Rachel Kay
Cleveland, OH
Having been born in new york and raised in Chicago, I knew that antisemitism was real, but even if I ran across some ignorance where I grew up it was never in a vacuum of exposure to Jewish people or culture. When I was in college in Iowa I experienced, for the first time, people who had such total isolation from my cultural group that they had no conception that a Jew could be standing with them as they told these hurtful jokes and I understood that these jokes and their themes were, historically, one and the same which were used to spur violence against Jews in history. And we were in America, modern, way way post-holocaust America that lives with me, but I struggle with how to pass that knowledge to my children without also instilling the ‘we are victim’ mentality.
