Invisible Identity, Unsolvable Puzzle — Part 1
When my parents met my soon-to-be-in-laws for the first time, we all went out to brunch together in San Francisco. My in-laws are multi-generational Arkansans, active members of their Southern Methodist church, and wonderful, warm, welcoming people. As we walked out of the restaurant I looked at my now-husband, then-boyfriend and said, “I think that went pretty well — how about you?” With all blood drained from his face, he stared back wide-eyed and said: “Is the holocaust always brought up so casually over brunch when you meet someone for the first time?” And I said something like… “of course it is! What could be more natural? After all, your parents are the ones who asked my parents where they were from…”
In any relationship or social community, we must choose how much of our true selves to reveal at any given time. As a professional, I’m always judicious. It’s heartening to see how the focus on belonging at work has made more room for people to show up as their whole selves. But the reality is, no one shares everything — it’s not always appropriate to do so. Where vulnerability ends and professionalism begins can be a blurry line.
For the past 20+ years, the aspect of my identity I’ve been most judicious about sharing at work is my relationship with Judaism — Israel in particular. Aside from explaining what all the holidays mean and occasionally sharing a ritualistic culinary treat, I kept it on the DL. Why? So many reasons.
For one, since I moved to California from NJ, I experienced a major culture shock in terms of how much (or little) was understood by people around me about what it means to be Jewish. I encountered a healthy mix of plain-old ignorance or just some incorrect assumptions. When a sentence begins with, “So wait, Jews believe that Jesus was…” you realize you have a lot of explaining to do. Like — most people don’t understand that the word “Israel” can refer individually and collectively to a land, a people, a religion, or an aspiration. One of the hardest things about being Jewish is how little is understood about what this identity means. Is it a Religion? Ethnicity? Race? Culture? People? Nation? Land? All of the above? It is some, all or none of these things depending on who / when / where you ask. We don’t fit neatly into any identity box, and so often don’t find the representation we seek in professional, public, and otherwise non-Jewish spaces.
For another, my own connection to my Jewish identity has evolved and shifted over the years. I grew up what you might call a “super Jew.” Judaism was my everything — from community to education to recreation. As an adult, I’ve been largely secular. I married outside my faith. This distance has made not being easily identifiable as Jewish at work pretty easy. Explaining the complexities of my Jewish identity to someone without much context about me or my culture is risky. As anyone from a historically excluded or minority identity knows, it is also just hard work.
But lately my position on how much to share has changed. As I’ve witnessed the stark rise of antisemitism in the past year as well as a major shift in public discourse on Israel from my childhood to today; as the generation of Holocaust survivors who raised my parents’ and my generation dies off one-by-one; and as I’ve finally found a congregation where I live in San Francisco that feels right for me and my family, I’ve been opening up more and more.
Two weeks ago I attended and delivered a keynote at Culture Summit, a conference for people who work in organizational culture. It was a complicated experience. For one, I missed the first day because it was scheduled to begin on Yom Kippur. Talk about a miss for a conference about culture. I set that aside because I really wanted to be there and have a platform for a talk I prepared that was a culmination of decades of work and thought leadership. When I arrived, I heard an incredible talk about “Invisible Leadership” from Victor Nichols II (Strategic Partnerships and Engagement Lead Sr Manager at Genentech). In it, he had audience members share aspects of their identity that people can’t tell by just looking at them. Really interesting personal stories emerged: Being adopted; illness-survival; immigrant status, and more. A great discussion ensued about how these invisible identities influence our experience as members and leaders of organizations — and the value of revealing them — or not.
The next day I gave my talk entitled “Creativity in the Balance: Why it’s Imperative to Design for Connection at Work.” I wove together wisdom from throughout my career and life — from primatology to psychology to culinary to start-up to workplace experience to experience design to… Judaism. Yes, that’s right. I actually spiced up the experience by having participants engage in the fun tradition of throwing soft candy (Sunkist Fruit Gems™). Afterwards, one attendee approached me to tell me how much that moment meant to her because of how seldomly she sees people openly identify as Jewish on a public stage. I told her that I did this exactly for people like her (and me). That representation matters, and is a part of authentic connection. Including my Jewish identity in my talk also set me up to impart this bit of wisdom from the Talmud:
As a workplace experience professional, I’m constantly in conversations about the nature and value of “place,” the future of real estate, and the impact of culture and geography on how and where and why we live and work. And you might say I was weaned on this topic. The relationship between Jews and place is as old as our existence. From God’s promise to Abraham as told in the Torah, to the exodus from Egypt, to the many homes in the diaspora from which we were expelled and persecuted, to the formation of the modern state of Israel, so much of our identity is all about that old adage about the three most important aspects of real estate: location, location, location.
Just a couple weeks ago, Dror Peleg published an incredible blog post about his recent trip to Saudi Arabia that had, hidden within it, one of the best short histories of how the region we now know as the Middle East came to be — with its tribes, factions, artificially-contrived borders, and conflicts. And how the extremely tiny state of Israel (which is roughly the size of New Jersey or Wales or Belgium or Telangana or El Salvador or Fiji) fits into all of this. I thought about simply sharing a link to this article with my workplace experience / real-estate community as a safe and professionally-relevant way to broaden people’s perspectives on the region. And I do recommend you take a moment to read it now, before moving on to the rest of my personal story, below. If you don’t read all of it, take a look at this excerpt:
“Thus, the end of World War I left the Middle East with what Historian David Fromkin called “a peace to end all peace.” The region was divided arbitrarily and casually by Britain and France. As Churchill put it, he created new countries “one Sunday afternoon,” probably while having a Whiskey. The result was a series of new countries filled with tribes and nationalist movements who did not wish to live together within borders that didn’t make sense. Since the Brits reneged on their promise to the Hashemites, Faisal’s agreement with the Jews was also nullified. The Brits, for their part, also failed to materialize the 1917 plan for a Jewish national home in Palestine, leaving the Jews to their fate. This led to intensifying conflicts between Jews and Arabs in British-controlled Palestine and culminated in the systematic murder of 6 million Jews in Europe and North Africa in the 1940s.”
While highly educated about my own people’s history, I’ve never felt particularly adept at remembering *all* the relevant facts of history and geopolitics, nor confident in building a cogent argument or engaging in debate. Which is why I think it’s so important to read articles like the one above — just to see how incredibly complex this is and from so many different perspectives. And to understand that while our sibling rivalry is as ancient as the Bible, Jews and Palestinians alike have been pawns in a much larger and much more recent game of geo-political chess that resulted in the borders and peoples and lands that we know today.
There is a saying, “two Jews, three opinions.” We disagree with each other a lot, and so there is never one, monolithic opinion from within the Jewish or the Zionist / pro-Israel community about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In fact, whenever I review the facts as I’ve learned them, I argue with myself. And so I’m sure many from within and outside of my own community will disagree with some of the things I’ve said only so far into this essay. I am pro-peace and also pro-self determination an pro-self preservation. And also pro-reality and pro-complexity and pro-survival. And pro-Israel and pro-Palestine. And pro-human rights and pro-democracy. And anti-terrorism and anti-dogmatic rule.
Here is where I might point to the facts of the matter. And tell you why my side is right and the other is wrong. But that’s not what this essay is about. Instead I’ll observe that there is simply no way that the complex and horrific reality of Israel and Palestine today doesn’t result in a traumatized, fearful, and pessimistic populace on each side that will continue the cycle of intergenerational trauma and violence. For all of my own people’s trauma and needs, I know there is at least as much trauma, and need, right across a very thin border.
And I’m unwilling to boil any conflict down to a binary right vs. wrong. Certainly not one this big, nor this old. When there is so much conflict, and so much trauma, generation after generation, there comes a point where repeating yourself or digging in your heels just doesn’t seem worth it. It is simply… an unsolvable puzzle. So until now I’ve tended to retreat from this topic, and stay very, very quiet other than when lending an empathetic listening ear to my family, friends and others who don’t have the luxury of staying on the sidelines.
But what I CAN do, but haven’t yet done due to my conflict-averse nature, is make visible bits of my own personal story that have shaped the person I am today and which, until now, have been kept private and only selectively shared. And are the reason why I, Mirit Cohen, simply could not compartmentalize and carry on business as usual this week.
I hope it goes without saying — none of these experiences are in and of themselves explanatory of the war that is happening on the public stage. But I’ve seen the power of individual storytelling to move hearts and minds in complicated issues of diversity, equity and inclusion. As humans, we’re not so great at taking in large numbers of anything — including people impacted by tragedy. We experience “psychic numbing.” But we’re really great at retaining stories. This is the “individual victim” or “singularity” effect.
So I’m here to tell you nothing other than my own story.
I imagine thousands of equally complex individual identities involved in all sides of this conflict being similarly shared. Perhaps together, they can paint a picture of the complexity that is inherent within this conflict, and move us past binary thinking. And then, it might be possible to fathom the despair and hopelessness that I and so many others feel right now. The despair that is leading me to conclude, for the moment at least, that this is an impossibly tragic and unsolvable puzzle. I hope to be pulled back into a state of hopeful determination for Peace again soon. So without further ado, here are some facts about me, Mirit Cohen, and my lived experience, you might not have known…
My inherited legacy:
Jews are “Jewish” whether or not they believe a single word of the Torah or Jewish religious law. This is true from the perspective of religious doctrine (in contrast to much of Christianity, Judaism is a religion of action over belief); and true in how the world has treated us (just ask the Nazis); and true of each individual’s experience (you can be “culturally Jewish” or “born but unaffiliated Jewish”); and evidence-based from modern genetics (Jewish ancestry is detectable in multiple ways in 23&me). See above re: other modern concepts of identity. In fact, we’ve been around since the bronze age; and for about the first thousand years of our existence, we weren’t even called Jews, but the “people of Israel.” Or simply “Israelites” or “Hebrews.” When people say “Am Israel Chai” / “עם ישראל חי” (which you might be seeing a lot of in your feeds), it means “The People of Israel Live.” At least some population of Jews has been living in the modern land of Israel uninterrupted for these ~3200 years. Our numbers grew and shrank along with a series of exiles.
Merely a generation ago, Jews in America were not considered “white.” Every time I fill out a race/ethnicity questionnaire I feel invisible and misunderstood. I am not “white” in the way many of my readers are white. Don’t get me wrong — I pass for white, and benefit from the privileges that come with it. That is the race/ethnicity I tick off because it’s the most honest choice. But I don’t always “pass.” I stick out like a sore thumb whenever I leave the coastal metrolopolitan areas — I’m easily 1.5 ft shorter than everyone around me and with such distinct features. My dad and his parents were born in Philadelphia - descendents of Jewish Ukrainian immigrants who fled the Pogroms and who subsequently lived with a lot of overt antisemitism in the US. They were not deemed “white.”
I am the 3rd generation descendent of Holocaust survivors. Here’s what I have pieced together about my family’s experience. My Savta (“Grandma” in Hebrew — Alta Frohman) left her family’s home of Bedzin, Poland as a young woman in 1939 after the Germans invaded Poland. She wanted to spare her parents the expense of taking care of her. She fled to Katowitz where she was employed by a bank and then on to Riga where she heard there would be ships to Palestine. But along the way, they were met by Russians who had taken control of the area and she, along with hundreds of thousands of other Polish citizens was sent to a work camp in the Gulag — Arkhangelsk, less than 100 miles from the Arctic Circle, where temperatures were typically 40 degrees below zero. She wore threadbare rags and built train tracks out of ice and cut wood with a saw. She was fed a starvation diet. Cleanliness and hygiene were very important to her and I grew up learning that she was the only one in her camp that bathed in the ice cold water given to them. Who knows, it may have saved her from disease.
Her brother (my Dod Avram Rozenes) and their parents were sent to the Nazi death camp Auschwitz. Her parents and most of their family were murdered there. Dod (“Uncle” in hebrew) Avram survived, only after being experimented on by Nazi “doctor” Josef Mengele, and, unable to return “home,” he moved to the still-forming state of Israel. There he got married to a woman from his hometown in Poland (my Doda Rivka) who also survived Auschwitz thanks in part to efforts he and other men in the camp made to sneak her extra food since she was younger than she appeared. Later he fought in the war for independence.
When Germany invaded Russia, a treaty was signed which freed all Polish citizens from the Russian Gulag. Whereas Jews who had accepted Russian passports were trapped in the Soviet Union. Savta was one of only some that made it out alive as the journey was long and treacherous. She headed for the warmest part of the Soviet Union — Jizzakh, Uzbekistan (where my uncle was born), and lived there with a Muslim family. She eventually returned to Poland searching for her family where she learned exactly what had happened in the holocaust. Jews who returned to their homes were being murdered by the people who had taken them over. So she left, through Czechoslovakia and onto a DP camp in Munich, Germany, where my mom was born. She began her journey speaking Yiddish and Polish, and ended it knowing all the other languages that people spoke along this route, and retained this knowledge through the years. Later, her brother (my Dod Avram Rozenes) miraculously found her in Germany. It was rare for two siblings from one family to have both survived. She followed Dod Avram to Israel where she also learned Hebrew.
The late 40s — early 50s in Israel were a big melting pot of many traumatized survivors trying to build their lives back. This was my Savta’s, great uncle’s and aunt’s experience. Many in Israel spoke different languages and so they all learned Hebrew as a common tongue. It was not an easy time. Everyone tried to find any surviving extended family member they could. My family found some close and distant cousins from Poland. These were my “extended family” growing up — even if no one could easily explain our relations. We counted any family we had. My Savta eventually moved to the US — Philadelphia — when my mom was seven, on a ship that stopped in Greece (where my mom famously lost her only coat). My great uncle Dod Avraham, Doda Rivka and their son Shai stayed in Israel, living in Ramat Gan in the outskirts of Tel-Aviv. Growing up, we visited each other a few times and always kept in touch.
My childhood:
The Holocaust and Israel were extremely important, ever-present topics in my childhood. Almost like siblings. I was immersed in the “never-forget” ethos that required me and my peers to face the detailed horrific truths of the genocide against our people from a very early age. There was hardly a family or community gathering in which the holocaust was not part of the discussion. I became fluent in trauma and genocide. I knew all about things like — death camps, gas chambers, medical experiments, losing everything suddenly and being forced to flee, barely surviving a dark train ride with no food or water crammed in with barely room to breathe, hiding under floorboards for hours, babies miraculously keeping quiet, playing dead in a pile of actual dead bodies in order to survive — for as long as I can remember. Israel was and is the first place where my family felt safe. Besides, we had no other place to be. Our homes were taken from us.
As I learned growing up, Zionism is defined as the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in a land of our own. Its connection to THE particular land that is Israel was somewhat secondary — other lands had been considered by early pioneers of the movement (we could be arguing about Uganda right now!). Though today clearly the two are inextricably linked. In fact, the word “Zion” means “Jerusalem” and/or “Israel” in Hebrew. While there has been a continuous presence of at least some Jewish population in the modern-day land of Israel since biblical times (yes, really), there were also many years of and generations of Jews in exile. Throughout history, Jews were never quite welcome where we settled. And there was always a yearning to have a land of our own where we could be free from these worries, and a “return to Zion.” From the Spanish Inquisition to the Eastern European pogroms of the 1900s, the Holocaust of WWII, the expulsion of Jews from Arab lands between 1920–1970, the persecution of Soviet Jewry in the 1980s, to the Jews from Ethiopia in 1991. Not to mention organized antisemitism on US soil driven by groups like the KKK since 1865.
I attended a Jewish day school K-12 in New Jersey where I learned all the gen-ed subjects as well as Jewish subjects like history, Hebrew, Torah and Talmud. I even took a year of Arabic, taught by my incredible Hebrew teacher Shoshana Cohen who believed that learning the language would promote peace. She was born and raised in Baghdad, Iraq but along with her family and the rest of the highly prominent Jewish population there, was forcibly expelled from her home in the mid-forties. After watching her uncle be hanged in the Bagdad town square for being Jewish, her family settled in the newly formed Jewish state of Israel along with many other “Mizrahi” (eastern, not Ashkenazic) Jews who were also fleeing after being expelled from Arab states (at the same time many Palestinian Arabs were fleeing from Jewish / Israeli land).
One of my classmate’s grandfathers was one of those saved by virtue of being on Schindler’s List during WWII. He later helped fund the Spielberg film as well as the new Holocaust museum in DC. My high school class got to go visit it just before it first opened.
I was a member and leader in a Zionist youth movement called Young Judaea and attended its summer camps every year. The movement was founded in the early 1900s as idealistic Zionism was taking shape and helped many Jewish American youth find connection with one another and our culture and people. I saved up my own money to be able to go on a summer trip to Israel just before my sophomore year in high school. I took inspiration from Zionist founder Theodor Herzl who said “if you will it, it is no dream.” On that trip I learned a lot more about the experience in Israel and even got to visit border communities of Arabs, Druze and Israelis.
It was within Young Judaea activities and at camp that I learned so much about leadership, and the complex history of our people and land. It’s even where I was first introduced to experience design, including some of the best pithy advice on how to ensure audience engagement in educational activities from legendary leader Mel Reisfield, such as “start with a bang” and “cut it at its peak.” From a young age, I was given responsibility for organizing weekend-long conferences for the youth leadership of our movement — filled with experiential activities that helped us learn more about our identities and history. It was always full of lively debate from every part of the political spectrum and ALWAYS involved a goal of working towards peace in the Middle East. I even wrote a how-to manual for program development. Many of the alumni of this youth movement have gone on to become leaders in the Israeli government, society and/or on the American side of political work, and/or in peace efforts with the Palestinian community.
I took a gap year between high school and college during 1995–1996 to go with Young Judaea to Israel to participate in a program called “Year Course.” I spent about ⅓ of the time on a kibbutz in the south (Negev) learning Hebrew and volunteering in the kitchen; I went on to do a work-study program in Jerusalem and additional elective volunteer and learning experiences in communities throughout the year. I visited my Dod Avram and Doda Rivka who lived in Ramat Gan on the outskirts of Tel Aviv and my cousin Shai, his wife Aliza, and their two kids as much as I could.
It was a momentous year politically. Just two years before this, Clinton helped broker the Oslo II peace accords between Rabin and Arafat which were signed in the fall of 95. There were frequent terrorist bombings that year. It was scary, but I had some sense of safety by keeping to certain bus lines and neighborhoods as directed by my counselors. Several months later, I was returning from a weekend trip to Jerusalem, back to my kibbutz in the south — in the negev desert. When I got off the bus I saw all my friends on line for the payphone to call home — I learned that Rabin was assassinated by a right-wing Jewish man, Yigal Amir, who was adamantly against the Oslo accords. Within hours we were all back on a bus bound for a peace rally / memorial concert in Jerusalem. It was called “Shalom Chaver,” meaning “Good-Bye Friend” — the words Bill Clinton spoke in response to this horrible tragedy.
There was a brief period of unity and hope that finally we could all see that if only we set aside our differences, we could work towards peace. It didn’t last long. An election ensued between labor party leader Shimon Peres and Likud-led Bibi Netanyahu (who had earlier incited violence against Rabin). It was contentious — Bibi won. But throughout the year terrorist bombings continued, largely driven by Hamas, a terrorist organization and subsidiary of the Moslem Brotherhood with the stated aim of the destruction of the entirety of Israel and intifada against the Jews. A particularly bloody terrorist bombing by Hamas occurred in Dizengoff Center (the largest shopping mall in Tel Aviv) on Purim (a joyous Jewish holiday that celebrates our near escape from another antisemitic massacre). Thirteen dead and 150 wounded. Unity unraveled. It felt like the wind in the sails of peace had been extinguished.
While my childhood was wholly experienced in the context of the Jewish community, in college I finally faced life with a much more diverse population. But I still stayed quite sheltered within the Jewish sub-community of Hillel. I was in our Israeli dance troupe that practiced and performed regularly — a cultural activity I always loved, and the only “exercise” I’ve ever been able to commit to long-term.
My cousin Shira, daughter of Savta’s son Dov, became a rabbi and married a man she met through a Klezmer band they were in together. (Ken later went on to become a cantor and is now a rabbi too!). In the year 2000, well before they were an item, their Klezmer band had an opportunity to join a large festival of Jewish music in Poland. They asked my Savta to come along as an interpreter. She did. Their mom, my Aunt Meme and Shira’s brother Noam went as well. A videographer came along too and so we’re blessed with some incredible footage of that time. Savta took the group to visit the apartment in Bedzin where she grew up and had been taken from her family. The apartment was still there, exactly as she had remembered, including where they built their sukkah every year. At first, the current occupants were hesitant to let her in. But eventually they did. She looked around and they talked for a while. The owner gave her a framed photo he had of the house to take home with her. She was so emotional and also happy that she got to have that experience. She noted that the little girl in the house seemed not to have been raised with hate, because she stayed and wanted to talk — and she didn’t pull back from Savta.
Around graduation and beyond, I was questioning my faith. I know this is not something to casually drop in and leave without further explanation, but to finish this essay I must. It’s too long a story. Perhaps it will come in “Part II.” Questioning our faith is common and expected for Jews. See above re: a religion of action over belief. And besides, I was in my 20s — can you blame me? Anyway, after I moved to California and for the next 15–20 years, I pulled back from being an observant Jew and built up other aspects of my identity. I was an atheist who knew too much about my own religion to play along simply for the culture. It didn’t all add up for me. I couldn’t pray and say words whose meaning I understood but didn’t believe. I stayed connected mostly through the ritualistic foods and experiences that are important to each Jewish holiday and by gathering with my family.
Over the past ten years, I started a family and my husband and I agreed to raise our kids “Jewish” — what exactly that would mean TBD. In this time each family member who had survived the holocaust passed away one-by-one, most recently Savta’s cousin’s husband Zeishe — the last survivor I remember growing up with — just last week. None of them are left. And I’m left with the stark realization that it is now upon me and my generation to tell their stories so that we may “never forget” the lessons of history. Graphic descriptions of horror-movie level experiences have certainly stuck in my memory. But is that what I would give to my own children? Not a chance.
A year ago, after finally feeling safe enough post-pandemic to participate in regular community events, we decided to join “The Kitchen” — a very San Francisco (and also very “me”) approach to Jewish life. It’s extremely inclusive and manages to feel both traditional and edgy all at the same time. It’s the only congregation I’ve seen that is both Ashkenazic (Jews whose ancestors settled in Eastern Europe) and Sephardic (Jews whose ancestors settled in Spain and surrounding countries including many in the middle east) at once. While my family was clearly Ashkenazic by recent history and custom, we also could trace our ancestry to Spain, so we liked to think of ourselves as Sephardic too. My rabbi at the kitchen, the incomparable Noa Kushner, is Ashkenazic; and our cantor, renowned ethnomusicologist Asher Levy, is Sephardic. It’s meant so much to me to have this place to reconnect and pass on this heritage to my children.
Every fall we celebrate the succession of Jewish high holidays that starts with Rosh Hashana — the Jewish New Year, continues a week later with Yom Kippur — the day of atonement, and ends with the week-long harvest festival of Sukkot — where we experience the joy of shared meals with friends in temporarily-built structures in our backyard. It’s an emotional and experiential journey if ever there was one. Another example of how my Judaism and yen for experience design feel interlinked. I was really looking forward to a full experience of all of the high holidays this year with my SF Jewish community — something I hadn’t really done in a very, very long time. It’s why I didn’t get to Culture Summit until the 2nd day. It’s also why I wasn’t able to fully participate in a work trip that happened in another state during the week of Sukkot — I didn’t want to miss more than one night of gatherings.
Sukkot ends with “Simchat Torah” — a celebration that marks the completion of the annual reading of the Torah — with lots of singing and dancing. As a lover of words and books, and as someone who has reconnected with my own identity as a writer, being a member of the “People of the Book” is so important to me. My education and understanding of the Torah are exactly why I set them aside for so long. If I didn’t believe in what they stood for, I couldn’t play along. But it was tough to be without a community where I really felt like I belonged for so long. Especially living across the country from family and childhood friends. And especially after the pandemic. And my kids were asking for it — it was time. This past year — highlighted by my rabbi’s teachings, cantor’s music, the education program’s enrichment of my children’s identities and two special weekends — has facilitated an incredible reconnection to this core part of my identity. I’ve been living with chronic pain in my leg and hip for several years now but just recently had a breakthrough and I was excited to be able to dance with the community I’ve gotten to know so well over the last year.
But on Saturday morning we got the news that Hamas enacted a sophisticated terror attack on Israel, broke through the border fence and systematically hunted down, murdered, raped and kidnapped innocent civilians — Jews, Israelis, and other foreign nationals. It was the 50 year anniversary of the Yom Kippur War and it was the night of Simchat Torah. The echoes of this traumatic event reverberated as members of our synagogue tried to decide what to do. I wasn’t sure if the celebration would go on as planned, and if it would, if we should go. Ours was planned to be held at a local venue that was part bookstore, part cafe, part community gathering space, and 100% owned by a liberal and politically-engaged former Israeli; though he had openly hosted Arab-Israeli discussions and took no public stance on Israel, he had nonetheless endured antisemitic and anti-Israel protests against his business ownership of this establishment in San Francisco. I wasn’t sure if it was even safe to go. But I also couldn’t NOT go. So I took my family and we went. I told my kids the bare minimum — that there was active fighting between the Jews and Arabs in Israel / Palestine. I drove around the block once to make sure I didn’t see any antisemitic protests. We went inside.
I can’t tell you how meaningful it was to be able to have a place to go and be with my people at that very moment. Our rabbi said just the right words to us. She told us she didn’t know what we’d do but had faith that we’d figure it out as a community. I exchanged hugs, hand-squeezes and understanding glances with friends. We chanted and sang. We rolled out the entire torah and looked at the letters and words with our kids. We did a sort of version of the dancing we intended to do, harkening back to the many times in Jewish history that Jews observed our traditions ANYWAY, despite the oppression around us. A rebellious version, not a joyous one.
Both of my kids woke in the night. One with nightmares he refused to explain and the other “just because.” I lost several hours of sleep. And then on Monday I tried to pull it together and show up for work. I found that I could not.
I’ve never experienced anything quite like this. I prepared for it — as you can understand by now, I’ve been waiting for “the big” antisemitic event of my life. I had learned to expect it. But I didn’t experience it like this until now — my year of terrorist bombings while living in Israel included. This is different. It’s different in scale and it’s different in the context of the world — of the US, of the unprecedented recent fracture in Israeli society with the election of a far-right government, of antisemitism (at its highest in history in 2022), of terrorism, of new settlement occupation, of the longevity of the Palestinian cause and rule by Hamas in Gaza, of how we consume media and information, of political polarization, of our still so recent trauma of the global pandemic, of how the workplace has changed — of all of it and more that represents life in 2023.
Every day I learn of someone else I’m connected to who is missing, kidnapped, injured or dead. And every day I see celebrations of the horrific acts of terror that make me ill. And I read messages for one side or the other or both of every stripe across many platforms — some taking a stand, some fueled with anger and hate, some trying to walk a fine line. Many friends and even mere aquaintances have reached out to express their sorrow and support — which means the world. But there’s also been lots of silence. The world keeps spinning and so many keep spinning along with it, as surely I have done in the face of another community’s tragedy - as much as I’d like to think I didn’t. I think the statements that are hardest to read are the ones that are vague and general. Because while this is an incredibly complex problem, and one that I’ve already concluded feels so unsolvable, what happened this week was horrific in some very specific ways, very specifically to the Jewish people.
And the world of DEI hasn’t really been paying much attention to the identity or plight of the Jewish people. Whether or not a company allows for employee resource groups with religious affiliation is a mixed bag. I can certainly respect a decision to keep religion and politics out of company-sponsored workplace programs. But Jewish identity as a people beyond religion makes this especially complicated. As does a history of persecution. And this week, I found myself asking — what does the word “underrepresented’’ mean? Is it enough to be counted in numbers in the employee base? What about when we need our community and allies to support us and leaders to represent us?
A colleague, Ben Forta, shared some wise words he has been using to explain to others who don’t quite understand — I couldn’t have said it better myself:
“This is personal. Almost half of the world’s Jewish population lives in Israel. As such, there is barely a Jew on the planet who doesn’t have family, friends, or some personal connection to the ongoing terror. This isn’t something far away, it’s happening to all of us. Middle East politics are complicated and emotionally charged. We are not asking anyone to take sides in politics and conflict, we don’t even want to discuss the topic at this time. But it is not hard to draw a line; you don’t have to get involved in Middle East politics to be able to condemn brutal and barbaric acts of terror, and show compassion for its victims.”
My aim for this essay was to share my story alone, from my point of view. I tried to leave anything contentious out, though that’s admittedly impossible. Because, as I said, I believe in the power of individual stories to change minds, and the world. That youth movement I was in — In addition to all the learning and trauma-processing, we had a lot of fun too — dancing, putting on plays, and lots of singing, including such inspirational refrains as:
“The whole world is a very narrow bridge — and the main thing to recall is to have no fear at all.”
and
“You and I will change the world.”
There is so much more to me and my story. I am a Jew whose family survived — but I am not just that. And there are so many more stories to hear. I encourage everyone to tell theirs as well, and to read, watch and listen to what others are telling you. Maybe, somehow, we can solve this impossible puzzle by exposing our invisible identities, and create the next chapter of our stories together, in peace.
