Kike

Kike

Steeb Hall is located on the south end of the Ohio State campus, along with several other dormitories. It was the better part of campus, for freshmen at least, because all the good college bars were located within four minutes’ walking distance. Mean Mr. Mustard’s was the alternative music bar on the corner of 11^th and High Street. It’s where I learned about tattoos, pink hair, and something called slam dancing, where kids would literally ram into each other on the dance floor. I’ve never been one for pain, so one try at that was enough for me. An ex-girlfriend once asked me to hit her hard during sex, and I declined that as well. Mother Fletcher’s was next door and played a mix of alternative and top 40. You had to walk down a long flight of steps to get to the underground bar, which seemed mysterious to a college student, except I had already snuck in several times in high school so it wasn’t that cool to me anymore. Two doors down, you had Park Alley, and was more or less a frat dance bar. Not an uncommon sight to see drunk, rich white kids vomiting on their way out at 2 a.m. Papa Joe’s was a two-story bar across the street. It basically was a loud, sit-down, beer-guzzling bar, which I only visited once or twice for “kegs and eggs” before Buckeye football games Saturday mornings. The juicy rumor about that place was that some inebriated college senior fell over the balcony to the first floor and was hospitalized.

Not only were students in bar heaven on this part of campus, there was a Buffalo Wild Wings, back then called BW3s, a one-dollar gyro joint, and something called All-In-One that served Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and KFC all under one roof, providing plenty of fuel for my freshman fifteen. Another four or five bars I never even ventured into were also nearby, but I can’t recall their names now since some greedy real estate developers demolished all these places well after I graduated in favor of drab retail, an Aveda salon, a high-end sports bar and T-Mobile. Prior to the so-called beautification of High Street, Ohio State probably had more bars per square foot than anywhere else in the country. Needless to say, I felt like I had hit the jackpot when I got my first-year dorm assignment in 1987.

Most of the other dorms were on the north side of campus, and it took students a good twenty to thirty minutes to walk to the cool south-end bars on weekends. Kids in those dorms sometimes even took campus busses to the south side it was so far. Two other twenty-six story dorms were located even further away near Ohio Stadium along the Olentangy River, referred to us back then as the Olengrundgy since it wasn’t the most pleasant or clean river one ever saw. Brown and muddy to match the all too frequent gray skies of Columbus, Ohio. I was definitely grateful I hadn’t been assigned to either of the two lone towers, named Morrill and Lincoln. Legend had it that Ohio State built one of these towers for every virgin to graduate since Ohio State was founded in 1870. That’s a grand total of two virgin graduates in over 100 years! It certainly made me feel good about my odds of meeting girls.

My dorm, however geographically desirable, was a total culture shock to me. I had gone to high school with a fair mix of people. Most of my close friends as a teenager were either Jewish or black. Even a few kids from Yugoslavia and a Native American boy. But Steeb Hall was different. I was the only Jew on the eighth floor in a sea of white kids from mostly small-town Ohio. Sean from Massillon. Corey from Marietta. Luke from Lima. Just to name a few. The only good thing about my floor was that it was co-ed, and the girls from rural Ohio were just as pretty as the rest of them. Sometimes even better, although my dry, curly, nappy, untamed Jewfro wasn’t exactly a turn-on to this demographic. Hell, I know it wasn’t a turn-on for anyone. Thank God I later discovered hair gel after law school.

My roommates were Len from Berea, a mostly white and conservative suburb on the west side of Cleveland, and Billy from mostly rural Mansfield, Ohio. Len was a quiet kid. He knew a ton about sports but didn’t talk about much else. Nice enough guy, but he decided to pledge the Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity that first fall semester, so I rarely saw him. Tekes, as his frat brothers were called, boasted Ronald Reagan as one of their alumni. Billy wasn’t as docile as Len. Opinionated. Loud. And full-on redneck. He was tall, maybe six-foot four. Had a lanky frame. Blonde Aryan-like hair with hazel eyes and lots of freckles. Always cracking jokes, except their frequency about race and homosexuality irritated me. Still, he never really bothered me personally. Even asked me to pitch on his intramural softball team since I had played for my Jewish youth group team in high school. Billy high-fived me after good plays from time to time. I’m sure I could’ve fared worse than Len and Billy.

In 1987, Ohio State had about 50,000 undergraduate students, but my new life was more about the forty or so kids on my dorm floor, most of whom never met a nice Jewish boy, or any Jewish boy for that matter.

“Wait, so you guys don’t believe in Jesus?” a well-meaning girl Cara from Findley, Ohio asked me just before our first all-floor dorm meeting the day before classes started. It hadn’t taken long for the entire floor to discover I was Jewish. I wore it like a badge of honor, so it wasn’t exactly a secret. Cara wasn’t trying to be abrasive, but her tone suggested a level of how in the fuck is that even possible you don’t believe in Jesus approach to the subject. I had never been asked this type of question before and was almost scared to let her in on the dirty truth of what us Jews believe. “Well, um. . . no. . .  We just think Jesus was a really good person,” I responded apologetically, although I actually had no idea whether Judaism thought Jesus was cool... especially since so many of my ancestors were killed in the name of Jesus over the years. Our synagogue in Columbus, Temple Israel, certainly wasn’t discussing Jesus. We were too busy learning about the names of death camps in Poland and Germany to be bothered with belief systems. I knew about Auschwitz and Buchenwald long before I ever heard the words Genesis and Leviticus. You can imagine the joys of that education. “Good morning boys and girls! You’re Jewish! So guess what? Your brothers and sisters were gassed by the Germans!” All I really knew about Jesus was from having to watch my childhood neighbor Patrick perform in Passion of the Christ plays at his church when I was nine. I got the pleasure of watching child actors playing my co-religionists rat out poor Jesus, leading him to his demise.

My first semester at Ohio State consisted of Business Calculus, Hebrew 101, Physics, and Black Studies 101. A full class load. Ohio State required students to take four semesters of a foreign language, so I signed up for Hebrew. I had a bar mitzvah at age thirteen and figured I would coast through with straight As. That idea lasted for one semester, and I ended up dropping Hebrew before my freshman year was over. I didn’t sign up for Hebrew so I would actually have to study! Damn that language was hard. I really didn’t appreciate what Black Studies was either, but since I had a lot of black friends, I signed up with two friends from high school who were also attending Ohio State.

The Black Studies course was a welcome respite from my white-washed dorm floor. Nobody looked at me like the odd man out, despite being only one of two white kids in class. The other one, Emily, was dating one of the football players, and before the world of cell phones and text messages, spent more time passing notes to her boyfriend than asking about West African history. Still, nobody there questioned my presence in class. The problem with the course, though, was that it made life more stressful by opening my eyes to society’s black-white divide. Up until this point, I thought racism was a 1960s thing. My fifty-fifty mixed black-white high school seemed uneventful. Friendships with black kids were organic and natural. So when our instructor began discussing the rampant and pervasive racism in society, I was stunned. When students one after the other shared their horrific experiences, it made me angry. And I mean really angry. I had to take that anger back with me to my Dukes of Hazards dorm and navigate my evolving feelings every day.

The kids in my dorm were by no means card carrying members of the KKK or intentionally racist. But their all-white worldview stood in stark contrast from what I was learning in Black Studies. I felt as though I was living in two separate countries. This was the first time I had actually even realized I was white myself. I always thought being Jewish was a separate race until I heard the almost daily trauma of what people of color endure. Yes, I knew I was different than the other white students, but let’s not kid ourselves, I still got to go to a bank and, despite my Eastern-European Jewish hair, get serviced without incident.

The first time I became aware of my own skin color, which I like to exotically call olive, although I never actually ate an olive that looked like me, was in my third week of college. The kid next to me in Black Studies was Tommy. He was from University Heights, in Cleveland, a mixed Jewish and Black neighborhood. Darker than most black kids I knew. Short and a little pudgy. A shaved head. Always joking around with a smile. “What up white boy Kassanova,” he greeted me one morning with a warm clasp of our right hands, making a play on my last name, Kass. White boy? What was he talking about? I actually looked at the back of my hand to check myself out. Was I really white? Should I be offended? I thought I was Jewish, not white, but alas Crayola never added the color “Jewish” to the box of sixty-four.

Over the next few weeks, I couldn’t stop thinking that maybe I was just like all the other white kids on the eighth floor of Steeb Hall. I mean, other than one kid in high school who was a bit crazy anyway and seemed to hate all groups, I never experienced any hatred because of my Jewish identity. Certainly nothing directed to me. It had been relatively smooth sailing for me, which stood in clear contrast to my Black Studies classmates’ lives. Despite my dad’s never-ending admonishment against anti-Semites my entire childhood, I hadn’t actually met one and figured he was just stuck as a victim of another era. I wasn’t completely ignorant. I read about how Jews were excluded from clubs, universities, and the like. I read about Jews’ being called kikes. But all that seemed a thing of the past relegated now to just a few nut cases like Louis Farrakhan, Pat Robertson, or Lyndon LaRouche.

You can imagine, then, how utterly stunned I was when I arrived at my dorm room at 2:35 p.m. on Wednesday, October 21, 1987 to a giant three-foot by three-foot red swastika painted on the door. It was so big it almost covered the entire top half of the door to our room. At least that’s how I remember it. I suppose any size swastika would seem big to me. The red paint was the same color hue the Nazis used in their flag, which before then I only saw in history books. I stood there shaking but also in some sort of this-isn’t-really-happening frozen shock. By the time I was in law school five years later and saw “Die Jews” painted on the walls of the elevator at the University of Toledo College of Law, I was used to the hatred, but at a naïve eighteen years old, tears began flowing down my face as Len opened the door.

“That thing was on there when I got back an hour ago,” he said stoically, as it became apparent that he hadn’t shared his discovery with anyone yet.

That thing? I said nothing in response and instead called the campus police.

“Ohio State Campus Emergency,” the woman answered the phone after I dialed 0, years before 911 existed.

“Yes, I just was the victim of an anti-Semitic incident. A Nazi symbol was painted on my door in Steeb Hall, room 801,” I told the operator.

“I’m so sorry, we’ll send someone over right away,” the woman on the other end of the phone said back. I couldn’t tell if she was really sorry or not.

Fifteen minutes later, two of Ohio State’s finest showed up in uniform.

“Is this the only thing that happened,” one of the officers asked me as his opening question. I gave him a bewildered look.

“What do you mean, only? Yes, this is what happened,” I told him as more tears flowed down the sides of my cheeks.

“Listen, son,” as he put his arm on my shoulder. “People just use that symbol as graffiti all the time and it doesn’t mean you were targeted because you’re Jewish.”

I couldn’t believe my ears as I reminded him “But… I’m the only Jewish kid on the floor and my door is the only one with the swastika.”

The second officer backed his partner up. “You realize the symbol actually was originally from India and it had nothing to do with the Nazis.”

I hadn’t ever heard that one before, although I’ve since learned his bullshit explanation is technically true. Not sure why this cop knew that info, but okay. Over the years, I’ve come to realize that’s the same refrain repeated by anti-Semites and their silent supporters. My teenage self knew the cop’s response was absurd, but I didn’t have enough life experience yet to let the depth of his ignorant comment sink in.

It wasn’t just Len who hadn’t reported the incident. None of the other kids who saw the paint before me did either. Even after a dozen or so of them watched my tears as the police questioned me in the hallway did one so much as say an “I’m sorry” or “how awful.” They just stood and stared like they were watching a building burn to the ground. A nauseating combination of disbelief and a how-cool-is-that curiosity on their faces. Most of them couldn’t even look at me after I called the police, with one kid Vince rhetorically asking me the next day, “You didn’t think the police would actually do anything, did you? It was just paint.” I was angry, yet felt sorry for the lot of them. Their world was filled with ignorance and a certain narrowness that might never allow them to truly experience the beauty of other types of people.

It wasn’t enough that my eighteen-year-old world was just shattered with red paint strokes on my door, but the police weren’t taking this seriously on top of it? Maybe Dad was right all along. Maybe the entire world still hated us Jews like they had for the past 3,000 years. College students. The police. Everyone. Maybe I would’ve been more prepared for this had I listened to Dad. I just couldn’t accept a world that hated me. How depressing. How stressful that must be for any group that endures regular hatred, I thought then and know now. No wonder we Jews are Tums’ best customers. I used to think the pervasive stomach problems many Jews experience was just a result of unhealthy Jewish food, but I wouldn’t be surprised if generations of hate-induced stress creeped into the Jewish gene pool and that’s just how we’re wired now.

The next two days were a whirlwind. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t focus on classes. I started suspecting at least three people on my floor as possible perpetrators. My main suspect was my roommate Billy. His softball high-fives weren’t enough to render his racial jokes insignificant. He just looked and acted like the Webster’s Dictionary definition of redneck. Without the help of the police, though, I knew I’d never figure out who the budding racist door artist was. So instead of fighting, standing up for myself, or letting people know I wouldn’t take it—all reasonable choices—I let fear win. I rushed to the Ohio State dorm assignment office and quickly got permission to move dorms to Morrill Tower, that virgin dorm all the way on the northwest side of campus, about as far away from the south campus bars as one could imagine. And far away from the Hitler youth in Steeb Hall. I would never have to see those powder white faces again, and I didn’t for my remaining four years of college. Not once did I run into Len, Billy, Cara, or any of my other dorm mates on Ohio State’s vast 1,700 acre campus.

Dad reported the incident to the office of Ohio State President Ed Jennings, but they did nothing, just like the police. ABC news anchor Peter Jennings, the president’s brother, was known to report negatively lopsided on Israel quite regularly, so I wouldn’t be too surprised if this paid no small part in his brother’s inaction. The only person at Ohio State who shared any sympathy about the hate crime other than the student housing office was Mr. Thompson. He was the sixty-something-year-old black maintenance man who was tasked by the university with removing the blood-colored paint from my door. “Man, that’s fucked up. Do they know who did it?” he asked me with a disgusted yet comforting look. He was the first person who calmed me down for at least a few moments. Not because he all of a sudden made me feel safe or because what happened wasn’t as bad as I thought, but because of the empathy in his eyes. He undoubtedly had endured years of racism trumping my swastika experience and knew what it must feel like to come face to face with hatred. “The police aren’t even trying to catch the person,” I responded. “Typical,” he said, disgusted, and looked at me again with understanding even though we hadn’t engaged in a full discussion. I stood there watching him erase the rank hatred from my door with some ammonia smelling chemicals. Usually strong smells like that cause me to gag, but this time I was unaffected, lost in my thoughts about our shared experience.

Campus housing helped me gather my things and move dorms a couple days later. My new dorm room, on the seventeenth floor, was more like the United Nations rather than a random sample of ten of Ohio’s eighty-eight cornfield counties. A Pakistani kid. Three black kids. A girl from Chile. One Jewish girl from Chicago, who unfortunately wasn’t my type. A New Yorker. Someone from Houston. And one Chinese student. Despite my newfound happy place, I was still angry. Sure, I was still pissed some asshole painted a swastika on my door, but angrier at myself for not fighting back. For not clenching my fists and letting people know that if they messed with my five-six frame, I was gonna give it to them. (I’m glad I grew another three inches in college.) I couldn’t believe I moved dorms. “What the fuck was I thinking?,” I thought to myself for weeks on end. That anti-Semite who did this was probably laughing at me. I’m sure he thought us Jews must be a bunch of pocket-protector pussies, like the media often portrays us. Accountants. Stock brokers. Nerds. But not Navy Seals or prize fighters. The truth is that Jews actually make up about 2% of the military and 2% of the general population in the U.S. and Jews actually dominated boxing in the 1920s until places like Harvard ended their Jewish quota system. Hardly just a bunch of nerds. Sixty years later though, we’re just a bunch of pushovers to most people. My walking away from Steeb with my head down only confirmed that idea.

My anger took over. I decided I was no longer going to stand for hatred of any kind. I didn’t care if it came from Arabs against Jews. Jews against Arabs. Whites against blacks. Anti-gay. Anything. My eyes were going to remain open. I was going to be “woke,” as they call it today. I was fucking done with hatred. I was determined to stomp it out. To shout it down. Nobody was ever going to run me out of my home again. I started organizing protests for race issues I saw on or read in the news or for incidents that happened on campus. One involved police abuse of an unarmed black kid on campus. It was easy to protest the police after how they treated my situation. I protested the school newspaper, the Lantern, when they published a Holocaust denier’s advertisement in the name of free speech, although I’m pretty sure the U.S. Constitution didn’t require them to run the ad. I started working on political campaigns. I wasn’t just protesting and working on issues, I was doing so with fire in my eyes. As far as I was concerned, every regular white guy was a racist. It was easy to fill my cup with anger, too, when my circle of friends consisted mostly of Jews and Blacks.

My four, okay let’s call it five, years at Ohio State were a flurry of nonstop political activity and fighting racism. Everything flowed from that. The courses I took. My efforts. It became my reason for living. The problem, though, was of course not all regular white people are racist. Not even all white Republicans are racist. It hit me hard in the face in law school when I met Mark Gross. Mark was a blonde kid of German descent. German last name. German face. German hair and eyes. He looked and smelled German. Like he just ate a few bratwurst and drank some Bavarian style beer. So when he met me and started with “You don’t look Jewish,” I lost it. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean,” I responded in a high-pitched voice, my swastika anger still hot in my belly. “Do Ethiopian Jews look Jewish? Do Mexican Jews look Jewish? How about Swiss Jews? What are we supposed to look like?” My tone was aggressive. The funny thing about the incident was that I actually do look European Jewish, minus the stereotypical larger Jewish nose. “Whoa. Slow down,” Mark said in a state of disbelief. “I didn’t mean anything negative about it.” Mark was visibly shaken by my unwelcome reprimand. I knew nothing about Mark, and here I was basically accusing him of being racist.

It later turned out that Mark was from a small town of 2,000 in Ohio. Strident, conservative, religious Republican. Anti-gay marriage. Anti-affirmative action. Anti-abortion. Straight down the line far-right wing. But despite abhorring many of Mark’s political views, I quickly realized at best he didn’t know better from his upbringing and at worst he was just repeating stereotypes about the “Jewish look.” Mark wasn’t a Jew hater. He wasn’t out to put me down. To the contrary, he would go on to ask my help on various law school subjects and always showed me respect as a fellow human being the rest of my three years of law school. Mark was the water I needed to put out some of the overreaching anger still lingering from my run-in with Nazi art. And just in the nick of time before I left law school to interact with the rest of society, which lo and behold is mostly white and Christian. Mark unintentionally balanced me out. To distinguish between real racism and ignorance. To intelligently react to situations differently based on the motivation of the actor. It wasn’t that I stopped hating hatred. Or that racism was okay so long as it came in an unintentional form. It’s just that everyone has a story, a background, an upbringing—and if I was going to be part of society’s solution, I needed to stop my own racial profiling. I needed to know when to speak up and when to keep quiet and process instead.

I had the pleasure of having dinner with civil rights activist Dr. Cornell West in 2018. Dr. West has been one of the seminal voices and philosophers on race issues in America for the last thirty plus years. He teaches at Harvard and Princeton and travels the U.S. fighting racism. We were discussing, what else, various racial issues and Dr. West reminded me of a hope that gets lost in the battle for racial justice. “My dear Jewish brother Jeffrey,” Dr. West began in his typically warm manner, “the good news is today in America, young people are the most accepting and tolerant people in the history of our nation. We have more good meaning, loving kids in college than ever before. Kids that don’t care if you’re black, gay, Jewish, Muslim, or purple. The future is bright despite the deep societal racism. Let’s not lose sight of that.”

I’ll try to remember that, Dr. West, the next time someone shits on me because I’m Jewish. Oh wait, that was just last Tuesday.  2019 if you were wondering.