I’m not going to wait for the persecution to begin…

Being Jewish these days is more than a little scary. I’m not observant. My family was never observant. But that doesn’t matter. If you’re Jewish you’re often targeted by hate. It’s been that way for close to 2,000 years.

Jews sit around and ask one another: Did we deserve this? Did we do something wrong? And, of course, there are Jews who do do something wrong — sexual predators like Jeffrey Epstein, slum landlords like Jared Kushner’s family, political monsters like Benjamin Netanyahu. Then, of course, there are Jews who get it right from Steven Spielberg to Jamie Raskin.

Are we so different from the general population of those who do bad and those who do good? Do we really deserve to be singled out and threatened and punished? Of course, we live in an era where a lot of people are being singled out for threats and worse including Asians, blacks, Hispanics, immigrants, etc. We are probably less persecuted than trans-gender individuals or Muslims in this country. But, naturally, when it happens to you, it feels bad. Especially when you don’t have to look back very far in history to see a time when it wasn’t just bad, it was catastrophic.

I’ve written a book for young people, Forced Journey: the Saga of Werner Berlinger that recounts the story of a 12-year-old boy who flees Nazi Germany and ends up facing prejudice in his new home — New York City. To write the book, I had to do a lot of research — it was painful reading the accounts of these children who left their families and everything they knew — many of them aware that they might never see their parents or siblings or grandparents again. And three quarters of those who left didn’t see their families ever again. After the war, some of them returned to villages that had been entirely razed, erased as if they’d never existed.

And these were just ordinary Jewish families — teachers, tailors, shop-owners — who were completely destroyed at the whims of a cruel dictator. A tyrant who discovered that hatred was a potent unifying cause for a German people distraught by hunger, joblessness and political chaos.

The people of the United States today are also distraught. We’re not suffering from the same levels of joblessness, hunger and political chaos as the German people experienced in the early 1930’s. But we are beset by problems that seem bigger than our will to face and combat these problems like climate change and immigration issues. And there’s huge social disruption too, like gender fluidity, which affects a very small percent of the population but has been promulgated by social media into a major distraction.

And many Americans seem unwilling to sort out their real problems from the ones thrown in their faces every day by the media. I sometimes think these spurious issues are appealing just because they distract from the very complicated and difficult ones.

In my opinion, rising anti-Semitism is just one of these distractions. It’s another convenient target for people’s angst, their anxiety, hopelessness, helplessness, lack of purpose, lack of connection and lack of belief.

We had belief, we had hope when Barack Obama ran for president. He kindled that spirit in people across the country. But that vision has faded. The power of his words has faded. Joe Biden somewhat re-kindled that hope in his pleas for decency and cohesion but he proved to have clay feet and has been largely discarded as a figurehead.

It’s sad. It’s a sad time despite the fact that we’re not suffering like the people of the Ukraine who don’t have light or heat or food or safety. We have all those things but we lack what the Ukranians have — a love of country and belief in themselves as a people.

As a Jewish person in this country, I’m not fleeing yet like the character in my book, Werner Berlinger. But I do consider it. I don’t want to be one of those who waited too long to leave. I’d prefer to see the political and social climate in this country change. Like most engaged people, I’m watching….