After 36 years of leading my congregation in Northfield, a recent Friday night shook me in a way I can only describe as quietly and profoundly earth-shattering. Our sanctuary was packed, and as we do every spring, we were gifting our graduating seniors T-shirts in Hebrew with the names of their soon-to-be universities. We always laugh because it can be hard to figure out the English names transliterated in Hebrew — Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin.
Everyone laughs. But this year, none of it felt funny anymore.
Would a T-shirt with Hebrew letters make those students targets on campus? After all, many college students in our congregation have returned home over the past several years with stories of harassment, intimidation and isolation because they are Jewish. Indeed, many colleges and universities have been roiled by frequent antisemitic incidents, Title VI antisemitism investigations and dismal grades from antisemitism watchdogs. I found myself wondering if this was still an appropriate gift.
I told the students that I hoped their campuses were working to protect them and that they should take pride in their strong Jewish identities. As we sat down for the traditional Shabbat dinner, I quickly realized I had hit a nerve. Two congregants, seasoned public high school teachers, shared that the antisemitism they have faced — from fellow teachers, national organizations and their union — is unlike anything they have ever seen. They are profoundly worried about the future of public education for Jews, even here on the North Shore of Chicago, where Jews have long felt comfortable.
Later, while I stood in line for dessert, a mother from one of our new young families spoke to me about scheduling her son’s upcoming bar mitzvah. When planning this milestone, it is natural to reminisce about your own rite of passage. That’s when she said, simply, “My bat mitzvah was at Tree of Life.”
There are dozens of synagogues across America named Tree of Life, but in the Jewish community, in these conversations, a heaviness removes the need to specify that she was referring to the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. This is where 11 Jews were murdered for the crime of being Jewish during Shabbat services in October 2018. It now feels like ground zero for the assault on Jewish spaces.
At the end of the evening, one of our congregants who had long ago emigrated from the Soviet Union asked, “Did you hear about the incident in a park in Skokie a few weeks ago?”
I had not.
“That was my daughter,” she said.
Her daughter and her friend were attacked for being Jewish. Despite hiding her small Star of David necklace under her shirt and denying she was Jewish, her daughter was hit. The other girl’s hair was pulled. A report was filed, and the police went to the house of one of the assailants, but there was nothing they could do to the minor who had assaulted her.
The mother told me that when she lived in the Soviet Union, she never imagined that a daughter of hers would face this type of antisemitism in the United States.
“I want my daughter to be proud,” she said. “I don’t want her to feel like she needs to hide her Jewish star in public. I’m enrolling her in a self-defense class.” She’s 12 years old.
I didn’t face antisemitism growing up here. I thought it was a thing of the past. Never in a million years did I think our children would be facing this. How am I to guide the young people growing up in an era of increasing antisemitism? How am I to respond to college students who come to me with questions about antisemitism that I struggle to answer myself?
At the end of the night, one of our young adult congregants approached me. He was the son of one of the teachers who spoke to me earlier in the evening, and he had just finished his freshman year at the University of Georgia. Last year, we gave him a T-shirt, and this year, he reciprocated with a T-shirt for me and our head of school from his college. It read: “University of Georgia, School of Jewish Studies.”
That gave me some hope. For all the fear and uncertainty that filled that evening, this young man had answered the question I had been struggling with all night. The response to rising antisemitism is not retreat. It is standing up for your identity, and being proud enough to remain visibly, publicly and unapologetically Jewish.
This is the resilience that will carry us through.
Rabbi Debra Newman Kamin is the leader of Am Yisrael Congregation in Northfield and past president of The Rabbinical Assembly, the international association of Conservative rabbis.
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