After Pittsburgh, Stand With Us
On Saturday morning, the Jewish holy day, a man carried an AR-15 assault rifle and three handguns into the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. In the hour it took to apprehend him, he stalked through the synagogue, yelling anti-Semitic slurs as he massacred eleven congregants and wounded seven. He told a SWAT member that “all Jews must die.” He posted on social media that Jews are the “enemy of white people.” An hour before entering the synagogue, he wrote a final message: “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.” This was the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in American history.
More than anything, Saturday’s massacre has made me feel alone.
Part of the reason I came to Exeter was the Jewish community. In my town at home, I was the only Jew at my school. When I came here, I found that Exeter has a rabbi on staff and Shabbat is celebrated every week. It seemed like a dream. Exeter Jewish Community, EJC, is a family for me. We are very close—but we are close in the way only extremely small communities can be. There is only one practicing Jewish girl in my dorm. We’ve gone to S habbat together every Friday night since prep fall. Together, we laugh at the ignorant Jew jokes our classmates make and the challah bread Wetherell serves during Passover. Each year, we bet on which teachers will be the most forgiving with extensions for assignments due during our high holy days when the rest of our peers don’t know what is going on. Each year we make plans to go home for the holidays we don’t get time off for; plans that always inevitably fall through. Having one person who shares my culture and experiences has made a world of difference, but every summer when the new girls in our dorm are posted on ExeterConnect, I rush to see if there are any Jewish-sounding names. Every year, the two of us are alone on Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Hanukkah again and again.
On Sunday night we walked to the steps of the Exeter town hall to hold a vigil for the murdered. We lit candles from a box labeled “Christmas Eve.” The whole school had been invited via email, but there were hardly any students there. The crowd was made up of town churchgoers coming to show solidarity and their support meant so much to me. But there were nearly no Jews. When Rabbi lead the Mourner’s Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, her voice echoed, mostly alone, across the bandstand. The group remained silent rather than stumble over the unfamiliar Hebrew letters and sounds.
As a member of a persecuted minority, I am incredibly privileged. Few people can tell from my outward features that I am Jewish; my minority identity, unlike skin color, is not immediately apparent when I venture into society every day. Those who do know are accepting, if unknowledgeable. But hatred against Jews is on the rise in America, and at Exeter we need to recognize it. In 2017, the number of anti-Semitic incidents in the United States increased by 57%— the largest single-year increase recorded by the Anti-Defamation League since it began collecting data in 1979. The FBI reports that 53% of faith-based hate crimes are perpetrated against Jews. Last year in Charlottesville, Virginia neo-Nazis chanted “Jews will not replace us.” Currently, in lead-up to the midterm elections, the alt-right is “twitter bombing” Jewish journalists with an estimated five million anti-Semitic tweets per day in an act of intimidation. Back at home, armed guards are the first people I greet on Friday nights when my grandparents and I attend Shabbat. My synagogue frequently receives bomb threats. Until this weekend, I never took them seriously.
Do you know what it feels like to open your phone and find hundreds of detailed accounts of how individuals who you’ve never met around the world hate you? I sit in my classes surrounded by people living ordinary days. Except for my adviser, not one of my teachers have acknowledged the massacre. Extremely few friends have. They could be silent for a number of reasons. Maybe they don’t read the news and simply don’t know what is going on. Maybe they are aware of the massacre but don’t know what to say. Maybe they have become desensitized to mass shootings, and to them this is just another unfortunate event. Maybe they feel it is not in their place to speak. But this is speculation; all I hear is silence. And to me, silence feels like dismissal. Dismissal because this massacre doesn’t matter enough to address.
I am so thankful to those who have chosen to speak. The friends who have reached out to say, “I see what you are going through.” The religious services faculty who are trying their best to make sense of this. But we are a small group at Exeter, as in America, as in the world. We need you to stand with us against hatred. We need you to stand with us for community and trust. We need you to stand with us for love.