What a day; another Interlude, even stranger - Anti-Semitism and the Intellectual

It's an odd thing, but I find some of the stray attacks on me on Facebook (and though it has been quiet, maybe one on Substack) to contain a tinge of anti-Semitism. I felt that way during my 20 years in Maine, where it was permissible to be Jewish with a small j, but show your ethnicity in more obvious ways, assert yourself if public ways, as I have always done, and you were immediately put into social isolation.

This may sound like a crazy accusation, but there is a tone to those who, without really reading what I write, write me off as a "complainer" whose very existence is sustained by complaining, that I find disturbing. You can disagree with me all day and night and I will engage with you. But turn it into something personal - and something with disturbing echoes of anti-Semitic stereotypes - and you make yourself clear. One particular person on Facebook, whose own timeline a few years back contained extremely offensive anti-Semitic attacks that were left unchallenged, felt it necessary to intervene in one discussion on my Faceboook page and post some weird non-sequitors that related to nothing I had written.

It bothers me; and I think it's real though I know it would be difficult to prove in a court of law. I come from a complex intellectual tradition, which arose out of the dual traumas of Eastern European/Russian genocide and the Holocaust. We who feel the pressure of this kind of existence are super-sensitive to changes in the angles of argument, which can veer from spirited interaction to implications of evil intent. The truth is that some of us feel driven by intellectual and social injustice. And the irony, of course, is that some who feel violated by my points of view and complain that they are too persistently "negative" have no problem with repeated political posts that border on (a well justified) hysteria.

I will admit that some of my own dislikes of various people have led me to cross the line on more than one occasion, but I have gotten better (I think).

And I will reiterate that Substack has been a bit quieter. I realize that we don’t here have the kind of constant interactions here that we see on places like Facebook, and I feel a bit of sanctuary away from the occasional pitchfork-and-torch carrying, pissed off person who suddenly appears on my Facebook feed to tell me how horrible I am.