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Is it time for ‘The Talk’ with my Jewish sons?

Pexels.com - Photo by Life Matters: https://www.pexels.com/photo/people-protesting-at-brooklyn-bridge-4613879/
I reached out to “J,” a classmate from Harvard Business School, in the summer of 2020. At that time, the US was being rocked by justified protests against police brutality in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. J is the CEO of a billion-dollar company, but as a Black man in America, he’s never too far from racist threats to his safety.
J told me he’d recently been pulled over by the police for driving a high-end Mercedes. The police thought the car had been stolen, because why else would a Black man be at the wheel? He and his family sat on the curb for nearly an hour as the police finally figured that he did, indeed, own the Benz.
After that, as J explained, it was time for “The Talk” with his sons. As happens in many Black families, parents feel compelled to sit their children down and explain that they have to be careful how they conduct themselves in public, especially around law enforcement. That is just a sad fact of life if you’re Black and live in this country.
Is it time for the Jewish version of “The Talk” with my sons, who attend yeshivos and wear black hats and tzitzis?
This conversation has been on my mind in the last few months. Is it time for the Jewish version of “The Talk” with my sons, who attend yeshivos and wear black hats and tzitzis? Even as anti-Israel and white supremacist threats ramp up, it would be alarmist to fear the kind of violent risk affecting J’s family. The night is young, though, and I have a bad feeling about what’s on the horizon.
I think back to my family’s version of “The Talk,” which I got from my mother in 1972. I was seven at the time. After the Palestinian-led terrorist massacre at the Munich Olympics, my mother, who grew up in London during the blitz, told me that if someone like Hitler came to power in the United States, we were to leave the country. I rolled my eyes. It would be five more years until I could have retorted with Woody Allen’s classic quip from Annie Hall, “If you’ll excuse me, I have an appointment back on planet Earth,” but I recall thinking that she was exaggerating the risks we faced.
When my mother was seven, she watched her father cope with his failure to convince his Polish cousins to move to England. They hadn’t listened, and they were murdered by the Nazis.
What I didn’t appreciate is that when my mother was seven, she watched her father cope with his failure to convince his Polish cousins to move to England. They hadn’t listened, and they were murdered by the Nazis. That sort of thing stays with you.
My life was largely free from antisemitism until 2017, when we watched Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia march with torches and swastika flags while shouting “Jews will not replace us.” Antisemitism was there, but it was mild and muted.
I’m lucky. My experiences of people disliking Jews came out in subtle interactions, such as being weirdly ignored in certain situations or being informed, usually obliquely, about little force fields and invisible fences in American society that Jews simply didn’t cross. However, if that was as bad as it would get, my life was a dream of Jewish prosperity and security.
There’s a new, decidedly toxic vibe when we’re out in public. Hate stares abound. Airline employees won’t look you in the eye.
Things feel different now. There’s a new, decidedly toxic vibe when we’re out in public. Hate stares abound. Airline employees won’t look you in the eye. You get threatening looks from men driving pickup trucks with bumper stickers of Pepe the Frog or Celtic crosses, both symbols of white supremacy. Twenty-somethings glare at you for being “complicit in genocide.” I think twice about going to certain places for fear of being harassed for being either a Zionist or an enemy of the white race.
Still, are we going to get to a point where Jews have to fear from law enforcement and violent antisemites? It may seem farfetched, but I fear we are closer to that moment than we realize. Escalating threats are coming from multiple directions. With Israel at war, we are witnessing increased tolerance for anti-Jewish intimidation, vandalism, and violence.
On the Harvard Business School campus where J and I once drank beer and joked about our professors, Jewish students are being roughed up by their classmates for supporting Israel, egged on by professional agitators paid by Iran. The school has said all the right things, but the ugly reality of the situation lingers, and will almost certainly return in the Fall.
Is it crazy to predict that we will soon have “anti-Zionist” policies creeping into legislation and public policy, or a tolerance for discrimination in areas like banking and education? It feels as if it’s only a matter of time. Already, six in ten young Americans are anti-Israel. That number will only go up as pro-Palestinian groups push to have anti-Israel curricula implemented at the elementary and high school levels. The effects are already noticeable. As of today, if you seek healthcare in at least one major San Francisco hospital, your nurse might be wearing a “Free Palestine” lapel pin.
Alternatively, American Jews are staring down the prospect of a political party coming to power that regularly describes Israel as “Your country,” invoking the classic antisemitic slur of dual loyalty. This party divides American Jews into “good” or “bad” categories based on our perceived support for their Christian nationalist agenda. If you are familiar with history, this sort of thing doesn’t usually end well for the Jews, especially when the party endorses politicians who speak about “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood of our country” and promise to have the US military round up immigrants and political opponents and put them in deportation camps. Sound familiar?
Will Jews be able to trust American law enforcement to protect them? Today, the answer is a resounding “yes.” What tomorrow will look like is not clear, and certain signals are not very encouraging on that front. It’s an open secret that many (too many) American police officers either have an affinity for white supremacism or are outright members of neo nazi groups. Some have Nazi tattoos.
Consider what Rabbi Avigdor Miller said about such risks in the 1980s. Regarding the potential for serious antisemitism in America, he said, “So you say, ‘Well, In America the Constitution is our rock and salvation.’ Forget about that. All we need are some judges who will interpret the Constitution according to their own ideals.” We are there already.
Rabbi Miller also said, “Chas veshalom It (America) will turn into a fascist country. Finally the gentiles in the Midwest will get so disgusted with the liberals that they make a revolution and what will be then. America, fascist country, chas veshalom?! Who knows what kind of gas chambers can be here?”
So, yes, maybe it’s time for “The Talk,” or at least some sort of talk with my sons. We’ve had baby versions of it—cautions about watching where you go and whom you talk to in public, but I feel more serious warnings are required to keep everyone safe.
It may turn out not to be necessary. They have eyes. They can tell that American society is becoming more hostile to Jews. But, do they really understand the depth of the danger? It’s hard to parse the facts on the ground without sounding paranoid, but I feel I must share my concerns with them. I want them to be safe. The assumptions that American Jews have had for decades—that we’re free to go where we want and not worry about violence or intimidation—may start to fall apart sooner than we imagine.
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