I posted over at Alas with the idea that it would be inter­est­ing if peo­ple, Jews and non-Jews alike, were to tell sto­ries about their expe­ri­ences with anti­semitism. Here is what I wrote:

Read­ing through the com­ments gen­er­ated by my two posts (here and here) on anti­semitism so far has got­ten me think­ing about how many of us – Jew­ish or not, but espe­cially Jew­ish – ever really talk about our expe­ri­ences with anti­semitism, not in the con­text of argu­ing a point about the Palestinian-Israeli con­flict or of any other issue that is not, sim­ply, an asser­tion of the fact that anti­semitism exists and that it has real con­se­quences in Jew­ish (and non-Jewish) lives. I know that the first post I wrote was the first time ever that I tried to con­struct a chronol­ogy, a nar­ra­tive of the anti­semitism I have expe­ri­enced in my life, and it brought home to me all over again just how enor­mous and pro­found an effect it had on my world­view, not all of which I wrote about in the sec­ond post, since my focus in those posts is really quite spe­cific. I was moved when AndiF chose to share her/his (sorry, I real­ize I don’t know) expe­ri­ences from a gen­er­a­tion before me, and I was inter­ested to read some other people’s expe­ri­ences from the gen­er­a­tions after me. So here’s what I pro­pose: a post where the point of the com­ments is, sim­ply, to tell sto­ries about our expe­ri­ences with anti­semitism, not to ana­lyze those expe­ri­ences, but just to tell them and then let them speak for them­selves. I am not talk­ing about polit­i­cal analy­sis of some politician’s or scholar’s or blog posts’ rhetoric, and I am not talk­ing about list­ing anti­se­mitic inci­dents at which you were not present. I am talk­ing about moments when you saw or expe­ri­enced anti­semitism in action.

I am not going to limit this post to Jews, because I think it’s impor­tant to hear from non-Jews about their expe­ri­ences, but it is my plan to delete any com­ment that is not a story. (I am not going to make that an absolute rule, since there are always excep­tions, but it is my plan.)

Let’s see what kind of col­lec­tive story our indi­vid­ual sto­ries com­bine to tell.