Reflections from a Young American Jew

I was born in Atlanta, Georgia. I was raised with the belief that the promise of this country, its ideals, its freedoms, its protections, was mine to inherit, the same as anyone else. I led my BBYO chapter, studied at the Jewish Academy, and grew up believing that Jewish life in America was simply part of American life. And then, one day, a classmate threw a penny at me, and the curtain was pulled back. "We are different," they said. And over time, that message only got louder.

Danny Sanders, WUJS Board Member, Atlanta GA

Last Wednesday night, two young Jewish leaders were shot and killed outside a museum dedicated to our people’s history. Their lives were taken senselessly, brutally. And in the days since, what has followed is not just grief, but something more hollowing: the sound of silence. The kind of silence that has a weight to it. The kind of silence that makes you feel like maybe, just maybe, people have grown tired of caring. Or like they never did.

Atlanta, 1913: Leo Frank was lynched by a mob fueled by prejudice and a lie. His innocence wasn’t enough. During World War I, the U.S. Army published a recruitment pamphlet warning that “the foreign born, and especially Jews, are more apt to malinger.” In 1971, President Nixon tried to remove Jews from positions of influence, and two years later, he was caught on tape saying that American Jews must learn to be Americans first, Jews second. The record is not new, it has just been ignored.

And we’re tired. Tired of repeating ourselves. Tired of carrying the burden of explanation. We wish we didn’t have to say any of this, but silence has never protected us. We wish our friends would say it with us, but too often, they don’t, and we don’t know why. We want what everyone else wants: to live in our homes, to walk our streets, to feel safe in the skin we were born in. But the world keeps telling us, in ways both loud and quiet, that we don’t belong. And we’re done pretending we don’t hear it.

We’ve said it before, words matter. Hate speech isn’t free speech when it leads to a funeral. And we’ve watched, again and again, as warnings go unheeded until the blood dries. This time, it happened in Washington. But it could have been any city, any campus, any street corner. It could have been any of us.