Corey Robin in The New Yorker:
My first and only experience of antisemitism in America came wrapped in a bow of care and concern. In 1993, I spent the summer in Tennessee with my girlfriend. At a barbecue, we were peppered with questions. What brought us south? How were we getting on? Where did we go to church? We explained that we didn’t go to church because we were Jewish. “That’s O.K.,” a woman reassured us. Having never thought that it wasn’t, I flashed a puzzled smile and recalled an observation of the German writer Ludwig Börne: “Some reproach me with being a Jew, others pardon me, still others praise me for it. But all are thinking about it.”
Thirty-one years later, everyone’s thinking about the Jews. Poll after poll asks them if they feel safe. Donald Trump and Kamala Harris lob insults about who’s the greater antisemite. Congressional Republicans, who have all of two Jews in their caucus, deliver lectures on Jewish history to university leaders. “I want you to kneel down and touch the stone which paved the grounds of Auschwitz,” the Oregon Republican Lori Chavez-DeRemer declared at a hearing in May, urging a visit to D.C.’s Holocaust museum. “I want you to peer over the countless shoes of murdered Jews.” She gave no indication of knowing that one of the leaders she was addressing had been a victim of antisemitism or that another was the descendant of Holocaust survivors.
It’s no accident that non-Jews talk about Jews as if we aren’t there. According to the historian David Nirenberg, talking about the Jews—not actual Jews but Jews in the abstract—is how Gentiles make sense of their world, from the largest questions of existence to the smallest questions of economics.
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