Gloves Off

Notes from the descendant of not one but two Auschwitz survivors.

My father and grandfather did not survive so that their legacies could lose meaning, so that their suffering could be diluted, minimized, ignored, or repackaged by an antizionist movement hell bent on our destruction… AGAIN.

They did not endure the unendurable so that I would be told to stay quiet, to be patient, to wait my turn to be heard while hatred keeps gathering strength again in plain sight.

I’ve tried reason and patience. I’ve tried extending the benefit of the doubt. But nothing I say seems to be enough.

So I’m taking off the gentler gloves.

I see the gaslighting. I see the omissions whenever Jew-hatred is discussed. I see the double standards and the suspicion that so many still reserve for Jews — and especially for Jews who refuse to apologize for existing or for standing up for themselves.

I see the smugness too.

History has taught my family something that too many people still refuse to learn: hatred rarely announces itself all at once. It climbs. It tests boundaries and it waits to see what decent people will tolerate. Once one group of Jews becomes acceptable to despise, the category expands. It always has.

To those who call themselves friends while excusing terrorist supporters, remaining silent, repeating libels and twisting themselves into pretzels to rationalize antisemitism… your silence was never neutrality. And selective empathy is not justice.

In some ways, I have more respect for people who state their hostility openly than for those who disguise it behind fashionable slogans, euphemisms, and endless rationalization of the irrational. At least honesty allows everyone to see what we are dealing with.

Antisemitism has always depended on people looking away, explaining it away, or convincing themselves it isn’t really happening.

I’m done pretending not to notice.

I am a Jewish woman still in mourning.

Stop talking over Jews!

Believe Jewish women, too, G-d damn it!