This is what our grandparents warned us about.
I now realize what it was like to be my ancestors, feeling public opinion building against the Jews, powerless to stop it. We thought we were free, but maybe we have always lived in the "shtetl."
Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.
This is a guest essay written by Hana Raviyt Schank, a writer and fourth-generation Brooklyn Jew.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Immediately after October 7th, before Israel responded to Hamas’ brutal declaration of war, the war on Western Jews grew more visible.
The first line of attack was social media. Overnight, my feed transformed from babies, cocktails, and beaches to flippant Jew-hatred, shared exclusively by people who had never set foot in the Middle East.
When two fellow Brooklynites shared antisemitic posts, I felt an idiotic flash of superiority. I knew something they did not, based on my lived experience. Lived experience was progressive currency, and I was flush with the Jewish kind. I still stubbornly believed my experience was important, despite my workplace’s insistence that it was not.
I messaged my friends: “I grew up with this conflict. It’s very complicated and messy and long. You do not know enough to post about it. If you would like to learn more, I am happy to talk or meet for coffee.”
But antisemitism is a conspiracy theory which states that Jews are liars. Thus, either my lived experience was a lie, or I was lying about it.
Like a Jew.
If someone told me that I had shared something racist, I would take it down immediately and educate myself so I never posted something offensive ever again until the end of time. But as all Jews now know, this is not what happens when you tell someone that they have shared something hurtful and antisemitic. Instead the offending party always responds, “No I didn’t.”
The next line of attack materialized as organizational statements. I was walking the trails in Prospect Park — I walked miles in the park that fall, propelled by an epigenetic need to keep moving. I did not know yet that Jewish trauma runs through my veins, or that Jews all over the world were experiencing the same feeling — the creeping fear of “Here we go again…” paired with a sense of “Are you f*cking kidding me?!”
In each and every generation they will rise up against us. Does it have to be now? Because I already have a lot on my plate, to be honest…
Anyway, when the organizational statements hit their targets, I was deep inside the park. My phone exploded with Jews who were very extremely upset about statements, or the lack thereof. Left-leaning organizations had badly miscalculated after George Floyd’s murder in 2020, each attempting to outdo the other by voicing their grief and boldly declaring that White policemen murdering African Americans was BAD. Super bad. Don’t do it, America.
Now, after receiving news of 1,200 incomprehensibly gruesome murders in Israel on a single day, the same organizations were receiving an object lesson in antisemitism and finding themselves to be not as bold as they thought. Since Jews are rich and control everything, maybe a little Jewish murder is okay? Maybe they even brought it on themselves and kinda deserve some murder?
The first call came from a close-in-age Boston cousin. We never spoke on the phone unless someone is getting married or pregnant, dying or dead.
“What’s up?” I asked, mentally running through a list of possible candidates for death or birth.
“Just canceled my American Psychological Association over their Israel statement,” said Boston Cousin, “and how are you?”
The American Psychological Association’s first statement acknowledged the devastation of Hamas’ attacks and offered sympathy to Israelis, Jews, and anyone with Israel connections. Then they retracted the statement. They were no longer sorry that 1,200 people in Israel got themselves massacred.
Now, they were worried about the most vulnerable people in the region. Confusingly, those were not the people who had been raped to death or taken hostage from their kitchen, because those people were mostly Jews (who control the banks and the media and love genocide and are orchestrating a new world order, et cetera).
Boston Cousin and I mulled what Sigmund Freud would think.
Then, the Washington, D.C. Jews called. Jewish women and parents were rare at my D.C. jobs. (Wondering who runs the United States? Visit D.C. and find out! Spoiler alert: not the Jews.)
When we encountered each other, we performed a sort of Jewish mating dance, mentioning that we would be out for dates that were weird to everyone else in the room; dropping code words like New Jersey, New York University, and putz; or a mention of a kid’s Bar Mitzvah here, a lack of Christmas plans there.
We exchanged weary looks in meetings that said: “I see you, fellow Jewish parent in the halls of power.” If we grabbed a minute alone, we exchanged Jewish digits: “Do you belong to a shul, are your kids in Hebrew School, let’s discuss but never organize a Shabbat dinner because D.C. hours are insane, and holy sh*t what a trip it is to be Jewish in America…”
“Hello, my sister,” I said to D.C. Jew. We had not spoken in over a year due to a perceived work slight while I was working at the think tank “New America.” None of that mattered now.
She laughed, then hyperventilated into sobs: “They aren’t putting out a statement.”
I inhaled deeply, trying to suck in the deep greens of Prospect Park.
This was not surprising news. “New America” receives significant funding from the Ford Foundation.1 Before “New America” blocked me on LinkedIn for calling them antisemites, they used to send me to a training or roundtable in Ford’s Manhattan office. I knew the history of Ford. With every step I took down the glassed-in, goyishe kop hallways, I felt Henry Ford rotate in his grave.
Henry was revolted that one penny of his money was in the pockets of a Jew, let alone a whole paycheck. Specifically, my paycheck. So he rolled whenever I stepped in the building. From the minute I walked in the door, through the catered lunch and the meaningful closing words about social justice in America, I could not wait to get out of there. The Ford Foundation’s CEO was just a few months away from his own useless, culturally appropriated statement.2
Anyhoo, “New America” was not putting out a statement. Its CEO, Anne Marie Slaughter, said she had emailed her Jewish friends to make sure they were okay. Just not her few remaining Jewish employees. D.C. Jew and I puzzled over this statement. Did she really have Jewish friends? If so, why did they deserve sympathy, but not her employees?
D.C. Jew hung up, heading to DEI training. The think tank’s all-consuming equity journey had intensified since my departure.
“They’re still on that equity journey?” I screamed. “Tell them it’s not working!”
The trees in Prospect Park wondered what I could possibly be so angry about on a glorious Fall day. “Shouldn’t the American Psychological Association, or Secretary Hillary Clinton’s former advisor at the U.S. State Department, be more aware of the psychological and political implications of antisemitism?” I asked the forest.
On Marathon Sunday, epigenetic terror propelled me to a house on the New York City Marathon route where our friends lived. The Marathon Drinkers’ windows were plastered with Israeli hostage signs — we were in the full throes of the hostage sign war, before Jews in Brooklyn discovered we were outnumbered, and that no one could stomach looking at Jewish hostages. Not even baby Jewish hostages. The Marathon Drinkers worried the signs might get the house vandalized, but they were going to keep them up, Jew-haters be damned.
Marathon Sunday is Brooklyn’s best Sunday of the year — a public celebration of the weirdness that makes New York unique. The runners are only 5K into the race as they pass through my neighborhood, still plucky and excited as they stream by, while the good people of Brooklyn hand out bananas and water, or offer use of their bathroom. The Marathon Drinkers and I screamed words of encouragement to the runner based on what they were wearing, or the words they had taped to their chests.
“Go Diego!” We screeched. “Let’s go, FDNY! Woohoo Donna! You got this, Jenny! Yeah Team F*ck Cancer, bring it!”
Then a White woman ran by with “FREE GAZA” taped to her shirt, and the joy drained from the day. I left the marathon and kept moving, my need to be with Jews now insatiable. I needed more people with whom I could exchange looks that said, “Is this what our grandparents warned us about?”
Next, I stopped by my hairdresser. Gabriel is an Orthodox Russian Jew who opened a salon in Park Slope because he heard that is where the rich Jews live. He lives in an Orthodox community on Staten Island. He confided in me once that his rabbi told him Park Slope Jews are not real Jews. I was raised in a half-Orthodox, half-atheist family, so I am familiar with this take.
For years, Gabriel cut the whole family’s hair, and over time we’d developed a mutually beneficial relationship. As my kids outgrew their clothing and toys, we passed them down to Gabriel, whose own brood was growing. And when my kids began asking for more time-consuming hair cuts, Gabriel never charged the full amount.
But during the pandemic, we found ourselves on opposite ends of the political spectrum. After he told me he feared the COVID vaccine because it could alter your DNA, I stopped getting my hair cut. Once the imminent danger of having an unvaccinated hairdresser passed, my kids returned but I did not. My locks had grown to ridiculous dimensions both horizontally and vertically, as Jewish hair does. Now, our political differences no longer felt important.
I watched as Gabriel finished trimming the hair on a transgender teen, instructing them how to get the best bounce for their glossy curls. Gabriel and I exchanged the sad smile American Jews now use as a greeting. After the teen left, it was my turn in Gabriel’s chair.
We talked about the attacks, and the local antisemitism that felt like a noose tightening. Gabriel’s wife is Israeli, as is some of his own family. I asked after them. Everyone is okay, he said, but they are all being called into army service. His cousins, too, are back in the IDF.
“Did you see that video of the EL AL flight that landed in Dagestan?”
Earlier, a video of a Russian mob of storming the airport in search of Jews flew around social media. One person held a sign reading, “There is no place for child killers in Dagestan.”
“That’s where I’m from,” Gabriel said. “You see why I had to leave.”
I knew Gabriel was from a far-flung part of Russia and spoke a language that was neither Hebrew nor Yiddish nor Russian, but had never cared exactly where that far-flung part was.
“Where is Dagestan?” I asked. Gabriel rattled off a list of other places that I had heard of, but could not locate on a map: the Caucasus, the Caspian Sea, Azerbaijan.
“How long has your family been in Dagestan?” I asked.
“Forever.”
Gabriel is a Mountain Jew. His family reached Dagestan from Israel in the 7th century. They speak a Persian dialect called Judeo-Tat. We sat in the shared silence of people who have had to run for their lives before, and might have to do it again.
‘This is why we need to pass laws now to keep them out,” said Gabriel.
“Who?” I asked.
“Muslims,” he said. “They’re all terrorists. You see what that congresswoman from Michigan said, the Palestinian woman — ‘from the River to the Sea.’ They’re all antisemites and they won’t rest until they kill all the Jews. So we have to pass the law now.”
“Is that what they’re saying on Fox News?” I asked.
I wanted to explain to Gabriel that this is America, not Dagestan. Muslims and Arabs are not coming to America to kill Jews. Or … are they? Is America still America?
“The real problem,” I opined, “is the White ‘Free Gaza’ people.”
“Who are these people?” asked Gabriel.
I laughed.
“No, I am serious,” he sputtered. “Who are they? What do they think Hamas is? Did you see that gay boy whose hair I was cutting when you came in?”
He meant the six-foot tall transgender girl who loped out of the salon wearing a pink plastic belt. It seemed like the wrong moment to correct Gabriel’s misgendering.
“You think Hamas would let that boy walk around like that? They would chop his head off.”
Is this who’s going to live in my shtetl?3 Is it going to be me, the xenophobic misgendering barber, and the Marathon Drinkers — just because we are all Jews?
A few weeks earlier, I had dropped off my 85-year-old Holocaust-survivor cousin for a solo cruise to England. In the ride to the cruise terminal, we chatted about the toxic soup of my Jewish upbringing. Some of the family was Orthodox, the other hated religion, and almost everyone was an atheist — especially the ones who had survived Auschwitz.
I told my cousin that, in my 20s, I decided not to be Jewish. I was about to explain how I eventually accepted my Jewishness and was now raising my kids with Jewish joy — when he interrupted, syllables sharp with the wisdom and terror of surviving extermination.
“You don’t get to decide,” he said. “You are Jewish.”
And so is Gabriel and so are the Marathon Drinkers and so is Boston Cousin and so are the D.C. Jews. And when the next generation rises up against us, no one will care if we were friends or which side of the political spectrum we fell on. To them, we are all just Jews.
We no longer live in shtetlach, because Western policy lets Jews live anywhere. But we have always clustered in Jewish sections of cities, near synagogues or cultural centers, where we are less likely to be “othered” on a daily basis. I tried living in many other parts of the United States, but this country is really racist. And Christian.
So, I chose to make a home in the most Jewish part of the most Jewish city in America, which also happens to be where my family has lived for more than 100 years. Now, even Brooklyn feels unsafe.
But in talking with other Jews, I began to build my shtetl. I do not have a choice about who lives there with me. I do not have the luxury of avoiding people with opposing political views. I understand now what it was like to be my great-grandparents, feeling public opinion building against the Jews, powerless to stop it. I know what it means to watch your homeland turn against you.
In the year since, my shtetl has grown. With no barriers to friendships beyond antisemitism, my world stopped shrinking and blossomed. I have built friendships with former Jewish colleagues across the country. I worked on my synagogue’s garden in the rain, clustering with other sodden, muddy Jews taking our feelings out on roots and dirt. We laughed about accidentally hitting a buried Torah, and swapped stories about time spent in Israel. Everyone was named Ellen or Michael. It felt like home.
I joined my synagogue’s choir, which I never had the time or inclination to investigate before — too Jewish and full of old people. Now, it is exactly the right amount of Jewish, and an intergenerational Jewish friendship sounds fan-f*cking-tastic.
And thanks to this platform, Jews across the country have raised their hands and said, “I see you, I feel what you feel, and we are in this together.” It is the most wonderful and terrifying feeling in the world. We thought we were free, but perhaps we have always lived in the shtetl.
Recently, I passed the Chabad4 in the Bowery. Chabad types and secular Jews do not usually get along. Secular Jews think Chabad types are too Jewish, cultish, and going to get us all killed. (They are the most routinely attacked and brutalized for being Jewish.5) And Chabad types think secular Jews are not real Jews.
The street was closed to traffic for the celebration, and people were singing and dancing with a Torah. I stopped to savor the moment of freewheeling Jewish joy.
“Are you Jewish?” asked a Chabadnik. If you live in New York, you have definitely been asked this question by a Chabadnik.
I began to move away, but my Jewish star necklace caught the light, and also, maybe dancing with a Torah was what I needed right now? Just a little Torah dancing before my dinner celebrating a progressive policy shop? I had never danced with or around a Torah. Was it time to start?
“I am. Is it Simchat Torah?” I have been paying more attention to which holiday is when, lately, and participating in more of them.
He nodded, then invited me to dance. On the women’s side.
“I have my own shul,” I said. (Chabadniks do not usually care if you have your own shul, because it is the wrong kind of shul, as opposed to their shul, which is the right kind of shul.)
“Wonderful!” he said. He saw my shul and recognized its Jewishness. We stood together for a moment on the street, two Jews who did not get to decide whether we wanted to be Jews.
“Chag sameach6,” I said, then walked across the East Village to dinner.
Mr. Chabadnik and I lived in the same shtetl, now, where some Jews danced in the streets, some danced in a synagogue, and some did not dance at all. We all just have to get along. What other choice do we have?
“The Ford Foundation Carries on the Legacy of Its Namesake.” Tablet.
“Rejecting the Rising Tide of Antisemitism.” Ford Foundation.
A small Jewish town or village in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust (“shtetl” is Yiddish and means “little town”)
Belonging to the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) branch of Orthodox Judaism, Chabad is one of the world's best-known Hasidic movements, as well as one of the largest Jewish religious organizations.
“Audit of Antisemitic Incidents 2023.” ADL.
Hebrew for “Happy Holiday”
I want you to know that there are a small but passionate and loyal minority of non-Jews -- mainly among Evangelical Christians -- who are taking a stand with you, and for Israel, regardless of the cost. Sometimes we may seem invisible to you because we don't usually live in big city centres, and too often there is a cultural divide between us... But we do identify and feel a close connection with Jews who still believe in God and who are not so isolated from mainstream society that they reject friendship with non-Jews. And we do support Israel and all that entails.
In the past few decades, we have also been maligned and "othered" by the Woke Left, who are now attacking you! So we (at least those of us who are unafraid of rejection) want to come alongside and stand with you however we can.
Attending and supporting the Jewish-sponsored pro-Israel rallies and events in Vancouver has helped us feel not quite so helpless... and the warmth, appreciation and acceptance we've felt there has been such an encouragement to us!
I don’t understand her play on Chabad. Every Chabad family and Shaliach I know welcome all Jews at every level of knowledge and practice. I’ve never experienced them feeling “their shul is better.” Rather they celebrate that you go to shul. And they’ll bring you as close to observance as you care to travel and celebrate that as well.