“Do you think other Jewish people will be there?”
I cringed at my daughter’s loud question on the not-quite-empty train.
For the first time in my life, I was afraid to draw attention to our Jewishness.
My nine-year-old daughter and I were on the Long Island Railroad on our way to the Gershwin Theater in Manhattan. I was taking her to her first Broadway musical and, incidentally, also on her first train and subway rides. It was an exciting night! But because we live in a smaller town and were heading into the city at the time of day most people were leaving it, there were very few people around on the first leg of our journey, and my daughter was nervous.
I didn’t admit it to her - but I was nervous too. It was my first time venturing into the city since everyone’s anti-Semitism came blatantly out into the open, and I was alone with my nine-year-old. I didn’t want anyone to hear her talking about being Jewish. I just wanted us to enjoy our night out without incident.
How did we get here? New York City, the Big Apple, NYC, my playground for four glorious years while in college, the industrious island from where you can see the Statue of Liberty professing “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” and where countless Jews from the past rose to success and even stardom - not a safe place for Jewish people? The city where being Jewish used to mean getting a cheeky “shalom aleichem” from people trying to sell tickets to comedy shows, is now home to anti-Semitic behavior and protests calling for global intifada, and where I have to feel anxious about my religion?
And a bigger question: How do I explain the current climate to my daughter?
When our kids were younger and asked if bad guys were real, we reassured them that no, bad guys were only in stories. Maybe that was the wrong thing to do (therapists might say it’s important for even young kids to know not everyone out there is a good person), but it was the only way to get our kids to sleep.
When they got old enough to learn about Pharoah and Haman wanting to harm the Jews, those characters were like cartoon villains in a Disney-like story of good overcoming evil - and many thousands of years ago, too. It was nothing that would keep a child up at night.
When our oldest grew up more, it became time to let her in on the not-as-long-ago horrors of the Holocaust.
Growing up as the granddaughter of a survivor who made it his mission to publicly speak and educate about the Holocaust, I don’t remember specifically learning about it for the first time because I always knew my grandfather’s story. There was no reveal, no “Guess what? Remember Pharoah and Haman? People still hate us that much even today! Enough to do really bad things.”
Our kids’ generation doesn’t have that easy, immediate access to Holocaust survivors. It’s up to us to introduce them to modern-day anti-Semitism, and that’s a daunting task. At what point would you as a parent feel, Today is the day. Today, I will shatter my child’s illusion of safety in the world. There’s no day that feels like the right day for that!
How do we talk to our kids about anti-Semitism? I’m neither a therapist nor have I studied this subject; I’m just a Jewish parent winging it and using my best judgment to get through each day. I put off talking about it for as long as I could. But after October 7, a Holocaust that happened in our children’s lifetimes, I felt I had no choice but to talk about it, at least with my oldest. My daughter wasn’t completely ignorant on the topic of anti-Semitism; she knew a bit about the Holocaust from school. But, although I did try to talk to her last Yom HaShoah about her great-grandfather’s Holocaust experience, she wasn’t ready to hear it. I respected that and didn’t push it. Next year, I thought.
In dribs and drabs, I let her know there are people out there who don’t like us. Some of those people did some bad things to Israel and that’s why there’s a war now.
“Why?” she asked me after one of the first times I brought it up.
How do you answer that?
“There’s no real reason,” I said. “They just do. There have always been people who haven’t liked the Jews. But we’ve always won in the end, right? Like on Pesach? And Purim?”
Yet, even though my daughter knows of the war in Israel, it’s still happening across the globe. I still haven’t discussed the anti-Semitism right in our very own backyard. I still need my daughter to be able to sleep at night. But it breaks my heart when she tells me she’d be afraid to visit Israel. No, I think. Israel is not where we should be afraid to be. Israel is where we should always feel safe. I understand as her parent, I still have a lot more work to do to help her understand that.
On our train ride to Manhattan, I realized two things.
The fear I have of revealing my Jewishness is the result of a galus mentality. If I’m afraid to be openly Jewish, then I’m very obviously living in exile from my true homeland. This is more evident post-October 7 than it has ever been in my lifetime.
Also, my daughter asking if other Jews will be at the show illuminates her feeling that being with other Jews means feeling safer. Which is exactly the point. It’s exactly why we need Israel.
For the first time, I truly do feel like a stranger in a strange land. Israel may be at war, but it’s also the only place where we can be openly Jewish without fear, and with a Jewish army defending us. It’s the only place where we’re free from another government controlling how safely we can live as Jews. And as long as we live outside of Israel, we will carry that hesitation about revealing our Jewishness whenever we go outside of Jewish spaces.
Yet, as much as it feels like pre-Holocaust times right now, it isn’t. In 2024, we have a strong Jewish army fighting for us. We have a Jewish country waiting with open arms for us to return. G-d is not hiding it. His message is as loud as the call of the shofar: It is time to go home.
History is repeating itself. Purim, which is quickly approaching, is all about hiding and revealing Jewishness in the face of adversity. I hope that this Purim, we see the evil decree of Hamas (and, let’s face it, Iran - where Shushan is supposed to have been located) turned upside down, and that we can live in a world where we all reveal our Jewishness with pride and without fear.
We’re halfway there. The conversation has morphed from, “People hate us for no reason” to, “People hate us for no reason, but there’s a place to go where we belong and where we have the power to defend ourselves.”
Still, I don’t know what it will take to change the rest of the world, at least in terms of policy and what’s acceptable behavior towards Jews. Probably a miracle.
I hope and pray that our days of having to talk to our kids about current anti-Semitism becomes a story of the past – much like Haman.
Shira Zwiren works in marketing and has loved to write from a young age. Around the edges of her day as a professional and a mom of three adorable kids, she tries to find time for personal creative writing and art. Follow Shira on Instagram: @myjewishjoy.
