When We Remembered Zion

 I had lunch on Zoom today with a friend who's thirty-two and lives in Seattle. She's Ashkenazi, a descendant of grandparents who immigrated from Russia in the twenties. She made a joke about how a Jew like her must seem very alien to people in Mississippi.

So, I told her Jews aren't aliens here at all. They came in fairly large numbers during the cotton boom and settled all over the South. I told her about Beth Israel Cemetary, where we told ghost stories when I was in college and how it was the most immaculately manicured cemetery in Mississippi.

Then I told her about what happened to Rabbi Nussbaum when I was a little boy. How the klan had bombed the Beth Israel Temple and Rabbi Nussbaum's home, and she had a look of confused pain on her face.

Then I showed her a clip of Driving Miss Daisy, which she'd never seen and didn't know was about a Jewish woman. I showed her the scene where Houke tries to drive Miss Daisy to temple, but the police turn him back because someone had bombed the temple, and he tells Daisy a story about a man who was lynched.

I explained that the scene in the play was inspired more by a similar bombing in Atlanta in the fifties, but the impact was the same as the one in Jackson. To preserve their closed culture, men in the South would destroy places of worship.

A tear rolled down her cheek. In her young life, where she lived, the persecution of her people never really seemed that real. Somehow, me telling her the story made it feel real, and she wept.

By the waters of Babylon, we sat down, and we wept when we remembered Zion.

Men will do terrible things if you make them believe their culture is in danger, and there's great political power in making people believe that danger is real, even when it isn't.

I wish bigotry and hatred of the other were only limited to race and religion, but it goes so much deeper than that. There's always somebody willing to say, "They are dangerous because THEY are different," and someone will do something terrible because they believe it.

When I was a child, about the same time as the Beth Israel Bombings, even my church split apart over race and culture; now it's happening again over sexuality. Nobody's set off any bombs yet, but it's not a far journey.

You don't have to be "woke" to be afraid of what bigotry does to your community. You just have to be good at history.

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10CatherineandRichard Freis, Edward Peter Cole II and 8 others