I am a Heritage Jew

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I heard there was a Jew Hunt in Amsterdam on November 7, 2024. There is a rumor going around that this hunt will be coming to a neighborhood near us, as in the US. Hearing that news made me feel for the practicing Jews in America, the hatred exploding today, which minorities and the fringe in our society must deal with now. It made me feel for folks, like myself, a heritage Jew, who have never seen this level of hate in our lifetimes until now, this era, this time in history, this century.

To define it: A heritage Jew is not a practicing Jew but one of ethnicity, if one can think of any religion as an ethnic group. It is not, but that is how this religion rolls. Jews became an ethnic group because of the Holocaust. It was a big deal in Hitler’s Germany, which regime defined Jewishness in law. It became known as the Jew test or Mischling (mixed-blood) test. According to that test, I’d be nonexistent today if my great-grandparents hadn’t fled Poland when they did, before the rise of Adolf Hitler.

I am an American of Jewish descent. My grandmother, Sofia, who was a kid when she was brought to America from Poland, was a practicing Orthodox Jew in her lifetime. That is what makes me a heritage Jew, that is, according to the Nazi’s.

Gran’ma Sofie, as we called her, came to the United States in 1908 as a child. She came as a result of a Catholic priest’s efforts. He paid for my family’s voyage to the States.

They left to get themselves out of the dangerous politics going on in Europe. They left because of the hate and antisemitic attitudes of the people there, which attitudinal virus, it seems, came to the USA in spades via WWII.

Sophie and my great-grandparents, who are buried in Muskegon, Michigan, came over on the bottom of a steam ship, the cheapest level, and crossed the Atlantic to New York. How they ended up in Muskegon, Michigan, is a mystery but they had to do one thing when they got there. They had to change their last name, which was Zieniewicz in 1908, in order to gain employment. (Zieniewicz is pronounced zen’ eh vich. Beautiful, ain’t it?) They changed their last name so they wouldn’t sound so Jewish, because, as they discovered, Americans were also antisemitic.

Choosing the new last name caused a ruckus in the Zieniewicz family. The elder men, the deciders, had a problem with the proposal of Zeanwick as a last name. They wanted Zenawick. The other side wanted Zeanwick.

In the end, this issue split the family apart with one part Zeanwick while another part was Zenawick. From then on, the family was divided, one side not recognizing the existence of the other, a very Nazi thing to do. That’s changed, though, since the advent of Facebook, and parts of the Z-family are finally getting to know other Z’s, albeit, we are now scattered all over the planet, most of us not knowing each other very well at all … because of the Holocaust.

A Gross But Enlightening Example

Today, the Jewish population in the US is approaching 8 million people, which is less than 3% of the American population. Yet for the tininess of this statistic, we still have the haters, the Nazi’s, right here, right now, today, in the USA.

David Schummer is a Jewish actor and is on the platform X (formerly known as Twitter). This is what he said about events that involved the Super Bowl LIX advertiser and all around MAGA dickhead known as Ye. He said: “Kanye West has 32.7 million followers on his platform, X. That’s twice as many people as the number of Jews in existence. His sick hate speech results in REAL LIFE violence against Jews.” (Newsweek, Kanye’s Super Bowl Ad Directs Viewers to Site Selling Only Swastika Shirt, Jesus Mesa, 2/10/25.)

Read that again if you have to.

So much of this hate is based on age-old conspiracy theories, that do not rely on any science whatsoever to bear them out. For example, “to say that the Jews run Hollywood is conspiratorial; to say that Jews founded it is factual.” (Franklin Foer, The Atlantic, 03/4/24.)

“The oldest conspiracy theory of them all, a belief that Jews control the world.” News Flash: It is not the Jews, ya’ll. It is the oligarchs. People like Peter Thiel, from South Africa, are the ones who rule our world.

Thiel, if you don’t know him, heavily financed Elon Musk, who is another South Afrikaner, and Musk is a proponent of apartheid. Thiel too is a proponent.

Thiel has his fingers everywhere at the White House. He even helped vice president JD Vance reach his current position there. Now, that Musk is in the White House too, we really need to ask ourselves if what we Americans are witnessing in the White House is coup d’état by a bunch of extraordinarily wealthy white guys?

More Theories

One of the top false views is that Jews stick together more than most Americans, which 70% believe, while another 53% say Jews go out of their way to hire other Jews.” (The Ledger, Joe Strupp, 12/16/24, A-5.) The most damaging of all the conspiracy theories going around right now is religion-based. It is the belief that Jesus was not a Jew. It appears to be a popular belief in some circles and to have originated from Nazi’s.

Truth Out! Jews R Democratic

Jews as a group have voted primarily Democrat throughout our history in the US. Even today in the recent election, the majority of Jewish folks voted Democrat. Only 31% voted for Donald Trump.

Why this solidarity with the Democratic party?

In short, because Democrats are inclusive of the fringes of society. Joachim Prinz, president of the American Jewish Congress, said it best in 1963: “…As Jews we bring to this great demonstration, in which thousands of us proudly participate, a twofold experience—one of the spirit and one of our history … From our Jewish historic experience of three and a half thousand years we say: Our ancient history began with slavery and the yearning for freedom. During the Middle Ages my people lived for a thousand years in the ghettos of Europe … It is for these reasons that it is not merely sympathy and compassion for the Black people of America that motivates us. It is, above all and beyond all such sympathies and emotions, a sense of complete identification and solidarity born of our own painful historic experience.”

What Will Happen?

Practicing Jews may be a tiny group in the US but they are a group that truly remembers their history. They understand what savage persecution looks like. They recognize the dangerous direction in which the US is heading.

We are seeing folks, like Elon Musk, being called out on voicing “Nazi-themed jokes” and throwing a Nazi salute in public. (Not a Jew hater? I beg to differ.) We’re seeing other folks, such as Christian priests, mimicking the salute. The hate has come back because the folks fueling the hate, the Elon Musk’s, the Peter Thiel’s, the oligarchy of this world, want it.

In 2001, National Public Radio announced that “nearly one out of every four Jews in the U.S. has been the subject of antisemitism over the past year.” That is not an acceptable statistic.

As a heritage Jew, I find their plight is my plight. Remember: Nazi’s never distinguished between practicing Jews and any other Jew. If there was a Jew Hunt in my neighborhood today, heritage Jews would most certainly not be spared.

What will happen if Americans ignore and don’t rise up against what is going on before their very eyes?

Well, we all know what happened the last time a bunch of folks ignored Nazi’s in high places.