Growing up, I was told that Clark was an “Ellis Island name.” The story went like this: when my great-grandparents arrived in New York from Eastern Europe in the early 1910s, the immigration officers could not pronounce their Jewish surname—too foreign, too many consonants—so they assigned them something simpler. Something American. Clark.

I never questioned it. A lot of Jewish kids I knew growing up had similar stories. Smiths and Greens and Millers—names that sounded like they had been in this country since the Mayflower, all supposedly handed out by overwhelmed clerks at Ellis Island who could not be bothered to learn how to spell a name from the old country. It was a cute story. An origin myth for American Jews. We came here with nothing and they couldn’t even let us keep our names.

It was also not true.

After October 7, I went into what I can only describe as a deep-dive hyperfixation—reading everything I could about the history and sociology of antisemitism, trying to build a framework to make sense of the world I was suddenly seeing around me. One of the books that hit me hardest was Dara Horn’s People Love Dead Jews, which I cannot recommend strongly enough to every person, Jewish or otherwise, reading this.[1] And it was there that I learned the truth about Ellis Island names.

They were not a thing. Immigration officers did not rename anyone. Our great-grandparents were not stripped of their identities at the door—they stripped them off voluntarily. They changed their own names, deliberately and intentionally, to avoid the scrutiny they knew would come from being visibly Jewish in a new country. They wanted to leave the pogroms and the persecution behind them. They wanted a fresh start. And then they told their children and grandchildren a more comfortable version of the story—because the truth was harder to say out loud.

The truth was that they wanted the option to move through the world as something other than a Jew. Because it was easier. Because it was safer. Because they had learned, through generations of brutal experience, that being identifiably Jewish came with a cost.

I understand why they did it. But I have come to believe it taught us exactly the wrong lesson.

What Was Lost at the Door

When my great-grandparents discarded their “clockable” Jewishness at Ellis Island, they did not just leave behind a surname. They left behind a set of survival lessons—hard-won, passed down through centuries—that never made it to my generation.

My grandfather spoke fluent Yiddish. His early years would have been unrecognizable to me, a 90s kid growing up in the suburbs of Florida. But he never spoke of it. He never told me what his parents had fled, or about the pogroms they’d left behind. He never talked about what life had been like for Jews in Eastern Europe, or what it was like for a family to arrive at Ellis Island and decide to become someone new. To me, he was just a dentist from Rochester, New York. A normal guy. We were Jews, sure, but that did not mean anything particularly significant—it meant eight nights of presents in December and an epic bat mitzvah party to plan.

I wish now, more than I can say, that I had asked the questions I never thought to ask. What did your parents tell you? What did they carry with them? What do you want me to know?

But my grandparents did not offer that information, and I think I understand why. They believed, with the full force of American optimism, that antisemitism was a thing of the past. They were in America. Their children were American. The old hatreds could not follow them here. Theirs was a very Fievel Goes West kind of optimism—the sort that only really holds up in animated children’s movies, where the mice always make it to the frontier and the cats get their comeuppance by the final musical number. They thought they had done the hard part already. They thought the ending was happy. They thought there was no need to warn us about something they believed was extinct.

The Instinct to Stay Quiet

What our grandparents and great-grandparents passed down instead—without meaning to, without saying it out loud—was an instinct. An instinct to assimilate. To blend in. To not draw attention. To handle things quietly. To not make waves.

It is an instinct I recognize in almost every Jewish person I talk to about what they are experiencing right now. Since October 7, I have spoken with Jewish professionals who have been subjected to loyalty tests at work, who have had their impartiality questioned because of their ethnicity, who have been treated differently in ways they can feel but struggle to name. And the overwhelming impulse, in almost every case, is to stay quiet. To let it go. To not be the person who makes it a thing.

I understand that impulse—it is practically encoded in our DNA at this point. Generations of Jews learned that visibility meant danger, and they taught their children accordingly. Keep your head down. Do not give them a reason. Be grateful for what you have.

But that instinct, however well-intentioned, is doing us real harm. When we stay quiet about discrimination, we do not make it go away—we make it invisible. We make it easier for employers, institutions, and colleagues to believe that what they are doing is acceptable, because no one ever told them otherwise. We let the people around us believe that antisemitism is a relic of the past—because we are acting as though it is.

Our great-grandparents changed their names because they thought antisemitism was something they could leave behind at the border. We stay silent because we have inherited that same hope—that if we just do not make waves, it will pass.

It will not pass. It has never passed.

Why This Moment Is Different

Here is what I have learned through my work as a civil rights attorney, and what I wish I could go back and tell my grandfather: silence does not protect us. It never has. The only thing that has ever changed how Jews are treated is insisting — loudly, publicly, and with consequences — that mistreatment is unacceptable.

That means naming what is happening. Not in whispered conversations with other Jews, but openly — in workplaces, in institutions, in public. It means understanding that the loyalty tests, the double standards, the quiet exclusions that so many Jewish people are experiencing right now are not just uncomfortable. They are discrimination. And they are illegal under laws that already exist — laws like Title VII and Section 1981 that were designed to protect exactly these rights.

It means being willing to make waves.

I did not grow up thinking I would become a civil rights attorney for the Jewish community. I spent the first part of my career on the other side, and it took October 7 — and the education that followed — to understand that this was the work I was supposed to be doing. But I am far from alone in that realization. There is an entire ecosystem of Jewish civil rights organizations, legal aid groups, and pro bono attorneys doing this work — and they exist because individual Jewish people should not have to fight these battles alone, and should not have to choose between their livelihood and their dignity.

The legal infrastructure is there. It only works if people are willing to use it. And people will only use it if they stop believing that staying quiet is the safer option.

Our great-grandparents changed their names. They stopped speaking Yiddish. They buried the stories of the pogroms and never passed them on. They did all of this because they loved us and because they believed, with all their hearts, that they were protecting us from a world that no longer existed.

The greatest tragedy is not that they were wrong. It is that by hiding what they knew, they left us unprepared for the moment we are living through right now.

We do not have to repeat that mistake. We can learn our history. We can teach it to our children. We can stop downplaying our experiences to make other people comfortable. We can stop changing who we are to avoid scrutiny. And when we are treated differently because of our Jewish identity—at work, in our communities, in public life—we can refuse to let it slide.

Not because making waves is easy. But because the alternative—the slow, quiet erasure of who we are—is so much worse.

My last name is Clark. It is an American name. It is also a Jewish name—because I am a Jew, and I am done pretending that is not the most important thing about it.

[1]Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present (W.W. Norton & Company, 2021). Horn debunks the Ellis Island name-change myth, explaining that immigration inspectors worked from ship manifests prepared at the port of origin and had no authority or reason to alter passengers’ names. Name changes were initiated by the immigrants themselves.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)