When I Realized Anita Kaplan was Jewish

When I was in ninth grade, a 6’4” girl named Anita Kaplan showed up at practice.  Maybe it took a few weeks for me to hear that she was Jewish.  I think it came from one of the Catholic fathers who were coaching us in gyms in and around Troy, N.Y.  I don’t recall any of them saying anything derogatory.  Yet I just wasn’t sure why it mattered or what it meant.  I was simply thrilled to have another soul sister who loved hoops as much as I did. We both had fathers who loved the game, and who loved us.  My dad did color commentary over every one of Larry Bird’s moves as we watched Celtics games, and Anita’s dad made sure that his daughter had her most unstoppable weapon:  the Kareem-Abdul Jabbar hook shot.

While I don’t remember the moment I’d heard that Anita Kaplan was Jewish, I do remember where I was a few years later when I heard “kike” for the first time. The word, the tone of it, the smirk on the speaker’s face -- all of it seared me as I sat at my desk in my new home away from home, surrounded by new students and prospective friends during freshman initiation week at Northwestern University.

I assumed what kike meant, but I was too embarrassed to confirm it until later when I asked my roommate in private.

She sort of laughed at me.

“It’s a Jew, Mo.”

Dean, my roommate’s new boyfriend, and his roommate, Sean, used this word and other ethnic slurs I’d never heard of, repeatedly.  They used combinations of slurs based on the first and last names written on our dorm room doors. They amplified their filth when they were in a drunken stupor.  As my new dormmates passed, they yelled out or coughed up or sneezed a “kike” or “Jew” and included odd nicknames, codes or combos. If they dared to do this while in our room, I glared at them, angry and disgusted.  When they caught my reactions, they laughed and called me a “mick,” or “lily white” and “such a virgin.” 

I soon learned through my roommate that Dean had grown up comfortably in Wisconsin. He had even shortened his Arabic name Nadean to the more American version of “Dean.” Sean, an Indiana native, was a blonde, blue-eyed tiny guy with acne scars and a chicken-chest.

I often wondered the moment they met, and how long it took for them to realize that they shared the same anti-semitic bond.  I wanted to ask them both what exactly Jewish students on campus at Northwestern University -- or anywhere -- were doing to them that was so horrible. 

But I didn’t.

Instead I deferred to my roommate since it was her boyfriend and his usually drunk guest. I also was afraid to ask two guys with higher SAT scores than me because they would clobber me in world history, and scoff at all I didn't know about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I’d witnessed similar epithets at some (not all) family gatherings. The remarks always came from and were mostly limited to one bigoted uncle who regularly targeted African-Americans, knowing that my teammates and best friends in high school were black.  His words and sick jokes never failed to devastate me.  Knowing he was a recently retired city police officer made it all the more horrifying. 

My uncle knew how much he upset me by his comments.  Yet he did not relent.  As was the case with Sean and Dean, I think others either laughed at them hoping that in doing so, they weren’t agreeing or disagreeing, and maybe just hoping that he’d get his boost of confidence and move on.  Never did I see my uncle confront a person of color in person socially or where he worked.  Yet with Dean and Sean, the targets of their verbal assaults were never too far away.

You can only imagine the fear I had when my AAU teammate, the Kodak-All American, Anita Kaplan, was scheduled to visit Northwestern. Protocol was for recruits to stay in our dorm room. I told my roommate Anita’s name and how tall she was -- she had grown an inch by then -- so that hopefully she would not act so surprised when she saw her. Dean was in the background.

With a smug smile, he said, “A six-foot-five kike chick?”

“If you come near her,” I said.  “I will kill you.”

His smile grew and he laughed.

“So lily white,” he said.

I turned to my roommate, who probably would have put money on me -- or herself -- in any physical contest against her out-of-shape boyfriend.

“He does not come in here when Anita is here,” I said.

She nodded her head.

Anita arrived at campus shortly thereafter. On the first evening, we walked into my dorm room while Dean and my roommate were there. There was no need for him to be there, and my look clearly told him I knew what he was doing. He just had to get a look like all the workers behind the Burger King on Route 4 in Troy, N.Y., when Anita and my friends would stop in after basketball practice. They all stopped, stared and said stupid things. I tried to talk to her or distract because it was tough being so tall and strong as a girl. But Anita always knew.

Dean looked at Anita, and mumbled a hello. He smirked at me and left the room.

Dean continued doing what he and Sean did best, which was be vile racists both while drunk and sober. By spring of our freshman year, my roommate finally woke up and broke up with Dean. Yet he was still doing what seemed to make him most proud. Our residential assistant, Brent, who happened to be Jewish, caught them screaming and spewing their hatred at night into the courtyard. Brent wrote them up. I believe that Brent may have caught them writing swastikas on his door either just before or afterwards the courtyard episode. As we waited to learn of their fate, word got back to me that Dean’s dad had some money, enough to make it all go away. It did. Dean and Sean ended up with a slap on the wrist, their dirt swept under the rug of our hallways. And everyone knew it.

What hurt me even worse than this situation was at the end of my college days at Northwestern when I was telling a guy I had a crush on how I was going to my first bat mitzvah that night. He was a near perfect male to me because up until that moment, he rarely said anything negative. He always kept his cool. He went to church and was involved in evangelical groups on campus, which prompted me to consider a change from my misery as a Catholic. While I was trying to come up with a better fit, I can say without a doubt that I was momentarily leveled during a brief conversation. 

I told my perfect imaginary boyfriend that I was going to a bat mitzvah that night.

“How can you be around them?” he said.

“What?” I said. “What do you mean?”

No response.

Anita who had been with me when my career started, and when it ended years later at the American Basketball League try-out at Emory University. At the time, she was my roommate who knew the fascia on the soles of my feet were so torn and damaged that sometimes I could not feel all of my soles. She was there when I buried my head in my pillow. I was more upset and angry about being cut in the final round than by the fact that I struggled to stand up and walk without chronic pain. 

Anita was there at the end of my career, after playing such a huge role at the start of it. I was outside the bathroom door when she was in high school and crying in the shower because her sister called us before a huge game with hundreds of scouts set to show up. Anita was bawling her eyes out because her sister told her that she saw her crush with his girlfriend at the gym. And there was me with a teammate at the door, our fates resting in the hands of each other, especially the play of our 6’5” center, a rising junior, saying to each other during our critical rising senior summer, “Nita, any chance you’ll come out of the shower, play the game, and then just cry after it? We’ll even cry with you.”

Our relationship extended beyond basketball. After college, I sat next to my friend in a movie theatre and heard sob during Life is Beautiful. On the way out of the dark, silent theatre after the movie, still wrecked by it all, Anita whispered to me, “Seeing the railroad tracks always gets me.” 

And years later, there I was, the lapsed Irish Catholic girl, who didn’t understand her religion or religiosity, standing in her Jewish wedding.

I didn’t know what it meant to be Jewish then, and what I’ve learned many years later is that I still don’t know nor will I ever. All that matters is that I know who I am, and that I only stayed true to half of that person when I failed to stand up to what my gut was telling me to do. 

What is most important right now is to admit that while I had a few vertebrae, I wouldn’t sit up straight because I didn’t want to upset my roommate. I didn’t want to start trouble with our peers mostly because they made me feel stupid or less than them. And by halfway, I mean that I sat there when they bashed a Jewish girl passing by on her way back from chemistry class without kicking them out or turning them in, yet I gave them hell when my friend was due to arrive and I wanted to ensure her protection.

My silence equated to support of their bigoted and racist behavior. Their excuse may be they were just trying to impress everyone by being funny, and that back then right up to now, I'm just way too serious and I need to lighten up. I won’t ever know if they were sorry or not. But what I do know about myself or anyone in my shoes at the time is that by not speaking up and shutting down bigoted, evil, vicious and miserable assholes, my greatest risk and loss was in knowing how easily I could have been considered or counted as one of them.

POST-SCRIPT: Within five minutes of posting, the first person to like the story and send me a message was my former roommate. Keep in mind I had sent the rough draft to Anita for her okay, but I had not sent it to my former roommate because I was afraid I’d balk (lapsed Catholic guilt). I also felt that if I knew her as well as I think I do, she would not back down from owning the truth as hard as it is to read and reflect upon.

I was correct. Here are her words:

“Over time, and especially once we broke up in early spring, I began to realize the sheer offensiveness of their words and actions. It was after we broke up that they began putting swastikas on the RA's door. But, by then, it was too late to do or say anything. I was already complicit and wanted nothing to do with them. What a horrible portrait painted in your story of your naive complicit roommate. Unfortunately, it's also true. Mainly because of ignorance than because of any intent. But, true, nonetheless.”

“I think it was partly a matter of being stronger. But it was also a matter of being informed and educated. I had no predisposition toward or against Jewish people (or any race or culture for that mattered) because I had no idea coming from a small town with no cultural or racial diversity. I had no true idea what anti-semitism was or why it existed. It wasn't until later that I realized how horrible their actions were and how I inadvertently reinforced their ideals by not doing or saying anything.”

Thank you to all who have read the story, liked, loved and shared it.

Maureen Holohan is a former college and pro basketball player turned entrepreneur, author, writer and director. Her published work and blogs can be found at ToTheRim.com — Truth, Accountability, Reconciliation & Leadership.