The shirt in the park - The Jewish Standard

I was walking my dog through the park on one of the beautiful days we had last week, all green and blue, with the kind of breeze that makes you glad to be alive, when I saw two men walking toward me.

One of them was wearing a brightly colored t-shirt, visible under his open jacket. In hot red letters, it said — really, it yelled — ZIONIST.

I turned off my podcast and interrupted his conversation to tell him how much I liked it, and to thank him for wearing it. He smiled and kept on walking.

And then I thought about what it means.

I’ve never seen a shirt like that before. Not too long ago, it would have been as unlikely as wearing a shirt labeling the wearer as Democrat, or Republican, or Suburbanite, or Middle Manager. Entirely uncontroversial and somewhat odd because, after all, who cares? Or to be more accurate, who cared?

Because now it is extremely controversial.

It’s hard to say exactly when the climate changed. Antisemitism’s always been around, even if it just lurked underground and around corners, but it seems to have risen to the surface at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, with its idiotic-looking marchers holding their little tiki torches and chanting “Jews will not replace us.” It’s gotten more and more obvious in the nine years since then.

Last weekend, the New York Times had a story about Jews and antisemitism, headlined “Fear and Vigilance Are Now Constant Companions for Many American Jews.” It seemed pretty accurate, describing how Jews aren’t really scared, not all the time, not yet, but they are just less comfortable than they used to be. The story quoted, among many other Jews, Teaneck Mayor Mark Schwartz, who is Orthodox and said that he used to wear his kippah everywhere, and “judge people who didn’t.” But when he was in Paris recently, he reported, his wife warned him not to wear it; he did anyway, but prudently carried a baseball cap with him. “It’s a shame,” he said.

To be clear, this is not Germany in the 1930s. There are many structural differences between then and now. I keep remembering the march over the Brooklyn Bridge to protest antisemitism and support the Jewish community in January 2020, just before the pandemic. The bridge was packed with us — aside from everything else, it’s always exciting to walk over the Brooklyn Bridge, because it’s beautiful and historic and iconic, but I digress — and there were New York City police all over the place.

The police were there to protect us. They were friendly, they were kind, they were on our side. It was the opposite of Weimar Germany. That matters too.

Back in Central Park last week, the man who wore the Zionist t-shirt was youngish and looked fit — it looked good on him — but to wear such a shirt, even in Central Park, in the heart of so-very-Jewish Manhattan, takes both physical and moral courage.

That is a shame.

—JP

Opinion

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