The Gulag academia
Here’s an excellent article by a Jewish woman who emigrated to this country from Russia in 2012. An excerpt:
I immigrated to America from Russia in 2012 so I wouldn’t have to hide anymore. That hasn’t worked out so well for me.
Hiding our Jewishness was a family tradition. This was an understandable response given that my Ukrainian paternal grandfather, Danil Fyodorovich Bykoder, served 15 years, beginning in about 1923 at the age of 19, in the Solovki labor camp, whose anguishing cruelties were vividly described in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s epic work, The Gulag Archipelago. My grandfather’s tripartite crime was criticizing Stalin, being an intellectual, and being Jewish. …
… The children at school … threatened me, mocked me as a “cheap Jew,” and poured a syrupy Russian knock-off of Coca-Cola over my head. This was my baptism into a culture of fear.
After school, to avoid them, I would walk the long way, through a scrubby patch of forest, to reach the little house I shared with my mother. …
For these reasons, among others, I emigrated to America in 2012, declared and was granted political asylum, and became an American citizen. Now I am Irina Velitskaya, having changed my last name back in Russia because I, too, wished to avoid a certain stigma—in my case, the stigma of a name that represented hiding and shame. “Velitskaya” means “great,” and that was what I’d hoped to be, unfettered by the ugly superstitions of the Old World.
I was safe now.
Not anymore. She describes what has happened to her recently as a student at Berkeley. It’s worth reading the whole thing.
This is heartbreaking to read – and I grew up marinaded in WWII history, and knowing full well of how Jew-hate poisoned Europe. I had the example of those Righteous Gentiles who aided their friends, co-workers and sometimes total strangers to escape Nazi death squads always before me. Many of my own best friends, to include one boyfriend, and my parents friends were Jewish I was always quite proud that the most vicious forms of Jew-hate had not appeared to have taken root in America — until now.
If I wear a tee shirt saying “I STAND WITH ISRAEL”, will the prosecutor say I was looking for a fight?
Might be worth finding out. I can think of a church which could be a possibility.
Indeed, it is sickening. What can I/we do?
Reassure our Jewish friends?
Richard Aubrey:
I wear a t-shirt emblazoned with that message to my gym. I also wear an “I Stand With Ukraine” t-shirt.
There are a great many reasons I’ve always been sympathetic to the Jews. Among them is that I’ve always thought there is something to the canary-in-the-coal-mine idea. When Jews are being persecuted, there is a very real sickness in that society. There is clearly a sickness emerging in the U.S. and it is frightening.