DAMON LINKER

MAY 28, 2021

News that Jews are being attacked, both verbally and physically, on  the streets of American cities and around the world has sent me back to painful memories of  my own childhood. They are memories of bigotry, bullying, and abuse — along with  earnest efforts to combat the problem ever since.

Things have changed. But not as much as one might have hoped.

I’m Gen X, born in 1969. While growing up in southern Connecticut in the early 1980s, everyone I knew had a copy of a thin paperback book published by a division of Random House called Truly Tasteless Jokes. We’d keep it in our lockers or carry it around in our back pockets and whip it out on the fifth-grade playground during recess. The book, which sold millions of copies at the time, was divided into chapters: Jewish, WASP, Black, Hispanic, Polish, homosexual, handicapped, etc. It was a feast of stereotypes and prejudice. If you belonged to the group being mocked by one series of jokes read out loud by a peer, it was uncomfortable. But you knew that the reader would move on soon enough to another group, directing the animus elsewhere.

Fast forward a few years to high school — 9th or 10th grade. A boy from the American South who’d moved to our town a few years earlier brought a level of anti-Semitism with him that I’d never encountered. I was Jewish, but I didn’t talk about it much. I didn’t observe the sabbath, attend a synagogue or Hebrew school, or wear a yarmulke. Yet I was known as a Jew — one of a relatively small number in my high school. Which is probably why this kid decided at some point to make an example of me by yelling “Hebe!” in my face when he’d pass me in the hall. Soon a group of other kids in an overlapping circle of acquaintances took up calling me a kike.

This was nearly four decades ago. There was no official anti-bullying program at school, no school counselor on duty. The headmaster didn’t proclaim the school district was “No Place for Hate,” as the leadership of the public schools in my suburban Philadelphia neighborhood now does. It was simply understood that there were bullies out there in the world, and that it was terrible to be the target of abuse, but that this was life, and it would pass. There was nothing much to be done about it in any kind of systematic way. Boys would be boys and bigots would be bigots.

Was that an acceptable response? Probably not. I understand why well-meaning people reacted to searing experiences like mine by encouraging a new form of moral education in schools — an education that began in the late 1980s, got labeled “political correctness” by conservative critics during the early 1990s, slowly made its way through the culture over the intervening decades, and finally exploded into the “woke” revolution that began to roil workplaces during the mid-2010s and became much more pervasive after George Floyd’s murder a year ago.

The effects of this moral education can be seen all around us. It is impossible to imagine Truly Tasteless Jokes coming out from a major publishing house today, let alone it becoming a runaway bestseller that children read aloud in public. A student who hurled racist or anti-Semitic slurs at a peer would promptly be expelled from public school today, at least across wide swaths of the country. Instead of singling out members of various ethnic, racial, and religious groups for verbal and sometimes physical abuse, it’s the would-be abusers who are called out and criticized, their behavior (and the thoughts and assumptions behind the behavior) treated as shameful.

The ultimate goal of these changes has been the creation and perpetuation of a better world — one of greater equality and mutual respect, with less bigotry and cruelty.

Is this what we’ve gotten? Are we really that much closer to the goal of universal equality and respect than we were when I was in high school? In some respects, yes. It’s good that my own kids don’t carry around joke books ridiculing classmates and their families. I’m happy that (as far as I know) no one in their schools is yelling slurs in the faces of peers — and that if it happened, the student flinging the epithet would be punished.

But in other respects, we seem to be moving in the opposite direction, with movements explicitly opposed to political correctness on the rise at home and in countries around the world, and anti-Semitic attacks spreading like contagion. In response, those behind the project of moral reformation insist that efforts need to be redoubled — and that the backsliding must be blamed on a reluctance to shame the perpetrators even more aggressively. We simply need to do a better job of calling people bigots, of drawing lines and excommunicating larger numbers from the public square.