As a Jewish Coloradan, I’m afraid

I am a Coloradan. Before that though, I am a Jew. An unapologetic, visible Jew. Today, those two identities seem to be in conflict.

Yesterday, Melat Kiros, the young democratic socialist who called the slaughter of 1,200 of my brothers and sisters on October 7 “inevitable,” is now the Democratic nominee for Colorado’s 1st congressional district. In a district that leans as heavily blue as the Israeli flag (the irony is not lost on me), she will almost certainly be the next person to represent me in the United States Congress.

That is scary for me and my community but not for the reason you may think. When I posted these feelings on social media this morning, I was inundated with hundreds of hateful messages accusing me of supporting the “genocide,” and “baby killers,” and “white supremacists,” etc. I won’t share these awful comments, but you can see them yourself on Threads (@joidenver)

This was surprising considering I was only sharing how I personally felt. I wasn’t condemning anything or anyone. I wasn’t claiming to speak on behalf of others. I was simply expressing my perspective. The response was so filled with misinformation, propaganda, and vile hatred that I felt the need to respond in a longer format and explain what is behind these feelings.

Every day, when I walk out the door, there is nothing ambiguous about who I am or what I believe. With my yarmulka on my head, it is clear that I am Jewish. Today, that feels a little more frightening.

Everything I am reading this morning makes it clear that support for Israel defined this campaign. The starkest difference between her and Diana DeGette was Israel.

I can understand a misguided politician. History is full of them. What I cannot stop thinking about is the people who voted for her. The neighbors. The people standing next to me waiting to check out at the grocery store. My doctor. The person in the car next to me at the light. These are the people who looked at everything she said and decided that it was acceptable, or worse, that it was right.

I obviously disagree with Melat Kiros. I don’t think she is evil. My tradition teaches us to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. I do think though that she is very misguided. From her statements it seems clear that she has never been to Israel and has very little, if any, first-hand knowledge of a topic that won her this election. I think she, like many young people in our nation and the hundreds of people who cowardly attack me online, has absorbed a framework so distorted by a biased narrative that she cannot see the simple truth.

What scares me is how many people in my district looked at her anti-Israel positions specifically, understood exactly what they were endorsing, and voted for her because of it. They heard her claim that the rape, kidnapping, and butchering of my brothers and sisters on October 7 was “inevitable,” just a form of resistance. They know that she was fired from a law firm for antisemitic views. They watched as she responded to the murder of an 82-year-old Jewish woman, Karen Diamond, and injury of over a dozen people at the Boulder firebombing, refusing to call it an act of antisemitism. They heard and saw all of that and chose her to represent them.

I am sure if I were to have a conversation with Kiros, she would defend herself and say, “I am not antisemitic. I am anti-Israel.” In fact, most of the comments online followed that line of reasoning. People who say this believe they have found a clean moral distinction. But the truth is her statements are not as brave or honest as she may think they are. She is being reckless with language that has life-and-death consequences for real people. The data shows clearly that anti-Israel sentiment leads directly to acts of violence against Jewish people thousands of miles away from Israel. So when people say that they are just against Israel, not the Jewish people, so I shouldn’t be afraid, the actual facts on the ground tell a very different story.

Kiros is confused about history and drunk on ideology. That is frustrating. But the firebomber on Pearl Street was not confused. He knew exactly what he was doing and why. And the people who cheer her on, who share her posts, who pack her watch parties and scream when her name is called, they are the ones I am scared of. Like a modern-day blood libel, people soak up the false claims, and it turns into real hate and violence.

Kiros says Israel is an apartheid state, and that October 7 was the inevitable result of that apartheid. This word gets thrown around constantly, and her supporters that are repeating it have never looked at what it actually claims.

Arab citizens of Israel, roughly one-fifth of the country’s population, vote in Israeli elections, run for the Knesset, and currently sit in it. They serve on the Israeli Supreme Court. Arab citizens practice law, medicine, and every profession you would expect and hold the same civil rights as Jewish citizens, and are protected by the same courts. Apartheid was a legal system built specifically to deny citizenship, the vote, and basic civil rights to a racial group on the basis of race, by law. That is not what exists for Arab citizens of Israel.

What Kiros and people like her are actually pointing to is the West Bank and Gaza, where Palestinians who are not Israeli citizens do not have Israeli civil rights. That is true. But neither do I as a Jewish American citizen. This is not evidence of apartheid any more than the fact that Canadian citizens do not vote in American elections or serve on the US Supreme Court is evidence that America practices apartheid against Canada. Citizenship confers rights. You can believe Israel’s policies in the West Bank are wrong, unjust, or counterproductive. Plenty of Israelis believe that. But collapsing that argument into “apartheid,” a word with a specific and horrifying legal meaning, is not analysis.

In her victory speech, Kiros said one of her goals is to “end the genocide in Palestine.” The inaccurate and misleading term “genocide” that she purposely uses is meant specifically to demonize the State of Israel. This leads to hatred of and violence against Jewish people around the world.

As the ADL writes, “Regardless of how the term is applied, the accusation is aimed at convincing the general public that Israel is guilty of committing the most awful of human atrocities. Once levied, these charges tend to affect perception and confuse lay individuals, regardless of their falsity.”

And that is my point. The lay individuals, the supporters at the rallies, aren’t looking into the truth of these claims. They are absorbing it like a sponge in the name of liberalism and standing up for the oppressed, and data shows that this leads to real attacks on my community. The fact that most of the data and statistics of deaths and proportions of women and children were reported and fabricated by Hamas doesn’t matter. The images that we now know were posed, taken of a child with a genetic condition, taken out of context, and from other regions in the world have already done the damage of convincing people they know the facts on the ground.

The PR campaign against Israel has been so successful that people around the world and especially young, American students openly side with a people that livestreamed their atrocities for the world to see instead of a democratic state that is only trying to protect its citizens. These people, the ones posting their hateful comments online, believe they are being morally superior freedom fighters when they are in fact the useful idiots of truly evil monsters. The danger is that it doesn’t just stay in the realm of the theoretical. It turns into real targeted hate towards me, personally, regardless of my political opinions or feelings about Netanyahu and the Israeli government.

After October 7, the ADL recorded 3,291 antisemitic incidents in just the first three months, a 361 percent increase compared to the same period the year before. That figure was higher than the total number of antisemitic incidents tracked in any full year in the previous decade. This is not a coincidence. Anti-Israel movements do not stay contained to the political argument. They have a way of turning into something physical. They have a way of finding people like me on the street.

This is what I am thinking about this morning as I am sitting in traffic. I think about it when I drop my kids off at camp this morning knowing that they are going on a trip. I think about it when I pass someone on the sidewalk and wonder what they see when they look at me. Not because I assume the worst. But because the data keeps telling me I should take the question seriously.

So when I say that last night scared me, I want to be precise about the fear. It is not the kind of fear that sends you running. It is quieter and harder to shake. It is the fear of looking around a town you called home and wondering how many people in it have decided, consciously or not, that your existence as a Jew is unwelcome.