I thought my life was hard years ago. 

I was in my late thirties, had a little boy and was working full time teaching and trying to publish.  I was experiencing the old familiar juggle for professional women who are also mothers. The pull between wanting to be with my little one and needing to teach and write, not just for financial reasons, but because that’s a large part of who I am. I’m a mom and wife, but also a teacher and writer.  Those things are an essential part of my being and they connect me with many people.  And I’m certain those things will be part of my legacy in the future. 

In time, I figured, my wonderful little boy would grow up and the fight for my time and soul would lessen.  I loved every minute with him—taking him to see “The Muppets Take Manhattan” or “The Jungle Book” (even though I hated cartoons). I also loved taking him rollerskating, reading books together, and just being silly.  I treasured it all, knowing that he would be more independent, and eventually wouldn’t really want to spend so much time with me.  We’d still be loving, but I’d have more time for writing books and articles. I would be able to do it all.  When my parents got old, I had some of the same tensions, the same pull on my time, but they lived a thousand miles away and I wasn’t always called to care for them. When I went back to Connecticut to deal with a difficult, demented father while helping my exhausted mother, I knew in the back of my mind that in a few days I could just leave and return to my peaceful home. Never did I really think about the distant future. I didn’t think I’d have to relive these difficulties later in my life. 

But here I am.  I’m busier than ever professionally, asked to give talks and write papers. I feel that I’m teaching better than ever, understanding how to connect the past and its literary texts with the present, especially with our current challenges. But I have a husband who is riddled with what is called Parkinsons “plus,” making him ever more demanding of care and attention at this stage of his life. I knew my son would grow up and that my situation of feeling divided would be temporary.  But with my aging husband, now 80 years-old, the moment is temporary, but he’s not going to grow up…. He’s going to die. Though who knows when since his body is strong, despite the diseases, much like my mother who lingered with Alzheimers until she was 95.

Sometimes the days seem interminable. My challenge is not just to sleep or find time to do everything, but how to be loving, give him care, still be myself and not dragged under.  I’m often filled with sadness, anger, frustration and fear. So many mixed emotions, turbulent, even as I try to keep calm.  Immersing myself in work or writing keeps these things at bay. When I walk into the classroom and see the beautiful faces of my students eager to learn, I’m filled with joy and intellectually alive.  When I sit down to write, the ideas and words continue to come, thank God, and I can still focus. 

They say “self-care” is important—it’s not a word I particularly like, just as I’m not keen on the word “caregiver.”  I mean, isn’t that what we should always be doing? Caring about and for other people, other human beings, not just our family and loved ones? Of course, we must not sacrifice ourselves in the process. They say that helping others benefits you. It makes you feel better. But this care-giving now that I’m struggling with is something entirely different. It is, really, “taking care” of someone. To me, the phrase captures that it’s not just a gift but that it takes something from you as well.  There’s always the problem of balancing one’s own needs and health against another’s.  You can become a martyr, which some people may baskl in, but that’s not for me. 

I went to a support group last year where a woman taking care of her mother with Alzheimers said, “there is a purity in our relationship now, and I’m happy.”  “Well, I don’t feel that way,” I said.  The young rabbi said, “Well you will finally get there.” I thought to myself, but didn’t say, “what a pollyana-ish way of glossing over the tragic loss and denying reality.” Maybe if you’ve survived a difficult childhood, as I did growing up with a father who thought he was god, you’ve developed an instinct for getting by. 

Am I enriched by the experience or caring for my increasingly dependent husband? Or drained? It’s a combination I guess and I confess I don’t feel enriched at the moment.  Just torn between all the things I need (and want) to do. I’ve always got to make choices. Do I spend the next few hours at a hospital bed (he’s been hospitalized again for the third time in a month) with my agitated, miserable, but sweet husband, or do I spend them with my 3 year-old granddaughter who’s come for two days to visit?  One gives energy and joy to me, while the other takes it from me. Do I go to my new Parkinson’s support group, where we gain strength from sharing our miseries, or sneak off for a nice lunch to enjoy salad with buccatini cacio e pepe and a big glass of super-Tuscan wine, giving guilty thanks to God for being able to still relish life at times?

This is my daily struggle.

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.