I’m carrying a legacy, and wearing a target

Recently, someone in a position of financial trust—someone who knows my Social Security number and has access to my family’s financial livelihood—shared blood libel about Israel on social media. I won’t repeat the content. I don’t want a phone call, or an apology, and I definitely don’t want the excuses. What this moment revealed was that someone with power over my life could share ancient propaganda against my people, dressed up in modern language, without realizing it.

I don’t believe he hates Jews. I believe he is uninformed and dangerously impressionable—the kind of person blood libel is designed to reach. He didn’t post out of malice, but because it was trending, and he never learned where this kind of propaganda leads.

But I inherited this lesson without any choice.

My grandparents were sent to Auschwitz because of people like him. Not ideologues—ordinary citizens who looked away and nodded along. People who didn’t know any better, and didn’t try to.

When I saw his post, something shifted. I understood that I had crossed into a new era of Jewish life in America. I am no longer just aware of antisemitism. I am now reorganizing my life around protecting myself from it. This isn’t the first time I’ve had to re-evaluate who is safe to be around.

After October 7, everything changed. Overnight, people I once hiked with—people who were friendly acquaintances, casual “activity partners”—became dangerous to be around. Not physically, but emotionally, spiritually. They became sources of suspicion—some through silence, others through sudden distance. But it wasn’t just silence. Some reposted and reshared anti-Israel propaganda, aligning themselves publicly with a cause they didn’t understand—a narrative designed to erase people like me. These weren’t calls for peace. They were declarations: pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel, anti-me.

By December 2023, I had one friend left. One.

That was the beginning of the shift. The moment I realized that trust—especially as a Jew—has to be earned in a much deeper way than I ever previously allowed for.
And now, after seeing someone I trusted with my financial future post modern blood libel, I’ve shifted again. I am not just cautious. I am building a life around caution. I am tailoring my entire existence to a survival strategy. I am doing what my great-grandparents once did in Hungary: living in preemptive defense.

The difference is, I know how their story ended. Despite all their caution and tailoring their lives for survival, they were still forced onto trains to Auschwitz. And that’s the terrifying truth I live with now: that even the best survival strategies sometimes aren’t enough. That knowledge lives in my body and shapes how I live.

So when I learned about the May 21 shooting—when Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim were murdered outside a Jewish museum in Washington, DC, by a man affiliated with an extremist, antisemitic organization—I didn’t process it as a distant act of violence. I processed it as confirmation. When someone spreads blood libel about Israel, they are attacking Jews. Maybe not always consciously, but ideologically the leap is shallow, and socially, it has become trendy. Yaron and Sarah weren’t killed in Israel or wearing IDF uniforms. They were simply at a Jewish site—and that was enough.

So now, once again, I am recalibrating. Not just emotionally, but practically, because more than ever I feel my identity is a target on my back.

A few days before the museum shooting, I had a conversation with some Jewish friends. They told me they don’t wear necklaces with Jewish symbols—not out of fear exactly, but out of quiet caution. Just in case.

I reminded them that blending in is an illusion. We may look like everyone else, but history has shown us—again and again—that Jewishness is always recognizable to those who want to see it. To the wrong person, in the wrong moment, any trace of Jewishness—or even perceived alliance—can be enough to make us a target. I encouraged them to be proud with me and reject the instinct to shrink. That’s how I was raised.

I was also raised on Holocaust stories—not just on Yom HaShoah, but in the ordinary rhythm of daily life. Caution wasn’t just taught—it was embedded in everything, and so was pride. My grandparents taught me both: be careful, but never hide.

And now, after May 21, I feel like I told my friends to walk into traffic. I’m caught in the whiplash between ancestral pride and inherited fear. My grandparents survived so I wouldn’t have to live like this. But if they were alive today, I don’t think they’d be surprised.

I’ve spent my life carrying the weight of stories meant to prepare me for a world I was told would never again exist. In the wake of betrayal, murder, and watching the past bleed into the present, I am walking through the world differently. Not just as a granddaughter of survivors, but as someone who finally understands what they survived.

What am I supposed to do with the parts of me that know how to be proud, when the world is telling me to hide?