Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Travel Writer
I was in Barcelona, dropping by a friend’s shared apartment, when it started up. “I’ve been so busy here, I haven’t even had time to go shopping!” I laughed, and was met with this teasing response from my friend’s housemate — a Bulgarian cellist I barely knew. “No shopping? Why, for you, that must be as unthinkable as not building settlements would be for an Israeli!”
Huh? What on earth did shopping have to do with Israel? It was a nasty comment, and weird to boot. I was still reeling from the unexpected dig at a nationality none of us had any obvious ties to when the cellist’s girlfriend, a Brazilian, mentioned that she hadn’t been shopping during her visit, either. “I’m very frugal lately — I’m like a Jew, I just hate to spend money,” she said.
Jewishness hadn’t come up in the conversation, nobody had a clue about my heritage, and the comments were uttered lightly, unprovocatively. But there it was. In Europe, I have found, ugly remarks about Israel and Jewish stereotypes surface as a matter of course, with the tacit assumption that everyone shares an anti-Israel viewpoint — and that nobody present is Jewish.
If it is unfashionable to say ethnically pointed things in historically multicultural America, it can sometimes seem the opposite abroad, at least with regard to Jews and Israel. And it can make traveling to otherwise lovely lands, filled with otherwise friendly people, very uncomfortable for American Jews.
When Anti-Semitism Is Part Of The Vacation
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