I am a state senator in Montana. A Democrat in a red state. I have spent my career building bridges — working on public health equity with Indigenous communities, partnering with First Ladies Bush, Obama, Biden and more on global health initiatives, building bipartisan coalitions that have garnered attention from The New York Times and CBS National News. I believe in finding common ground, in compromise, in tomorrow being better than today.

And for over two years, I waited for tomorrow.

I waited for people to see that their proclaimed opposition to US aid to Israel has unleashed unbridled antisemitism and Jew-hatred worldwide. That the campus protests, the social media campaigns, the “anti-Zionist” movements — whatever their stated intentions — have given permission for the world’s oldest hate to explode. I’ve been waiting for them to connect their activism to the attacks on Jews in Paris, Toronto, Melbourne, Manchester, Jackson.

Like every generation before, they have not seen it.

And like Diaspora Jews throughout history — including my own grandparents in 1930s Germany and Austria — I kept waiting for tomorrow. For people to wake up, to see the pattern, to make the connection.

But as an elected official, I’ve learned that what happens isn’t inevitable, but the results of choices that we make collectively. Which means that we can choose differently.

My grandparents waited for tomorrow too. I thought I would be different. This is me saying: I’m done waiting. Tomorrow isn’t coming.

When it comes to fighting unchecked antisemitism, there is only today.

The Stories They Told Me

My grandparents left Germany and Austria, respectively, in the nick of time.

My grandmother, Johanna, was born in 1908 into a well-established Jewish family in Bingen, Germany. Her father owned Ferdinand Seligmann & Söhne, a timber, coal, and building materials business on the Rhine that had been in the family for generations. They even engaged in timber rafting on the Rhine – photos show logs piled by the Rhein-Nahe corner near their lumber yard. Johanna was academically brilliant. After the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws were passed and she was expelled from her German university, she did not give up, and pushed to earn her PhD in political history from the University of Bern in Switzerland, writing a dissertation on 19th-century German diplomacy, even as Germany’s anti-Jewish laws were making her and her family’s lives untenable.

My grandfather, Alfred, was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1910. His father died of tuberculosis after fighting for the Austro-Hungarian Empire in World War I—part of a generation of Jews who had served loyally, only to face growing antisemitism afterwards. Alfred earned his JD from the University of Vienna in 1934. He attended Sigmund Freud’s invitation-only Wednesday Society. He held a government position in Vienna. He built a career, a life, a future.

And then, piece by piece, they each had their lives taken away.

The Seligmann family’s generations-old business was forced to close. Their homes were ransacked. My grandmother finally found work teaching at Jewish schools in Germany. My grandfather watched his Austrian government position disappear and his legal career end. Jews were systematically stripped of civil rights, of livelihoods, of dignity.

Friends stopped speaking to them. My grandfather’s mentor — a man who had been like a father to him — crossed the street when he saw my grandfather coming. Just looked away. My grandfather told me it was one of the most heartbreaking........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)