How you doing?

In the last 12 days, I’ve gotten calls, texts and notes from people asking me “how I am doing?” None of them know I’ve had a cold, they were checking in because they know I am Jewish.   And I am not religious or observant, I’m “jew-ish” as my everybody friendly, God optional hippie dippie Rabbi likes to say.  I have enough Jewish DNA to have been put in the gas chambers in Germany, but a regular kinda of privileged white person living in New York in the 21^st century that is impossible to tell from any other white privileged person walking the streets.

Yet, I’ve never been shy about talking about my ethnicity or incorporating my heritage into my work, fear or personal safety concerns for myself, my family, my staff, my company never really entered the reality of daily life.  But when a good friend, a proud black man, calls me and says, “hey man, how you doing?”, It’s hard not to think deeper about it.  First, my friend is a very busy person I really admire and while we get together 3-4 times a year, I don’t get too many calls from him in the middle of the day to just check in on me.  How you doing?, there was real emphasis and empathy in the question.  He too didn’t know I’ve had a cold but was concerned as a fellow persecuted human with long history on his shoulders wondering how his brother was doing. 

It almost makes me cry as I write this, how sweet that call was.  I certainly have never reached out to my Muslim friends, my black friends, my fellow immigrants asking them how they were doing when the media was covering heated Black Lives Matter moments, heightened islamophobia periods, or painful injustice to fellow humans.  Yes, I’ve called my highly progressive lesbian sister to ask her how she was doing over the years, when some dumb ass law is passed reducing her rights as a human being to choose a lifestyle when other privileged white men make the law that I know affected her.  But she’s my sister, so I need to check in once in a while.  But when the velocity of questions come more frequently and broadly, from distant friends, from people I sit down in meetings with who know I am Jewish and they are not, how am I doing, that alone starts to scare me a bit.

Do they also see something out there coming.  The increased white supremacy in this country supported and encouraged by Trump certainly fueled the flames of increased antisemitism, but not to the point of people calling to check in on me.  Burning books in Florida, while reminiscent of the Kristallnacht in 1938, I didn’t get phone calls.  But my brothers are calling me now.  It is both heartwarming and frightening.  Before the new conflict in Gaza, I was worried about the climate crisis—the normal daily paranoia that our planet was reaching a point of no return.  But when a performing artist in one of our venues requests extra security simply because they are Jewish, we have more urgent concerns on our plate.

As a live music producer, nightly in our 300 capacity venues, as a festival producer with many more people, I am very sensitive when I hear about the wind blowing down a stage roof or a terrorist shooting from a hotel room into a crowd, etc.  But when a group of terrorists’ kidnaps 200 people, kill many more than that at a music festival, we have gone into mad max surreal territory.  When the mission statement in the Hamas or Hezbollah Covenant simply has a final solution statement to kill all jews, period.  I don’t think a few new metal detectors at our front doors is going to be much of a deterrent.  While floods and wildfires was keeping me up a few weeks ago, the Jihad call to arms, the inability to know truth from fiction, and all the ignorance that accompanies that, well, that is keeping me up now.  But at least I know that there are friends who really do care how I am doing, and I am reminded to ask many others now how they are doing.  How are you doing?