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Yael Fisher talks about her reaction to the shooting of the synagogue of the Tree of Life with other members of Avodah, a Jewish service corps. (Calla Kessler / The Washington Post)
Shots rang out in Pittsburgh. And in Washington, for the first time in her life, Yael Fisher was afraid of being Jewish.
"I've never felt in danger because I'm Jewish and physically in danger," said Fisher, 22, while she was picking up the remains of their Chipotle dinner last week. "I had to race alone and I was nervous. I have never felt that before. "
His three friends, all equally 22 years old and Jewish, acquiesced gravely.
Hayley Berger told Fisher that she remembered the day she had learned that there were Americans who hated Jews, who hated Jews so much that they were going to kill. It was the day of April 2014 when a white supremacist shot dead three people outside the Jewish community center and a Jewish retirement home in its suburb of Kansas.
Reuben Siegman remembers the day he learned: he was living in St. Louis last year, when a Jewish cemetery in the city was vandalized. Tombs were again spilled a few days later in a Jewish cemetery in Philadelphia.
"It has led me to wear a kippah for a while," he told his friends. "It was like," I'll be Jewish. And there is no violence you can do that scares me. "
For many Jewish youth in the country, last month's mass shooting at Pittsburgh's Tree of Life synagogue was a jarring lesson. Many Generation Y youth who grew up learning about anti-Semitism from their parents and grandparents think of the Holocaust, the pogroms of Eastern Europe and the United States. at the Spanish Inquisition when they think of violence against Jews – stories that they read in history books recounting events that happened far more than ever before. half a century ago, and all in the old country, not the United States.
The sacking of Pittsburgh, committed by an armed man who allegedly shouted: "All Jews must die" while he was shooting, broke what was left of this illusion.
Young Jews living in the United States are now aware of this: they live in a country where anti-Semitism still exists – and where it kills.
The idea that hatred against Jews lies in the past has faded in recent years, with anti-Semitism constantly pushing their heads further and further. Hate crimes have increased. In the days following the shooting in Pittsburgh, the vandals wrote "F — Jews" on the wall of a synagogue in Irvine, California, and "Kill all the Jews" inside a Brooklyn synagogue.
Every day, Twitter broadcasts anti-Semitic messages attracting billions of views. President Trump himself was accused of anti-Semitic messages and when neo-Nazis marched through the streets of Charlottesville chanting "The Jews will not replace us," Trump responded that there were "very good people on both sides. "
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For 24-year-old Gaby Kirschner, the filming took place in May last year, when she went to a demonstration organized in New York by the Trump government.
She had never been very religious. she still describes her Hebrew childhood school as "an old lady in a basement screaming at me after school." She learned about the Holocaust, but she never learned that Jews had been discriminated against in the United States without any social, professional or other distinction. educational opportunities for decades. "We have never been taught that this is still going on today," she said.
But that day, last May, Kirschner heard a group of pro-Trump counter-partisans shouting at her "Jew" as she walked down the street. It's happened on Twitter too. Strangers responded to his tweets about the sport and told him "Jewish". She was shaken.
She returned to the religious practice she had left after her bat at the age of 13. She began attending Jewish community meetings, feeling proud of her faith: "If they want me to be erased, well, I'm here!
Still, she still felt frightened on the street, wondering if a stranger looking at her might sympathize with the neo-Nazis, wondering if he could read his identity on his face. After this day during the event, she did something else she had already envisioned for aesthetic reasons and who now wanted safety: she had a nose job.
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Five years ago, young Jews were well aware of the discrimination experienced by other people – and less focused on discrimination against Jews. In a major survey conducted by Pew Research of American Jews, 80% of respondents aged 18 to 29 said that there was a lot of discrimination against Muslims, compared to 58% for Muslims. Set of Americans aged 18 to 29 years old. Sixty-nine percent of young Jews said that there was a lot of discrimination against blacks and Hispanics, compared to 50 and 57 percent of young Americans.
According to a new analysis of this week's age survey data for The Washington Post by Greg Smith, Pew's associate research director, only 39% of young Jews said in 2013 that they perceive anti-Semitism as widespread United States.
In 2018, Jews of the same age were much more likely to report having perceived discrimination. When the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding published a poll this year polling a diverse sample of 500 Jews and 500 Muslims on their experience of discrimination in America, Jews aged 18 to 29 were more likely than older Jews to Claim to have been personally discriminated against because of their discrimination. faith: 64% of young Jews said yes.
Thirty-five percent of the Jewish youth surveyed assumed that "most" religious Americans were victims of religious discrimination, even more so than the 10% of Jews aged 30 to 49 who responded the same way. or the 13% of Jews over the age of 50. (or that Muslims of any age).
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Older generations of American Jews told their children stories of persecution according to which their ancestors had taken refuge in this country, that they had left Eastern Europe early. of the twentieth century, fled the Nazi Holocaust in the mid-twentieth century or that they were from many other parts of the world. the world where the Jews were in danger.
But American anti-Semitism – quotas restricting the entry of Jews into some universities, neighborhoods where Jews were not welcome, organizational discrimination that prevented Jews from entering the hotels and holiday camps until they are created – all this rarely makes it Hebrew. school programs.
The millennia therefore tend to think that anti-Semitism is an old and European problem.
"My understanding of anti-Semitism was to think about the Holocaust experienced by my grandparents. I did not necessarily think about it in the modern context, "said Gaby Joseph, 24. This changed when Joseph studied in Copenhagen in 2015 and that an armed man killed a guard in front of a synagogue. Police suspected that he had been influenced by terrorists who had killed customers at a kosher grocery store in Paris the previous month.
"As a granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, I felt honestly a little naive and I could be shocked by something like that," said Joseph.
She sent an email to her grandfather about her overseas study program to tell her how much she was upset by the shooting. He answered with one word, she said, "It's hard to be a Jew."
Suddenly, she saw how her perception of anti-Semitism was different from hers, how safe she always felt as a Jew in a world where he felt in danger.
Last week, before going to the crowded sanctuary of the Adas Israel synagogue in northwest Washington to pay tribute to those killed in Pittsburgh, she again opened this message in one line. Again, it looked like a punch.
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For others, he hit home for the first time watching the news after the Pittsburgh attack. "Watching the news the other day was the first time I cried in front of the news," said 27-year-old Corey Teich.
He was nauseated by the speech the Pittsburgh gunman would have read and adopted – the online attitude that Jews are foreigners who undermine American society.
"I have so rarely ever thought of it. You know the word "anti-Semitism". You know the Holocaust. You heard about it at the Hebrew school, "he said. "You know it happened in history. You know that theoretically it is possible. But you never think about it, because you feel safe – probably the people who lived in Squirrel Hill as well. "
His Jewish identity resides in bagels and lox and Seinfeld; he rarely visits a synagogue, he said. But he felt an urge he could not explain this week: put his chai necklace, the Hebrew word meaning "life".
Prejudice, he said, is "more prevalent and more real" than he has ever known. "It certainly makes me more proud to be who I am, because some people want to end this."
For young adults eating Chipotle takeaway near Dupont Circle on Thursday night, the next day was a busy day – the first Shabbat since the Tree of Life massacre was scheduled to begin at sunset on Friday. Jews around the world have made calls to "come to Shabbat", inviting Jews and non-Jews to gather in synagogues.
These four young people, members of the Jewish service corps Avoda, had planned to host 30 guests in the house where they live during their one – year commitment to employment in social services. They hoped to offer consolation to those in mourning. They hoped to be able to cook enough food.
For Fisher, the reality of hate outside their united circle could not quite understand. She told her friends that she was reading statistics published by the Anti-Defamation League, showing the largest increase of a year ever recorded in anti-Semitism. incidents in the United States.
"It's crazy, I do not have the impression of having already met her directly," she said. "Of course, this exists – but where is it? "
She paused. Now, they all knew the answer.
"In Pittsburgh."
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