Is this really the look you were going for America?

In June 2016, a rabbi friend told me he’d never really experienced direct antisemitic language until his middle teens. The situation was almost comical … almost. It had to do with selling/buying unwanted baseball tickets outside a major league stadium. In the exchange of tickets for cash, there was a moment of confusion about how much change was due, and the white man my friend was dealing with reassured him by saying "I wouldn’t try to jew you out of it."

My friend talked about his sense of obligation to speak to defend his Muslim friend, an imam whose brown skin and traditional beard and clerical garb made him stand out in the Midwestern town that was his home. My friend said America had been good to Jewish people and felt he had a sort of privilege that compelled him to act, if not from friendship then from self-preservation because, as he’d told me in another conversation, "If they come after American Muslims, it’s just a matter of time until they come after us."

A few months later, near the end of September 2016, my rabbi friend told me his name had been distributed on an internet list of flagged Jews — people apparently perceived by the list-makers as somehow dangerous.

My friend said he’d been targeted with threatening language on social media. 

He told me he’d been verbally harassed on public transportation. 

He said a stranger called him "god-killer."

What changed in America between mid-June and late-September 2016?

Four years later, that change has deepened and worsened. Today, my friend wrote:

Over the last 4 years, personal, online antisemitic threats of violence and harassment have just become a part of my normal. 

**This week alone** I have been told: "your time is up, Juden!", "I pray we don't have to kill you all!", and had a group of nazi trolls join [his spouse’s] class on Sukkot yesterday screaming "Heil Hitler!" and drawing swastikas.  

And it's only Wednesday.  

#TrumpsAmerica

Replying to a social media friend who expressed a hope that he was reporting the abuse, my friend said, "This is not an abnormal week in "fan mail"....if I reported it all, it would be constant."

Between June and September, 2016, my rabbi friend saw his homeland turn from a place where he had no serious reason to think he did not belong, to a place where he is threatened with impunity by people whose hatred is ideological —people who have an idea about who he is, contrasted with an idea of who they are, and hate him for being other than them.

It takes a population of piss-poor Americans to stand by while this goes on … people whose unearned advantage is being born not-brown, not-Jewish, not-Muslim, not-immigrant … people who don’t grow up having to look over both shoulders in the land of the free.

It’s not supposed to be like this. I’m a White, straight, "Christian," man, and I know it’s not supposed to be like this.

I can't rest, because

My neighbor

My friend

My sister

My brother

Can't breathe.