I'm not crying. There is a wolf.

We should be concerned with the public silence that has followed the Colleyville attack.

It’s hard to know what to say this time around. This emerging genre of synagogue attacks is not one that I’m enjoying very much. I don’t want to write yet another piece about how even when things like what occurred in Texas on Saturday morning happen, I will continue to be a proud Jew who goes to synagogue and that I stand unafraid. It’s only half true anyway. I am a proud Jew. That is, and will remain, unchanged. And when I can attend services in person again, I will. I attended services following the Tree of Life massacre in 2018, and I was at synagogue when the attack occurred in Halle, Germany, on Yom Kippur in 2019. But I am not unafraid. I can no longer claim to be unaffected by the increasing violence against my community. 

But I’m not here to talk about violence. I’m here to talk about silence. 

I’m not afraid of the gunmen. 

I have been aware of the inherent danger of large gatherings of Jews for my entire life. I have never attended a synagogue in a major city, including Seoul, South Korea, that did not have security outside. I have gone through metal detectors, been tested on my knowledge of Judaism, and had to hand over my passport to be permitted entry. None of that should be as normal or as necessary as it is to keep me safe while I pray. I know that every time I go to synagogue or a Jewish event, there is the possibility that something terrible might happen. I accepted this risk long before I was told by an officer with a big gun at the door to Temple Emanu-el in Manhattan that Torah study was cancelled due to a bomb threat. 

I am afraid of the deafening silence from those outside the Jewish community that echoed as four people were held hostage in their synagogue because of a belief in an Antisemitic conspiracy theory about Jews and power. This is the same belief that resulted in the murder of Ilan Halimi in 2006, and it is by the grace of Hashem and Rabbi Cytron-Walker yelling “run” that this ended differently.  

When four men were held hostage in their synagogue for over 10 hours by a gunman who believed that a Jewish conspiracy was responsible for the imprisonment of Aafia Siddiqui, a notion propagated by Siddiqui herself on countless occasions, it failed to attract the public outpouring of support and sympathy that we witnessed following the Tree of Life Shooting in 2018. No one put a “#together against Antisemitism” filter on their Facebook photo. There have been no messages of support from the broader community. At school on Monday, none of my professors mentioned the horrific Antisemitism that occurred over the weekend in their discussions of hatred, racism, and discrimination. The response has altogether been a tad strange. 

Instead of support, we have seen attempts to de-centre what happened from the Jewish community and Antisemitism. As CNN provided their live updates on Saturday, they made sure to mention how Rabbi Cytron-Walker was active in the interfaith community and friendly with the local imam; because his life would have been less worth saving if he hadn’t been? Though they have now changed their position, the FBI initially claimed that this attack was not targeted at the Jewish community, something which was always patently untrue.

Even as the fate of four men held hostage in their synagogue was unfolding, the focus had already turned away from the Jewish community. The public and the media were more concerned about the potential Islamophobia that could result from the fact that the attacker was Muslim than they were with the actual Antisemitism taking place. 

The reason this attack didn’t happen at a church or other gathering place is because of the way that unchecked Antisemitic conspiracy theories and libel have permeated so much of progressive public discourse. There have been no widespread calls to hold CAIR (Council for American Islamic Relations) accountable for defending  Zahara Billoo’s 27 November statement that “Zionist synagogues are the enemy”. No one is calling for checks on the social justice position, currently being taught at many schools and universities, including my own, that Israel is the enemy and that Jews in Israel are ‘White, colonial oppressors’. 

When these statements are bandied about, the Jewish community makes a lot of noise - but mostly to ourselves. We either look too similar (people like me) or too different in the wrong way (Jersey City shooting, 2019) to be the kind of underdog anyone wants to root for. So when we say that things aren’t okay, the noise-cancelling headphones go on, and the only ones listening are each other, and we already know. 

I have been in a leadership position for Jews on campus at my university for nearly two years now. And for most of that time, I have been sounding the alarm about Jewish safety. Others have been sounding it for much longer. I have, again and again, told anyone who would listen to me that Jewish students are physically and emotionally unsafe on campus. I have again and again told anyone who would listen that when professors use their pulpits to spread the myth of Jewish power and paint Jews in Israel as ‘colonial oppressors’, they are dehumanizing us and fomenting something truly dangerous in the process. And even when our lives were threatened, no one listened. No one cared. We have been regarded as little boys crying wolf.  

What I have heard, time and again, has been silence. We need to start talking about how Antisemitism permeates the fabric of our society. We need to talk about Antisemitism on both sides of the aisle. We need to talk about how the hierarchy of the current social justice movement feeds on ancient Antisemitic stereotypes about fictitious Jewish power. We need to talk about how allowing this rhetoric to go unchecked results in actual violence. It is time for people outside of the Jewish community to start speaking up when they witness Antisemitism. It is time to stop treating it as a lesser form of racism - as one that is somehow less pervasive or less deadly: it’s not. 

For years, we have been shouting from the rooftops that things are getting worse. We have been attacked on the streets, in our homes, and at our houses of worship. We are not crying. The wolf is here. We have been looking at him for years. We have been shouting at you to open your eyes and behold his presence. How much louder do you need us to be?