Poems

Anti-Semitism is

anti-Semitism is 

anti-Semitism.

It can’t be censored out

nor covered up

nor explained away

by moral equivocators

of the right or the left.

Most gentiles can’t define it

though we sure can

and know it when we see it.

Not all anti-zionists

are anti-semitic,

we understand that.

But a hell of lot of them are,

we understand that too. 

Anti-Semitism is

the President of the United States

equating torch baring Nazis

with anti-fascist counter protestors,

being nicknamed Ike the Kike

by your high school drinking buddies

and going along with it,

being ashamed of your refugee parents 

for their foreign ways, 

being ashamed.

Anti-semitism is

the murder of Jews in the Pittsburgh synagogue,

the swastika scrawl in the professor’s office,

Alice Walker promoting a holocaust

denier as a purveyor of truth.

Anti-semitism is 

the failure to speak up.

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