Nazi tactics

I’m on line at a deli in Skokie when the notifications come through on my phone. It’s Saturday morning, so the place is much less crowded than usual, but I still had to take a number and wait by the glass case of Nova lox, whitefish salad, and pickled herring. My parents are visiting, and I’m picking up my usual order: gefilte fish and chopped liver, corned beef, pastrami, half sour pickles, challah, rye, and a black and white cookie. 

The deli is my favorite place in Skokie, just fifteen minutes from my house in Evanston, past the synagogues on Dempster Street with their security guards and white tents, past the Pita Inn, past the preschool with the sign that says “Where Judaism is Fun!” I always laugh. If there is anything people in Skokie know, it is that Judaism is not fun. At least seven thousand Holocaust survivors settled in Skokie after WWII; in remembrance, it has its own Holocaust museum. 

I never feel more Jewish than I do at the deli. The whole place reminds me of my grandparents in Scarsdale and my in-laws in Miami. I know to order the Nova and not the belly lox. I know that the gefilte fish is good and the knishes are only so-so. The synagogue is different. I’m an imposter there. I know the melodies but not all the words, and I don’t read Hebrew. My husband can, and so, now, can my older son. Half my ancestors, at least the men, would recognize the prayers. The other half, farmers and factory workers in Maine, would have been utterly lost. 

Waiting at a deli in Skokie on a Saturday morning, I can imagine I’m living a version of my grandmother’s American life. But then I go to work on Monday, take my place at the lectern, and do something very different. My grandmother’s father - an immigrant’s son who worked his way from rent collector to real estate executive in New York City - had wanted to be a scholar. He read voraciously, novels piled on his nightstand. He drank martinis and had a tidy mustache. No one remembers him as particularly Jewish, but I once looked him up on Lexis-Nexus and found him in the New York Times raising money for German Jewish refugees in the 1930s. 

It’s hard to be in Skokie without thinking about my grandparents, or without thinking about the Holocaust. And now it’s particularly hard, because the notifications on my phone are all about an article in the Japan Forward that accuses me and my co-authors of “Nazi tactics” in our criticism of an academic article. I should be used to this. It isn’t even the first time we’ve been accused of Naziism. A few months ago, a professor at Waseda University called us all “contemporary Nazis” on the cover of his book. 

This is usually the place in an essay where I would shift into my driest, most sarcastic tone. I would point out that, in fact, the Nazis were not known for technical criticism of academic arguments, or even polite requests to retract articles. But the humor falls flat. The Nazis were known for murdering six million people. People like my grandparents and my in-laws. People like my father and my husband and my sons. People like me. 

My husband laughed when I told him about the article. “It’s just ridiculous. You are so obviously not a Nazi,” he said, as I laid silverware on the table. “It’s just a thing people say now. Everyone’s a Nazi all the time.” 

“But doesn’t that bother you?” I said. “There were *actual* Nazis! They systematically murdered Jews! These people have no understanding of what the Nazis actually did!” The silverware was going in all the wrong places. 

“Yeah, it’s bad,” he shrugged, “but what can you do about people like that? They’ll always be there.”  

“What can you do about people like that?” I think to myself, again, in the deli, and take a photo of the case. “Pursuing the Nazi tactic of ordering gefilte fish,” I write to my co-authors. You can make jokes, of course, that’s one thing you can do.

But making a joke is a way to pretend that you aren’t bothered, and I am. 

“This is not worth your time,” my friends say. They agree with my husband. “It’s ridiculous.” 

But what else is there to spend time on? I should prepare Monday’s lecture. I should order all this food. I should just recognize that “Nazi” is now an empty signifier, a meaningless insult to hurl at people you don’t like. The Gestapo is a metaphor, Kristallnacht is an analogy, and no one actually reads Japan Forward anyway. 

But I can’t do it. Standing at the deli, crumpling my number in my hand, I think, “I’ll write an essay.” After all, it’s the only thing I do.