I’m guessing that things were pretty tense at Zachary Tannen’s house during the high holy days this year. I feel sorry for him, but I’m kind of trying not to.
Tennen brought national attention to East Lansing, Michigan in late August of this year by alleging that he was attacked at an off-campus party by Nazi/Klan sympathizers because he was Jewish. The story interested me, particularly, because half of my family is Jewish and because I live about ten city blocks from the scene of the reported crime.
The story was horrific. Tennen arrived at the Emergency Department of a local hospital badly beaten, and told his parents and ELPD officers that he was beaten up and had a staple forced into his gum after individuals raised their hands in a Nazi salute. His jaw was broken. It seemed to be a patent hate crime here in the corn-fed wholesomeness of a Big Ten town, an un-provoked and savage attack on a physically slight and totally innocent boy. I remember the sharp sting of tears in my eyes as I read the stories, imagining my own son injured and alone. I was panicky and furious at the idea that Michigan State University was home to some group of virulent anti-Semitic thugs. In the days that followed, the story was all over the internet, and locally there was talk of vigils, Facebook groups and other means of demonstrating support for the boy and his family.
Here’s the thing: it didn’t actually happen. Well, Zachary Tennen was beaten up at a party on August 26th, and his jaw was broken, but the rest of it was fiction. The story started to change a couple of weeks ago, when the County Prosecutor reported that the ELPD had interviewed more than 50 witnesses, none of whom saw anything related to Nazis, Klan sympathizers, or anti-Semitism. I will admit, dear reader, that even then when I heard that particular news, my reflexive reaction was “of course they all denied it!”
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http://open.salon.com/blog/ann_nichols/2012/09/28/zachary_tennen_the_boy_who_cried_wolf
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