Amalek, One Toy Shop in Tel Aviv, and All the Antisemitism There Isn't

Growing up Jewish is a scary thing, I’ll tell you. Not because of all the pogroms you routinely never undergo since the end of WW2, but because the system is optimized to make you always feel like you’re in a gas chamber or, if you’re lucky, in a pantry, hearing (naturally) SS soldiers climbing the stairs.

I remember clearly Holocaust Memorial Day sirens that freaked the hell out of me as a 5 or 6 years old, walking to kindergarten and stopping on the way and thinking, as I assumed I was expected to do (judging from everything on TV on that day), about people thrown into mass graves and babies being shot in the head, as one teacher once told us Nazis had done for fun - and they were laughing as they were doing it (but there was no Instagram back then, so few images survived).

Or the old survivor who came to our school one day and told us how she had been in a gas chamber in Auschwitz, naked as everybody else was, a girl of maybe 8 years old, but then the gas ran out, and that’s how she was saved.

One of the most memorable TV series of my childhood, one which was watched religiously by the Israeli public (and forever burned in the collective psyche) in the days of only a single state TV channel, was Pillar of Fire, dedicated to the horrors of the Ashkenazi life before Israel was established, aka ‘how Zionism started‘. A collection of episodes was dedicated to the Holocaust, and it was the most shocking and traumatizing form of education you can imagine.

While some Lybian (and to a much smaller degree, Tunisian) communities have been tragically impacted, Mizrahi Jews, and especially Morrocan Jews, belonging to the biggest Jewish community in a Muslim country, were mostly spared from the Holocaust.

Having arrived in the newly-founded Jewish state without the Holocaust trauma, the state organs made sure we would acquire it nonetheless. And so I, an Arab-Jewish boy from Palestinian and Morrocan communities which were generally transparent for both Ashkenazi Jews and gentile European mass murderers was taught to see myself as a potential Anne Frank at all times. This is what we were supposed to think and dream about. It was normal.

I was constantly reminded as a child everybody wanted to kill me - everybody in the whole wide world - just because I was Jewish. And that was because god loves me and chose me. I can’t say it made much sense, but I believed it. It was just the tendency of non-Jews to be crazy rabid would-be murderers of Jews.

Don’t take my word for it. Here is a screenshot from ADL’s website:

If you follow the link and check out the site, you’ll be able to see a convenient breakdown of antisemitism by such factors as religion and gender. Oh, and that’s from 2014. I’d safely say by now we’ve added at least 2 billion more antisemites. So much ground to cover.

And this is how they bring up Jewish children. But wait, that’s only the appetizer.