It was the end of November, 2018, a week after Thanksgiving, a month after the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre. I was driving down to Barnard College to teach and was listening to 1010 News in my car, when suddenly I heard that a Jewish professor at Columbia’s Teacher’s College had walked into her office to find the walls smeared with large red swastikas and the anti-Semitic, “Yid.” 

Just across the street from me a woman I didn’t know, who is a clinical psychologist and holocaust survivor, who as she said when interviewed “doesn’t hide that I’m Jewish,” has a mezuzah on her office door, symbol of a hoped-for protection, a sign that she was a Jew. Professor Elizabeth Midlarsky had felt relatively safe even though in 2007 she’d had a similar attack when protesting the appearance at Columbia University of the president of Iran. But now, for the first time, she was afraid.

I shouldn’t have been surprised, given the uptick in anti-Semitic incidents in the last couple of years.  Still, these red swastikas were too close to home. This doesn’t feel like the city I moved to in 2004. I’d been in NYC the day before the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center.  New York, the city that had more Jews than anywhere else except for Israel, had been singled out. Jew York City.  The TV showed angry young men in the Middle East burning flags and demonstrating hatred, not just of America, but of Jews, as if the two were linked. On September 13, 2001, I’d fled from the east coast to what felt like a safer Midwest.  But when I was offered a job in New York less than three years later, I knew I had to return.  

When I arrived, I put fear behind me.  I felt suddenly at home, amazed and grateful that I was living in a welcoming multicultural city, with a wonderful synagogue I joined that shared space with The Church of St. Anthony’s and St. Paul’s, which I partnered with them to feed the hungry, provide beds to the homeless. The senior rabbi even played the Oud, a traditional lute-type instrument, in the New York Arabic Orchestra. What could be better symbols of interfaith and intercultural love and understanding? 

Here I was at Barnard College, an all-women’s liberal arts college that practiced need-blind admission.  Across the street was Columbia University, one of the oldest, and just north of it, Columbia’s Teacher’s College, with the names of liberal educators engraved along the top of the building. Then came the Jewish Theological Seminary, and across from that, Union Theological Seminary.  I thought I’d come to interfaith heaven. I felt I had really come home since my writing and teaching had increasingly become concerned with complexity of Christian and Jewish identities and relations between the two religions.  I’d worked to foster interfaith understanding in the hope that peace might come from cultivating the ability to understand how people think differently from yourself.

But on November 29th, my dream world was shattered, not broken, but cracked. I was brought back to the reality we now live in. Anti-Semitism is rising around the world, and that makes me recall the America I was born into, where palpable Semitism existed even as World War II had ended, when America had been fighting the Nazis.  

I grew up in a small white Protestant village in Connecticut, an hour outside New York City. When wealthy Catholics bought summer homes on our street by the water during the 1920s and 30s, they were met with hostility. Jews were even less welcome. My parents woke up one morning to find a large red swastika on their garage door—a swastika very much like that found in the professor’s office at Columbia’s Teacher’s College.  The war had just ended, but anti-Jewish feeling was quite alive. My parents complained to the police, but nothing happened.  Our next door neighbor threatened to shoot my father, but he used only words, not a gun.

In our village, we were the only Jews when I was growing up. People didn’t sell their homes to Jews. Was it an unspoken agreement, like the title of that film Gentlemen’s Agreement, about Darien Connecticut?  Like African-Americans, Jews, even if they had the money, couldn’t buy. Of course, African-Americans were visible by skin color in a way Jews were not, though Jews’ names, features or mannerisms might mark them. Still we were “the other,” and our good white Christian neighbors didn’t want us living there. Eventually a few Jews moved into the town, even joined the local Christian Church, to “pass,” I guess. But even in the late 1960s, when my best friend Barbara’s parents wanted to sell their house to a Jewish doctor and his family, they were pressured not to, and didn’t.  

Maybe anti-Semitism in America isn’t as widely announced by ordinary people now as it was then, but it certainly seems more virulent and violent. A recent CNN poll has documented its astounding rise in Europe, finding that one in four Europeans were anti-Semitic. The British Labor party has been so overtaken by anti-Semitism that some members are now leaving it in protest.  

We don’t really know how widespread anti-Semitism is here in America. How much remains invisible? I would like to think that anti-Semites are the exception, not the norm. Anti-Semitism is rampant among white right-wing extremists, where it often partners with anti-Muslim, anti-LGBTQ and racist prejudices. But it sometimes is seen in the extreme left, where anti-Zionist sympathy for the very real plight of Palestinians can spill over into anti-Semitism, suspicion and hatred of Jews, or even be a cover for it. 

Anti-Semitism has fractured the unity of the Women’s March. Ilhan Omar, the young Muslim woman elected as a representative from Minnesota, in February 2019, made comments using anti-Semitic tropes about Jews and their money that raise the question of whether she holds anti-Semitic views or simply used these tropes without thinking about their history or meaning. I wonder if such hatred always been here and is just coming to the surface, whipped up, not only by inflammatory rhetoric, but also by powerful people, even our president, who won’t call anti-Semitism out, when saying, “there are good people on both sides.” As if there is no moral difference.

 The distinction between right and wrong is daily being eroded in parts of America, along with the difference between truth and falsehood, and these distinctions are essential to justice. The internet and technology have made hatred even easier to spread. The very freedoms we treasure in America have made us more vulnerable to people driven by hate, who now have free access to military-style guns, which did not exist when I was growing up.  How do we find our way out of our present situation? Gun control, obviously; voting, education and more..

But I wonder… how can you change the culture, and people’s attitudes through education, if education and those highly educated are despised as “elitist”? Or when the AMA comes out against assault weapons and stands for gun-sense laws only to be told in a November 7th NRA tweet that “self-important anti-gun doctors [should] stay in their lane?”

There is something profoundly sick in a culture where the right to kill trumps the commitment to save lives.

In the spring of 2018, under the leadership of Rabbi Matalon, responding to the deepening polarization and deteriorating quality of life in America, B’nai Jeshurun Congregation in NYC undertook an unusual project. Thirteen members, including two rabbis, participated in an exchange with 10 members of the Michigan Corrections Organization, the union of corrections officers in Michigan (MCO).  They wanted to create a bridge between Christians and Jews, the liberal East Coast and the so-called heartland of America, between progressives and conservatives. “Over three days together in Lansing, MI, followed by three days in Manhattan, we asked: How can we deepen our understanding and address our preconceived notions of the “other” in American life? What about conservatism could progressives come to value, honor and learn from; and vice versa? Could learning from others about their values and experiences help identify solutions to our nation’s most pressing problems? We hoped that the exchange would be meaningful and provocative, but we never expected that we would develop such a profound relationship with MCO, with a depth that would lead MCO members to travel to New York in November to share their love and support with us.”

At the end of the Shabbat services that Saturday, Rabbi Matalon introduced three young men, probably in their late thirties, officers in the Michigan Correction Organization, who came to New York.  They had made the trip from Michigan to read a letter to us that they had written after the shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue.  Standing in the front of the congregation where the rabbis usually are, in front of the ark where the Torahs are kept, they took turns reading the long letter from the MCO. They were Christians, they said, and some of them had never known a Jewish person before.

“We are writing today as conservative, patriotic Americans,” they began. “We believe America is indeed an exceptional place that has served as a unique symbol and model to the world. As such, we have seen enough of the divisive politics that separates our country and are calling for an end to any rhetoric that confuses hate and fear mongering with patriotism. We were shocked, angered, and saddened to learn that a man filled with hate for Jews entered the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh PA and committed a horrific act of terror on Jewish Americans peacefully at worship. We are literally sick over what happened and at times have had no words to describe it. Although this was the madness of one twisted individual, we can no longer turn a blind eye to the people and places where this kind of hatred is fueled. As Americans, we all understand what terrorism looks and sounds like and should fear this example the most because the perpetrator is an American. We feel connected to this tragedy through our Jewish friends and family and our shared religious traditions. …we understand this was an attack on all of us. We wish to convey to you that we grieve this loss of Jewish American lives and that we care about the safety of your community. We condemn anti-Semitism in all of its malignant manifestations.”

The synagogue was silent. We listened to these young men, saw their serious faces, saw their emotion.  They were probably the age of my son, who’d grown up in the Midwest, played ball with people like this and made life-long friends.  At the end, the whole congregation (probably more than five hundred people, all rose as one in a standing ovation that lasted for a long, long time.  Ever since the first sentences of the letter, tears had been streaming down my face.  I was filled with gratitude, awe, and yes love for these men who now found themselves at a different place, intellectually, emotionally and ethically. They were Christians, true to the teachings of their faith, as they stood in our synagogue, giving and receiving love. I don’t know that I’ve ever witnessed anything more moving.  I could see that the exchange my synagogue had organized, six months before the shooting at Squirrel Hill, had been transformative for everyone involved.  It was a grass roots effort to spread peace and understanding. 

Who knows, how many other efforts might be going on around the country, even as I write?

Click here for more about the event and to read the letter in its entirety.