That time an antisemite came after me

Last week, after an exhausting work shift, I lazily loaded onto an MTA shuttle bus running along the J-line in Manhattan. A man of medium build, clad fully in what appeared to be military surplus fatigues, was sitting central in the back seat, his face concealed behind a frayed, black bandit’s bandana. Despite what I could discern as muffled screams escaping from his tattered cloth, I, like most New Yorkers taking public transportation on a weekday, was disinterested in my surroundings and proceeded to ignore him. My phone offered me a comfortable window into a preferable world outside of the city and, with my head down, I took full advantage of it.

The shouting man’s presence took dominion over the bus as if we had entered his church, the back row of seats delegated as his altar from which he preached. The seconds went by, and his aggression intensified into an enraged soliloquy, the volume of which no headphones could dampen. Positioned away from him near the front of the bus, I paid little mind to the content of his ramblings, assuming they were no more than generic, hateful platitudes. “Blah blah blah. Something something Jews! Something something Palestine!” And it went on. Some passengers smacked their lips in annoyance. Others rolled their eyes. A few appeared mildly scared. “Suck my d–k! Jewish rats… something something occupation… Palestine will be free!”

And then, the ultimate mistake. I glanced in his direction, and our eyes eclipsed.

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That was when I became a Jew. And not just any Jew. I was his Jew.

“There’s one among us!” he roared, his bandana crumpling up and down over his chin as his jaws flapped rabidly. “F—ing Jewish rat! They’re everywhere!”

I quickly looked away, pretending it wasn’t me he was talking to, but his gouging eyes were fixated.

“Why don’t you suck my d–k you sickly Jewish pig! F—in’ rat Jew! Ugly a– Jew!”

With only a few more stops to go and given the cramped space between us that gave him no clear pathway to me, I figured he would eventually lose interest.

But the abuse continued, and his words became more threatening. “I should f—in kill you, Israeli pig!” A few commuters took note and gave me the proverbial, “Sucks to be you right now” look. It’s one that many New Yorkers give each other these days.

But there was no Daniel Penny on this bus. I was on my own. I took the expressions of indifference as my cue to leave, despite being several stops away from my destination. I pressed the button and the bus pulled over under the Cypress Hills station. I slithered my slim frame through the crowd, hopped off, and stood idly on a Jamaica Avenue corner.

As the bus was about to depart, the shouting man pushed his way through the closing doors onto the curb. The bus pulled away, abandoning me.
I turned away and walked briskly, continuing my strategy of feigned ignorance, while scouring with enlivened peripheral vision for signs of law enforcement nearby. I snuck a glance over my shoulder to see him burrowing towards me. I walked faster. I could see people standing around a deli on the next corner. Witnesses! Thank God!

I hurried over and stopped outside the deli, hoping the small crowd itself was a sufficient deterrent. I dropped my bag to the street, turned, and found him feet away. He was closer than I had realized. Without hesitation, he approached and began circling me, yelling more obscenities about Jews and Palestine. I stiffened my posture, tightened my jaw, and readied my hands in a boxing position. Did he have a gun? A knife? A razor?

He sized me up. Then he threw up his shoulders and lunged his still-covered face toward me like a rabid dog on a leash. He was close enough that I could feel his breath. We locked eyes. I said not a word.

Then, after a pregnant moment of silence, he whispered, “You’re lucky I like you. You’re lucky I like you.”

And with that, he snaked past me into the distance, never to be seen again.

Relieved but still residually anxious, I walked back to the subway station and took the next bus home. By the time I went to bed, the adrenaline had given way to indignation.

Having spent none of my 42 years on this earth as a member of the Jewish faith, I tended to keep my mouth shut when conversations around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict devolved into heated arguments, only ever offering my “thoughts and prayers” to anyone whose passions or families were tangled there. But that night, it dawned on me:

In a city that deliberately fosters a paradigm in which mad men are emboldened with a messianic sense of entitlement to intimidate and stalk with impunity, it is the Jews who suffer most, and whose affronted dignity is acknowledged least.

I can offer no useful suggestions or solutions to the very tangible plague of Jew hatred erupting on our streets. But what I can offer is testimony of the everyman’s existential angst that accompanies a society complicit in antisemitism. PJC

Garrett Shore is a New York City tour guide, photographer, and documentarian. For decades, he has been chronicling how the history and culture of New York influence today’s political and economic realities. This article first appeared on The Times of Israel.