Back in the USSR, once WWII was won, it became a really bad idea to be a Jew. People changed their first and last names, faked Russian ethnicity on their passports, hid their Jewishness with all they had but it didn’t work. Everybody knew and despised them.
As a Jew, you knew from infancy that something was wrong about you. A bad, shameful secret that always dragged you down.
Of course, people look for ways to wriggle from out of the shame. One such way was the myth of the bad Jew. “Yes,” said the Jews who used this method, “we have to recognize that a lot of Jew-hatred is justified. There are, indeed, Jews who are greedy, sleazy, dirty, dishonest, and repellent. They kind of deserve all the criticism. We are not like them, of course. We are good.”
The bad Jews of this myth had different names. I’ve heard them referred to as shtetl Jews or Bukhara Jews. They weren’t real, of course. They were a trick that sad, scared and ashamed people played to feel less disgusted with themselves. Interiorized shame and self-hatred are unbearable, so you project them onto a small part of the self and repudiate that part.
I always remember these sad Soviet Jews whenever I read yet another article by a white person denouncing “whiteness,” “white liberals / conservatives” or “white supremacy.” They are doing the same thing, although for far less respectable reasons. “It’s not me, it’s that guy! Get him!” – this method has been tried many times.
But guess what?
Both you and that guy end up getting your teeth kicked in.
Because for those who hate you, there’s no such thing as a good Jew.
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