American Jews Are Scared. We Also Have to Be More Than That.

When I was 9 years old, someone drew a swastika on a bathroom stall in my elementary school. I barely remember anything about the assembly we had afterward, but I remember crying in the car that afternoon. Later, when I was in high school, I chased a classmate down the hallway to try to get him to explain what he meant by “You can see the Jewish in his eyes.” Once, a boy set down a coin in front of me; after I did not pick it up, he told me I’d passed the “Jewish test.”

I am starting with all this because I want to say that I know how deeply upsetting it is, particularly as a young person, to encounter antisemitism. I remember all of that, still. I remember how it made me feel scared and angry. When I was younger, I thought that to be Jewish was to be the target of, and to push back against, antisemitism. That was the sum of what I understood it to be.

So, too, do I know that many American Jews are very afraid right now. There are those who have family and friends who were killed or taken hostage by Hamas, and many more who have family and friends in Israel about whom they are deeply concerned. Images and reports of people’s homes being set aflame and people being pulled out to be taken away remind many Jews around the world of the worst, darkest moments in Jewish history—and in their families’ histories. In the United States, synagogues have been vandalized; elsewhere in the world, they have been attacked. We have watched a mob in Dagestan storm an airport in search of Jews, and read reports of antisemitic graffiti on buildings in Paris.

I have friends and acquaintances who are now afraid to wear their yarmulkes in major cities. This is to say nothing of the increase in assaults on traditionally Orthodox Jews before this war even began. On university campuses, long sites of conflict around all things Israeli and Palestinian, many Jewish students feel isolated, and nervous, and scared. An Israeli student was reportedly assaulted at my own alma mater while putting up pictures of the Israelis taken hostage by Hamas. Cornell University’s Hillel advised students to stay away from the kosher dining hall due to threats. It should not be difficult for others at the university, and certainly for those in positions of power, to say that there is no excuse for such a thing.

I also know, and have personally experienced, how small and sad it feels when someone dismisses antisemitism, and how important it is to feel like you have allies in pushing back against it. American Jews are grieving, and shocked, and scared, and they need resources to deal with all of that. This is perhaps especially true of young Jews, away from home and trying to process all of this as undergraduates.

It is not despite all of this knowledge that I hope we will nevertheless be careful not to let our fear close us off to others’ pain, or to shut down debate, or to equate ourselves with our fear. It’s because of it.

First, we should take this care because fear and pain can make us only look inward if we let it. As the Israeli writer Etgar Keret told the New York Times recently, “when I see people watching the horrible tragedy that is happening here as if it were a Super Bowl of victimhood, in which you support one team and really don’t care about the other, empathy becomes very, very selective. You see only some pain. You don’t want to see other pain.”

Similarly, I hope that American Jews resist the temptation to let our own fear, sadness, pain, and trauma to blind us to others’ fear, sadness, pain, and trauma. Palestinian and Palestinian American students, for example, are also worried for family members and friends, for the people in Gaza being bombed with dwindling fuel and water. I am sure that many Muslim students are also worried about rising Islamophobia. The Israeli left offers an example here, as people still try to speak out in support of civilians in Gaza and to support people, regardless of ethnicity or religion, struggling during the war, even in the face of reported government and police repression. So, too, did more than 150 Jewish groups show solidarity when they came together to condemn Islamophobia and anti-Arab hate. There are positive examples on university campuses as well: Dartmouth reportedly managed to navigate the days after Hamas’ attack by holding forums for discussion that made space for multiple narratives and traumas. That is not only moral; it also presents an opportunity for learning, which is at least in part why students are at university in the first place.

Second, we should be careful that fear and pain is not used to close off discussion and debate, including when that debate may make some uncomfortable. Discomfort does not feel good, but it is not a threat. A Palestinian flag is not inherently antisemitic. Palestinian writers, books about Palestinians, speech in support of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, calls for a cease-fire: None of these are threats to American Jews. And as the war continues, as Israel continues its aerial bombardment of Gaza, and as “ground incursions” expand, Americans will continue to discuss it, including on university campuses. That is not antisemitism. Again, there are actual threats to American Jews, but they should not be used as a pretense to silence speech on American foreign policy, or on Israeli politics, or to keep people from considering and indeed centering a war in which, according to one Palestinian NGO, a child in Gaza is killed every 15 minutes. (This statistic is not antisemitic, either. It also does not diminish the horror and tragedy of the murder and kidnapping of children by Hamas.)

And if those reasons do not suffice, we should be careful because of this: Being Jewish, I have learned, can be so much more than feeling hated and threatened. Being Jewish in the United States in particular means navigating what it means to be part of a larger, non-Jewish whole. We should not overlook the very real support that has been shown to American Jews, including—notably, given the particular antisemitic episodes of history to which people sometimes compare our present—from the current government. The Biden administration is not only not discriminating against us, but also regularly speaks out against antisemitism, as do many elected officials in Congress and at the state and local level. Sometimes, when we stress the silence—when we emphasize the absence of outreach from ideological allies—we cannot hear the solidarity being offered, which we can, in turn, offer to others.

I do not want American Jews, at this moment, to reduce ourselves to our fear. We are entitled to our fear. But we are also simultaneously capable of nuance, and empathy, and solidarity, and refusal to see ourselves only as the objects of antisemitism. That is how I wish I had thought of myself as a younger Jewish person. It’s what I wish for Jews on American campuses, and, for that matter, throughout the country and of all ages, right now.