31 Days, 31 Memories - Day 2

[bironic]

2. High School

Christmas Day, and my family went to the movies. I was already grating against the tradition then but wasn’t aware enough or brave enough to say I wanted to stay home. The movie had ended and I was standing in the lobby while everyone else used the restrooms. A middle-aged woman and her husband passed by. She gave me the once-over and whispered to him, loud enough that I heard her, "You can tell we’re the only Christians here."

Comments

[synn.livejournal.com]

Day 2
Day 1

I have no words (at this hour) for a woman like that -- people amaze me.

[kabal42.livejournal.com]

2. 4th grade, gym class.
We are doing athletic disciplines; running, jumping, throwing. Our teacher (female) tells us that people are either sprinters/jumpers or runners/throwers. As it turns out that the only thing I'm decent at is throwing a spear, she comes up to me and says: "But you are one of those clumsy girl who are not good at anything." (Clumsy doesn't quite cover it, but that's what the dictionary suggested for a translation.)

Your memory reminded me of this because of the impact.

[bironic.livejournal.com]

People are amazing with tactlessness -- especially when they don't even realize they've just insulted someone, said something that will stay with that person for years.

[kabal42.livejournal.com]

It is amazing. I don't think she had any clue that she'd given me a wound there that was deep enough to be remembered so vividly 20 years later...

[bironic.livejournal.com]

Strange that that would happen in your area - doesn't it have a fairly high Jewish population? But I suppose stereotypes can flourish anywhere.

The odd thing about living/traveling abroad is that I'm less likely to be tagged as "Jewish" by appearance, as opposed to, say, Eastern European. In fact people often aren't able to place me until they notice the accent, and even then their guesses as to my heritage are all over the map. (Remember when we were in Malta and the clerk tried to figure out where we were from?)

[kabal42.livejournal.com]

*jumps in* In my experience Europeans are more interested in country/place than ethnicity. The Jewish populations in Europe are not really noticed as being something other than just people in this or that country - being Jewish is like being Christian or Buddhist.
Only exception to that rule is Middle Eastern heritage, where being a muslin and looking arabian gets muddled together and is targetted for racism.

[bironic.livejournal.com]

In my experience Europeans are more interested in country/place than ethnicity.

I'd say that's true of most people I know, but I'm not sure whether it holds for the general population of America, at least as it's portrayed in the media. The Arab/Muslim conflation really picked up after 9/11 and is a good (in the sense of terrifying) representation of exactly how little people understand about what it means to be from a geographic area vs. be a member of a religion (let alone what those entail in themselves).

The Jewish populations in Europe are not really noticed as being something other than just people in this or that country

I'd agree except that was supposedly the case with much of the Jewish population of Germany immediately preceding Hitler's rein there -- the Jews considered themselves German above all else, the Germans knew them as neighbors, and then the scapegoating that came with poor economic conditions etc. singled them out.

[kabal42.livejournal.com]

On the first part:
I believe you are right. I can of course only speak of the conditions here. The Muslim/Arab things is older here - the immigration to Europe has, for the last thirty years, consisted of mainly people from Arabian/Muslim countries so we have a situation here that can be likened to the past of the US. Europe has not had that much immigration before.

On the second part:
As far as I know, all of Europa was rather anti-semitic before the WWII - especially around the end of the 1800s. It was a period of nationalism and creation of identity as nations and peoples. The Jews got a rather rought deal there being a non-nation people. They managed very well and it was of course not as bad as during the war. What happened in Germany then was not as surprising as it should have been. Jews were vastly mistrusted in most of Europe for the exact reason that they did not have a nation to call their own. Which obviously makes the creation of the state of Israel a lot more logical as a means of compensation.

[bironic.livejournal.com]

Jews were vastly mistrusted in most of Europe for the exact reason that they did not have a nation to call their own.

Yes, I remember learning about how the Jews' international migrations and insular communities (which were breaking down by the early 20th century, so you did have integration into 'normal' society but also that lingering mistrust) contributed to the anti-Semitic sentiment at the time. But it is strange, when you think of it that way -- Why should a religion need to have its own country to be trusted? Wouldn't the creation of a nation for a specific religion (and Israel/Holocaust reparations is a whole other set of problems) look like an attempt to get the minority out of the way? Forgive my uneducated questions.

[kabal42.livejournal.com]

Not uneducated at all. And I agree. It doesn't make sense to me either. We can only really look back and see that this is what happened. The Jews saw themselves as much as parts of the nations they lived in as any other citizen, but it was not always viewed the same way by the rest of that nation's people.
I also found out at a time, that one of the reasons for the Zionist movement was that this established Jews worldwide as one "nation" - albeit a landless one.