Vicki Larson: Why it matters to know what’s hate and what’s not

The response to a Nextdoor post makes clear that many people are unsure of what's antisemitic and what isn't. Even though there's been a rise in antisemitic incidents across the country and in Marin.

This is a story about a pig. Sort of.

Last week, Jason Walker wrote a cheeky post on Nextdoor about finding friends for his pet, a 5-month-old mini pig he’s named Gina Hadassah Goldstein. Piggie friends.

Pigs need to be around other pigs, he wrote, for socialization, and to entice other pig owners to come out and play. The San Rafael resident joked that they could could fire up the grill, throw on a few pork chops and some bacon-wrapped prawns, kick back a few beers and call it a pig party.

This did not go over well.

The animal-loving vegans had things to say, naturally. But mostly, the self-appointed Nextdoor police came out, telling Walker that he baited people with a cute photo of Gina as a “back door” to “write racist and anti-semitic things,” and that joking about eating pork was more than just not (excuse the pun) kosher —  it was “offensive to Jewish people.”

Walker, by the way, is Jewish and sends his three daughters to a Jewish school. True, Jews are not supposed to eat pork, but as he points out, many do — count me as one of them — and many pigs also eat pork, no matter how distressing that may sound. I have a friend who feeds his not-so mini pig bacon. And I ran into a couple with a mini pet pig in downtown Mill Valley who named it Prosciutto.

Evidently, pig owners have a wicked sense of humor.

Walker questioned if there could “possibly be something more adorable and virtuous, and the farthest thing on earth from being racist and anti-semitic?” than a piggie party.  “It’s really so sad to see what happens when the pendulum of Marin society swings so far onto the ‘woke’ (I hate that word, but if the shoe fits) side that we are all left to contemplate everything we say or write to make sure it is completely sanitized of any personality or humor,” he wrote.

I hate the word “woke,” too, and even got into a bit of a kerfuffle with a friend when I asked him to define it — we don’t all have the same definition or understanding of it despite using it way too many times. Even conservative author Bethany Mandel, who includes a chapter on “wokeness” in the book she co-wrote, “Stolen Youth,” got flustered and couldn’t describe it in an interview that has since gone viral. That said, social media does not seem to handle nuance, personality or humor well, and Nextdoor attracts a certain amount of outrage that is also hard to describe.

Walker asked if we could all just chill out a bit. I’m all for chilling out, especially when there’s no “there” there. But the response to Walker’s post makes clear that many people here are unsure of what’s antisemitic and what isn’t. Even though there’s been a rise in antisemitic incidents across the country and in Marin, which has seen swastika stickers posted around Fairfax and where antisemitic flyers have been distributed to houses in Novato, Ross, San Anselmo, San Rafael, Mill Valley, Corte Madera, and other locations in the county. It’s why Marin’s Jewish community recently got mass shooting training from Israeli medics — we are likely targets.

And yet when the IJ has reported on those incidents, there’s a common response — it’s free speech protected by the First Amendment, it’s probably just some bored teens, it’s stupidity but not a crime, it’s just a crank and the ever-popular, “who gets to decide what’s a hate crime?”

Actually, Marin County is pretty clear about what constitutes a hate crime and hate incident; there are definitions on the District Attorney’s website in case anyone is truly confused. So does the White House, which last week announced a new national strategy to counter antisemitism.

Posting swastikas and distributing antisemitic flyers are racist and hate crimes — what experts have called “quasi-independent terror cells.” Naming your pet Gina Hadassah Goldstein is not, whether you’re Jewish or not. And joking about eating pork also isn’t offensive to Jews, or at the least a vast majority of Jewish people, especially the funny ones. And we have a lot of them — Jon Stewart, Larry David, Sarah Silverman, Gilda Radner, Lenny Bruce, Ben Stiller, Chelsea Handler, Jerry Seinfeld, Bette Midler, Maya Rudolph, among many others — in our tribe.

But does it even matter? It does, exactly because we are seeing a rise in hateful speech and actions against Jews as well as LGBT people. If you don’t understand what’s hateful and harmful, you risk saying or doing something that is. And that’s going to be a lot harder to swallow than some bacon.

Vicki Larson’s So It Goes opinion column runs every other week. Contact her at vlarson@marinij.com and follow her on Twitter at OMG Chronicles.