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Editor’s note: Elephant is a diverse, reader-created community. We welcome all points of view, especially when offered mindfully. Have a different opinion? We welcome you to submit your wisdom, mindfully: elephantjournal.com/post
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I am heartbroken, sickened, and scared.
Sixteen people were murdered in Australia today near a Hanukkah celebration.
Within minutes, I found myself trying to decide whether it’s safe to attend our own town square’s menorah lighting.
We live in one of the most progressive counties in America. And I’m afraid.
This isn’t a new fear.
In 2018, news of the Pittsburgh massacre reached me at my son’s flag football game. Eleven people. Shot during Shabbat services. I remember finding the father of my son’s best friend in the crowd, both of us with phones in our hands, both of us already crying. No words needed. Just two Jewish parents suddenly understanding what it meant to be afraid.
But here’s what I didn’t tell him: I had only recently begun to understand what “us” meant.
I didn’t grow up Jewish. I didn’t know any Jews growing up. Judaism was completely outside my world—something I encountered only through jokes I didn’t think much about and stereotypes I didn’t recognize as harmful because they weren’t about people I knew.
Then I married a Jewish man with two children. I chose to give up my culturally Christian upbringing—Christmas and Easter—and build a Jewish home. Then we had a son.
And antisemitism became one of my problems.
Not in the abstract, theoretical way it had been before, when I could observe it from a distance and feel sympathetic concern. But in the immediate, visceral way of a mother calculating threat levels for her child.
My son made it through elementary school mostly unscathed. Middle school was different. Those years were rough—at least for my husband and me.
That’s when he became a bar mitzvah and began to own his Jewish identity. He used the pseudonym “the Jew” as his gaming username. Not hiding. Not minimizing. Claiming it. Being visible and proud.
Then came a surprising wave of antisemitism in our progressive town.
He was called “Little Auschwitz.” One kid wrote, “Enjoy your summer in the gas chambers,” in his yearbook.
One year, he dressed as a rabbi for Halloween—a joyful, silly assertion of identity, the kind of thing Jewish kids do during Purim. He was called into the school office four times. Each time, administrators interrogated him, trying to get him to admit he was mocking Jews.
I finally had to send them an explanation of Purim, along with a video of his Orthodox cousin’s wedding, to prove his Jewishness was real—that his pride wasn’t mockery.
The school thought they were protecting Jews. They were so primed to look for antisemitism-as-mockery that they couldn’t recognize Jewish celebration. They turned my son’s moment of cultural pride into suspicion and shame.
We eventually suggested he change his gaming username. Not because he felt unsafe. But because we worried—about his digital footprint, about college admissions officers, about what visible Jewishness might cost him later.
That calculation—that quiet parental risk assessment—tells you everything about the climate we’re navigating.
Then came October 7, 2023.
And everything intensified even more.
I started noticing it everywhere—the casual cruelties and the well-meaning erasures that add up to the same message: you don’t quite belong here.
A handyman casually saying “Jew it down” while trimming tile. Friends sending me long messages about Middle East politics, treating my Jewishness as something that needed correcting. Anger and violence toward Jews rising everywhere, wrapped in political righteousness.
But it’s not just the overt hostility. It’s the smaller things too—the erasures that happen without malice, just indifference.
My husband went to five stores in our town looking for Hanukkah wrapping paper this year. Five stores. Not one had any. Just Santa, snowflakes, and “Happy Holidays.”
Our school gave Rosh Hashanah off last year but scheduled classes on Yom Kippur—the holiest day of the Jewish year.
And then there are the moments that force you to name the danger out loud.
This past High Holiday season, we went to services. My teenage son wanted to sit near the door—for a quick exit, he said.
I told him, “No. If there’s a shooter, we’d be targeted first.”
His eyes widened.
I realized then that I was having this conversation casually. He wasn’t.
To me, it sounded practical—the way other families might discuss whether to sit on the aisle or in the middle. But for him, it landed differently. What felt like routine threat assessment to me felt like a sudden loss of innocence to him.
This is what it means to raise a Jewish child now: danger isn’t whispered. It’s named. Out loud. In synagogue.
That’s what Pittsburgh did.
That’s what Sydney does.
That’s what terrorism accomplishes—it makes Jewish families 7,500 miles from Australia calculate whether a menorah lighting in their own town square is worth the risk.
After Sydney, I talked with my son about standing up when he hears antisemitic tropes. About the importance of humanizing Jews—because I was once on the outside, and I didn’t get it. We talked about not staying silent.
And then I told him I was afraid to go to the menorah lighting.
He’s 16 now. I can’t protect him from this—not from the handyman’s casual slur, not from political lectures, not from the fear that public Jewish gatherings might not be safe.
What I can offer him isn’t certainty or protection. What I can offer is honesty, and presence, and the knowledge that he doesn’t have to carry this fear alone.
Maybe safety, for now, looks like that: telling the truth, staying connected, and choosing visibility together—carefully, consciously, and with our eyes open.
I grew up not knowing any Jews.
Not my problem. Not my world.
Now I know what it costs to raise one.
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