Jews for Satan

~ Clarissa

I shared with a colleague that my students don’t know who Jews are.

“Oh, mine do,” she said. “I asked them what they knew about Jews and they said Jews are the people who worship Satan!”

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Published by Clarissa

14 thoughts on “Jews for Satan”

  1. Lovely. Not as bad, but a colleague of mine asks hir students if they knew what “diversity” was, and if they felt they were in contact on a daily basis with a “diverse” range of people. One student raised hir hand and enthusiastically said: “Oh yes, since I was little. My neighbors are protestant”. Given that probably 40% of the students at my institution are protestants, you can imagine the laughs of the rest of the class.

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  2. That is beyond weird. Why would any colleague think that? In the Fundamentalist Xtian church of my childhood, we were told in n uncertain terms that the Jews were God’s own Chosen People, and that God would severely punish anyone or any nation who mistreated Jews. It might not happen immediately, but it would absolutely certainly happen eventually.

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    1. That’s a very liberal kind of fundamentalism, David. Or perhaps a fetishising kind? There is a bare minimum of Jewish people in my city — most of them emigrated slightly before and mostly after WWII — and yet at my church school, for those of us who paid attention to value education classes and morning assemblies, we knew they were not the right sort of people. They killed Jesus! Oh noes!

      And so on.

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      1. Don’t worry, I can laugh about it now. Back then though, jeez, those kids were among the most un-Christian people on the planet.
        At least they didn’t think I kidnapped Christian children to use their blood for satanic sacrifices and to make matzo ball soup, or if they did, they didn’t tell it to my face. Which is apparently what Medieval English Christians thought of Jews.

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    2. Good lord! Good *everybody’s* lord. What vicious meanness.

      The funny thing about this story is that at my school — which, as I said above, was a church school set up by an archdeacon some 160 years before I landed there — had a minority of Christian students, and a whole swarm of Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and Jain students.

      It’s my personal hypothesis that even in deeply conservative countries, like mine, religious diversity is normalised by sheer virtue of practise. There has been no time in recent memory that our cities and suburbs and larger villages haven’t been crammed full of different kinds of people, and despite the hierarchies of power this creates, it makes living with difference seem like the normal thing to do.

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      2. This is why I celebrate every rare occasion when an immigrant family moves onto my street. This is precisely what this town is missing: a larger variety of people, a larger variety of cultures, races, everything.

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  5. Oh, good grief! That is weird to me as well. I was raised by parent’s who were Baptist (American), NOT southern and there is a difference. Perhaps my upbringing was more liberal, like David’s experience. I never considered my exposure to my childhood religion as fundamentalist either, since it was very different from my later experiences of Calvary Chapel, which I would consider fundamentalist. Later, I became interested in eastern religions through a course in philosophy. I was drawn to Zen, although I never got into it like other people I knew. I’m not much of a joiner or a group type of person and pressuring tactics tend to piss me off and do not work. Well, I was acquainted with a man who did get involved and who also shared some pretty ugly experiences (long, but interesting story). He later returned to Christianity.

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