You may feel that this is a time to lay low, to downplay your ethnic identity, to keep quiet and blend in. This is a way for an individual to survive. The Warsaw ghetto needed the blonde girls to travel through the sewers to the outside and to smuggle guns and bread back into the ghetto. We needed the uncircumcised boys to live outside so they could survive. We needed those who, like my mother’s cousin, were saved by non-Jews who took them in and told them, as my cousin was told, “don’t speak Yiddish.” Those survivors were precious and we needed them.
You might feel that this is a time to be “out and proud,” wear your Star of David, talk about celebrating khanukah, put your menorah in the window and celebrate. This is a way for the Jewish community to survive. As Jazz Salwen-Grabowski said, “intentionally cultivating joy and community feels like an act of resistance.” Throughout the centuries, the Jews of every land have built communities and created traditions that have held our people together. We need those who keep our traditions alive and teach the next generations the Jewish values of dignity, equality, kindness to others, and the responsibility to make the world a better place.
You might feel that this is a time to fight back and punch a Nazi, our own homegrown Jew haters. This is a way for a decent civilization to survive. At khanukah, we celebrate the fighting Maccabees who killed not only the Hellenized Syrians who oppressed them, but also, troublingly, the Jews they saw as collaborators. We honor the fighters of the Bar Kokhba rebellion against the Romans and the ordinary Eastern European Jews who resisted the pogroms of 1881-1883 and 1903-1905. And we revere the partisans in the forests and the heroes of the uprisings in the ghettos under Nazi rule. Those fighters helped to create a world that was safer for Jews and for all despised minorities.
So, hide or celebrate or fight – your response is valid.