I’m standing in front of the clearance rack, minding my own business. When I saw that there were half-price expired Milky Ways, I must have squealed a little bit, because a wizened woman standing next to me smiled. With a heavy Slavic accent, she asked me, “Are you American?” When I said yes, she asked, “of what extraction?” I told her Danish. She then said, “I thought you were northern European. I am Ukrainian…” Then, apropos of nothing, she grabbed a packet of leftover clearance Passover napkins off the shelf, pointed at the Star of David, and added, “… but not THAT. Trash!”
Seriously. In 2012, inside the Beltway. I was dumbstruck, and asking myself, “did she actually just DO that – out of nowhere – in front of a total stranger?” She was staring at me expectantly, though, so I stammered vacantly, “how quaint.”
She then asked me, “do you know Ukraine?” Helpful as ever, my brain tossed out the only Ukraine fact at the front of my mind: “Mila Kunis is Ukrainian.” Then I mentally berated myself, “Idiot! Isn’t Mila Kunis Jewish? This nutcase is going to fly off the handle.” Fortunately, though, she didn’t know who Mila Kunis is, and she wandered off to inject someone else with venom.
I live inside the beltway and have also lived in the former Soviet Union, including a lot of time in Ukraine. I can categorically state that overt anti-semitism is much, much more common in the FSU.
A woman from the Ukraine asked you if you were American, after bumping into you shopping in a grocery store in the USA:confused: That is even stranger to me than the random anti-semitism.
(did she think you were looking at some Euro import foods on the clearance rack or something?)
Once I was in a grocery store just after midnight when a kid walked up and shoved a bunch of goat cheese in my hands. He said “It expired 10 minutes ago so it’s free! Take it!” I looked up and there was a Jewish mom and 3-4 kids dashing up and down the aisles loading up with random stuff (which I assume was expired/free). I took the goat cheese, after all it was free and only 10 minutes out of date.
I thought that was just a total coincidence until I read your OP. Maybe expired-grocery-scavenging is some well-known stereotypical Jewish thing that you happened to demonstrate, in her opinion? (Ignorance-fighting and all, I really have no idea, just trying to make sense of two odd experiences).
It’s very international in northern VA, inside the Beltway. There are lots of diplomats, as well as immigrants and foreigners here for work or study. It’s a wonderful aspect of the area.
I would have been very tempted to go off on her about how I think a Ukrainian wrote the malware that infected my computer. I’d like to think it was an anti-semite who did it, because that lets me hate the fucker even more.
Or I might have figured that the old stereotype of Russians being drunkards applies to Ukrainians as well, or at least to this particular Ukrainian. What she did does sound like something someone might be more likely to do after they’d had a few.
Note: I do not hate all Ukrainians, but I do hate anti-semites and people who write malware. Nor do I think all Russians or Ukrainians are drunk all or most of the time, though I do think this particular woman may have been drunk when the OP met her.
I’ll share my own recent crazy inside-the-beltway conversation. I was in the ice cream shop with my kindergartner to buy an ice cream cake for my other kid’s birthday. There was a Hispanic woman there with her daughter. The other little girl looked to be about the same age as my daughter, but was, shall we say, on the pudgy side. There was also a Latino man there. Anyway, my daughter was exploring the store. She wanted to see something in a display case that she was too short to see into, so she jumped, grabbed the edge, did a pull up, and held herself there while she looked around. After I told her to get down and stop climbing on things, the man says, “Well, at least it looks like she’s in good shape - unlike that other one.” I was a little startled - who says something like that in front of a kid? But, I just said something about how my kid is always climbing, jumping, and running around. Then the guy went on to talk at great length about how his community was doing their children a real disservice by letting them get so fat, and look at this girl, by the time she’s 16 she’ll weigh 250 pounds, and all the women are fat and just say that we have to accept them like that but the only guys who want to date them are the blacks.
It was astonishing. I had no response. I couldn’t believe that someone would say things like that in front of a couple of little girls. When we left the store, I said something to my daughter about how that man wasn’t very nice. She said, “What man?” I was glad she missed it.
TriPolar, I would be floored by verbalized anti-Semitism inside the beltway.
Had this incident occured in Ukraine that would be a salient point. My experience in this country is that overt anti-semitism is as common or more common inside the beltway as outside. (And I am descended from Ukrainians. My last name seems to have come from the name of a town in the Ukraine).
If she is older, perhaps she has the beginnings of dementia. I understand that often people start saying and doing things they never would normally. It’s as if your filters go down.
Mental illness did occur to me, since it was so out of nowhere. She did not take the napkins; they were apparently just a teaching tool. And I assume I caught her eye because I’m a stereotypical blond squarehead, not because I was doing something stereotypically Jewish. But just because I look Aryan doesn’t mean I swing that way. :eek: