Last week during the celebration of Hanukkah, a decorative menorah on an Arizona family’s lawn was vandalized to look like a swastika. This vandalism is the latest in a long line of anti-Semitic destruction and expressions of hate that have been happening since the presidential election in November, alongside a rise in hate crimes in general.
The menorah was put out on the Ellis family’s lawn because their kids wanted to celebrate Hanukkah the way they’ve often seen Christmas celebrated — openly, loudly, joyously, and without any kind of fear. Sadly, but maybe not surprisingly, celebrating that way is not as easy for other religions as it is for Christianity, no matter how many wars on Christmas are claimed to be waged.
Hanukkah, like many Jewish holidays, is about the resilience of the Jewish people in the face of those who have wanted to harm them. As the classic joke goes, “they tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat.” In my — thankfully— privileged life as a Jew living in diverse east coast cities, I’ve been surrounded by people who are like me and by people who understand me, and that makes it easy to gloss over the past and present that some Jews have to experience. An experience that is seemingly becoming more and more common.
A little over a month ago, over a post-Thanksgiving lunch I found time to catch up with my grandmother. She asked me about my internship, how my friends were doing, if I was enjoying the apartment that I had moved into at the beginning of the semester. Then she casually turned to my college experience. “How is school?” she asked. “Have there been any incidents? You know, since the election. Anything like the anti-Semitism I keep seeing on other campuses?”
To be clear, I go to school in New York City. My classes are peppered with kids who have had similar upbringings to my own — suburban, east coast, reform Jewish — and there’s no doubt that most of the people I talk to on a daily basis are liberal leaning, if not even further to the left than I am myself. And yet, I had an answer for her. “There’s been some stuff,” I answered. “A door in a dorm had a swastika on it, but any real vandalism there’s been has been aimed at Muslims.” My grandmother looked sad, but not entirely shocked. That wasn’t the first time the issue of our country’s rising outward anti-Semitism had been raised during that Thanksgiving break and I was right in thinking it wouldn’t be the last going forwards.
My grandmother grew up at a time when there were still stigmas barring Jews from fully melding into society. She likes to tell the story of one of her bridesmaids who, when she met my grandmother, had never met a Jew in her life. There are also the less charming stories of realizing areas like country clubs were “no Blacks, No Jews allowed” spaces. It’s not such a stretch to see that we were there not so long ago.
Kids like the Ellis children probably grew up the same way I did. Hearing about hate and hardship, but not really experiencing it for themselves. Older Jews look at us and see children unaffected by direct hate or bigotry when it comes to Jewish identity, but I don’t think that the worry that one day it will affect us ever goes away.
