Jews

I grew up in the Midwest and have lived here all my life and, to my knowledge, haven’t had many encounters with Jews, except for my first job out of college. I worked for a company that made food flavorings and it was owned by a Jew and the CEO was a Jew. Other than that, I don’t think I’ve known many Jews. Honestly, I never think about them and I don’t care (Jews in general that is; not my former employers), sorta like any foreigners or members of an ethnicity that don’t bother or affect me. But I can say that the owner of that company treated me fair and as far as I could tell, treated the others pretty fair – if not good – too.

But Jews seem to get a bad rap. And, like I say, it’s hard for me to judge based on little to no interaction. But I hear, all in all, sorta like the Asian immigrants, they tend to do pretty well for themselves, which you’d think is a good thing for everybody. But when shit starts to hit the fan (like now, it seems) that nostalgic Jew hate seems to really start simmering. We get all tribal and it makes sense, in a way, that we start hating on the most successful, not unlike the average looking girls hating on the prettiest one.

I don’t know much about history but in recent history, from what I can tell, the world’s done some pretty dirty things to groups of people but to round ’em up and exterminate them seems godawful dirty. Evil, even. And to know it happened not that long ago, in the enlightened, modern world – not even the “barbaric” third world –  can’t make them feel too safe once people start taking sides and all the antisemitic bullshit starts getting stirred again. And as the grumblings of Jew hate starts festering under the skin and the cyst or carbuncle turns pusillanimous and throbbing and soar, that’s gotta be downright disconcerting to the objects of those grumblings. And that’s a sorry state for them and it’s a sorry goddamned state that we’ve not moved on any better.