Who Gets to Talk About Jewish Safety?

The first time I understood that Jewish safety in America did not receive the same treatment as, say, Black safety or Asian safety, was when I accidentally replied-all to an Obama alumni list. People on the list were discussing ways the Democrats could take back the White House. This was three months after Trump was re-elected and six months after Hamas kidnapped and killed over 1200 people, including 46 American citizens.

No one on the list uttered a word about the American deaths, because the American citizens were Jews. When other groups were marginalized or victimized, the list sprang into action. Did the police shoot a Black man? All organizations immediately released statements declaring the shooting of Black men to be wrong, launched DEI initiatives to teach white people how to be less racist, and promoted Black members of the list to leadership positions regardless of qualifications.

Were there a incidents of anti-Asian hate during Covid, when Trump called it the China disease? Not to worry — my think tank immediately launched a project to combat Asian hate, which I led. I was proud to tell people what I was working on because it meant my organization listened when marginalized people spoke, and stood for truth, justice and the American way.

But when American Jews were slaughtered by Hamas, the list said nothing, because everyone knew the Jews deserved it. That’s what you got for going to a concert in a genocidal apartheid state, even if it was also home to the members of your extended family who’d survived the Holocaust. Anyway, Jews were not considered marginalized, because they were perfectly safe in America and around the world. Everyone had learned in their DEI sessions that Jews were White people, so who cared if White people were slaughtered. Some of the murdered or kidnapped were not technically White, in that they were Jewish, Arab, Asian or Black, but that was nuance and no one cared about nuance.

I’d largely kept quiet about the lack of response from a list of people who responded to absolutely everything. Hurricane in Texas? Here’s a spreadsheet. Earthquake in Puerto Rico? Ten people were on the phone with Google Maps building a map layer for locating shelters, water and food. Jews raped to death, women’s vaginas shot full of nails, men’s genitalia mutilated and stuffed in their mouths, and babies beheaded? Meh, what’s for dinner?

But when one person on the list proposed taking back the White House by using Mark Cuban’s money and Scott Galloway’s platform to promote an AOC- Bernie Sanders candidacy, my brain blew a fuse. How could this email list of people who thought they were the smartest people in the room be so stupid?

I forwarded the email to a friend, writing, I’ll eat my hat the day Zio Galloway does an event with that bigoted moron AOC. Then I changed into workout clothes and tried to Peloton my rage away. When I finished my workout and looked at my phone, my email was full of responses to the Obama list. I had not forwarded the email to my friend. I had, for the first time in a very long career of correctly using email, hit reply all.

Immediately, a woman I’d been forced to take to HR at my think tank for her poor behavior jumped in to defend me. We loathed each other, but we were both Jews, and I appreciated her sticking up for me.

In the same way many people feel harmed by politicians’ speech on the right, there are also people who feel harmed by politicians speech on the left. If you had a child you had to evacuate from Israel on October 7th, you might feel similarly. If you had a child, as I do, who you drop off at a Jewish daycare in a red state (or a blue state, for that matter)… you might feel similarly!

I quickly responded to the list with an apology, noting that obviously the email was not intended for the list. Then I addressed the elephant in the room: the group’s astonishing ability to ignore threats to Jewish safety.

Jews have been living a horror show that has gone unrecognized, to the extent that I am not comfortable allowing my daughter to finish school in bright blue Park Slope Brooklyn. We are gearing up for a nightmarish NYC mayoral primary, and as someone who has been deeply immersed in Jewish history, a weak Left is when it’s time for my family to GTFO. We are moving to Israel, where I can continue my work without having to defend my ethnicity on an hourly basis. I never thought I would be an immigrant, and have been appalled by the willful ignorance of many in this community.

Three other Jews immediately chimed in echoing my sentiments. A woman wrote, “there’s no question antisemitism is real, and coming from both the left and the right. I personally don’t know anyone in the Jewish community who would disagree.”

Oh, well hold on there, Jews who feel scared in America, because there’s always an As-a-Jew waiting in the wings to tell you your feelings don’t count. Just like when Asians said they were scared, other Asians chided them for their feelings. Or when Black people stood up and said, I don’t know anyone who has been shot by the police or experienced racism, so therefore these things are not happening. I jest. Those things never happened, because those communities aren’t divided about racism the way American Jews are. Anyway, if a Black person wrote they’d never experienced racism in America, a thousand white people would club them to death via email for that opinion.

Instead, a certain Mr. Zuckerman felt the need to tell the list he felt extremely safe in America. Perhaps, he posited, we were confusing anti-Israel sentiment, which he wholeheartedly endorsed, with antisemitism. Because Jews be like that. Always confusing a country in the Middle East with cultural and religious practices largely done at home.

I’d worked with Zuckerman. I almost fired him off a project because though his work was solid, I found him so infused with moral superiority that he was impossible to work with. But I also knew he was steeped in the problem-solving process we’d used at the Obama White House. The process said: listen to people. Hear what they need. Look at the data, and understand the pain points. Here I was expressing pain, and rather than taking an interest, this man negated my experience. I was just confused! People didn’t hate me, they just hated the only Jewish state in the world for totally legit reasons like non-existent apartheid or the world’s least-effective genocide.

Because I knew Zuckerman, I also knew what his life looked like. He didn’t belong to a synagogue, where he would have walked through a metal detector past armed guards to observe the new year. Thus, he didn’t volunteer at synagogue on the high holidays, which would have required him to attend security training. He didn’t have children, so no one was telling his 14-year-old she was a genocidal baby killer, or excommunicating his 18-year-old because he didn’t agree that from the river to the sea Palestine should be Arab. He didn’t go to Jewish events, like the talk I’d attended by Henri Bernard-Levi at an undisclosed location, which required us to submit our IDs in advance for security screening. He’d never sat in an auditorium in midtown Manhattan staffed by Mossad or FBI agents with earpieces and guns, while listening to an author talk about a book.

Zuckerman had Jewish first and last names, but he did not live the life of a practicing Jew passing their heritage to the next generation. He lived as a white American. Who cared what he thought about Jewish safety?

Jewish American history dates back to George Washington’s welcome letter to Jews fleeing certain death, but most American Jews did not arrive in America until around 1900. Reform Jews from Germany began immigrating in the 1850s for largely economic conditions. The massive wave of Jewish immigration from which most American Jews descend started in the late 1800s — a reaction to state-sanctioned violence on top of laws restricting Jewish life, forcing the migration of 2 million Jews from Eastern Europe.

The bulk of American Jews have been American for at least 120 years. (Persian, Russian, Syrian Jews and others arrived in smaller concentrations over the last 50 years.) In that time, we’ve spread out from the East Coast cities where ships deposited our ancestors, jettisoned Jewish traditions that kept us from holding jobs (like refusing to work after sundown on Fridays), shed clothing that marked us as Jews, and convinced ourselves that Jews are regular Americans.

In some cases, we also married non-Jews and raised children with Jewish names but no understanding of what it means to be Jewish. Or, we raised Jewish children who hate being Jewish, because to be Jewish in America is to be different, and who wants that?

In previous eras, if Jews wanted to stop being Jewish, or marry a non-Jew, they had to convert to Christianity. This gave Jews, at least, a clear dividing line. The Nazis and the Spanish — genocidal antisemites looking to erase Jews from the map — didn’t care if you converted or not. Many modern Jews have taken this disregard of conversion to heart. Today, because most churches will marry anyone, you can get married in a Catholic church and still claim to be Jewish.

Sometimes even Israel fails to understand America’s assimilated non-Jewish Jews. Over a decade ago, I attended a wedding in a Catholic church between a Catholic man and his half-Jewish wife. Their kids do not observe any Jewish traditions, were not bar-mitzvah-ed, and have nothing to do with Judaism. But at the ANU Museum in Tel Aviv, when the elevator doors open on the 4th floor, a full-length portrait of this family greets you. Someone told the ANU the family was Jewish because the wife was half-Jewish, and the Museum believed them, because who was the ANU to question someone’s claim on Judaism?

To keep our family Jewish, my husband and I paid for Jewish summer camp, Hebrew School, a synagogue membership, bar and bat mitzvah tutoring and parties, and a Jewish Teen choir. We both held senior positions at work that allowed us to take off three days of work on the High Holidays, and two days plus travel time for Passover. We were organized enough to host five family gatherings a year across the the major Jewish holidays, complete with hard-to-find ritual foods and either a home-made round challah or a week’s worth of flour-free meals.

All of these activities identified us as Jews, and by placing us in Jewish spaces like a synagogue or a kosher supermarket, put us at risk. Because unless we’re wearing identifiably Jewish garments, Jews can pass as a range of ethnicities. My mother often passed as Latina or Native American. Black people used to give my father knowing looks, because they thought he was a light-skinned Black man. My brother and I are often asked where we are from — me because of my light hair, eyes and pale but olive skin and other obviously Jewish features, and him because of his strong Middle Eastern vibes (read: dark skin for a white guy).

At first I dismissed Zuckerman as a one-off. Someone who was part of the brainwashed Left, who needed Jews to be safe in America so he could continue feeling like a privileged white person and not have to worry about Jews being forced out of progressive spaces. But then it happened again. Twice more, in fact.

First, I ended up in a group of far Left Jews, under the mistaken impression I might find community there. When I wrote that my family had decided to move to Israel to escape the daily cudgel of antisemitism in New York, a man quickly responded that he felt perfectly safe in New York and would never leave the United States. Obviously, I was being hysterical and Islamophobic.

Then, a half-Jewish man with an Italian last name harassed me on Facebook. I’d written that, based on the latest data set from the NYPD, Jews are attacked every day in New York City. I literally wrote a book about data, so it is a topic I know well. As a woman in tech, I’m used to being dismissed, but this was next level. First the man insisted the data showed Jews to be safe. Then he wrote about how much safer he felt with Mamdani as mayor. Finally, he stated that Zionist Jews like me were the problem.

How did this man think Jewish safety worked? And, what made him qualified to opine on Jewish safety? His mother had been Jewish, but he didn’t have a bar mitzvah, his wife wasn’t Jewish, his kids weren’t Jewish, they celebrated Christmas, and for all intents and purposes walked through life as white Americans. Yet he was under the mistaken impression that having a Jewish mother, from who he inherited no cultural or religious Judaism, qualified him to discuss Jewish safety.

Today, Judaism is not necessarily passed down by name or bloodline. In public, no one will know these men are Jews without seeing identification and a family tree. Historically, antisemites don’t ask these details before firebombing a mall, gunning down your family, blowing up your kids’ preschool or burning down your home.

For most of the past 2000 years, staying Jewish in the Diaspora wasn’t an issue because Jews weren’t allowed to assimilate. We lived in areas designated for Jews, governed by Jewish law, and were educated by Jews. Technically you could convert, but as with most indigenous communities, conversion often meant excommunication and exile. Obviously, forced conversions happened to Jews all the time. Italian Jews were legally required to spend Shabbat listening to priests tell them they were going to Hell. Spain converted Jews, and then a century later killed the converts anyway.

When they weren’t being forced to convert, Jews lived in Jewish ghettos and villages, dressed like Jews, kept kosher, and observed rituals as they’d done for thousands of years. Adherence to Jewish law was part of being in the Jewish community, sometimes to the community’s detriment. When the Russian army conscripted Jewish boys as young as 9 into the army to serve as cannon fodder, they didn’t provide kosher food or permit Jewish clothing or rituals. If the conscripts survived to return home after living as a non-Jew for years, the community often shunned them. Jewish mothers often sent their boys to hide in the woods to avoid conscription. Many Jewish boys froze to death while hiding, but that outcome was preferable to living as a pariah.

Sholem Aleichem’s story “The Yom Kippur Scandal” captures this prioritization of Jewish law above all else. In the story, a large sum of money goes missing on Yom Kippur, so everyone at synagogue is asked to turn out their pockets. One man refuses, leading everyone to believe he’s the thief. Finally, he does turn out his pockets and the congregation discovers what he’s been hiding: chicken bones. Yom Kippur is a day of fasting, but the man ate chicken in shul. In the uproar over the chicken bones, everyone forgets all about the missing money. But no one will ever forget the Yom Kippur when Shmuel Goldblattsteinman-whatever-ski ate a piece of chicken.

Today, Christianity has dimmed as an organizing principle in America. Over 40 million Americans have left churches in the past 25 years, a phenomenon called de-churching. Fifty years ago, most marriages involved a religious ceremony, and 81% of marriages were between partners who shared a religion. Today, less than half of Americans are married in a religious setting or by a religious leader. Over a third of Americans marry in secular ceremonies. Todays American Jews, now more ideologically and geographically dispersed than ever before in American history, have not been immune to this trend.

In a previous era, marrying outside the Jewish religion would have been unthinkable. When my great-uncle Harold introduced his future wife to his mother, Eva’s first response was, “You’re marrying a shiksa?” Eva thought leaving Czarist Russia meant her sons wouldn’t freeze to death, be conscripted into the Russian army or bludgeoned during a pogrom. She didn’t know it meant her children might find new ways to discard their culture and ethnicity.

“I didn’t know you had to do anything to stay Jewish,” my aunt confessed to me recently. “You were just Jewish, and so was everyone else.”

She grew up in Brooklyn surrounded by Jews. Her parents observed no Jewish holidays and didn’t keep kosher. But they had a mezuzah on the door, a macrame’d wall hanging of the Western Wall, and my grandfather wore a thick gold chain with a chai around his neck. Also they were briefly communists, which was basically the other option for American Jews — religion or workers rights, pick one.

But what my grandparents never did was go to synagogue. They never lit Shabbat candles. They didn’t observe Passover. Of their six grandchildren, only two chose to raise Jewish children. When you live in a country with a dominant religion, it’s much easier to slip into the mainstream than go against the grain.

That’s fine if people don’t want to maintain or pass on their Judaism. Like many Holocaust families, mine is marked by individuals who suffered terribly at the hands of the Nazis, and then made a range of decisions about Judaism. My cousins include Reform, Conservative and Orthodox American Jews; Orthodox, Hassidic and secular Kibbutznik Israelis; Evangelical Christians of at least three different flavors including a first cousin who identifies as a Jesus Nerd; and secular French and Americans who erect Christmas trees in their homes. If the United States decides to institute Nazi Germany’s Nuremberg Laws, all of us will be on the hit list. Until then, only some of us are qualified to discuss Jewish safety.

After being told multiple times that my opinion on Jewish safety was hysterical and a lie, I have instituted a rule to determine if someone lives as a Jew. What, I ask, was the last Jewish thing you did? Eating a bagel or speaking out about Gaza do not count.

This Jewish thing doesn’t have to be religious — maybe you read a book about Jews. Maybe you went to a lecture on antisemitism. Maybe you argued about God or Jewish ethics or whether a two-state solution is still possible. Maybe you turned off your phone, set the lights on a timer , lit candles and went to Shabbat services. Maybe you danced the Hora at a wedding and didn’t feel silly doing it.

But in the Diaspora, being Jewish happens only with intention. I often think about my ex-Obama colleague, Mollie, who never discussed Judaism with me. Based on her name I guessed she had at least one Jewish parent, but she never signaled her Judaism the way other Obama Jews did, with invites to Shabbat or knowing nods about taking vacation days in September.

The December after 10/7, while Hamas still held hostages in Gaza, as the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry claimed 18,000 Gazan women and children had died (due to Hamas’s utter lack of interest in protecting their own citizens, refusal to release the hostages, and the good PR they were getting from increasing the death rate), Mollie outed herself as an As-A-Jew.

So grateful to be doing something, anything, was this woman who apparently had loads of free time while observing no Jewish holidays or customs. Mollie, whose partner is a non-Jew, has no children, and believes Jews are immune from threats to our safety, decided the time was ripe to let the world know she, too, was a Jew. Not a Jew who supports the existence of a Jewish state, obviously. The good kind of Jew. One who would prefer Israel not respond at all to the massacre of 1200 Israelis. A Jew against all forms of violence, except anti-Jewish violence, in which case the Jews deserved it.

After I confronted Mollie about her post, writing that she had deeply internalized antisemitism that needed excavating, she responded with another post. She was not an antisemite. In fact, spreading blood libel and advocating for Hamas was the most Jewish thing she’d ever done!

In that moment, I felt awash in pity for this women, even though she seemed to be actively working toward Jewish extermination. Imagine being so removed from an actual Jewish practice that you believe stoking antisemitism is the most Jewish thing you can do. Imagine only gathering with other Jews to berate yourselves for being dirty, conniving, blood-thirsty Jews. Imagine being a Jew who has no idea what it means to be Jewish or how electric and inspiring it feels to be part of something larger than yourself.

Worst of all, imagine having to sit through a Seder of ablation, which uses this Haggadah and this completely batshit Seder plate. Imagine taking the story of Jewish liberation — a journey from darkness into great light, the founding moment of the Jewish nation — and thinking what it really needs is a little Hiroshima. Imagine thinking every ethnicity on earth deserves the right to self-determination … except the Jews. I don’t think I can envision a worse existence.

So tell me, dear readers, what’s the last Jewish thing you did? As for me, I’m off to learn more of the language Jews have maintained for thousands of years, a language so old that letters are also numbers and pictures. After that, I’m going to walk around being Jewish in the only place in the world where I get to do so as part of the dominant culture. And it’s going to be fabulous. Jewish, hot, sunny, and perfect.