Inconceivable

I wasn’t even 10 when Ronald Reagan got shot in 1981. I remember the heavy scrum of Secret Service agents surrounding the president before and tossing him into the big black presidential Cadillac. I remember the arm of the gunman extending towards the sky. I remember James Brady on the sidewalk, blood pooling around his head. And I remember something odd my mother said before we knew the identity of the gunman: “Please don’t let it be a Jew.”

When news about the murders of Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner first popped onto my feed the night after Australia’s Hanukkah massacre, I had a mirror thought: “Please don’t let it be because they were Jews.”

It makes me sick to feel relief that it was the Reiner’s son, Nick, whom the police arrested for the killings, but relief is what I feel. Relief that we’re not kicking off weeks of finger-pointing, posturing, and Erika Kirk-style townhalls about growing political violence. I’m relieved it wasn’t some MAGA lunatic or ISIS lunatic or a shitposter with a grudge. As disgusting as it is, I’m relieved that the perpetrator appears to have had no greater motivation than mental illness and a monstrous drug addiction.

I don’t know how others are feeling, but this Jew is reluctant to call too much attention to the growing antisemitism at home and abroad. My reluctance is deep-seated, growing from the same fear many minority groups have about making waves, the fear that if we point out abuses directed against us, the abuses will only compound. There is the sense that, even generations after my family arrived here from Eastern Europe, that I should retain gratitude to the nation of my birth for granting my ancestors sanctuary, and that this gratitude means I ought to look past minor indignities like antisemitism. The gratitude I feel today is only that the likely identity of the Reiners’ killer (hopefully) forestalls another tedious discussion about the role of Jews in America.

It’s a conversation that - thanks to Tucker Carlson, Candace Owen, and Nick Fuentes, among others - is currently front and center of the current American Right. Our loyalties are questioned, our “influence” scrutinized, our motivations debated. Can we be trusted as true Americans or, as I imagine these nutjobs think, are we in secret, nefarious league with the Israelis?

Jews, of course, are far from the only American minority group whose loyalties are periodically examined. In America, every minority gets their time over the barrel. If it’s not the Muslims, it’s the Mexicans. If it’s not the Mexicans, it’s the Vietnamese. Or Haitians, Irish, Germans, or Japanese. And, of course, the African-American experience is in a category all to itself. The fact that Jews have managed to, so far, escape the worst abuses this nation has hurled at its own citizens only furthers my reluctance to call out the relatively low levels of American antisemitism.

Which is why my fear spiked when the Reiners’ were killed, and it’s why that awful, intrusive thought – Please don’t let it be because they were Jews – rocketed straight into my amygdala.

It’s the same reason my mother worried about the ethnicity of Reagan’s killer. If the shooter had been a Jew, she worried about what it would mean for all of our safety.

I’ve written before about the common sense among Jews that our acceptance here is conditional. That we’re welcome so long as we don’t get too Jewy about things. The sense that we’re tolerated more than welcomed. It’s paranoia, of course, but as Joseph Heller (Jewish) wrote in Catch-22, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.”

Then a prominent Jew gets murdered in his own house on the first day of Hanukkah, right after a massacre of Jews on an Australian beach, and you might find yourself looking over your shoulder.

On this third night of Hanukkah, I guess I offer something like a prayer. May the rest of the holiday pass in peace. May all of our hard hearts soften just a bit. May the holiday season inch us closer to understanding and further from fear. May those who lost loved ones in Australia find comfort. May your latkes remain unburnt and your Hanukkah gelt chocolatey. May the new year bring new understanding and deep discounts on consumer electronics. Finally, may the Reiner family find peace, and may their memories be a blessing.

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