One of two swastikas that were spray-painted on the window of a closed business on S. Broad St. in South Philadelphia on November 9, 2016.

When I was in graduate school, I spent a summer in Berlin, and one night, the woman from whom I was renting a room invited me to a dinner party with some of her friends. They were lovely people, they all spoke English, we were having a delightful time, and then the British guy at the table started telling a joke about a Jew.



Finally I spoke up. “I’m Jewish, just so you know.”

“Oh, you are?” he said. I don’t look especially Jewish, but I also don’t not look Jewish. I think it had simply just never occurred to him that anyone he associated with would be Jewish. “Well, it’s not, like, a Jewish joke.” He was genteel, educated — and seemed almost offended at the notion that I would take offense to his humor.

Certainly, the "joke" wasn't violent, or scary — just sad. I'd lived most of my life in a relative bubble of diverse, open-minded people of all races and religions. We did not tell jokes that were racist or anti-Semitic. It felt especially pointed to hear an anti-Semitic joke in Berlin, a city that seemed eager to prove it had fully reckoned with its Nazi past.

And it was one of those things that makes you think: Oh, so this is how they talk about us when we’re not around. I thought about this dinner party recently, because this election has brought into the open all of the things that people used to be too polite to say when they thought Jews might be listening. It turns out that we were naïve to think that they weren’t thinking them anymore. It turns out they've been thinking those things all along — and this election emboldened them to bring their hate and vitriol out into the open.

Until this election, it was relatively easy to pretend that anti-Semitism wasn’t really a thing in this country anymore; true anti-Semites were on the fringes of society, reviled for their extreme views. Jews were fully integrated into the fabric of American society, full stop. To think of ourselves as a minority, or in need of protection, seemed almost laughable.

Of course, this is also how Jews in Weimar Germany felt. They were not in need of protection, because they had fully integrated into the fabric of German society, full stop. Except, of course, not.