“She’s pretty, but she’s Jewish”: Illana Weizman describes anti-Semitic experience

Twice a month, essayist and feminist and anti-racist activist Illana Weizman writes a column for Madmoizelle in which she analyzes a fact about society, sometimes from her own personal experience. This week she recounts her own experience as a Jewish woman, faced with the latent but simmering hatred and anti-Semitism in society.

If I take the floor and describe my experience, it is not out of “exhibitionism” or a desire to “victimize myself” as I sometimes hear people say, in the context of the denial of racist and anti-Semitic violence, but because I believe in the power of testimony to account of the system of this scourge, for the human end. Since what is not said or not heard does not exist, speaking becomes the starting point for potential awareness.

Jewish “racialization”.

Anti-Semitism is racism, even if it goes beyond its definition as it is much older than the forms of racism that were structured during the nineteenth century on pseudoscientific bases. Like any racist system, it has very real effects on the daily lives of those affected. In the social sciences we speak of a process of “racialization”, which “produces categories, which alter and minorize”.

As a Jew living in a context where anti-Semitism is rampant, I am assigned to the category of “Other”, to certain postures, behaviors, survival reflexes. Alberto Memmi writes: “Judaism is always difficult […] shameful or demanded, persecuted or glorious, can only be tortured”a thought that resonates powerfully and expresses the ambivalence and strangeness of Jewish “being”, the product of a process of otherness that lasted several millennia.

In my militant life around issues related to anti-Semitism, what has always struck me is the general public’s lack of knowledge of what anti-Semitism represents in the daily life of Jews. There is a false belief that this particular racism would have been less active than other racisms and would have lost its operational strength after WWII. However, in France, Jews represent 0.7% of the population and alone account for a third of racist acts.

“I became a Jew at the age of 9”

The altering process begins with an original event. The first time we realize that our existence is disruptive, that we pay our difference. I became Jewish at age 9, baptized at a crucial time. A classmate speaks in these terms to another who exchanges Panini stickers from an album with me the beauty and the Beast : “You mustn’t play with Illana, she’s a dirty Jew.” As a child, having a very Jewish life at home, I discovered my Jewishness in the hostile external gaze, as if branded with a red-hot iron.. Not that this hatred alone came to define who I was, but it fatally began to be part of the construction of my identity.

“She’s pretty but she’s Jewish”

And this process has continued tirelessly throughout my life. Without being exhaustive, I will give you a few moments. I’m 12, a supervisor of my college swings: “Attali (my “maiden” name)? It’s a Jewish name, like the money tycoon Jacques, because you’re in a public school, there are schools for Jews.”. I’m 17, taking the RER A from my suburbs with a friend to go shopping in Châtelet when two boys see the Star of David hanging around my neck, the one my mother constantly asked me to put under my sweater when I went out. They push us, insult us, grab my chain and almost rip it off, I scream and get off the train, pulling my friend’s arm, heart pounding, tears in my eyes. I am 22 years old, during a party a group of boys stubbornly maintain that the kidnapping and murder of Ilan Halimi is not linked to any anti-Semitism, but to ordinary banditry. I’m 23, I’m in a nightclub and a young man I’m dancing with interrupts the conversation when he discovers that Illana is a Jewish given name and not a Russian one. I hear him tell his friend later “She’s pretty but she’s Jewish”.

I am 24 years old, after sleeping with a guy, he calls me mocking “I’ve never slept with a Jewess, it’s really like I imagined”. lived anti-Semitism, it’s also all those times I hid my Jewishness out of fear of potential reprisals, it’s the feeling of loneliness and terror at every murder of a Jew for being a Jew, it’s asking my brother to take off his yarmulke on his way home from synagogue because too many of your friends have been attacked under such circumstances, it’s listening to endless comments about fantasized wealth or Jewish influence in spheres of power.

Being a Jew is many things, luminous things, of the order of positive construction, of community and family warmth, but it is also living anti-Semitism, fearing living anti-Semitism and behaving according to these realities.

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