Writing on the Wall

To the surprise of no one with their cognition fully intact, three swastikas were recently discovered drawn on the walls at the Clark Kerr dorm compound. According to the UCPD, the first one was drawn last Wednesday night (4/21), followed shortly by two more early Saturday morning (4/24). They stand as the latest in what has been an unbroken series of incidents over my four years here – many of which I’ve been party to firsthand – of open, casual anti-Semitism. And lest you preempt me, in case you’re one of those indignantly callous Berkeley jerkoffs who considers any Jew crying anti-Semitism an act of inbred cowardice or overpreened sensitivity, allow me to define my terms: by an “act of anti-Semitism,” I mean some hateful resident of this monstrous wasteland employing racial epithets or traditionally anti-Semitic imagery to harass local Jewry.

As I said, though, that swastikas were drawn on University-owned walls came as a surprise to no one. After all, Berkeley is a hotbed of generalized sociopathy with a more-than-casual history of dalliance with anti-Semitism. What’s most irritating about the affair to date is the Daily Cal article covering the action, published on Monday. As ace journalists Jordan Bach-Lombardo and Javier Panzar reported, “though campus officials have condemned the drawings, classifying them as “hate incidents,” the drawings have elicited little student response.” They go on to note that “no students attended a community meeting hosted Thursday to discuss the incident, according to [dorm magistrate Marty] Takimoto.”

Since Bach-Lombardo and Panzar seem so confused by the apparent lack of student response, here’s mine: try asking anyone in the Jewish community, for whom this is nothing more than another bump in the proverbial untended San Francisco back alley of a road to their degree. You’ll find that used to such incidents though we may be, we were, as usual, unhappy to learn of the presence of yet another sociopath who took it upon himself to remind Berkeley Jews they’re not welcome here. As far as the unadvertised “community meeting” hosted less than 24 hours after the first swastika was drawn – and days before either of the other two were – take it from me when I assert that the lack of student turnout there was as representative of reaction to the swastikas as a freckle is to skin cancer.

In past posts, I’ve made perfectly clear my feelings about Nazi imagery in modern life. I recently assembled a Holocaust memorial issue of the Berkeley Jewish Journal, and encourage interested readers to check it out here. I’d offer some final, hopeful comment here that someday we wouldn’t be exposed to this sort of racist misanthropy, but I'm not inclined towards that kind of hope. So it goes.