Some readers are thrown by a reference in my latest story to the protagonist, home inspector and minor-TV celebrity Sadie Espinoza, who describes getting bullied in high school, noting that:
Jewish Espinozas weren’t remotely “wetbacks.” They weren’t even “immigrants”: they’d been in New Mexico—where her dad and his brother grew up—since before it was “New Mexico.” The only thing calling her “wetback” did was make it clear how stupid those girls were, like a house cat strutting around thinking it caught a snake when all it had was a shitty old lizard tail.
Some folks are confused because they had an American public school primary education east of the Mississippi (as I did), and thus don’t know that Santa Fe is the oldest state capitol in the US, having been establish 150 years before the country was founded.
A much greater portion of readers are confused because they think of all Jews as European shtetl folk who came here in the late 19th and early 20th C (as mine did), and thus know nothing about the extremely long history of Jews in the New World (short version: we’ve always been here, and you’ve never liked us).
Anyway, if you’re curious about any of this, the graphic novel El Illuminado is a good introduction to Crypto-Jews and the impact the Inquisition had on world Jewry. Maybe more importantly, it’s really fair in how it illustrates the divisions and discomforts within and among Jews of different traditions/colors/descents, as well as the way that even established, assimilated, respected, modern, “White” Jews often find themselves alienated no matter where they try to stand or sit.
It’s my town’s bicentennial year, and the local library graciously granted me the opportunity to write about The Old Jewish Burial Ground here—which was, in fact, the first Jewish cemetery in the state, despite being a fair distance from the Detroit Metro Area (which is where most Michigan Jews have lived).
SPOILER ALERT: the old Jewish burial ground is mostly underneath a big university building that was built in the 1930s, long after that first Jewish community had mysteriously left entirely of their own free will and not for any unpleasant or embarrassing reasons.
An advertisement that ran in the local Ann Arbor newspaper (spring 1852)
Kudos to the library, who agreed to go forward on this endeavor, even though the working title I pitched it under was “We’ve Always Been Here, and You’ve Never Liked Us.”
I’m mostly posting this for archival/documentary purposes. But I’m also posting this because I think that the “Is anti-Zionism antisemitic?” argument is stupid; you can go to these protests and demonstrations yourself, or look at comprehensive coverage, and decide for yourself if what you see is primarily motivated by a love of the Palestinian people or a loathing of Jews.
I captured all of these video at the weekly protest held outside Beth Israel Congregation each Saturday, during morning Shabbat services. This protest has been held mostly weekly for the last couple decades, and has been mostly the same throughout that period. The pictures show all of the signs that were on display that day. Some have been the same for years (I’ve lived less than one mile from this site for 20+ years), others are relatively new. I think only “Jews Bomb Hospitals” and possibly “Jews Bomb Churches” are new since the pogrom of October 7 and intensified bombings of Gaza. The entire video of my stroll past the demonstration is included at the bottom, for those curious.
I never spoke a word to these men, nor was I wearing anything inflammatory. I had on a plain black shirt and this hat, which I wear basically everywhere:
I wouldn’t rule out that these two protestors knew I was a Jew: the “Jewish Space Lasers” button on my hat is pretty legible (folks have complimented me on it) and, besides, I’m active in Jewish communal life here, and it’s just not that big of a community.
I mention this because near the beginning of the video you can hear the mustachioed protestor begin by talking about dead Palestinians (reasonable, at a nominally pro-Palestine demo) and then abruptly switching gears to talk about the “fact” that gas chambers never existed. I don’t know why he jumped topics like that, although I’d been warned that these two men (who both wear GoPros) would try to goad me into a fight. A portion of their signs are clearly intended to offend, and especially to offend Jews–like the families with small children who were arriving to attend religious services as I arrived.
Holy Moses! The “suave devil look” for magicians (goatee, tuxedo, etc.) was invented by a Jewish magician named “Herrmann” (which I think is German for “Mr. Man”—which just so feels like a name assigned by a census taker who was fed up with weird Yiddish shtetl names he couldn’t spell) who performed for Lincoln!
In fact, Herrmann (shown in the picture at the top, courtesy of his Wikipedia entry) is so synonymous with the look that if you prompt an A.I. with “create a poster for an 1800s stage magician. The magician needs a goatee” it gives you a picture of this otherwise obscure 19th Century French stage magician:
“The upshot is that the least antisemitic Americans are mainstream liberals and conservatives. The most antisemitic are the extreme left, the extreme right, as one of the theories noted above suggests, but also low information voters, who skew survey results by often self-identifying as “moderate.””
In other words, modern Jew-hate in America isn’t a right-wing thing (as most progressives insists), nor a horseshoe (as often seems to be the case on the ground, as a Jew), but instead a “W,” where the Left and Right peaks correspond to strongly ideological folks blaming Jews for this or that social ill (e.g., Jews are both the all-controlling capitalist puppet-masters AND the socialist-communist shadow agents driving the Great Replacement), and the middle peak is composed of average/moderate/centrist folks who mistrust the “mainstream” media, don’t identify as anything, and get their news from increasingly biased and ignorant spheres.
The thing that I most connect with in this comic is that the Jews look like ghosts. I identify with that, as I’ve often felt like a ghost here in my Homeland. I guess the big change for me since October 7 is that before I felt like a ghost passing largely unnoticed or unacknowledged. That was sometimes annoying, but usually fine. Or, at least, I was used to it, which made it seem fine if I didn’t think about it too much.
Now I feel like some portion of the population has noticed us and decided we need to be exorcised and banished, while another portion has noticed us and wants us to summarize 3000 years of history in seven words or less and then explain what the hell is up with a bunch of other ghosts in some other country who we don’t even know, while a third portion have noticed us and insist we aren’t ghosts at all—just pale “regular” people who should get over whatever unpleasantness happened in the 1930s and 40s in Europe, or last October, or last week, or last night, or tomorrow, because it’s all the distant past and in our heads and maybe didn’t even happen or certainly isn’t or wasn’t or won’t be as bad as we say it was/is/will be.
But the biggest portion look at me and say “You’re a ghost? I had no idea you were a ghost!”
“It’s an Old Story” is a recent riff on a late-medieval Kabbalistic demon tale recounted by Rabbi Tzvi Hirsch Kaidanover in his collection Kav HaYashar (“The Just Measure”), first widely published around 1705. (Here’s a direct link to a translation of the original story in-situ:Kav HaYashar 25:3.)
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“It’s an Old Story”
by David Erik Nelson
You wanna hear a story? It’s an old story; everybody’s heard it–everybody thinks they’ve heard it. Yet maybe still . . . OK. Once upon a time, back in Poland, there was a man, a rich rich man. He had land, he kept a shop, he had fancy clothes, he had chests and chests full of gold and jewels with big locks and heavy keys. But despite all these riches, he was a miser. Wouldn’t give a shekel to a beggar or a dime to charity, not even the burial society, not even on Rosh Hashanah. He couldn’t even stand to spend a penny to buy himself a sweet. But this was not to say he was a total sonofabitch. He was a shopkeeper and a landlord and a miser, but also he was a mohel–you know what a mohel is? A mohel does the circumcisions on the newborn boys, to consecrate them into the covenant with HaShem. To make them Jews. So he’s a little like a doctor who only knows one surgery, a little like a rabbi who knows only one prayer. But very respected. And in this, the miser was generous and joyful: no matter how far the journey, he went when called, whistling all the way. No matter how much the hassle, he refused all payment. One day a stranger comes to town, comes to the miserly mohel, and says his wife has just had a son. “Mazel tov!,” the miser cries. He’s only too eager to journey with the man–who warns him that it’s a long ways and bound to be a hassle. The miserly mohel won’t hear any it. He locks up all his chests and cupboards, locks his doors, hangs his knot of keys on their cord around his neck, and off he and the stranger go, up hill and down dale, over the river and through the woods, the miser’s keys jingle-jangling at every jaunty step, like wind chimes in the springtime. All the while, the stranger makes light conversation: The weather’s been good (but not too good), the wheat has come in well this year (but not too well), and prices at the market are fair (neither high nor low, but just as they should be). It grows late. The sun sets. The miser gets nervous being out in the dark in the woods with a man who, truth told, he doesn’t know from Adam. They walk on in the dark of night. The moon never rises, the stars never come out, it is as black as a rabbi’s hat. The miser’s gut sinks. His chest gets tight. Not good out here. Not good at all. He reaches out as he walks, but his hands don’t brush a single leaf or limb or trunk. He feels no breeze. He hears no bird, no cricket, no babbling brook, no browsing deer. The world has gone cold and silent, empty as the grave. Silent, except for the stranger. The stranger, he never stops prattling about inconsequentialities, his tone never shifting. The sun’s been warm, the breeze cool. The rain has been wet, but the dust dry. Bricks have been quite heavy this year, and yet feathers still very light. The miser follows that steady voice through the Void, his hand tight around the reassuring weight of his keys, solid and real in that dark that’s darker than dark. Other men, in such moments of extremity–a soldier, for example–might find themselves caught between a desperate desire to flee home to their families and their iron-clad loyalty to their nation and ideals. The miser, he finds himself caught between his obedience to HaShem, and his desire to see his gold, safe and snug in his lockboxes. He knows this is a shameful dilemma, but also knows it’s true. No sense lying to himself, in the privacy of his own skull. He knows what he is. Given how he passed the night, you’d think that the miser would greet the pinkening of the sky like a robin greets the melting of the snow. But no, if anything, the sunrise makes it all worse. ‘Cause when the sun rises, it does so in the east and west at once, like a man peering into your bedroom window and straight into the mirror on the other side. This double sunrise shows a landscape like the miser has never seen, not even in dreams: a misty mountain with sky both above it and below, trees rooted in the air with branches growing from both ends of the trunk. There isn’t a single mosquito or bird, not a buzz or a tweet. The only sound is little streams, crystal clear like heaps of broken glass, chuckling to themselves as they tumble up the rocks toward the peaks, and the gentle flutter of the tiny yellow leaves that rain down all around them without ever touching ground. This stranger has brought him to a place where nature is unnatural. God forbid, the miserly mohel thinks, gripping his old familiar keys, I am in Sheol. Soon they arrive at the stranger’s home, a lovely and sturdy chalet–which, of course, it gives the miser no joy to see. Seeing a lovely home in Hell is like finding a gold coin in your mother’s deathbed. Bitter. Worse than having nothing at all. They go around back and enter through the cellar hatch in order to come out into the bright, sunny second-floor bedroom. There the miser sees a grand bed, four-poster with canopy and curtains, and in the bed a lovely wife with a beautiful baby boy at her breast. In that moment, his joy at seeing such a scene, it overwhelms his terror and despair. “Mazel tov!” he shouts. “What a lovely wife! What a beautiful child! You are truly a fortunate man!” The stranger smiles a smile honest but unsettling, like a smirk bent down the middle by a funhouse mirror. “Indeed–“ “Dear,” the wife in the bed with the babe at her breast gently interrupts, “Do you mind terribly going down to check and be sure the cook is on schedule? I worry she won’t have everything prepared for the feast without me there–“ But already the proud papa is shushing his wife. “Or course! Of course my darling!” and he rushes from the room. Immediately the new mother’s smile falls away, and her exhaustion shows through. “Listen!” she hisses. “You are not among men. These are demons. All but me. I was lured here by their riches, their grace and beauty. But they contain no Spark of Creation, and so cannot have their own children. Now I cannot leave. My son cannot leave. Thank God you are here to perform his bris, and consecrate him to HaShem! As a show of my gratitude, I’ll tell you the one thing you must know: take nothing while you are here. Not a sip of drink, not a bite of food, no gifts or payment. If you accept nothing from the demons, then come nightfall–when the suns meet at the zenith of the sky and set into each other–you may leave. But only if you’ve taken nothing.” Before the miser can ask any questions the stranger–the demon father–returns, eager to get the mohel down to the schul, where he is to be honored with leading the morning prayers before the brit milah ceremony. The morning service runs smooth as silk, although the mohel is terrified. There is not an empty seat in the sanctuary–and yet, when he closes his eyes to say the Shema, it is as though he is in a deep cave, all alone in the cold dark. The crowd is completely attentive, hanging on his every word–but also completely silent: not a shuffled foot, nor a creaking pew, nor a single breath or cough. Nonetheless, The bris, it goes off without a hitch. The baby boy, he is brave and strong and hardly fusses. The mother, she weeps with joy. Then begin the festivities. There are long tables outside the schul, heavy with big braided loaves of challah, with roast meat, with vegetables and fruit in quantities like the mohel has never seen. Sweets and cakes. Wine and beer and cider and milk. Exotic liquors and tea. Heedful of the young mother’s warning, he doesn’t nibble a single bite. Doesn’t sip a single drop. Just keeps his hands on his keys, a reminder that if he keeps to the straight and narrow he’ll be back home again soon. “You don’t eat!” the demon father says. “If none of this is to your liking, then I’ll have anything you want made. Anything you could imagine.” The mohel declines. He isn’t hungry, he says. Participating in this simcha is sustenance enough. The demon nods, his smile symmetrical and knowing. He gets up and motions for the mohel to follow. They go back into the demon’s beautiful home, passing through the grand front door to find themselves in a long stone hall deep within the earth. The demon takes a lamp down from the wall and leads the miser to a stout door. He opens the door to display a treasure trove, silver cups and platters, tea services and samovars. “Take your pick,” the demon says. “As fair payment, for having come so far.” It is the finest silver Mr. Miserly Mohel has ever seen. Some primordial want in him cries out to touch it, to inspect this teapot, ring those forks. But the mohel steels himself, grips his keys, conceals his trembling, and scoffs. “Silver?” he scoffs. “I have all the silver I want.” The demon shrugs and heads down the hall to the next door. He opens it, and the mohel is dazzled: the room is full of gold, gold chains and gold lamps, golden ewers full of gold rings, heaps of gold coins stacked high on groaning tables. “As much as you want,” the demon says, “my gift to you on this day of my son’s entering the covenant with the Lord.” Is it beautiful? Yes! The miser’s fingers yearn to test the heft of those rings and chains. But still, it’s not his gold, in his lockboxes, back in his home in his shtetl. And that gives him the little bit of steel he needs to hold back. The mohel waves off the offer. “I couldn’t possibly. My gift and payment is to have served HaShem, to have made your wife smile, to have seen your whole shtetl feasting.” He says this in earnest, because it is true. The demon smiles, shrugs it off. “A learnéd man once told me that all gold is demon gold: It glitters and dazzles, but contains no shard of the Spark of Divinity. It comes up from the mud and dirt, and can only glitter with the reflected light of HaShem.” He shrugs again, continuing down the hall to a third door. “I wouldn’t know. I’m not a learnéd man.” With that he opens the third door. The mohel is speechless: this room is small, just a closet, plain and unfurnished. The walls are covered in iron nails. From the nails hang bunches of keys. But none of that astonishes the miser. Not really. “Not gold,” the demon muses knowingly. “Not silver. Those left you unimpressed. But something in this room catches your eye, does it not?” “Those,” the mohel croaks. He tries to wet his lips, but finds himself completely dry-mouthed. “Those,” he repeats, pointing to a bunch of keys off to the left on the upper half of the far wall. “I would know those anywhere. Those are my keys.” The miser gropes around his neck. His keys are gone. “Are they?” the demon asks. “Curious. Because these are all demon keys. Only demons can own them or use them. Are you certain they are yours? That you’ve used those keys?” The mohel tries to speak, but he is so very dry. “Tell me about your father,” the demon asks. Such an easy question, the mohel is eager to answer. “He was a very fat thin man,” he wants to say. But somehow that’s not right. The demon smiles and nods encouragement. But the miser, he feels jammed up, like a man who’s bit off more than he can chew, let alone swallow. “Or your mother?” the demon cajoles. “Tell me about her. Tell me about your sisters and brothers, the place you were born, the first cutie who ever caught your eye. Details, details; it’s all on the details, nu?“ The mohel gawps like a fish flopping on the floor of a boat. He discovers that he recalls no father, no mother, no sisters or brothers or childhood. His whole life has been his shop and his land, his locks and his gold. “Why didn’t I know?” he wonders, feeling like an idiot. “It’s all so obvious.” The demon smiles a broad and honest grin. He is glad to have brought back–well, if not precisely a rabbi or a doctor, something that was a little of both. A start, at any rate. At last the unpalatable notion slips down into the miserly mohel’s gullet. He can see clearly now, like a drowning man who has finally finished failing to rise. “Perhaps now you’ll accept a drink of our wine? Some little nosh from our table?” It’s then that he feels it: a momentary, wrenching sense of loss. He wants it to be the knowledge that he’ll never see his neighbors or congregants or shopgirl or errand boy again. But it is not them he mourns; he mourns that he’ll never see his gold again. And he is ashamed. But in the murky depths of this shame he discovers that he would also miss those moments when he closed his eyes in prayer, a newly trimmed baby boy in his arms, and felt himself reflecting some faint glimmer of the light of God. That had at least been a start, had it not? A hint of some possibility beyond Redemption or Salvation, perhaps? A hint that the worm who yearns to be a bird might at least aspire to being a moth. Finally, the miser accepts the demon’s offered cup. He sips the wine. And the wine is good, refreshing his parched throat. The wine is, in fact, ambrosial, neither too dry nor too sweet, neither too lush nor too puckery. He sighs, resigned, feeling the truth soak into his brain like the wine soaks into his stomach: He is home again, home again, for better or worse. At least for a time.
This is always a fraught time of year for grade-school music teachers: they wanna sing Xmas songs, most of the kids wanna sing Xmas songs. But they know that the constant wintertime Othering grinds away at the Jewish kids. (It’s even worse when teachers try to “include” you be singing the “Dreidel Song”; that song is crap, and we know it. The Xmas songs are way better.)
Back during the pandemic I eavesdropped on the most brilliant piece of classroom third-rail navigation I’ve ever seen in my life, and I wanna share it here again, for any that need help (esp. in what’s become an extremely fraught year for Jewish kids in America).
This was early in the pandemic, when our community was pretty locked down (my kids didn’t have in-person school for 400+ days). My daughter was then a third grader, and I was sitting nearby during her Zoom music class (we’ll leave for another day any discussion of the crime against humanity that was “grade-school Zoom music class”).
A few slides into the lesson, the teacher show a picture of an unremarkable middle-aged White dude, “Mitchell Parish.”
Who the heck is Mitchell Parish? Well, he was born in Lithuania, and brought here by his parents, who were Jews (my daughter immediately perked up; Jews! Like us!) looking for a better life. Mitchell Parish was a popular songwriter in New York in the ‘20s, ‘30s, and ‘40s—and he wrote the lyrics to …
My daughter felt seen, gentiles got their Christmas carol, and no one had to sing the goddamned “Dreidel Song.”
So there’s the trick to getting to sing Christmas carols in public school in what has been the worst year for Jews since 1945:
Start out with a brief bio of the Jews who wrote your Xmas song
You could do a whole Winter Concert—featuring “Rudolph, the Red Nosed Reindeer,” “A Holly Jolly Christmas,” “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” and “Run, Run Rudolph”—on just a single bio slide: All four of those classics were written by the same Jew (the inimitable Johnny Marks, whose Jewish brother-in-law was the guy who created Rudolph to begin with).
I’m a mixed Jew (i.e., one raised in an interfaith family, and raising my Jewish kids in one now). I’ve lived in the American Midwest for my entire life (which is kind of a double-Diaspora).
I think these songs—which I wrote and recorded nearly 20 years ago now—possibly capture that experience more purely than anything else I’ve ever written.
Another Dark Xmastime (FUN FACT: I wrote this during my first year as a fundamentally unemployable stay-at-home dad; for years my children believed it was an accepted part of the broadly accepted Xmas Music Canon.)
Dreidel Bells (FUN FACT: The beat here is an original GameBoy running an early German Nanoloop cartridge. Both voices are obviously me, but the filters for the robot voice badly overburdened my old iBook, causing significant lag–which is why Mr. Roboto struggles so badly to hit his marks.)
DreidelDreidelDreidel (FUN FACT: The beat here is a vintage analog Boss DR-55 purportedly once owned by Poe, crammed through a heavy-metal distortion stompbox.)
![“Who’s Coming to Hurt Us?”[UPDATE] ✡︎](https://www.davideriknelson.com/sbsb/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/LordSkeletor_hurt.jpg)
