I grew up in the same tiny suburban Jewish community as Krug, and I've been going down a deep spiral all weekend. I've thought a lot about how this community shaped me and how it could spawn someone like that. For now, I just want to echo how important @DrYoFiggy's point here is. https://twitter.com/DrYoFiggy/status/1301602923026284551

It is deeply shameful that these young scholars had to risk so much to expose her fraud. Obviously, the blame lies w/ Krug, but IMO, the KC Jewish community has a lot to answer for. I don't believe no one knew about her. And even if that were true, why didn't we? We let her do it

Jews have a long, complex, ever-evolving relationship with white supremacy. We need to understand the harm it's caused us and finally take responsibility for the role we play in pushing and preserving Anti-Blackness and colonialism. Here's some pages from my 1st grade yearbook.

I don't want to take up too much space w/ this, and all my love and thoughts go to the Black and Afro-Carribean people who are dealing with the fallout rn. I'm gonna be buying and reading a bunch of your books. (There's a great list in the original quoted tweet, btw). but, more:

The thing I want people to understand the most is just how egregious her lying really was. This was not just clever hinting to obscure a deeper truth. In the 90s, Overland Park/Leawood, KS was one of the most racially and economically homogeneous places in the country.

In 2000, Leawood's population of almost 30,000 was > 95% white, and less than 1.5% Black. In 2010, the median household income was > $130,000. Like all extremely segregated cities, this didn't happen by chance. Leawood and suburban KC was built as an explicitly racist project.

Kansas City was one of the nation's leading testing grounds for racially restrictive housing covenants and redlining. For example, check out the actual 1945 deed restriction for the Leawood Estates via this recent @FlatlandKC article: https://www.flatlandkc.org/news-issues/think-j-c-nichols-was-racist-meet-kroh-brothers/

By 1948, in Johnson County where we're from, 96% of all subdivisions had racially restrictive covenants. And after the Supreme Court ruled these covenants unenforceable in 48, they only picked up pace. More covenants were filed after '48 than before it, according to Gotham:

(Aside: there are 3 popular books on race, covenants and development in KC that I know of, 2 by white men and 1 by a white woman. If anyone can rec Black scholarship on the subject, please let me know).

When our parents were born, as Jews, they were still forbidden from living in the neighborhoods we eventually grew up in. In '54, Brown v. Board rose out of Topeka, less than an hour drive down I-70. The white flight from KC was overwhelming, and state line became a red line.

Through our proximity to whiteness and capital, Jews were (mostly) accepted into the lily-white, waspy KS burbs. This wasn't cause we worked hard and earned our way in (as we were told), it was cause granting us "whiteness" kept Black families away and out of the KS schools.

Krug claiming to be "a child of the hood" is not just a lie, it's like someone claiming to be a Palestinian refugee when they grew up in an illegal Israeli settlement. (Or claiming Cherokee when they grew up a white settler in OK). She prob didn't know any POC til highschool.

Re: the complicated relationship to white supremacy, the Jewish day school we both attended was housed inside the Overland Park Jewish Community Campus, which you might recognize as the site of a horrific, 2014 Neo-nazi terror attack. I wonder what Jessica felt when she heard?

ok, still spiraling, but a couple more things: Johnson County is named after this vile genocidal slaver who moved to Kan Territory after the Removal Act to exploit the 1.6 million acre Shawnee Reservation and push slavery west. He cut a deal with the Union "renouncing" the confed

and ran the Shawnee Indian Mission (the namesake of my entire school district) where he used indigenous child slave labor to become richest Kansan, outlawed indigenous language, and when Shawnee were removed again shortly, he stole government allotments of the kids "in his care."

It's Shawnee Indian Mission is a very common, mandatory field trip spot for kids in JoCo. It's completely run by old white people and explained like a fun summer camp. here's the actual video they make you watch. It's so completely deranged:

I didn't learn any of this until my 20s when I started looking into it on my own. At our school we were visited by holocaust survivors regularly, learned every excruciating detail of Hitler's rise and were taught Hebrew by young Israeli's often fresh out of serving in the IDF.

We were taught thoroughly about the trauma our ancestors faced, but I guess the price of admission to the burbs was swallowing the white supremacist vision of American history and colonialism. This dissonance can really mess with you. We need history of solidarity and struggle.

Bernie is a very familiar kind of Jewish to me. Like my uncle. But so are Ben Shapiro, Stephen Miller, and Jared Kushner. I grew up those kind of kids too. Now 3 of the most powerful racists in the country who use their Jewishness as a weapon. And now we have a Dolezal+, too.

Her parents' obits (in 2013 and 2017) both list Jessica as a surviving daughter and name the city where she was living. DC for 2013 and updated to the Bronx in 2017. At the very least someone in the family or at the synagogue was keeping track of where she was living. no google?

I'm gonna keep digging, but in the meantime, we gotta start recognizing and calling this shit out early. It festered and grew and hurt a lot of people when it probably could have been shut down early with an awkward call from old friend or family member.