In the past seven years, 18 more have passed Holocaust-education mandates. Before 2016, only seven states required Holocaust education in schools. After all, as many of them told me, it wasn’t the Holocaust.īut well-meaning people everywhere from statehouses to your local middle school have responded to this surging anti-Semitism by doubling down on Holocaust education. At a time when many people in other minority groups have become bold in publicizing the tiniest of slights, these American Jews instead expressed deep shame in sharing these stories with me, feeling that they had no right to complain. These casual stories sickened me in their volume and their similarity, a catalog of small degradations. I was surprised to learn how many people were getting pennies thrown at them in 21st-century America, an anti-Semitic taunt that I thought had died around 1952. These people talked about bosses and colleagues who repeatedly ridiculed them with anti-Semitic “jokes,” friends who turned on them when they mentioned a son’s bar mitzvah or a trip to Israel, romantic partners who openly mocked their traditions, classmates who defaced their dorm rooms and pilloried them online, teachers and neighbors who parroted conspiratorial lies.

What I didn’t expect was the torrent of private stories I received from American Jews-online, in letters, but mostly in person, in places where I’ve spoken across America. The anti-Semitic hate mail arrived on cue. I published a book in late 2021 about exploitations of Jewish history, with the deliberately provocative title People Love Dead Jews. But none of that would capture the vague sense of dread one encounters these days in the Jewish community, a dread unprecedented in my lifetime. Or I could share stories you probably haven’t heard, such as one about a threatened attack on a Jewish school in Ohio in March 2022-where the would-be perpetrator was the school’s own security guard. I could fill pages with FBI hate-crime statistics, or with a list of violent attacks from the past six years or even the past six months, or with the growing gallery of American public figures saying vile things about Jews.

The recent rise in American anti-Semitism is well documented. Maybe it had been an accident, except the shopper had shouted, “The kosher bagels are in the next aisle!” He’d considered saying something to the store manager, but to what end? Besides, it wasn’t much worse than the baseball game the day before, when other fans had thrown popcorn at him and his kids. Another shopper had rammed him with a cart, hard.

He hovered until most people had dispersed, and then described his supermarket trip that morning. Readers like him always tell me these things. When the 40-something reader in the kippah at my book event in Michigan approached the signing table, I already knew what he was going to say, if not the humiliating specifics.

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