This is the story my mother remembers, the story she has always feared would repeat itself. That no matter how comfortable we as Jews may feel today, it only takes a small group of people (and a large group of people to sit idly by) to turn everything on its head. I remember watching with her in our living room as Donald Trump assumed the presidency in 2017. It was on her mind. As he approached the podium for his oath she asked me, with tears welling in her eyes, “Are we going to have to leave?”

At that point I didn’t think the answer was yes; I’m not sure I do now, either. But with each incident that has followed, family conversations have become more frequently wrapped up in those kinds of questions. First there was “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville, Va. Then the attack in Pittsburgh, on a synagogue that looked an awful lot like ours. Then San Diego, Jersey City and other smaller but significant incidents in between.

Jewish students’ experiences on college campuses are becoming increasingly uncomfortable. This fall, swastikas were drawn in a school in our district, and in another one nearby. And in December, there were several anti-Semitic attacks in a little over a week in New York — arguably the Jewish capital of this country — ending with the Hanukkah stabbings in Monsey.

Now is the first time that I have truly felt, in my (admittedly few) 23 years of life, such an overwhelming fear of impending doom. It seems to be all anyone talks about anymore, perpetually swirling around us, and for good reason. If war won’t destroy the world, climate change will. And now to add to it, the wave of anti-Semitic attacks over the past year are instilling the seeds of fear into many millennial American Jews for perhaps the first time. Not even, perhaps, because we fear for ourselves — but because we fear for the future of our children and our grandchildren. I can’t help but think this is unnatural: We are so young! Many of us have yet to figure things out for ourselves, have yet to hold our own in the world.

And yet we wonder and worry for those who will follow us because we are so palpably and devastatingly confronted with hints of what they will face if we do not act.

My mother, I now understand, has carried that very same fear with her all along. Well before any of the warning signs of the past few years, before anyone else seemed to be concerned, she was, because she had lived it. She was part of a community that had once felt exceptionally durable and perfectly coexistent, but instead fell apart before her eyes.

The answer, of course, is to act. (We are all guilty of not acting.) To push back on our suffocating culture of complacency — that if we’re not directly in harm’s way, right now, we do nothing — and be the ones to go against the grain until the grain goes in the right direction. Make people uncomfortable when they say or do something they shouldn’t, no matter how innocuous it may seem, so that we may look back upon these decades not as the moment when more could have been done, but as a mere malignant spike in a generally positive direction.

Our children will thank us for looking out for them. For understanding all that is at risk. I now thank my mom every chance I get.

Jordan Salama is a writer and journalist.

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