From Cruelty to Compassion

Interview with a Jewish Social Worker

“Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life. Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny, inner sparks of possibility into flames of achievement.” – Golda Meir

“One of the very first lessons of the Torah gives it a place of high priority: All human beings are created equal. This belief in equality compels action in response to discrimination, racism, and racial injustice.” – Rabbi Dr. Laura Novak Winer

Until I was about 12 years old, I wasn’t aware that being Jewish was in any way unusual. I knew my Jewish grandparents had fled Poland at the turn of the twentieth century because of pogroms in which Jews were summarily round up and killed. I also knew something of what the Holocaust had wrought for World War II-era Jews and those similarly targeted. Still, perhaps wrought of wishful thinking, I thought of the attitudes that gave rise to these events as mired in the past. Personal experience bore this out. Inhabitants of the neighborhoods in which I lived, children at the schools I attended, both in a city and suburban environments, were mostly Jewish.

This was at least mostly the case until I experienced a rude awakening. On vacation with my mother, I found myself in the lobby of the hotel at which we were staying, surrounded by boys and girls my age. As a student at an all-girls’ school who longed to attend a co-ed one, this was felt like a happy coincidence. The boys began saying things to impress the girls. The one I remember was told by a boy who initially got my attention because my twelve-year-old self thought was cute. His comment went like this, “Where I come from, if you pick up a penny they call you a Jew.” It took me a minute to take in what he said; another one to compute what he meant. Once I did, I got up and left.

While this remained a token of the fact that antisemitism existed, it was a few years before I experienced it again, this time at a resort town in which my parents rented a summer house. The town had a country club that, as I was told, “didn’t allow Jews,” and my best friend, a girl whose affluent family was Irish Catholic, told me, “I’m sorry I can’t invite you to my house. My mother won’t let me. Because you’re Jewish.” The same summer, I made the acquaintance of a boy I initially thought of as my first boyfriend. It wasn’t long before his mother, who pretended he was simply too young to have a girlfriend, insisted he stop taking me to the movies. A few weeks later, when he took a fancy to an incidentally non-Jewish girl, she had no objection.

Later, at the predominantly non-Jewish private girls’ school I l transferred to, I was called out by the principal for staying home on a Jewish holiday. She had accepted me to the school ignorant of the fact that I was Jewish. My last name, changed by my father because, as he told me, “I would never have gotten into law school with a Jewish name,” hadn’t tipped her off to the ‘unfortunate’ possibility I might be Jewish. In the same school’s locker room, I was greeted by comments like, “I’ve never met a Jewish girl before,” expressed in a decidedly uncomplimentary way. When, at the same school, I was applying to college, the principal asked me to turn down one school at which I had been put on the waiting list, “Since you’ll probably decide not to go there anyway. I’m not going to ruin my reputation with the admissions committee because of someone like you.” It was all too clear what she meant.

In adulthood I’ve experienced far less of this. This is not, unfortunately, because antisemitism has faded into the background of American life. It’s more because my attitude about prejudice of all kinds has been formed by those experiences, such that I do everything I can to avoid people who speak disparagingly of others and environments that attract such people. This is, oddly, less because of the prejudice I experienced than it is because of what I saw wrought against others, particularly at that girls’ private school. I saw that same headmistress turn a blind eye to mistreatment of an African-American girl in my friends’ sisters’ class, based on her skin color. I was outraged. “She didn’t know I was Jewish when she accepted me. She was evidently shocked and dismayed and behaved accordingly. In the case of this other girl, she knew what her skin color was. If she didn’t want a girl who looked like that at the school, why did she accept her in the first place?”

While all of this was frightening, as a result of having experienced it, I find myself compelled to operate on a principle opposite to the one propounded by Groucho Marx’s “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.” I have no interest in joining any club, or being part of any group, that would refuse to accept anyone because of their race, religion, ethnicity, or sexual identity.” I even go so far as to seek people out whose cultural labels differ from mine and even in passing, to offer them something approaching love. My personal world is infinitely richer as a result.

About the Author

The interviewee grew up in New York and now lives in Vermont. She is a graduate of the NYU School of Social Work and currently works full time as a psychiatric social worker with a specialty in treating PTSD.