"Please Don't Let It Be a Jew"

When I was a kid, whenever there was a shooting or significant crime, my mother would intone regarding the perpetrator: “Please don’t let it be a Jew.” This week, after the shooting at Joel Osteen’s megamall and discount worship center, I’m angry. Not because the shooter was Jewish. She was not, but she was mad at Jews. I’m angry because every group in this country should feel good about standing up for themselves. Every group deserves to be seen and counted. Yet, because of our history, Jews like me are nervous about making too much of a fuss – which is ironic because the one things Jews love is making a fuss.

So I guess I’m angry at myself for feeling like I want to speak up, but I feel restrained because of the particular bind American Jews find themselves in. Speaking up invites further scrutiny, staying silent may invite further harm.

The Lakewood shooter apparently expressed antisemitic sentiments, and the butt of her weapon had the word “Palestine” written on it. She also had a lengthy criminal record for, among other things, theft, forgery, and assault. Further, she had well-documented mental health problems and, at the time of the shooting, was involved in some sort of dispute with her ex-husband, who is Jewish. Their child, a seven-year-old, was shot in the head during a firefight between the mother and police. The shooter was killed, and one congregant injured.

I haven’t paid much attention to this story, other than to note the poverty of Osteen’s prosperity gospel in this recent post. Reading more about it, though, I felt compelled to add a little bit more because it speaks to my deep but subtle paranoia about the role of Jews in American life.

Every Jew recognizes that America has been a very good home for us. We’ve been here from the beginning. Five “converso Jews” were among Christopher Columbus’s crew. (A Converso Jew was a Jew forced to convert to Catholicism during the Spanish Inquisition, which eventually resulted in the expulsion of Jews from Spain.) The first practicing Jew arrived on American soil in 1584, and the first group of Jewish settlers came in 1654. Americans have been involved in every aspect of American life, except maybe the annual White House Easter Egg Roll.

So why does it still feel like we’re, in some sense, outsiders? Why did my mother, born and raised in Chicago, worry for the safety of her Jewish kids? Why do I worry about mine (they’re half, but still)? Why are we still putting up with this booolshit?

Since the October 7^th Hamas massacre and the disproportionate Israeli response, antisemitism has risen to what FBI Director Christopher Wray calls “historic levels.” We’ve all seen the headlines: assaults, swastikas, threats. One small consolation is that most of this behavior is online, with “51% of [Jews]… seeing or hearing remarks related to their religion on Facebook.” I can also attest to the prevalence of online antisemitism, having experienced an insane amount of antisemitism on my Twitter page, some of it as recently as yesterday.

(I also want to note the rise in anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiment, although that is not my topic for this essay, nor do I feel qualified to discuss it other than to say it’s bad.)

Received this little delight yesterday on Twitter.

The shooting at Osteen’s Lakewood Church was committed by a crazy person, which makes it easy to dismiss at a one-off. But all mass shootings are committed by crazy people and, at least in ‘Murica, these events are far from one-offs. Further, this particular shooter was obviously not trying to kill Jews; after all, it would be pretty dumb to try to shoot Jews at a Christian church. Yet antisemitism clearly at least partially motivated her.

The insidious nature of hate speech isn’t so much that it motivates the mentally balanced to commit violent acts. It’s that it cracks open the Overton Window, and as these messages become increasingly mainstreamed, the people most vulnerable to conspiracy theories start accepting tropes as truth. When that happens – whether it’s lies about trans people in bathrooms or a child sex trafficking ring in the basement of a pizza parlor or Jews secretly running the world - violence often follows.

Of course, easy access to guns makes crimes like this easier to carry out. In fact, the shooter’s former mother-in-law stated, “This is what happens when reckless and irresponsible reporting lets people with severe mental illness have an excuse for violence… She threatened her husband, my own son, and we still couldn’t get intervention.. We asked for help from CPS... We asked for help from police and received it many times but she was still allowed to own guns.”

The mother-in-law’s name: Rabbi Willi Caranza.

So I don’t know. I’m heartbroken that people were killed, at least in part, because of antisemitism. I’m sad that a recent survey by the American Jewish Committee found that “46% [of Jews who answered the survey] altered their behavior in 2023,” with 26% of those saying they avoided certain “events of locations” because of their Judaism. And it sucks that so many Jews like me don’t want to say anything because we don’t want to make a fuss. Maybe it’s time we did.