An ugly reminder of the hate that won't die

By Sally Friedman

It was a question that stopped my heart. On a golden afternoon decades ago, our daughter Nancy rushed in from the bus stop with this urgent query: "Why did kids throw pennies at me in the schoolyard?"

At 8, Nancy was blessedly innocent of an ancient schoolyard ritual. Those pennies were tossed at her because Nancy was Jewish - and, presumably, voraciously greedy.

Though our daughter didn't know anything about Jewish stereotypes, she did sense that something was very wrong with the schoolyard scene. Among her classmates on that spring afternoon were youngsters who already had been carefully taught that stereotype, and who had decided to test it out on little Nancy. This was in our supposedly enlightened Quaker town of Moorestown.

Old stereotypes die hard, and schoolyards are still battlegrounds. I can only imagine what African American, Hispanic, Italian and Asian kids are still subjected to, when the world is an even tougher, meaner place.

But our particular snapping dog was anti-Semitism. It was there, politely peeking out at various times during the school years of our three daughters. Nothing menacing, mind you. Nothing terribly overt. But then, even polite anti-Semitism is a looming menace - and maybe even more insidious.

Still, we've all gone on about our lives, living proudly as American Jews, and feeling safe and welcome in this land of the free.

But recently, I once again had my equanimity shattered. the Anti-Defamation League, which, for the record, fights not just anti-Semitism, but all forms of bigotry, has come out with some sobering new statistics.

It seems that my own state - New Jersey - is second in the country in anti-Semitic incidents, according to the ADL. Who knew? Who knew that only New York tops New Jersey as a state with a higher incidence of anti-Semitic acts?

One profoundly disturbing detail from the audits that the ADL collects each year is this snippet: As recently as 2005, 35 million adults in this country - 14 percent of Americans - maintained views about Jews that are "unquestionably anti-Semitic."

Add on these ugly New Jersey tidbits:

Last year, there were 244 anti-Semitic events in New Jersey. Disturbingly, a growing number of them are happening in schools and on college campuses.

In a middle school about 30 miles from my home, a two-foot swastika was carved into the floor of a boys' bathroom.

In Lakewood, Ocean County - just one county away - a school administrator was pelted not with rocks or blows, but with anti-Semitic invectives hurled at him by a student.

Jews sometimes believe the Holocaust will forever stand as a deterrent, a hideous reminder of hatred for "the other" run amok. "Never forget!" we repeat in our synagogues, and in our spring Holocaust remembrance, the solemn Yom Hashoah. But here we are, more than half a century later, assaulted by what seems an endless supply of haters.

"But why?" is what Nancy asked so long ago.

For Nancy's grandparents, my own parents, Hitler and the Holocaust were all too immediate. They spoke in whispers about what had happened "over there," and when my sister and I moved close to them, even the whispering stopped.

They moved from the University of Pennsylvania campus, where my father attended law school, to Wynnefield, a Jewish enclave near Philadelphia, and worried about what would happen to us when their two daughters ventured far from that insular world.

Nothing terrible did.

We definitely learned that we were a tiny minority in that larger world, and that some people didn't like us very much. But it never got ugly enough to make us frightened or even mildly anxious.

Yet, a generation later, my husband and I have joined the Anti-Defamation League. Maybe it gives us hope. Or makes us feel safer. Or reminds us that hate lives, and we'd better not be too sanguine about that.

I am encouraged by the work of the ADL - and deeply discouraged that the organization is still so needed.

I read the headlines, torn straight from the hatreds of the past and "never again!" seems like hollow rhetoric when the "again" is as current as today.

This I know: I don't want any grandchild of mine to come home and ask why kids threw pennies at him.