Joel Bierig, who lives in south suburban Frankfort, was badly shaken by last Tuesday’s shootings at a Jewish community center in Los Angeles. His parents were immigrants who came to this country in 1938 seeking refuge from the Nazis. But Bierig reacted to those scenes of policemen leading little children out of the center not so much because he himself is a Jew. He is troubled by what he sees as a rising tide of violence against a variety of minority groups.
“It just shakes your security,” said Bierig, 46, who lives an assimilated lifestyle in a non-Jewish community. “But I don’t think it’s just Jews who feel that way. It’s blacks, Asians, gays.”
Across town, David Hekiman immediately put the same set of events in the context of a chapter of Jewish history he knows firsthand. Hekiman, 75, was deported from Slovakia to Auschwitz and lost his parents and three brothers during the Holocaust.
“When I saw the little kids with the police,” he said, “I saw the SS.”
Hekiman’s response to last week’s events was heightened because an earlier episode of violence against Jews took place close at hand. He works at the Tel Aviv bakery on Devon Avenue–virtually in the shadow of Benjamin Smith’s drive-by shootings of Orthodox Jews returning from Sabbath services in July.
How the Jewish community views these recent episodes of violence–which include the arson burnings of a series of synagogues in California–has more to do with life experiences than ethnic identity.
For older Jews, for whom the Holocaust was the defining event of their generation, this flurry of anti-Semitic violence has left them with an unsettling feeling of vulnerability, awakening old memories of being strangers in someone else’s land.
Younger Jewish people, though, tend to see themselves as an integral part of American life, and view recent events as just another link in this year’s chain of never-ending violence.
The Los Angeles attack gave Susan Litchtenfeld, who lives on Chicago’s Near North Side, a moment of anxiety because she has a daughter who attends a Jewish day school. But she quickly put her fears into the context of recent history.
“This week it’s Jews; last week it was day traders; before that it was jocks,” she said, refering to shootings in Atlanta and Colorado.
Even in smaller towns, someone like a Buford Furrow, the suspect arrested in the L.A. shootings, seemingly cannot shatter the peaceful co-existence that many Jewish Americans have come to take for granted.
“I don’t think it’s about us,” said Maury Lyon, a school principal in Galesburg. “I think it’s about violence and intolerance. The target could be anybody.”
Of course, even in bucolic surroundings, Jews are not quite strangers to hate. Five years ago, Lyon’s synagogue–with a membership of 20 families–was a target of vandalism. But anti-Semitism is more likely to be of the off-handed variety. Recently, Lyon was sitting in the cab of a tow truck when the driver started spouting off about the worldwide Zionist “conspiracy.”
Said Lyon: “I would have said something, if this guy wasn’t towing my car and it was cold out.” When a student’s parent used the word “Jewed,” she apologized for using it in front of Lyon.
“I told her,” he recalled, “that she shouldn’t be using it at all.”
Those kinds of experiences notwithstanding, it is difficult for younger Jews to entertain the possibility that the North Shore and Los Angeles shootings point to some festering pool of anti-Semitism hidden behind the polite and civil facade of this society.
The experience of most American Jews has been vastly different from the stories their grandparents told of pogroms and exiles in Europe. If anything, America has almost been too good to the Jews. Recently, Jewish leaders have felt that the threat to their community at the end of the 20th Century is more suburbia than Siberia, more assimilation than Aryan nation.
They fear that acceptance into the mainstream is robbing American Jews of their identity, pointing to warning signs like intermarriage and an increasing apathy toward affiliation with synagogues and Jewish fraternal organizations.
An immigrant generation might once have gathered strength in numbers by settling in largely Jewish, often inner-city, neighborhoods like Maxwell Street, Lawndale and Rogers Park. But suburbs that were once off limits to Jews, such as Lake Forest and Kenilworth, which used to have restrictive covenants, are open to anyone who can afford their stratospheric real estate prices. Colleges and universities might once have had quotas limiting Jewish enrollments, but today Ivy League universities have Jewish presidents.
Even the principal of an Orthodox school saw last week’s events as pointing to problems in the wider society rather than some stubborn strain of hate.
“We have to make sure every child gets a good education; not just academics, but a moral education,” said Rabbi Moshe Perlstein, who heads the Seymour J. Abrams Cheder Lubavitch Hebrew Day School in Skokie.
Still, even in an era when “Seinfeld” has topped the ratings and bagels can be found in North Dakota, some think it prudent to keep an eye on the economy. When it turns sour, Jews have historically been scapegoats, noted Rabbi Ellen Dreyfus of B’nai Yehuda Beth Sholom in Homewood.
We may be living at a time of unbridled prosperity, but for those not invited to the current economic feast, it may only fuel alienation and ethnic hatred, Dreyfus said. “Times are good, but they are not good for everyone.”
Indeed, the book “War Cycles, Peace Cycles” found in Furrow’s van, claims Jews have long controlled the world’s banking system, wreaking economic havoc on the Christian world.
Such long-standing prejudices are nothing new to older members of Dreyfus’ congregation, which was founded some 50 years ago by German refugees. Undoubtedly, it is what sparked some phone calls after the L.A. shootings from members “who just needed to talk,” she said. Safety issues were on their minds, particularly with the High Holidays less than a month away.
“You have to take steps, but you can’t be obsessive,” Dreyfus said. “You can’t live behind a fortress and a moat, because then you hand them a victory.”
