Might be ready to vent about that one time I tried talking about my complicated relationship with “Colonialism”- especially being a USAmerican who has Jewish ancestry


TW: antisemitism

This is a vent post about extreme antisemitism

So about a year and a half ago (maybe two years? who knows) I was in a very small class in my very small fine arts College where the teacher was incorporating ideas about morality, 
 
ethics, and Colonialism into her class on Writing College-level Essays.

So far, so good. I agree with her premise that Academia has a history of enabling and enacting colonial violence.
 


I then shared a story about how my Grandmother’s family moved from Germany to New York in the late 1800s. I mentioned how despite having some ancestors who were 
 
European (white) colonists, I also have ancestors who were genuinely seeking asylum long after the United States had been colonized. I talked about the complicated history 
 
of knowing that there were “ethnographers” who collected Yiddish folk tales from places like Poland in the 1920s, and having the knowledge that those people who told those stories 
 
to those Academics probably met a very tragic end. I also talked about how the compilation book I had read of all these Yiddish folk tales did not mention most of the originators names, 
 
nor the names of the people who told these stories to the ethnographers. The most prominent people who were credited where the compilers and the translators. We talked about how colonialism 
 
does this thing of never giving individuals the credit they deserve, unless they are already in the “In-Group”.

I also mentioned how hard it was knowing that distant relatives who I will now never know died in the Holocaust, and the weird generational survivors guilt that goes along with that.
 
Those distant relatives would have had grandchildren by now. I feel the absence of those people whose entire lineages were cut.

This is, as you can imagine, a very sensitive topic for me. I was talking about all of this in what I assumed to be a safe space.
 


Then next week, I went into class. I greeted the teacher, and she thanked me for sharing my story. She mentioned how she felt grateful to hear it. 
 
This teacher is not who this story is about though.

Another student, and I do feel that it is relevant to the story to mention she is a Black young adult, was already in the room. She had heard my story last week. 
 
She then interrupts me and says she’s been thinking about my story and about how she “means no offense” but she thinks its a load of bullshit. She then goes onto compare the
 
Holocaust to North American slavery of Black people and the trauma she feels about that. She says “I mean, I don’t even know why youre mad about the holocaust, 
 
it was like, barely long at all and I don’t think that many people were killed anyways. And also you should really think about how different your ‘trauma’ is compared 
 
to my *real* generational trauma.”

[I’m paraphrasing here while trying to be as accurate as possible. this was a while ago so I can’t recall everything]
 


She goes on to belittle my experience I shared, and explain how she thinks her generational trauma is more traumatic than mine.
 


Genuinely I don’t know what to say. I am stunned with fear and dread. She clearly is misinformed about what the Holocaust was, but if I correct her, 
 
will she take me seriously? Also why does she think her trauma-olympics is useful? Is she trying to put me down because I’m white-passing and therefore “can’t have trauma”?
 

I dont remember what happened after that, I do know we eventually started class as the teacher intended.
 


I tried bringing this up to a therapist later on, but she didn’t really have space or understanding of why I was so shaken.
 

Anyways, thanks for reading. This is the story I think about anytime someone minimizes the rising antisemitism in the United States. It’s brutal out here sometimes.