So this is strange to admit:
Over the past month and change, I have experienced more antisemitism than I ever have in my life.
I don’t mean that in the sense that people might think. No one has physically assaulted me for being Jewish. I haven’t been called any slurs — not to my face, anyway. And I don’t even think my synagogue has experienced bomb threats (the last one I recall, which thankfully was fake, was during Rosh Hashanah).
But there is, still, something in the ether. A vibe, if you will. People I once considered friends mockingly dismissing the deaths of other Jews. Signs at protests that tell me my family members are savages. A total lack of understanding as to the cultural context of why have the world’s Jews now live in Israel combined with a wholesale dismissal of everyone who lives within the country’s borders as evil. I could continue, but I don’t really want to, because rehashing it makes me feel really sick.
And I bring this up because — well, even knowing everything that I do about the impact of bias, of what we used to call “micro aggressions,” I have been shocked to see how aggressively this subtle shift in tone has affected me, personally. My anxiety has been up, my OCD gets more easily triggered, it is harder to focus on work. I feel paranoid that my friends hate me, that they assume the worst about me, that I cannot talk about any of this because it will lead people to turn on me and abandon me.
Basically: it’s been really bad.
I have enough therapy and mental health management skills under my belt that I’m generally able to manage it all, mind you. I know I have friends I can turn to to talk (paranoia aside, my actual close friends are all good people who have been super supportive). I know that I need to eat and sleep and exercise and that if I let any of that slip I will likely have a bad day. I know the spaces I can seek out to feel renewed and refreshed and all that. So please, do not worry about me.
But the reason I write about this at all is because it has been fascinating to watch how the increased visibility of antisemitism — something I always knew was there, but like, burning at a low simmer rather than the raging boil I’m witnessing now — has so profoundly impacted my mental health, even as my daily life remains unchanged. Even as I am safe at home in my apartment in Brooklyn, dealing with something that can mostly be boiled down to “mean comments on the internet,” I have witnessed a transformative shift in the quality of my mental health.
You know where I’m going with this, right?
Biphobia is not antisemitism, and I will not even attempt to compare the two oppressions for reasons that I hope are obvious. But I will say that biphobia is frequently dismissed as nothing more than “mean comments online,” that it’s not a “real” oppression, just the hurt feelings of some overly privileged people with too much time on their hands. That isn’t actually true, of course — there are structural manifestations of biphobia that extend far beyond just “hurt feelings,” as long time readers have likely heard me explain — but let’s imagine, for the sake of argument, that it was. Let’s imagine that biphobia truly is just some mean comments, some shitty memes, things that aren’t “real life.”
I’m living through that kind of experience and it fucking sucks.
It is hard to talk about “soft” oppressions like this, the ones that do not take the form of bombs and physical assaults and laws that criminalize your very existence. It is hard to talk about mental health — to even notice how oppression impacts your mental health in the first place. It has taken me nearly a month to piece together that my reduced productivity, my inability to focus, all this awful shit is connected to the antisemitism that has creeped into the background of my daily life over the past month. And yet I cannot deny that that is ultimately what it is.
And if antisemitism can do this to me… it’s not hard to imagine that biphobia has been doing it to me, and to you, for the entirety of our lives.
I'm truly sorry. I also know how when you start feeling those comments, even comments that continue to reference the situation without explicit compassion for you and yours can feel like a grating pile-on (or at least that's how my particular brain experiences things.)
I always try to bring up pushing back against antisemitism and antisemitic patterns while talking about current events, because it's always an important reminder, but also to let my Jewish friends and fellow travelers know that I don't think their lives are worth any less. I don't really think that's enough though. I also think that this whole situation has been traumatizing and retraumatizing for everyone exposed to it, especially Jews (and Palestinians) across the world. I don't bring that up as a counterpoint to our need for community responsibility and better guards against antisemitism. I don't want to be prescribing an individual solution for a community problem! But I also want to remind everyone that, like, checking out and taking care of yourself by not watching the news or keeping up with Xitter/Mastodon/Bluesky is okay on top of that.
Basically I wish I could send you a hug and a cup of tea and give you a pre-filtered social media feed and a box of kitten(s| videos) while we work on making everything better.
Our synagogue got a bomb threat this past Rosh Hashanah too. Sympathy.