This dirty Jew remembers every penny thrown at him.
The ones thrown from above, as we waited to be picked up from the public pool in my hometown on Long Island, our yarmulkes pinned to wet hair. By then, I was big enough to feel shame for the younger kids, who knew no better than to scurry around, as our local anti-Semites laughed.
I remember walking home from synagogue at my father’s side, in our suits and ties, and seeing a neighbor boy crawling on his hands and knees, surrounded by bullies, this time picking up pennies by force. I remember my father rushing in and righting the boy, and sending those kids scattering.
I remember when, at that same corner, on a different day, those budding neo-Nazis surrounded my sister, and I raced home for help. I remember my parents running back, and my father and mother (all five feet of her) confronting the parents of one of the boys, who then gave him a winking, Trumpian chiding for behavior they didn’t care to condemn. Even if it’s “kids with horns,” they told their son, he should leave other children alone.
I’ll never forget the shame of it. Nor any of the other affronts, from the swastika shaving-creamed on our front door on Halloween to the kid on his bike yelling, “Hitler should have finished you all.” I remember every fistfight, every broken window, every catcall and curse. I remember them because each made me — a fifth-generation American — feel unsafe and unwelcome in my own home, just as was intended.
I could, likewise, catalog every tough-Jew story of victory in the face of hatred. My favorite still: that of my bull-necked great-grandfather who worked for the railroads, who in response to the guy on the next barstool saying that there were “too many Jews” in the place, knocked the bum out with a single punch, without getting up from his perch.
But my great-grandfather is history. My childhood is history.
I live in Brooklyn now, where my father grew up. It was here, after watching people cheer Barack Obama’s victory in the streets, after gay marriage became legal nationwide and after other evolutionary steps, that I was finally able to embrace the past as the past and look at our collective present in a new light.
Secular now, I watch the younger religious Jews in awe. They don’t slip their yarmulkes into their pockets out of fear. It hit me at, of all places, a Nets game. I was amazed by all the yarmulkes in the crowd, and the boys beneath them eating hot dogs from — who would have believed it — kosher concession stands.
In a New York sports tradition, one of them was mouthing off at anyone and everyone who was rooting for the visiting team. I watched him razzing people, opening his mouth without thinking he’d be beaten to a pulp for drawing attention to himself. But no one said a single non-basketball-related, Jew-hating word.
I can’t tell you how much pride I took in that moment, the same syrupy pride I take when sitting on a subway car where no two faces, no two histories, seem alike, and feeling nothing but minding-our-own-business good will I felt the same watching all our children in the park, knowing that they must recognize difference but see nothing in it to fear. How great it must be, I thought, to grow up in that America, a place still flawed but striving to do better.
I understood that, in my 40s, I was already part of history. That certain things I knew didn’t need to be known anymore.
And yet, in seven months of this presidency, in one single day in Charlottesville, Va., all of that is lost. A generation, and so much more, stolen away. There is the trauma of those assaulted by Nazis on American soil and the tragedy that is Heather Heyer’s murder that belongs to her and her family alone. And then there is what all the rest of us share — the pain and violence and the lessons we draw from them. Because the children who witness a day like that, and a president like this, will not forget the fear and disrespect tailored to the black child, the Muslim child, the Jewish child.
They will not forget the assault rifles that this government puts in these violent men’s hands, nor the chants that black lives don’t matter and that the Jews will not replace them — just as I will never not hear what that kid on the bike screamed or stop seeing my father helping a boy, crawling for pennies, off his knees.
While harking back to my pious, head-covered days, I am reminded of a notion that our rabbis taught us: The theft of time is a crime like any other. Back then it was about interrupting class — one minute wasted was a minute of learning lost. But multiply that minute by everyone in the room, and it became 15, 20 minutes, half an hour’s worth of knowledge that none of us could ever get back.
Saturday in Charlottesville was just one day, but think of that one day multiplied by all of us, across this great country. Think of the size of that setback, the assault on empathy, the divisiveness and tiki-torched terror multiplied by every single citizen of this nation. It may as well be millions of years of dignity, of civility, of progress lost.
Just from that one day.
