I can still remember when my grandmother, daughter of immigrant Jews, would ask about any global or local news, “Is this good for the Jews?”
It was a common refrain among Jews — half joke, half commentary — back in the day.
For my grandmother, it was half joke, half commentary from someone who had lost relatives during the Holocaust.
It was half joke, half commentary from someone who knew antisemitism, in its most vile forms, up close.
It was half joke, half commentary from someone who lived in New York, then and now a liberal bastion, when 20,000 Nazis rallied in Madison Square Garden, when the German ocean liner, St. Louis, filled with more than 900 Jews attempting to escape the Third Reich, was turned away by the United States, as well as Canada and Cuba, many of them only to go back to their deaths.
She wouldn’t have had to ask the question about the Boulder attack — now officially labeled a federal hate crime — on a peaceful Run for Their Lives weekly march, dedicated to calling attention to the Israeli hostages held by Hamas for more than 600 days.
Run for Their Lives is a global organization. There are members in Denver as well as in Boulder. Marchers are advised not to protest, not to block roads, to concentrate only on the plight of the hostages and not the war in Gaza. They are, in fact, peaceful. The Pearl Street Mall on a Sunday afternoon is usually peaceful.
And yet.
It is terrible for Jews, as the rise in antisemitism becomes increasingly visible. It is also terrible for everyone of every religion, and of no religion, who lives in the hate-filled environment that is America today.
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SUBSCRIBEIt’s more than a little disturbing that the president would choose to attack the alleged attacker — Mohamed Sabry Soliman — as an “illegal alien,” that he would blame the attack on Joe Biden for his “ridiculous Open Border Policy,” and then say that those like Soliman “must go under ‘TRUMP’ Policy.”
It was inevitable that Trump — who has broken bread at Mar-a-Lago with self-proclaimed white nationalists and antisemites — would try to turn a story about a horrific antisemitic attack into a story about unauthorized migrants, writing that this “is another example of why we must keep our Borders SECURE, and deport illegal, Anti-American Radicals from our Homeland.”
(By the way, Soliman came to America on a tourist visa in 2023, after which he applied for asylum and was granted a work visa, which apparently expired on March 28, during, yes, TRUMP’s present term.)
My grandmother wouldn’t have been surprised that Soliman said he wanted to “kill all Zionists” — all Jews? — and would do it again if he could. Or that he had been planning the attack, according to what he told law enforcement officials, for more than a year. Or even that Soliman told authorities — in words that make you wonder where such hatred begins and ends — that he had waited to launch his terror assault until after his daughter’s graduation.
It would not have been lost on my grandmother and is definitely not lost on me — a secular Jew whose religious identity is mostly in line with, say, Mel Brooks — that Soliman used a makeshift flamethrower and Molotov cocktails to burn the victims, one of them an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor, as if to invoke the memory of concentration-camp ovens. The truth, though, was that Soliman told detectives he had wanted to use guns, but wasn’t able to buy them.
These “Zionists” were Jews who marched peacefully, who have been marching every week to remind people of the hostages.
Many Jews march regularly in support of Palestinians generally and in support, particularly, of the Gazans who have been killed and children starved during Benjamin Netanyahu’s vengeance-filled assault.
This conflation of anti-Zionists and antisemites — does opposing Israel make you an antisemite; does opposing the planned deportation of millions make you anti-American? — makes this issue even more problematic. Many Jews and non-Jews — look at the polls — don’t support Netanyahu’s policy in Gaza that has cost tens of thousands of civilian lives and leaves innocent Gazan children literally starving.
The distinction probably matters little to Soliman. Jews, we’ve learned for two millennia, are considered by antisemites as simply Jews and little else, whatever their beliefs. And if the rationale behind antisemitism changes over time, it never leaves us.
Jews are under attack today. It’s as simple, and as terrifying, as that. If you go to a synagogue, you’ll see security. If you go a Jewish film festival, you’ll see security. Go to a Jewish day school or a Jewish Community Center, you’ll see well-staffed security.
It was just two weeks ago that a couple who worked at the Israeli Embassy were gunned down after leaving a reception at a Jewish museum in Washington, D.C. The gunman fired over and over again.
Not long before that, there was an antisemitic attack on the residence of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Jew who, on that same night, had celebrated the Seder with his family on the first night of Passover. It has been noted that the flamethrower used by Soliman was markedly similar to those used in the Pennsylvania attack.
And now Boulder.
I talked to Stefanie Clark, who is a cofounder of Stop Antisemitism Colorado, which came to life soon after the Oct. 7 attack. I have long known Clark as a progressive activist, lobbying for the gun-safety movement at the legislature. She said that the reason for her new organization is that “the narrative coming from both the far right and the far left was creating this strange unification (of antisemitism) and needed to be called out.”
“It is heart-wrenching for me to see what is going on in Gaza,” Clark said, “but Jews are being targeted, and we have no say in what the Israeli government does. Someone has to stand up if no one else will.”
Most Colorado politicians have come out strongly against the attack, of course. Attorney General Phil Weiser said in a statement, “People may have differing views about world events and the Israeli-Hamas conflict, but violence is never the answer to settling differences. Hate has no place in Colorado.”
And yet.
My grandmother was, as a Jew, wary. As the child of immigrants. As someone who lived in the days of the Holocaust.
One day, soon after the Holocaust Museum in Washington opened, she and my mother and my daughter and I went there, four generations of Jews. We cried together. And we saw photos of Jews being transported from Hungary — where my great-grandmother once lived and where, I swear, the older women looked so much like my great-grandmother, years later when I knew her. What I know was that she owned a candy store in Brooklyn and cooked me latkes every time I visited.
My sister and I, New Yorkers who grew up in Virginia during Jim Crow days, were taught to be wary, but also to be activists.
As kids in the ’60s, the city’s most prestigious country club, located just a few blocks from where my sister went to high school, didn’t allow Jews to join. My sister could eat meals there with friends whose parents were members. She couldn’t go in the pool.
I remember my elementary school class, before the Supreme Court ruling against prayer in school, recited the Lord’s Prayer each morning. The Jews in the class — there were about maybe eight of us — didn’t recite the New Testament prayer.
Kids didn’t understand why we couldn’t. I didn’t understand why we couldn’t. But I knew, and they knew, we were suddenly seen as different. It’s a lesson I haven’t forgotten about all those who are seen as different.
My sister today works on Holocaust remembrance. She helped create a book relating the stories of survivors who came to live in her corner of the country. She opposes Netanyahu and the Israeli government for what is happening in Gaza, she says, but not Israel as a country. There’s a difference, she knows.
There is a difference.
But not enough difference for those Jews who peacefully march each week in Boulder and threaten nobody.
It’s not clear when the Run for Their Lives marches will resume, only that they’ll be back in the near future. And I can only hope that many thousand Coloradans march with them.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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