I was walking home for shul this Shabbos when a Lexus came to a stop about twenty feet away from me. Two kids, no more than seventeen, sat in the front of the car. As I walked by they rolled down their window and began to yell a series of anti-Semitic things at me. I assessed the situation and promptly decided on a course of action. I reached down deep for the meanest, scariest voice I posses and in a New York accent that would make Bobby D proud I shouted, “The @#&! did you just say?” I then began a slow, menacing walk towards the Lexus, staring the kid in the driver’s seat in the face. The reaction was priceless. The faces of the kids in the car went from amused to scared and by the time I had taken six steps the Lexus peeled away.
There were several reasons that I chose to deal with the situation this way. Firstly, the reaction I received was exactly the reaction I expected to get. I knew that these kids thought that what they were doing was very funny and so I chose to react in a way that shifted their paradigm. I made their actions change from amusing to frightening. In much the same way, people I have told this story to say, “Are you nuts? Those kids could have been armed!” Those kids thought, “Oh crap! He probably has a weapon or kung fu training or he’s a terminator or whatever.” The point is that I knew they were just two punk kids in a car and they only knew that I was crazy enough to think about assaulting an automobile. Because this experience became scary for them, I am fairly certain that they will not be doing it again. They weren’t really anti-Semitic; they were just hobbyists.
For those of you that believe I should have kept walking and taken the “turn the other cheek” mentality, I would like to say this: By ignoring negative behavior we reinforce that behavior. Had I ignored these two, they would have continued to see this activity as fun and they would have continued to do it. This isn’t to say that I always feel this response is appropriate. There was a time that I was in Philadelphia and as I walked to shul with my friends, an old homeless man began to babble about Jews taking all the jobs and money. One of my friends broke off from the pack and began to debate the truth of this statement with the hobo. Later I tried to explain to him that the reason it’s ok to ignore anti-Semitic statements in that case is because the individual making them was a crazy street person, and no amount of debate or intimidation would stop him from being crazy.
Overall, I think we need to present ourselves as less tolerant of anti-Semitism by making ourselves look less like targets and more like trouble.
