antisemitism – Stories That Are All True

I’m not a Jew. I’m Jew……. ish.

This is code for “my friend Tiina wrote a play for her congregation and asked me to be in it.” I am always desperate for more time with the whole crew, so I accepted. I’ll be going out to Fredericksburg several times between now and Purim. Tiina doesn’t live there, but the synagogue does.

I’ve not been there, but I have been to FXBG once. It’s lovely, the kind of downtown that reminds me of New England more than anything else.

I’m also picturing all of Aada’s Jewish friends telling her I was in it before I did and that didn’t seem to work out well in my head. So here it is in plain language above the fold. I just want to avoid the cognitive dissonance that would absolutely flip her out at seeing me in the grocery store.

I go to Tiina’s for emotional sustenance. I go to Wegman’s for Cheerwine, or “Pirate Blood Soda,” in their lingo.

Tiina, Brian, and the kids have slowly become my family of choice, and I hang out there a lot. The farm is in Stafford, where the neighbors are rare. They have a lake house in Louisa as well, and through my road trips South we’ve bonded. I watched the kids while they were out of town. Tiina feeds me early and often. We have a beautiful relationship.

She does other things for me, too, but feeding me is my favorite. 😛

My love language is food, and I wish I had prepared more for Galentine’s Day. It was a comedy of errors that I forgot Tiina’s olives (her standard answer when I ask her if she needs anything), and I felt bad…. but I will make it up to her next weekend if not before. I’m trying to learn everything so I can be off book. It’s not the lines that matter- I’m Bigtan, a Persian guard. He is a very minor character. The “off book” part is learning “No One Mourns the Wicked.” I have a YouTube video, sheet music, and time on my hands.

I am having the most success by turning up the recording very loud so that I can hear the intake breath. The piece doesn’t have a vamp. It just STARTS. Being able to catch breath intake at least gives me a microsecond of preparation.

Having the sheet music is allowing me to look for other entrances while the music is going on, harder to pick out.

I’m honestly quite happy about being a part of a team again. The entire family is also cast in the play, so I am working with people I already love and being introduced around at Zoom rehearsal tonight.

In a way, it is very much reclaiming my childhood.

When I was a child, my father was a pastor. We lived in several different cities in Texas, but in Galveston our next-door neighbors were Jewish. That was catnip for a preacher’s kid. I loved the faith and celebrated every holiday, Jewish and Christian, for two years until we moved.

I wanted way more than two years to ask questions and explore my faith.

Tiina and her family have welcomed me into their culture, and it fits me. But it’s not just synagogue life.

It’s her son giving me a Valentine.

Her daughter giving me a bracelet Tiina had to wrestle off me just to try on my costume.

It’s the feeling of family, a long way from home.

It’s stepping out of my comfort zone, and literally into a new role.

It was intentional. I needed to get out of the house, and Tiina’s synagogue offered me a place to plug in.

Nothing more, nothing less.

I don’t want to feel fear that I’m overstepping when I’m actually trying to step away. I don’t have any fantasies that running into each other is safe and comfortable, totally going unnoticed the way I would want.

The only option is to disclose up front.

But the plot has only thickened if Aada enjoys the roux.

Because a Purim spiel is totally the kind of thing I would have invited her to. It’s all about family.

Even those who are not Jews…… they’re Jew……………….. ish.

Antisemitism is no longer a local prejudice whispered in alleyways or scrawled on synagogue walls. It has become a transnational rupture, spreading across continents with the velocity of online hate and the fuel of geopolitical flashpoints.

The Bondi Beach massacre in Australia — fifteen lives extinguished during a Hanukkah celebration — is not an isolated tragedy. It is part of a grim ledger: Europe reports record spikes in France, Germany, and the UK, where pro‑Hamas demonstrations have blurred into antisemitic violence. North America logs hundreds of incidents in 2025 alone, from vandalism to physical assaults, with August marking the highest monthly total ever recorded in the U.S. Latin America, particularly Argentina, has seen antisemitic demonstrations swell, echoing the same rhetoric that ricochets across social media feeds worldwide.

This is not coincidence. It is globalization of hate. The same platforms that connect families across oceans now connect extremists across borders. The same geopolitical flashpoints that ignite protests also ignite prejudice.

For centuries, antisemitism has not been a passing prejudice but a recurring wound in the Jewish story. From the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem to the expulsions from Spain and England, from pogroms in Eastern Europe to the Holocaust itself, Jewish communities have lived under the shadow of suspicion, scapegoating, and violence. Each era dressed the hatred in new clothes — religious dogma, nationalist fervor, racial pseudoscience — but the underlying impulse remained the same: to mark Jews as outsiders, to deny them belonging, and to punish them for imagined sins.

This history is not abstract. It is inscribed in memory, in ritual, in the very rhythm of Jewish life. The Passover story of liberation, the mourning of Tisha B’Av, the candlelit resilience of Hanukkah — all of these are cultural responses to oppression, reminders that survival itself is a form of resistance. To be Jewish has often meant carrying both the weight of persecution and the stubborn joy of continuity.

What makes the current global rise in antisemitism so heavy is that it echoes these ancient ruptures. The rhetoric may be digital now, the attacks amplified by algorithms instead of pulpits, but the pattern is familiar. Once again, Jewish communities are forced to defend their right to exist, to worship, to gather without fear. Once again, the world is confronted with the question of whether it will allow prejudice to metastasize unchecked.

The scandal is not only in the acts themselves but in the normalization of rhetoric that makes them possible. Antisemitism has shifted from fringe prejudice into mainstream discourse, amplified by algorithms and weaponized by political opportunism.

To write about this is to resist erasure. To inscribe it into the archive is to say: this is not just another headline. It is a global scandal, a cultural wound, and a reminder that prejudice, left unchecked, metastasizes across borders.

Scored by Copilot, conducted by Leslie Lanagan