I come from a long lineage of Jews who took incredible risks for the survival of the Jewish people. On my mother’s side, my six great uncles were partisans in the forests of Nazi-ravaged Europe, and all but one lost their lives during the war. On my father’s side, my grandfather fought in the Israeli War of Independence, desperately working to break through the siege of Jerusalem, where 100,000 Jews were deprived of food, water, and medicine by the Arab forces, while simultaneously befriending the residents of Abu Ghosh, the only Arab village on the road to Jerusalem to allow the passage of Jewish humanitarian convoys.
Compared with theirs, my own hineni moment seems almost embarrassingly ordinary. Not only were my relatives and ancestors significantly more courageous than I am, but their hineni moments were also much more dramatic. For some, it was Hitler’s maniacal plot to exterminate European Jewry that forced them to take action. For others, it was the threat of the annihilation of a Jewish state that had yet to declare its independence. For me, it was simply a string of anti-Semitic acts of vandalism in Pico-Robertson, an overwhelmingly Jewish neighborhood in western Los Angeles.
Let me back up a little bit first.
As a kid, I devoured Elie Wiesel’s Night and Eli Ben-Hanan’s biography of Israel’s most famous spy, Eli Cohen, Our Man in Damascus. As a freshman in high school, I printed a photo I’d shot of the Kotel, Temple Mount, and Al-Aqsa Mosque to show my history teacher how much he didn’t actually understand about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And then, fresh out of high school, I took a summer job at the Museum of the Jewish Community of Costa Rica, taking it upon myself to restructure their visitors’ tour. Not yet knowing it, I had already begun putting together the story I would dedicate my career to writing.
That story erupted in the spring of 2020, in the wake of the murder of a black American man by a white police officer. Digging his knee into George Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds, the incident was caught on camera and disseminated widely, horrifying the nation, myself included, and bringing as many as 26 million Americans to the streets chanting “Black Lives Matter!” as they marched against police brutality. The overwhelming majority of the protestors were peaceful. Some weren’t.
And then, as so often happens in times of chaos, anti-Semitism began to creep up. At first, it appeared in subtler forms, with whispers of the “Deadly Exchange”—a conspiracy theory claiming American police brutality stems from cooperation with Israeli security forces while conveniently ignoring similar partnerships with Canadian, French, British, Australian, and other police departments. Before long, the rhetoric gave way to action, as protestors turned their anger toward Jewish businesses, schools, and synagogues, defacing them with anti-Semitic graffiti and carrying out break-ins across the predominantly Jewish Los Angeles neighborhood of Pico-Robertson.
Shocked that Orthodox Jews minding their own business had become targets, I shared my concerns with a friend, only to have them dismissed and the whole affair labeled “a white supremacist psyop.” “The left,” she insisted, “would never hurt Jews,” either unaware of—or unwilling to grapple with—the history of Soviet Jewry. Rather than engaging with my argument on its merits, she dismissed me as someone who “sounds like a Trumper,” reducing my concerns as a Jew worried about the resurgence of the world’s oldest hatred to mere partisan politics. Three years later, in the shadow of the October 7 massacre, she finally drifted out of my orbit.
My shock, however, didn’t end there. At the time, I ran a small online jewelry business called Roots Metals and had built a modest following, consisting mostly of independent artists and small business owners, the overwhelming majority of whom, like myself, leaned left. As activism migrated to social media during the world’s descent into the great void known as COVID-19, I watched how my online community was quick to hop aboard all of the latest social justice trends ranging from Stop Asian Hate to Black Lives Matter. I supported those movements too. But when Jews became the target of hatred, all I heard were crickets.
I discovered I am here for a bigger purpose than my own little life: to help other Jews find the terminology to describe what they already know in their bones.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. Just two years prior, after an American white supremacist murdered eleven congregants in a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, during Shabbat services, I noticed how many left-wing activists were determined to engage with the massacre in every way except for a reckoning with anti-Semitism. Ignoring the murderer’s explicit anti-Semitic motives and his documented hostility to Donald Trump, they reframed the attack primarily as a debate about gun control and cast all blame on the president. The year before, white supremacists and neo-Nazis marched down Charlottesville, Virginia, carrying Tiki torches and chanting “Jews will not replace us!” which the predominantly left-leaning mainstream media had largely reported as “you will not replace us!” Yet now, as that same anti-Semitic rhetoric increasingly gave way to violence, few seemed willing to say a thing.
Eventually, I reached the point where staying silent felt harder than speaking up. I opened up my Instagram stories and typed out a rant. Though in retrospect I was biting off more than I could chew, I tried to explain the history of the Jewish people, the history of anti-Semitism, and my gripes against the raging silence of my online peers. I’m not sure I was entirely coherent. I’m certain there were typos. After all, it’s hard to make sense when you’re fuming. For the first time, I was using the wealth of knowledge I’d accumulated over the course of my life, sharing it with the world the way friends had urged me to for years. I didn’t know it yet, but those Instagram stories marked the beginning of my online advocacy.
What followed was both expected and unexpected. As my old followers dropped like flies—some leaving the now-obligatory “What about Palestine?” comment on their way out—new followers showed up. Then more. Then more still. They wanted to know more about Jewish history and were hungry for all the details. They wanted to understand the patterns of anti-Semitism I was identifying and learn how to identify them too. They wanted the language to describe what they too had long sensed but had never quite known how to explain.
In a way, I became a loud and proud Jewish advocate against my will. But it was, I think, precisely what I needed. Pushing past my fear of being the center of attention—a fear I continue to grapple with to this day—I discovered something important I had never fully appreciated before: the power of my voice. I realized that I have something valuable to say, even as politically divisive public discourse futilely tried to put me in a box. More importantly, I saw that my words can positively impact other people’s lives. I discovered I am here for a bigger purpose than my own little life: to help other Jews find the terminology to describe what they already know in their bones.
So here I am.
Hineni.
