Words of the Week: Danielle M.
I keep coming back to something Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, in 1946:
“The anti-Semite doesn’t accuse the Jew of stealing because he actually believes he stole. He accuses the Jew of stealing because he enjoys watching the Jew empty his pockets to prove his innocence.”
That is what this period has felt like for many Jews, myself included: documented atrocities against Jews denied, dismissed, or rationalized, while sensational and dehumanizing accusations against Jews spread at neck-breaking speed, often used to justify why we are hated, attacked, or blamed in the first place.
Words are stripped of their context and then redeployed onto us as accusations. Terms like Zionist or genocide are pulled out of their history, flattened, and placed back onto Jews as things we are expected to defend ourselves against, even when they do not reflect what we believe, what the words actually mean, or what is actually happening.
Rumors, distortions, and extreme claims spread with extraordinary speed when directed at Jews or Israel. And no matter how absurd the accusation, we are expected to engage with it seriously in order to prove our humanity, our nuance, our right to complexity.
And even when every answer is given carefully, historically, factually, it does not end the cycle.
It just resets it.
A new accusation appears. A new double standard emerges. A new demand for explanation takes its place.
And part of what has become so exhausting is that I can feel myself still wanting to participate in it all anyway. I still want to empty my pockets for you. I still want to believe that if I just explain my family and our history and the Jewish people well enough, carefully enough, patiently enough, something might finally land and open people’s minds.
Source: “Emptying My Pockets,” on Danielle M(ussafi’s) Substack Ordinary Animals
