Epilogue of Melat Kiros’s Victory

As a Jew in Colorado right now I am still afraid.

Last week after Melat Kiros won the Democratic nomination for Colorado’s 1st Congressional District, I shared my fears on social media and wrote an op-ed on my Times of Israel blog . I expressed what her victory meant to me as a visibly Jewish Coloradan.

Kiros is the candidate who called the slaughter of 1,200 of my brothers and sisters on October 7 “inevitable.” She failed to call our local firebombing an act of antisemitism. In a district as blue as this one, her nomination all but guarantees she will be my next representative in Congress.

I wrote that my fear was not really about her. Politicians can be misguided, and history is full of them. My fear was about the people who heard everything she said, understood exactly what they were endorsing, and voted for her because of it. My neighbors. The person behind me in the checkout line. My doctor. Do they secretly hate me and my People?

Anti-Israel sentiment does not stay neatly contained within the borders of a foreign policy debate. After October 7, the ADL recorded 3,291 antisemitic incidents in just three months, a 361 percent increase over the same period the year before. Here in Colorado, we watched a firebombing on Pearl Street in Boulder take the life of Karen Diamond, an 82-year-old Jewish woman, and injure more than a dozen others. And I expressed that as an Orthodox Jew and a rabbi, when I walk out my door with a yarmulka on my head, there is nothing ambiguous about who I am, and that lately, that feels a little more scary.

I did not expect what came next. More than a thousand messages, most of them hostile, and nearly all of them making the same argument. Over and over, in ugly and uglier variations, people told me: don’t worry about it. Nobody has a problem with Jews. People are only against Israel.

Less than 24 hours after those dismissive messages were written, I was walking home from synagogue when a car slowed beside me. The driver rolled down the window, yelled “dirty Jew,” and drove off.

A thousand people assured me that the anger in the air was political, not personal. That it was aimed at a government, not a People. That my fear was a misreading of the moment. And before a single day had passed, I was targeted not for my beliefs but for who I am.

The driver did not pull over to ask what I thought of geopolitical issues. He didn’t ask my opinion of Netanyahu. He did not inquire about my views on the war, on settlement policy, on the judiciary, or on anything else. I was not wearing an IDF shirt. I was not carrying an Israeli flag or a sign or a slogan.

He knew nothing about me, and he did not need to.

My crime was walking down a public street with a yarmulka on my head.

This is the part the thousand messages missed. Hatred shouted from a car window does not come with a political questionnaire. The data after every flare-up in the Middle East shows the same pattern: attacks on Jews spike in cities thousands of miles from the conflict.

When anti-Israel sentiment reaches a boil, it does not stay neatly contained within the neat box of a foreign policy debate. It spills onto a sidewalk in Denver and lands on the nearest identifiable Jew.

It always has.

And often it’s not just nasty words spewed out of car windows. Next time, who knows if the car will swerve and run me over, or if instead of hurling insults the driver will fire bullets.

And if I needed any further confirmation, it arrived in my inbox alongside the messages telling me my fear was misplaced. One email read, “Free America from the Jews.” Not from Israel. Not from Zionists. Not from any policy or politician. From the Jews. It sat there, in plain text, on my screen, the same screen that keeps dinging with messages insisting that antisemitism is not the issue.

Let me repeat what I have said many times, because clearly it still needs saying. Criticism of Israel is legitimate. Israelis themselves are the country’s fiercest critics, and a democracy invites criticism. If your objection is to a policy, a party, or a prime minister, that is politics, and in a free country you are permitted to air your grievances. But when the objection is shouted at a rabbi walking home from synagogue, at a man who was never asked a single question about his views, it has stopped being politics. It has become yet another example of the world’s oldest hatred.

So this postscript is not an argument about the Middle East. It is a simple request. A Jew in your community said, I am afraid. A thousand voices insisted that the fear is not real. Before the day was out, the fear introduced itself. In person, from a car window, in three words.

The driver kept driving. I kept walking. I made it home safely, albeit a little shaken up, and returned for afternoon services a few hours later. Yarmulka still on my head.

But the next time someone tells you they are afraid, before you rush to explain why they shouldn’t be, consider the possibility that they understand their situation better than you do. I did not have to wait long to be proven right.

I wish, more than anything, that I had been wrong.