Jewish and Proud

I saw a video yesterday of someone yelling obscenities at a Jewish man walking down the street in New York. Among the vitriol he was spewing, the word ‘Jew’ was thrown about with such obvious disgust and hatred. It reminded me of a story my dad sometimes tells.

He was the force behind my family’s move to the U.S. My mom apparently was apprehensive about uprooting everything and gambling on a very uncertain future in America.

In the Soviet Union, anti-Semitism was a matter of fact. It was the very definition of institutionalized, a part of everyday life. I was an infant and as my dad tells it, he and mom were standing over me as he made the case to try to get to America as refugees. 

“You’re probably right,” he’d said to her. “If they’re not letting Jews into college when it’s time for her to go, we can make it happen. We’ll find someone to bribe. We will get it done. And if they’re not hiring Jews when it’s time for her to find a job, we have connections. She will have a job. But you know what I can’t figure out?” He’d pause for effect. “How do we keep someone from yelling ‘dirty Jew’ as she walks down the street?”

That, according to my father, is how my mother was convinced that an uncertain future in America was better than what was absolutely certain in Kiev. 

And now, more than 40 years later, I sit in my living room and watch anti-Semitic slurs hurled at an observant Jew right here in America. His only crime seems to be that he looks so obviously Jewish.

Today, that would probably not happen to me. I am a secular Jew. Unless you look closely, you don’t see the small Star of David or Hamsa (hand of G-d) dangling from my necklace.

But it did happen to me. Because it happened to someone else who is Jewish. While our level of observance is vastly different. While we choose to express our Judaism, our Jewishness, differently, we are not different.  To those who choose to hate us, we are the same person. He was just more identifiable.

For those who will say that these are isolated incidents, that most people don’t feel that way, I say this – these incidents are becoming so common, they are dangerously close to being normalized. Hate is festering both on the fringes of the right and the left. Ultra Orthodox Jews are the canary in the coal mine. We must heed the warning. We must let those who’ve become so comfortable in expressing their hate know that it has no place here.

The American Jewish Committee has designated January 6 #JewishandProudDay. Jews and our supporters around the country and around the world are encouraged to wear anything identifiably Jewish, like a kippah, clothing, anything at all. It’s a small step, but a bold one. 

History has shown us time and again that Edmund Burke was right – “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

Tomorrow, we can all do something.