I lied to my great-grandmother. Over spring break, my family went to Austria to ski, and I didn’t tell my 99-year-old great-grandmother, who had lived through the Holocaust and watched Austria’s Jewish community fall from a once prominent place in society to deportation, followed by death in concentration camps. Of course, she could not ever envision going on holiday there. Despite my great-grandmother’s inability to visit this place, a circumstance which evokes painful memories, I, born more than eighty years after her, could move beyond this narrative. I could carry the context of the past and remember what had happened there while still enjoying the trip.
My family’s story mirrors that of the Jewish narrative of Passover, the holiday we celebrated this past week. Like the Israelites who wandered in the desert for forty years so that the next generation would not carry the burdens of slavery with them into the Promised Land, I too can step forward into places where my great-grandmother’s lived experience will not allow her to go. There is something beautiful—and complicated—in the ability to move forward.
On the Thursday evening before break, my parents similarly lied to my sister. On Thursday, March 12, Hezbollah terrorist operative Ayman Mohamed Ghazali drove his car into Temple Israel of Michigan, attempting to “kill as many of them as [he] possibly [could].” On Thursdays, my fourth-grade sister attends Hebrew school at our temple; unlike every other week, my parents were afraid to send her, worrying about the possibility of a large-scale attack. With extra visible security surrounding our synagogue, they also feared that if she went, she would start to associate Jewish spaces—which have brought her joy—with fear. They wanted to preserve her connection with her Jewish identity. They wanted her, too, to be able to move forward.
This worry was not and is not baseless paranoia. In the past five years, antisemitism has surged across the United States and the world, and reports of harassment, vandalism, and violence have reached record highs. According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), acts of antisemitism have risen by over 344% the past five years and by 893% in the last ten years. In 2024, the city of Boston alone held 438 reported instances of antisemitism, a 188% increase from the previous year and the highest number of hate crimes since the ADL began tracking data in 1991. Jewish institutions have hired more guards, added more cameras, and developed more security protocols. But even with vast amounts of funds and attention toward documenting and fighting antisemitism, little has changed. Across years of antisemitic attacks, publicizing the repetitive data points depicting hate crimes against Jews neither changes the minds of the perpetrators nor nourishes Jewish youth trying to explore their identity.
Instead of poring over endless amounts of dispiritng data, Jews should practice and celebrate Judaism, investing in a strong and joyful Jewish identity; we need to change the narrative for ourselves and the world around us. I am not suggesting that we abandon security or stop tracking hate; our community needs us to do both. But I am suggesting that fear cannot be at the center of Jewish life. We need to move forward.
Being Jewish is complex and complicated; what celebration and practice look like for one person can look like the opposite for another. They can look like struggling with history or statistics, baking challah, not eating challah, keeping kosher, not keeping kosher, believing in God, not believing in God. They can mean something as simple as laughing along to Adam Sandler’s “Chanukah Song,” in which Sandler tells “the only kid in town without a Christmas tree” that there is a “list of people who are Jewish just like you and me.”
In a world where ADL reports and security cameras dominate so many Jewish conversations, Sandler’s song provides a radically different response. Rather than centering on fear, the lyrics celebrate recognition and belonging: you are not alone; you are part of something amazing. That is the kind of Judaism I want more of—one that remembers the past, faces the dangers of the present, and still insists on finding reasons to rejoice and move forward.