Genteel Prejudice

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Saturday, January 12, 2008

Some years we show the Confirmation class the movie “Gentleman’s Agreement”. It’s an old movie, from 1949, and stars Gregory Peck as a non-Jewish journalist who pretends to be Jewish in order to write about anti-Semitism in America. He learns that his secretary has changed her name in order to get a job in corporate America and that his old buddy Dave, recently discharged from the Army, can’t find a place to live, because landlords are reluctant to rent to Jews. He himself is turned away at a fancy hotel, and discovers that even his very progressive girl friend is not willing to have her friends think she is engaged to a Jew.

My students are often surprised to learn that this was a pretty realistic portrait of America in the 1940’s and 50’s but when they go back and talk to their parents and grandparents they uncover stories of restrictive covenants on houses, of quota’s in schools, and of common understandings that Jews just didn’t work in certain fields or for certain companies.

The Civil Rights movement in the 1960’s which eliminated Jim Crow and won for the African American community the right to vote also brought gains for the Jewish community. The Fair Housing Act has not for the most part created racially integrated neighborhoods, but it was successful in eliminating the housing discrimination which the Jewish community had experienced for several decades.

Sociologists estimate that a small hard core anti-Semitic community of perhaps 5% of Americans still persists, with another 10% of American expressing some negative beliefs about Jews. Political issues have also raised new concerns as anti-Israel sentiments sometimes picks up traditional anti-Semitic themes and has revived the old hateful literature of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and other forgeries; but for the most part American Jewish children do not experience much of what was portrayed in the film.

I am not however as optimistic as Elyse about the elimination of prejudice in our society. I think of the Hispanic engineer, in a high tech company here in multicultural Silicon Valley, who is handed a trash can to empty, by someone who assumes he is part of the janitorial staff, or the son of an African American minister coming to an evening meeting in Los Gatos who is stopped for what he calls DWB, driving while black or brown, being a young black man in a nice car in a place where he is not expected. Prejudice works in all kinds of subtle ways. I remember one young woman who grew up in our congregation, crying in my office. She was born in Korea and adopted by a Jewish family. She hated math, preferring to study art. She complained that none of her teachers would accept that she as an Asian, she really didn’t want to do calculus.

This week’s Torah portion about the Exodus from Egypt is often referred to elsewhere in the Bible as a reason for compassion and solidarity with the oppressed: “do not oppress the stranger,” we are taught, “for you know the heart of the stranger”, “remember that you were strangers in the land of Egypt”. As Elyse suggests our history calls us to speak out against genocide remembering the experiences of our people in the Holocaust. It also calls upon us to be sensitive to the more genteel prejudice, expressed in unwritten expectations and limiting stereotypes.

Each time we read the story of the Exodus or sing the Mi Chamochah, the song of our freedom, we remember that redemption is not yet complete. We commit ourselves to continuing to work for the day when all can sing a song of liberation from prejudice and discrimination.