Jew-ish
The lodge at Mammoth was packed the way it always is on a holiday weekend. Everyone in our group was crammed into the food court, trying to find a table, shuffling past people who weren't moving. And one of my friends, trying to say that everyone around us was slow and clueless, said something like: "It's a bunch of fucking Jews in here."
Everyone laughed. He wasn't making a political statement. He wasn't thinking about Israel or Palestine. He was reaching for a word that meant stupid, lesser, bad, and the word he reached for was "Jew."
Since October 7th, the shift has been impossible to ignore. Antisemitism has always existed, but it used to live mostly in the margins, in the dark corners of the internet, in mutually agreed-upon lunatics chanting "Jews will not replace us" through the streets of Charlottesville. What's changed is how comfortable it has become in the open. The jokes are louder now, the language more casual, the spaces where it shows up less and less surprising. It has seeped into the everyday in a way that feels new.
Every day on my lunch walk, I pass one of those green utility boxes on the sidewalk. Someone has drawn a swastika on it in black sharpie and written "kill the Jews" underneath. It's been there for months.
And it's not just what I'm witnessing in my own small world. On December 14th, 2025, two gunmen opened fire on a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney, killing fifteen people. It was the deadliest antisemitic attack in Australian history. Synagogues have been set on fire. People have been stabbed. The ADL documented over nine thousand antisemitic incidents in the United States in 2024 alone, a nearly tenfold increase over the past decade. The people these numbers describe can feel the acceleration.
For most of my life, I didn't want to be Jewish at all.
Growing up, it felt like a liability. Something that set me apart in ways I couldn't control and didn't want to explain. I got the nose jokes. The money jokes. The kind of antisemitism that felt almost quaint, like it had been grandfathered into the category of acceptable humor, the kind everyone agreed you were supposed to be able to take. And I took it. I laughed along, or at least I didn't react, and over time the two became indistinguishable. I kept my distance from the identity itself, never engaging with it more than I had to. I wasn't religious. I didn't go to synagogue. If someone asked, I'd confirm it and move on, but I never lingered.
What I felt, I think, was the shame of being other. I didn't know enough about Judaism to feel anything more precise than that. Just the low-grade, persistent discomfort of being something that made people look at you a little differently, even if only for a second. And at that age, a second is enough.
My grandfather is a Holocaust survivor. He and his family of four hid for nearly two years in a hole no larger than 6x6ft. He's in his nineties now, part of the last living generation who survived the Holocaust firsthand. When his generation is gone, there will be no one left who lived it.
He has a quote I carry with me. I'm paraphrasing, but the core of it is this: if the world had wanted to stop the Holocaust, it could have. But the world didn't care. So next go around, it's on us to make sure the world cares.
I used to hear that and understand it historically. Now I hear it and feel it pressing against the present.
The conditions my grandfather warned about, the ones he recognized because he lived inside them, have echoes now, and they are measurable. A Claims Conference survey found that 63% of American millennials and Gen Z did not know that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. 11% believed that Jews themselves caused it. 10% denied it happened or said they weren't sure.
My grandfather is still alive, and a growing share of the generation that will outlive him doubts that what happened to him was real.
I feel pulled toward my Jewishness in a way I never have before, and it isn't faith doing the pulling. It's responsibility. If my grandfather's generation won't be here much longer to tell the story, then someone has to carry it forward. I didn't earn this history or suffer for it, and I spent most of my life keeping it at arm's length. But it's mine whether I claim it or not, and the older I get, and the more I watch the world forget, the more I feel the weight of that.
I even feel compelled to go to a synagogue, which is strange because I don't even like religion. It has nothing to do with prayer or faith. Something in me just wants to walk through the door and be there, to show up and be counted among other Jewish people in a room. But I haven't done it, because at some point between my grandfather's generation and mine, sitting in a room with other Jews became the kind of thing that requires armed guards at the door.
I'm just trying to be honest about what this feels like. To carry an identity you once tried to hide and now feel called to protect. To watch the memory of the worst thing that ever happened to your people dissolve in real time, while your grandfather is still breathing. To love the people around you and still feel invisible to them in some small but important way.
If you know me, you probably didn't know most of this. That's okay. I didn't know most of it either, until recently.
I'm figuring it out.