I keep trying to not worry about rising antisemitism. Antisemitism is nothing new and if we up and left every time someone made a Jew joke, weâd never be still. And since I donât have the means to leave the country, I canât spend my emotional spoons worrying myself sick. But I also know that a lot of people who have tried to convince themselves of the same thing ended up murdered, and every community today exists because someone knew when it was time to get out.
I just got an email from my synagogue updating the congregants about new security efforts. Weâre a small synagogue. Friday night services usually get around 15 people. Weâre out in the boonies. Weâre not fancy or rich. We donât even usually do Saturday services because weâre too small. But the board unanimously decided to have armed guards at every service and event. Someone had already sponsored 6 monthsâ armed security for our Hebrew school, in case someone wants to come in and murder our children in cold blood. Theyâre talking of steel doors and a safe room, and self-defense classes for congregants.
Do you non-Jews understand? Do you understand the heartbreak and anxiety that we feel because we KNOW that these are practical steps for a non-zero possibility that someone will want to vandalize us, or set us on fire, or murder us and our children for no reason other than that we are Jews? Do you understand that this is happening in 2018 and it never went away? That your silence is complicit? That every equivocating tweet about âZionistsâ and a philosophy you donât understand, every time you defend kicking Jews out of your so-called progressive movements, every time you tell Jews that theyâre basically white and privileged so stop complaining, it is another bullet in the chamber?
