The Good Jew
My life changed irrevocably two years ago. And I am far from alone.
Nearly every Jew I know—no matter their political beliefs or ideological commitments—has had to reckon with how their ethnic/religious/cultural group is now perceived. For many like me, this is a new thing.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I grew up in a golden age of Jew tolerance, where Jew hatred was something I learned about from dusty textbooks or my father’s and uncle’s stories of Living While Jewish in Europe. Sure, I witnessed some acts of hate—in 1987, my synagogue in suburban Montreal was graffitied with swastikas and the phrase “Burn Jews”—but this was the exception. I never thought my Judaism made a lick of difference in how I was treated.
That carefree sense of psychological (and even physical) safety is no longer. The god damned plane has crashed into the mountain. I got a taste for this on October 8th, 2023, when demonstrators on the streets and campuses of North America’s finest cities were telling Jews …
