…and all he got was this lousy treatment.
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In this video, Zvika Klein, an orthodox Jew and journalist in Israel, monitored reactions of people as he walked the streets throughout Paris for 10 hours. He wore his kippah (skullcap) and tzitzit (tassels) at his waist. He hired a bodyguard, who is not shown in the video, if trouble arose. While Klein did, in fact, suffer anti-Jewish taunts on Parisian streets, France cannot be singled out, for bias against those constructed as “other” surfaces daily around the planet. For example, Klein was inspired to undergo this experiment by a video produced in the United States titled “10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Women.”
When I was teaching at a university in Iowa, my rabbi friend Michael visited me. He too wore his kippah as we walked around my town. On one occasion, a car pulled close and the occupants pelted us with pennies – an unfortunately common occurrence in my life going back to my elementary school years when students tossed pennies at me to see if “the cheap Jew” would pick them up. At the university, a number of my students either entered my office or wrote on their final paper stating that while they enjoyed the course and they thought I was a knowledgeable professor, they felt compelled to “inform” me that
“you still we be going to Hell because you are a Jew and you do not accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior.”
Stigmatized and marginalized groups live with the constant reality of random and unprovoked systematic name-calling and other forms of violence directed against them simply on account of their social identities. The intent of this xenophobic (fear and hatred of anyone or anything seeming “foreign”) violence is to harm, humiliate, and destroy the “Other” for the purpose of maintaining hierarchical power positions and attendant privileges of the dominant group over minoritized groups.
Just recently, in Libya, ISIS executed 24 Christians. We witnessed the brutal police chokehold death of Eric Garner, the multiple-bullet police killings of Michael Brown and Tamir Rice, the vigilante death of Travon Martin, the execution-style murders of three Muslim students in North Carolina — Deah Shaddy Barakat, a dental student, his wife, Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, and her sister, Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha – the destruction by arson of a building at the Islamic Institute in Houston, Texas, and the spate of murders of primarily trans* women of color, including Jessie Hernandez, Alejandra Leos, Aniya Parker, Gizzy Fowler, and Kandy Hall to name only a few. And these are merely just a few of the most visible examples of this form of violence against unarmed members of stigmatized groups.
Just this week, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst instituted a new policy of restricting Iranian students from enrolling in a number of graduate-level science and technology courses. The University justified its policy on the basis of its concern that these students may go back to Iran and contribute to their country’s development of nuclear weapons.
Although the U.S. government passed a law in 2012 baring Iranian citizens from attaining education visas to study in the U.S. if they specialize in the energy or nuclear fields, the U.S. Department of State asserted that this law was not intended to bar Iranian students from studying science or technology. Due to the negative publicity generated by the University of Massachusetts’ policy initiative, shortly after it was announced, the University backed down and reversed its position.
But we must not and cannot dismiss these incidents as simply the actions of a few disturbed and sadistic individuals or to a limited number of “bad cops,” for oppression exists on multiple levels in multiple forms. Prejudiced people live in societies that subtly and not-so-subtly promote intolerance, spread stereotypes, impose stigmata, and perpetuate violence and the threat of violence. These incidents must be seen as symptoms of larger systemic national and international problems.
Interesting the author brings up the full names of the Muslim students killed in NC as well as that of the trans women, yet somehow fails to mention AT ALL — let alone mention the NAMES — of the Jews murdered in Paris and Copenhagen simply due to their Jewishness. One would assume their mention would have somewhat more relevance given the piece started off discussing the ill-treatment of a Jewish journalist wandering through a French-Muslim neighborhood. But oh, those Iranian nuclear physics students in the U.S.! How tangential and progressive to mention them! This piece is rank Leftist hypocrisy,… Read more »
I think we should just let that comment linger in the air like a bad smell.