NYcitysveryprettyinthenighttime, But

It’s gone forever, that funny young, lost look I loved won’t ever come back. I killed that when I told you about Rebecca. It’s gone. In a few hours, you’ve grown so much older. 

Ok, so this ask is no doubt in reference to my post that discusses punching nazis. I know people have all kinds of feelings about this, and I’ve decided I’m going to take this ask as an opportunity to lay out my thoughts.

When I was in 9th grade and had recently come out, some boys cornered me in the hall, trapped me against a railing, and made various remarks the nature of which I’m sure you can all imagine. I went home, upset and scared, and told my father what had happened. He said, “If someone ever does something like that to you again, hit them.” I objected, saying that I didn’t want to escalate the situation, and my father said, “When someone is threatening your safety, the situation has already escalated.”

I don’t think anyone (with the exception of Roma people) can really understand just how traumatizing the Holocaust is to Jews to this very day. At my Jewish elementary school, almost everyone had grandparents with numbers tattooed on their arms. We didn’t need to learn about the Holocaust in history class. We’d been having nightmares about it our whole lives. It lives with us every day.

A couple of years ago, a family friend had to call Child Protective Services on his own family in order to force his wife to get therapy for her PTSD. Why did she have PTSD? Because her parents were both Holocaust survivors, and they’d been so traumatized when she was a child that they’d been unable to take care of themselves, let alone her. Their trauma caused her suffering, which in turn caused suffering for her spouse and children. Do you think her children don’t know that the Holocaust is the ultimate source of their pain? Three generations later, the Holocaust is still destroying our people.

And now there are Nazis. Now, right now, there are Nazis. No goyim (again, excepting the Roma) can even begin to comprehend how viscerally terrifying that is. My synagogue has metal detectors and armed guards at the doors. My old elementary school has the police bomb disposal unit on speed-dial. Our physical safety is threatened every moment of every day. The situation has already escalated.

So would I punch a Nazi? Fuck yes. Not to prove what a macho leftist I am; I don’t give a fuck. But when my community held a vigil last year for the victims of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, the victims of a fucking Nazi, I was standing there, looking over my shoulder, expecting that any moment someone would show up, to mock my family and friends, to celebrate our mourning and cheer our pain, and I was ready to punch them. Because their presence constitutes a threat to our safety. Because their presence would mean that the situation had already escalated.