“Excuse me, let me move my cup,” I say to the woman at the table next to me at my New York co-working space. I’d accidentally left my coffee on her table, taking up two spaces.
“No, that’s mine!” she replies, taking it from me. Indeed, I look at my table: I’d already moved my drink over. Silly me. “Oh, I’m so sorry, guess I already moved it,” I tell her. She glares at me.
As I try to resume my work on the computer, I steal sidelong glances at her. She’s a white American 20-something with a prominent nose: Is she Anglican? Polish? German? Probably not Jewish, I think, not the way she glared at me.
I feel like my eight-year-old daughter, who is prone to hyperbole. “She was glaring at me, Mama!” she always tells me about friends, strangers, teachers, or anyone who might not welcome her with open arms.
As with her stories, I don’t know if this is true, if this woman has evil thoughts about me or if her face is just like that. What I do have to wonder, though, is if it’s because of my necklace.
Does she hate me because I’m Jewish?
For the first time in my life, I’ve been walking around with a Jewish star necklace. The silver six-point Magen David falls squarely between my, um, V-neck. If I’m not covered up in a jacket and sweater – which increasingly happens as spring tries to bloom in fits and starts – it’s hard to miss it.
As antisemitism in America worsens, “Zionism” becomes a dirty word, and New York has become a hotbed of college campus protest, I consider whether I should keep wearing my simple Jewish star.
It feels like it affects every interaction in my life – on the subway, in coffee shops, in the dog park – in this new iteration of being a Jew in New York post-October 7.
“WHAT’S IT like in New York City right now?” one of my oldest friends recently asks me because I live near Columbia University.
It’s remarkably selfless of her, a mother of five sons living in Israel, with only one son miraculously serving. She’s the one in the war zone, and she’s asking me how I’m doing?
“I’m okay,” I say. I am – but that’s not the whole story. As a journalist, writer, and artist, these days I mostly only talk to other Jews. I feel abandoned by the liberal, Democratic community I once thought had my back. “We are looking for people who are younger, more diverse,” a publisher told me about my next book. (Read: not white and probably not Jewish.) This, before a Jewish author’s blacklist emerged. As a staunch anti-Trumper who used to joke “I’d rather marry a Republican than a vegan,” I don’t know where I fit in anymore.
But compared to my friends in Israel, I am fine. We are fine: My husband, an Israeli American, is worried, but his family, mostly in Tel Aviv, is safe; his cousins are mostly too old or too young to serve. We are grateful that our daughter is far from college age, safely ensconced in a Jewish day school, one of many that offered refuge to Israelis fleeing the war in December. Those families returned to Israel, and we have returned to our regular life, sort of.
Unlike our friends and relatives in Israel who cannot escape the situation, our day-to-day life is not directly affected by the war, “except” emotionally, simultaneously consumed with it, while dealing with regular life. This week, I am making a meal plan for Shavuot, trying to find summer camp programs for our daughter that don’t include nature (Don’t ask!), wondering if the low-income arts program she attended last year will feel welcome to Jews. Ditto for the folksy weekend music festival we attend every summer. It is run by Jews, but we’re not sure which kind.
And that’s how it goes for us in New York, quietly profiling people everywhere: Are they anti-Israel? Antisemitic? Dangerous?
I started taking a Krav Maga class at the Jewish Center synagogue on the Upper West Side after a punching epidemic began in the city (for once, nothing to do with being Jewish). This was my compromise for self-defense in an increasingly volatile city. In December, I learned to shoot at a firing range with a former IDF special ops officer but decided that owning a gun wasn’t for me. (“You can always escape to my bunker,” my special ops guy told me.)
The most useful thing I learn from Raz, our Israeli instructor, is how to get DNA off an attacker. “Poke him in the eyes, and then drag your nails down his face so you can get his skin under your nails,” he says to the two dozen women, many of whom looked as if they’d never even broken a nail. In addition to punches, slaps, and kicks, Raz teaches us how to carry ourselves confidently, to always be aware of our surroundings (“Never wear earphones!”), to shout at our attackers, to get distance, and in the worst case scenario, how to fight.
The classes leave me feeling not exactly prepared, but ready for a rumble. “Just try me,” I think for just a few moments on the subway home, sweating after class. Thankfully, no one takes me up on it. I am not on a college campus. Or regularly at demonstrations. I am simply a Jew wearing a Jewish star.
“Oh wow! A star!” is what I told the friend who gifted me one shortly after the war. I’d never worn any Jewish jewelry. In fact, growing up Modern Orthodox in Brooklyn, I’d never presented as patently Jew-ish (except that with my curly brown hair and deep-set brown eyes, if you’re an MOT, you know). I’ve never considered what my father, brother, and all my guy friends had to go through in life wearing a kippah, always emissaries for their religion, like Chabad guys but without the free Shabbos candles.
How hard could it be for me to wear a Jewish star?
“EXCUSE ME!” the tattooed young woman with olive skin huffs at me on the subway, rolling her eyes and blowing air out of her bottom lip for some perceived offense New Yorkers are always getting upset about. The way the other people on the train are nodding at me sympathetically, I know that I probably did not do anything.
Again I wonder if it’s my star. And if I should be wearing it.
A few weeks ago, I left my car too long at my mother’s complex in the Bronx, and the local security put a boot on it. It would cost $250 for them to take it off. I went to the security office, first putting on lip gloss, and then secured my Jewish star under my shirt. Just in case. I find myself doing that a lot lately: pulling my shirt up, turning my necklace around, re-angling the Zoom camera, hiding what I’d never worn but also never thought would have to be hidden – my Jewish identity.
Look, I’m not like that woman Briana on TikTok fuming over Leo Organics on the Upper West Side who refused to treat her because she was wearing a Jewish star (diamond, fancier than mine). “We were just hate-crimed.” I’m not like the head of my local Jewish Facebook group who was hit for tussling with people taking down hostage signs. I’m not like Jewish content creators who hired bodyguards because they were threatened by antisemitic vitriol.
I’m just a Jewish woman wearing a Jewish star.
I consider changing it for a small gold dog tag with a Jewish star I bought from Israel, more subtle than the large rectangular ones with the “Bring Them Home” logo donned by many religious Jews. But my daughter hates it. “Our Hebrew teacher told us that when an Israeli soldier dies, they break them in half,” she says macabrely.
What does it matter what I wear? It’s like the question of whether it’s anti-Zionist or antisemitic – I’m both, so who cares? There are more than 100 hostages trapped in Gaza, Israel is still at war, hated by the entire world, there’s a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and I don’t know if New York – or the entirety of America – is actually going to be safe for Jews in the long run. It probably wouldn’t make a difference if I painted my body in a blue-and-white Magen David and streaked through the Israel Day Parade nude. It’s rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
I enter the elevator of my workspace, standing with my back against the wall, as Raz taught me, turning off TikTok and assessing the other elevatees: There’s a red-bearded man holding an umbrella (possibly Irish?), and a tiny blond woman with clear glasses who could go either way. Suddenly I spot something glinting on her chest; I try to look without looking: It’s a silver aleph, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet.
“A Jew!” I think, pulling my necklace out of my shirt.
Redbeard does that thing, the one that progressive kids call microaggressions: He glances at my chest – but not that way – back to my eyes, and to my chest chain again. He walks off the elevator not saying anything, but not not saying anything, leaving me and the other Jew alone.
Together. ■
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