Part 1: When Your Children Ask What You Did
This is Part 1 of a two-part series. Part 2 will be published next week.
We are living in 2025, and authoritarianism is no longer a distant threat—it’s at our doorstep. In real time, a political party is consolidating power. ICE is committing acts of violence in our communities. Democracy itself is being dismantled piece by piece. Vulnerable people—immigrants, trans folks, people of color—are being targeted by policies that dehumanize and destroy.
When your children and grandchildren ask what you did in this moment, what will you tell them?
When authoritarianism rose, when vulnerable people were targeted, when democracy was under assault, will you tell them you stayed silent because it was safer? That you aligned with power because it promised protection? That you forgot the most basic lesson of Jewish history—that we were strangers in Egypt, and we are commanded, thirty-six times in Torah, to remember?
The Selective Memory Problem
For what seems like forever, I’ve watched many in the Jewish community who love to talk about our role in the civil rights movement: Rabbi Heschel marching with Dr. King, Jewish activists going to Mississippi for Freedom Summer, Jews standing with Black folks in the 1950s and 60s.
And yes, that legacy is real. It matters.
But here’s my question: Where are you now?
History is not repeating itself—it’s calling us again. We are in another moment of civil rights history. Not the comfortable past where you can claim credit for someone else’s courage, but right now. When immigrants are being hunted by ICE. When trans kids are being legislated out of existence. When the architecture of white supremacy is being rebuilt, brick by brick, policy by policy.
Many of you love to quote what Jews did sixty years ago. But when it comes to showing up today, too many are silent. Or worse—aligning themselves with forces that echo the very authoritarianism our ancestors fled.
I’m watching people whose grandparents knew what it meant to be on the wrong side of power now make peace with it, as long as it promises them safety.
But I need you to understand something: the promise of protection through proximity to power has never worked out for us. Never.
The Problem with Comfort
Here’s what I see: White people in this country are not used to being uncomfortable. And many Jews who benefit from white privilege have gotten so comfortable that they’re unwilling to be uncomfortable now—when it matters most.
Being uncomfortable means building coalitions across difference. It means working with people you don’t agree with on everything. It means understanding, for example, that a Palestinian flag does not mean the annihilation of the Jewish people—it means solidarity with Palestinians.
I know this makes many of you uncomfortable. But discomfort is part of the process. Be uncomfortable for a little while—I promise it will get better. But if you run away in fear or refuse to participate, it will never get better. We don’t have to agree on every issue to come together and fight authoritarianism.
Too many of my Jewish siblings refuse to work with people unless they agree on everything. That’s a luxury we cannot afford right now. If we are going to defeat this political party, if we are going to protect democracy, we need to come together. We need to be willing to be uncomfortable.
The comfort of ideological purity is a privilege that those who fled pogroms and survived the Shoah did not have. We must understand what it means to build unlikely alliances and find common cause with people different from ourselves, because survival demands it.
The Dangerous Myth of Safety Through Assimilation
Every time in history that Jews thought we’d finally made it—that we’d assimilated enough, achieved enough to be safe—we learned otherwise. The German Jews thought their patriotism and success would protect them. It didn’t.
White supremacy doesn’t stop with Brown or Black folks. It’s a machine that devours everyone who isn’t at the very top. And the top is very, very small.
What Torah Demands
In Exodus, we read about Pharaoh offering to let some of the Israelites go free—but not all of them. Moses refuses. He insists that none will go unless all can go. “We will go regardless of our social status; we will go with our sons and our daughters” (Exodus 10:9).
Moses understood something we seem to have forgotten: liberation is not divisible. You cannot be free while others remain in chains. You cannot claim the legacy of Exodus while siding with Pharaoh.
The prophets didn’t spend their time congratulating people for being religious. They spent their time calling out injustice. Isaiah told the people that God despised their worship because their hands were full of blood, because they trampled the poor. Amos raged against those who were comfortable while others suffered. Jeremiah got thrown in a cistern for telling his own people truths they didn’t want to hear.
The legacy of our prophetic tradition is about doing justice. And sadly, many are failing that test.
What We Must Do
In this moment, when authoritarianism is rising and vulnerable people are being targeted, which side are you on?
There’s the side that protects the stranger, remembers we were slaves in Egypt, and stands with the oppressed. And there’s the side that prioritizes safety, comfort, and proximity to power.
Our traditions teach us that silence in the face of injustice is complicity. That choosing comfort over courage is a betrayal of everything our ancestors fought for.
This means being willing to work across differences. It means building coalitions with people who may not share all your views but share your commitment to justice. It means giving up the comfort of ideological purity for the hard work of solidarity.
We are at a crossroads. When your children ask what you did when democracy was under assault, when ICE was terrorizing communities, when authoritarianism was rising—what will you tell them?
Because one day, your children will ask what you did. And you will want to tell them: I showed up.
Next week Part 2:
Yes and... or yes but? I agree with your central thesis but I do not know how to apply it to the situation we live in. What do we do when those flying Palestinian flags not only call for an end to the mass slaughter and starvation but in the next breath call for the elimination of Israel and the forced expulsion of every Jew there so that the land may be returned to those afflicted in the Nakba?
Should we support Gavin Newsome who in one breath fights against the fascist attempts to steal elections and consolidate power and then in the next breath tells us our trans children are not deserving of healthcare or equal protection in schools?
Where is the line between ideological purity and choosing not to ally with those who would do (some of us) harm?
Love reading your posts; they are always a cause for reflection, and often a call to action. Talk is is cheap, and huddling in debate while other people are getting dragged off the street, out of their homes, out of hospitals, out of court houses and their houses of worship is a luxury my own house cannot afford. If you stand for democracy, then you stand with me for the only framework that makes debate possible and any reasonable-sounding thought experiment worthwhile. For me, defense of democracy is the only ask in building an alliance strong enough to fight for the future of our country.