It is 2022
and my parents are asking me not to wear my Star of David necklace in public anymore
they say it is not safe.
when I tell them I will not hide away my identity
will not let the hatred win,
they shake when they tell me they are just worried for me
the ghosts of the anti-Semitism they fled from saturating the pain in their eyes
I see the fear.
They are scared to relive it.
It is America, land of the free, in 2022
and I’ve already had way too many conversations with friends and family about being scared to express our Jewishness
we speak of our fear that what they call “progressivism” is the start to another traumatizing chapter of our story, mourned by the next generation
By the same people who say they don’t know how it happened
The same people who will say “never again” as if they didn’t contribute to the hatred that caused it to happen again.
I do not want this to be the reason I end up in a history book.
I am scared that I will suffer from this generation’s new anti-Semitism
it’s new name anti-Zionism
They tell us they are not being anti-Semitic but yet refuse to listen to why we are hurt,
why we are scared
make up excuses to how they can’t be anti-Semitic
refuse to see those of us standing alongside them for Palestinian liberation.
But why does it have to come at the cost of my people?
Why should we be sent back to the places that massacred, expelled, converted, tortured, exploited, alienated us for years
when we are much safer in our own home
defended by our own, those who actually care about us unlike others whose wings we have been pushed under and suffocated by
Why are they so okay with every other national liberation struggle
Every other people’s right to exist
But refuse to accept Jews’?
Refuse to recognize our indigenous roots?
Jew hatred is the world’s oldest and most versatile hatred
They paint us in colors that don’t speak for us in every generation
and we become a shade that everyone despises
they outnumber us and our voices are drowned out
How can they claim to know what we want, when they don’t even ask us?
When they talk over us
Define our words for us,
rewrite our history,
ignore years of evidence to our connection,
call us white as if we haven’t been persecuted for our non-whiteness for centuries,
call us colonizers of the land we come from,
perpetuate the walls between the peoples of the land,
speak of the one or the other
instead of both,
together
in peace
until the world sees all Jews as the cause of the problem
…again.
It is 2022, in America, and they are making me scared to be a Jew. When I try to tell them this, their only defense is that
of course
they are not anti-Semitic.
