The Jewish fire inside me, which has been there since my earliest memory, was lit by Judith Aftergut Meller, the first caretaker I had outside of my parents. A child survivor of Auschwitz, Judith was orphaned at age thirteen when her mother, father, and siblings all died at the hands of the Nazis. Having started sharing her story with me when I was two or three—far too young to comprehend it—she told it over and over to anyone who would listen, believing that knowing what had happened could teach people something valuable for the next time it did.
As a very young child, I absorbed Judith’s life story much as I would any other cruel and outlandish fairy tale. A parable, it didn’t seem so different than, say, the story of Hansel and Gretel. From an early age, I understood that villains existed, that they put people into ovens, and that nothing was too awful to be true. Yet, though the Nazis murdered her entire family, Judith harbored no particular bitterness toward Germans or Germany, believing that kind of evil can be found in every group of people on Earth. These days, as I see that evil taking so many different forms all around me, I find myself thinking of her constantly.
Still, there’s always been a part of me that refused to believe in the realness of the people who lived in mid-twentieth-century Europe. Irrationally, I perceived them as black-and-white people living in the land of black-and-white TV. And so I always wondered: who on earth were these “friends and neighbors” of the Jews, the people who looked away from what was happening? Who were these people who so lacked in critical thinking skills that they fell for Hitler’s hatred in spite of their close relationships with the Jews? Could I ever have friends like that? Though I would have very much preferred to have never found out which of my friends would have made perfectly good Germans, these days I often feel like it’s simply and irreducibly the Jewish fate. In every place and age, we are doomed to see with our own eyes and experience within our own lives exactly how it happens.
On the day Judith escaped Auschwitz, the infamous Dr. Mengele had just consigned her to the gas chambers. Having been so thin by that morning’s selection process that he simply lifted her off the ground with one brutal fist closed around her neck, Judith looked straight into his eyes—eyes she described as black and dead, flat and inhuman as the eyes of a shark—and every ounce of her ferocious will was suddenly funneled into a marrow-deep, overpowering, visceral conviction. Dangling there, hanging from his hand, she thought, You will not be the death of me.
That very hour she escaped. When he flung her to the left—the side consigned to death—she managed to dart behind him and bolt into the surrounding crowd. So thin that she easily disappeared into the chaos of Auschwitz, she wended her way into a prisoner regiment leaving for a labor camp. Years later, living in Portland, Oregon, after weathering a series of staggering hardships throughout the rest of her life—marital turmoil, single parenthood to a child with cognitive impairments, ongoing financial insecurity, illness, exhaustion, depression, and chronic pain—she was among the first to avail herself of the state’s nascent Death With Dignity law. Seventy-four years old and suffering of terminal cancer, Judith declared that choosing the specific time, day, and method of her death was her final fuck you to Dr. Mengele.
Having taught me defiance, Judith also left me with a question that guided much of my life: how would I carry her torch? Though I was not Judith’s biological daughter, she always treated me as one of her own, and I always thought of her as one of my mothers. I wanted to make her happy. I wanted to make her proud. I wanted to avenge her suffering. I wanted to realize her dreams.
As a kid, I had many ideas about how I would do this. I would become a Nazi hunter like Simon Weisenthal. I would join the Mossad and assassinate terrorists. I would “Save Soviet Jewry,” as signs all over Jewish Pittsburgh exhorted us to do in the 1970s, piloting a plane into the USSR under cover of night, landing on some secret, prearranged Soviet airstrip, ushering refuseniks into the cabin, and flying them back to Israel or America. Watching the Sabbath scene in Fiddler on the Roof, I wanted Golde’s maternal blessing for myself: to come to be, in Israel, a shining name.
We Jews are well trained in social exclusion.
Though not as dramatic or heroic, I found other ways of carrying Judith’s torch. When I was 16-years-old, I won first place in the writing division of my city’s Holocaust Arts & Writing Contest with a poem titled Despair in Auschwitz.Then, in what would become the first fan letter I ever wrote, I mailed the poem to Elie Wiesel, the internationally renowned author and Holocaust survivor. To my amazement, he wrote back, thanking me for my letter and reminding me of the enduring power of words. Thirty-four years later, after one of my social media posts defending Israel had been widely shared, a message from his son, Elisha, appeared in my Facebook inbox.
Astounded that both father and son had each written to me—more than three decades apart and without knowing the other had done so—and that both had told me essentially the same thing, I realized that I would not become a Nazi hunter, an assassin, or a stealth pilot. Instead, I would fight for my people with the skills I had. Writing—my career, my passion—would be my weapon of choice. Looking back, I now see that my entire life has been leading me to this moment.
Before October 7, 2023, I made a steady income as a ghostwriter. I loved my clients and I loved my work, but after the massacre and the public response to it, I hit an internal wall. I could no longer devote my time and energy to helping other people tell their stories while feeling an overwhelming responsibility to tell our own. And so, I matched each of my clients with other writers, kissed my income goodbye, and made Jewish advocacy my full-time job.
Since then, I’ve created a Jewish newsletter that goes out several times weekly, two Jewish magazines, the country’s largest Jewish book club, and a still-secret initiative dedicated to strengthening Jewish presence in left-leaning and anti-Semitic social media spaces. With dreams of launching a Jewish publishing house, everything I have built has been—and remains—available for free, with one purpose: to celebrate, embolden, and lift up Jewish writers. At a time when Zionist voices are increasingly silenced and Jewish creativity is subjected to ideological litmus tests, I wanted to build the kind of platform I wished already existed. Though I earn far less than I ever did as a ghostwriter, I have never been more professionally fulfilled in my life.
The social marginalization of Jews in America, especially in the left-leaning spaces I have called home for most of my life, has been painful and infuriating. But we Jews are well trained in social exclusion. We know how to build when others refuse to let us belong. We built our own hospitals. We built our own medical schools. We built our own law firms. We built our own colleges. We built our own theaters. We built Hollywood. Now, once again, we’re building our own spaces, communities, and platforms.
I do not miss a single space in which I was once welcomed and no longer am. To all the people and places that have pushed us to the margins—or out the door altogether—I say: good riddance, goodbye, and good luck. Good luck without your Jews. As for me, I’m a Jew in this life, first and last. That is the loyalty I will choose above any other.
Here I am.
Hineni.
