The burden of a people, the burden of a father
Sunday morning, my daughter, my 19-year-old daughter who is living away from home for the first time in her life, called crying. My wife and I were at breakfast, the beginning of a day celebrating our youngest son’s birthday. But the celebration, for me, was shattered by the sound of my daughter’s sobs on the other end of the line.
She caught her breath and asked the question I feared was coming: “Daddy, the shooting in Pittsburgh … why?”
Fathers are supposed to have answers to their little girls’ questions. I had none. Why, indeed?
“Could that happen here?” she asked next.
“It won’t,” I muttered, hoping she didn’t detect the doubt in my voice.
“How do you know? How do you know it won’t happen here?”
I don’t know. Her fears are real and valid, and my only suggestion is to believe — believe that what happened in Pittsburgh won’t happen where she is or where her mom and I are or where her brothers or her grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and friends are. But I don’t know that.
Hate for Jews and other minorities is alive and well in America.
The Pittsburgh shooter defiled a sacred building on a sacred day, screaming “All Jews must die,” while committing the most heinous act of anti-Semitism ever perpetrated on American soil. My children heard those words. At last year’s white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., one demonstrator told a reporter, “This city is run by Jewish communists and criminal [n-word].” My children heard those words, too.
Hate for Jews and other minorities is alive and well in America.
The Anti-Defamation League informs us that the number of anti-Semitic incidents in the United States of America rose 57 percent in 2017, the largest single-year increase on record. It also tells us that Jewish people were the victims of more reported hate crimes than any other religious minority last year.
My great-grandparents escaped from Eastern Europe because, as Jews, they were marginalized and stripped of their rights, and they chose to come to America to raise their children in a place devoid of such hate and anti-Semitism.
But hate for Jews and other minorities is alive and well in America.
My daughter wants to know how you put something like the Pittsburgh shooting behind you, how we live without fear and go about our days without wondering when or where or if the next tragic act of hatred will happen. I want to know how a father goes about his day knowing that his children live with such fear. The man who committed the horrible act in Pittsburgh, like the men who shouted, “Jews will not replace us!” in Charlottesville — these people are on the fringes, yes. The person who called in bomb threats to Jewish institutions last winter, like the individual who brazenly left swastikas on the doorsteps of Jewish executives here in Orlando are in the minority, yes. They are on the fringes and in the minority, but they are not alone.
They are emboldened, and they feel empowered, and you can be sure that next week another one will commit an act of hate, and people will dismiss it, too, as an act by someone on the fringes and in the minority. I get it.
These things are easy to dismiss — if you don’t know the statistics.
Easy to dismiss — if they didn’t recur over and over again in your people’s history.
Easy to dismiss — if you’re not a father who has gotten a call from your daughter, your 19-year-old daughter, living away from home for the first time in her life, and she’s crying on the other end of the line asking her daddy if she’s safe, if she should be worried, if what happened to the Jews worshipping at a synagogue in Pittsburgh on Shabbat could happen to her.
Hatred for Jews and other minorities is alive and well in America.
Mark Freid is past president of the Holocaust Memorial Resource & Education Center of Florida.