’m all-American now, whether the rest of my fellow Americans like it or not.

As a sidebar, entre nous and apropos of little or nothing, I spent much of my first three years living with a Catholic family, friends of my grandmother and mother.  This huge family treated me like one of their own, and did what they could, whether intentionally or not, to show me and not so accidentally try to convert me to the joys of Papism.

I had no idea at the time why this happened, and never got a straight answer from anyone in my family.  It wasn’t until some months after my mother’s death that I learned that I was illegitimate, and that this sojourn as a toddler was a matter of hiding me in plain sight, in order to avert potential public shame to my mother. 

So yes, I’m a bastard, literally and figuratively—a secret my frankly rather awful mother took to her grave.  So much for Jewish sons and all that supposedly smothering mother love.

That said, with all that Catholicism being brought to bear in those years, it finally came home to me in my adolescence that as a Jew, I was a member of a club from which I could not resign.

And just to make matters even more interesting, I stopped believing in anything even vaguely resembling god, anthropomorphic, supernatural or any otherwise, within a year of my bar mitzvah. 

So, for those of you who think Jewry is only a religion, be advised—it’s an ethnicity, it’s an identity, it’s a culture—and I fucking love it, embracing it with every fiber of my being, stuck in it or not.

Some forty years ago, in the early days of my second marriage, my then wife—the only woman to whom I’ve been married who was born into the tribe-referred to Jews in the third person, as “…they,” or “…them.”

I said, only half kidding, but in my usual all too ready for a fight way, that when the knock on the door came in the middle of the night, the Jew hunters would likely not be willing to accept her denial of who she was and what she was stuck with as they dragged her off into the dark.

So even then, I had an inkling that Jew baiting wasn’t entirely gone from the playbook and had a pretty good chance of making a comeback.  We weren’t likely to be identified as victims, per se—but as prepackaged, easy to despise universally loathed representatives of whatever your particular cultural niche might find distasteful.

The neo Nazi right has been quiet in this particular conversation of late, since sparking it all anew in Charlottesville with their “Jews will not replace us!” bleats.  Apparently, this cry was the articulation of a brand-new wrinkle in the age-old libel—as we members of the tribe were now being held accountable for the mass immigration of brown people, who would be stealing the jobs of these apparently unsullied Aryan specimens, and muddying the gene pool of white Christian America.

Of course, the smarter and better informed on the Nazi right—you know, the kind of racist scumbag who congratulates himself for having a canny Jew lawyer to plead his case—have to be laughing up a storm right now, what with the toad like and toadying Sheldon Adelson buying his misbegotten wife the Presidential Medal of Freedom…or the newly reelected Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu, who has made peace, parley and parity with fascist strongmen, EuroNazis whose forebears would have gleefully shoved Bibi’s forebears into the ovens, or buried them alive in a mass grave…

…And of course, there’s this administration’s Goebbels cosplayer Stephen Miller, about whom I can proudly say that the only thing we have in common is we’re both ashamed he’s Jewish.

Really now, who wouldn’t want to be a fly on the wall at a White House gathering with David Duke and his fellow Nazis in attendance, sharing the floor and cocktails with this pack of collaborators?

No victims here, just identifiers with the aggressor, compromised moral cripples willing to betray the very nature of Jewish culture for a seat at the Nazi table. 

And speaking of victims, and of victim culture…

…I was reminded last week by a friend of mine who reposted a scathing attack in THE GUARDIAN on a book I’d written and drawn in 2017 entitled THE DIVIDED STATES OF HYSTERIA.  I assume he’d done this as a grim reminder of how things had swirled the drain even more in our disintegrating cultural discourse and national race to nullity.

Without rehashing too much awful shit, the bottom line of this experience were a series of ad hominem attacks on my work and my character, from people who hadn’t read the material, but just knew it was awful because, as it finally boiled down to, I was an “old, white, heterosexual cisgender male,” addressing subjects to which I was not entitled creative access, depicting characters who weren’t representative of me.

The exclusivity of inclusivity, not to mention the specificity of diversity, is always rife with irony.  And let’s face it—irony escapes this crowd like hot air from a punctured tire.

Everything came to a head with a cover for the fourth issue, depicting the aftermath of the brutal and bloody murder by lynching of a middle eastern/east Indian man.  The reaction, which I regarded then and now still regard as utterly fatuous, indicated that these idiots actually thought, or perhaps claimed to think, that I was encouraging such an act. 

All this despite the fact, obvious to anyone with a bit of awareness, that I was clearly portraying my own horror at what a misbegotten half of America had become and in becoming, had come to embrace such an act as a pretty good idea, all things being equal.

The cover was pulled, with my grudging approval, a decision I regret more and more every day.  I folded, when I should have stood pat.  I didn’t want my publisher to be smeared with collateral damage for my perceived sins, which, in retrospect, gave these guilelessly self-regarding clowns license to maim.

Now, two years later, rereading this Guardian piece once again, in all its frankly all too hysterical, off with his head tone, I’m struck by my own rather dimwitted misreading of the situation that precipitated this nonsense in the first place.

My assumption was that it was the act as depicted on the cover of the original cover for The Divided States of Hysteria that was the problem for those who took umbrage.  What a fool I’d been.  

Rather, it was the victim of the crime on that cover that created the mass outrage at the cover…that victim being a member of an ethnic group that has been adopted in its entirety for its protection by the gatekeepers of the self-entitled progressive left…

…Many of whom apparently had indicated a few years earlier that the murdered cartoonists at CHARLIE HEBDO might very well had had it coming by daring to publish those satiric images that were perceived as insults to Islam and Mohammed by armed gunmen. Thus, these murderers were deemed protectors of the faith by, at the very least, implication.

So, it occurred to me, that had I chosen to depict, say, a Jew—with enough signifiers to confirm that ethnic/religious identity—my fellow Members of the Tribe may very well have been outraged.  Yes, outraged but not offended, I suspect, but rather in complete agreement with me that this event depicted a wish dream of far too many of our fellow Americans on both sides of the political aisle.

Now, as noted above, I’ve never identified as a Zionist, nor with Israel in any particular way beyond an abstract, good for the Jews sort of way. 

And to be clear, Israel embracing relationships with Fascist regimes leaves me heartsick.  But, to be even clearer, none of that in any way grants the terrorists at her borders anything even vaguely resembling a higher moral ground in that seemingly endless conflict.

Furthermore, only a fool would mistake America’s degenerate Christian right’s apparent philo-semitism for anything other than a wish dream of the destruction of as many Jews as possible to facilitate the Rapture—and I may be occasionally dim, but I’m no fool.

I mock superhero comic book fans for their tastes in junk at every juncture, but the Rapture?  With all due respect, these guys will clearly believe anything.

That said, it seems pretty fucking clear to me that, coming from the left as it always does, anti-Zionism is all too often no more than a barely bearded dog whistle for Jew baiting, that old reliable, perfectly acceptable bigotry du jour.

So, what of that horde of the great offended, that swarm of morally performative gatekeepers of right and wrong, as personified by that foaming at the mouth in indignation Guardian piece…?

I suspect their reaction had I swapped in a Jew for a Muslim would have been the same flame they brought to bear on Serrano’s PISS CHRIST, or Ofili’s HOLY VIRGIN MARY, with their, shall we call it, somewhat offbeat portrayal of Christian iconography…

…Which is to say, I have no doubt whatsoever that those selfsame morally performative gatekeepers who were all over my ass wouldn’t have given a fuck about a comic book featuring a lynched and castrated Jew on its cover.

And I have a deep suspicion, in the private heart of hearts of those gatekeepers, there might all too likely be a nod of shared satisfaction at such an image, followed by a murmured sigh of “B.D.S.…”

…Because, hey, Jews, right?