(Originally written on 9/2/2024)

I grew up as a typical millennial byproduct of the 1990s in a family of mixed religious backgrounds; though I have always identified as both ethnically and spiritually Jewish. I am married to a converted Jewish woman, and we are active in a Reform synagogue locally in Dallas, TX. We are continuing to navigate the ever-changing waters of married life and raising our 2-year-old son in what is becoming an increasingly upsetting world. And I know I’m not alone in this feeling because the Pew research polling data I’ve seen really backs me up in this regard.

The area where I grew up has more Jews than average at about 10% of the city population compared to the U.S. domestic total which sits at about 2.5%. I really experienced very little antisemitism in my youth. I can think of maybe one, possibly two outright incidents of antisemitic epithets thrown my way. Of course, as time goes on, additional incidents did happen, but I’d still characterize them as very infrequent. When they did occur, I made sure to forcefully assert myself.

In fact, when I think back to attending Hebrew school, I recall tales of Nazism (from firsthand experience) as told by my teachers to be…something of a relic. These firsthand stories were impactful for me to hear, but were mentally placed on the shelf of history. For me it was an abstraction. This was something that we discussed in a historical context; I could not fathom such events being relevant to my present-day lived experience.

I recall my teacher discussing how as a boy he was smuggled out of Poland on a cargo ship in a crate and he never saw his immediate family again. I recall an Israeli teacher of mine shouting at all of us, ‘sheket bevakasha,’ which means basically ‘shut up (and listen). My teacher was distraught and worried about her family back in Israel. Israel was undergoing the ‘Second Intifada,’ which (among many other things) included waves of suicide bombings in nightclubs, buses, restaurants, and other public places. It was a very deadly time, over 1,000 Israelis died in the early 2000s.

I recall a photo of a Palestinian man who held his hands steeped in blood out of a building window to a cheering crowd. Even then, the outright unadulterated joy that I could see on the man’s face with bloody hands, smiling ear to ear, was chilling. There was a literal lynch mob that tore two Israeli soldiers limb from limb because they’d taken the wrong turn traversing through Ramallah. For context, 20% of Israel’s population is Arab/Muslim but if two Jews go through Ramallah, they end up getting lynched.

Still, despite these early experiences, everything “antisemitism” was so far away from me personally. When it came to Nazis, it was emotional but mostly academic. When it came to Israel and/or Islamism and Jihad, I had no family in Israel that I knew of (turns out I do of course as DNA testing later became more widespread). I do have cousins who fled to Israel sometime after leaving one of Joseph Stalin’s gulags after his death in........

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