Like Domestic Violence, Antisemitism Has Also Been A Thread Running Through My Life

“Whatsamatta, kike?! You’re Jewish dick’s not big enough? Hit me ya’ fucking Hebrew pussy!”

There were four of them and one of me, and the one screaming in my face was swinging a chain he would have loved to hit me with, but I had a hunch they wouldn’t lay a hand on me unless they could say that I had provoked them. I was neither foolish nor angry enough to take them all on at once, though, so I stood with my back flat against the wall of the brick building across from the elementary school I went to from third through sixth grade and made sure my hands stayed loose and open at my sides.

“We’re building an oven in my basement,” the ringleader smiled. (I remember his name. I remember all their names, though I won’t name them here.) Then he folded the chain into the pocket of his coat. “When it’s finished, remember, we know where you live,” he stage-whisper-hissed at me with one last thrust of his face up towards mine—he was a lot shorter than I was—and then he and companions walked off in the opposite direction from where I lived. Despite the fact that what I really wanted to do was run as fast as I could, I forced myself to walk as well. I tried not to keep looking over my shoulder, but I couldn’t help myself. This was not the first time they’d cornered me like that and I suspected they would have no qualms about attacking me from behind if something changed their minds about letting me go. The year was 1977. I was fifteen years old.

§§§

Before third grade, I didn’t know what antisemitism was. That year, I was the new kid in the neighborhood, and, as kids do, a classmate asked me one day in the schoolyard during recess what my religion was. I told him. I don’t remember what if anything he said in return, but the next day, as the boys gathered for a pickup game of dodgeball, he stopped me from joining in. “You can’t play,” he said. “My father told me I’m not allowed to play with Jews.”

I don’t know if the next thing I remember actually took place after he said that, but it follows in my memory as if his words had been a signal to the rest of the boys to push me—and I know I was pushed—into the center of the ritual circle of boyhood schoolyard violence. John, the boy who was known as the toughest kid in the class, was waiting there to fight me. I don’t recall if he and I said anything to each other, but I know the other boys started urging him on, telling him to punch me in my Jewish nose, and I know I tried to leave the circle and that the other boys shoved me back towards the middle. I can’t tell you who swung first, or if he landed a punch before I did, but since I knew that the only way out of the circle was either to allow myself to be hit or to hit him before he hit me, I chose the latter. I can still hear the crack that rang out the moment my fist collided with his jaw, and I can still see the blood that began to flow down his chin. We ran, all of us, but I have no clear memory of what happened next, except that I was relieved when I found out I hadn’t actually damaged him, that the blood was from a scab I’d broken on the side of his face.