me

 

Enjoying a drink with colleagues, talking about past experiences. D talked about his time in Soviet Russia in the 1970s and out of the blue he said he had talked about the Jewish Question.

It was completely out of the blue but I asked him, what did he mean by "the Jewish Question"?

He said, you know they were very anti-Semitic in Russia at that time.

I said I knew that. I was going to say that ironically, now it is part of anti-Semitic discourse that the whole of Communism was a Jewish conspiracy and also to remind him that the Protocols of Zion were a Russian invention - so extreme anti-Semitism wasn't new to Russia in the 1970s... but it was a light happy night and I didn't want to change the mood...

When we got up to leave, I looked over and saw that from D's seat, he had been staring directly at a flyer for some theatre production. I couldn't see the caption - or the title of the play - but it was advertised with a huge picture echoing Nazi propaganda of what a Jew looks like. So it was kind of shocking. Obviously that's where the out-of-the-blue "Jewish Question" came from - but it also made me wonder what play it was advertising - and why would anyone choose to reinforce or echo anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda?

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