#Neverforget

Today is Yom Hashoah where I’m from. Today is the day that I try to put in words my feelings on the Jewish experience as a whole. It’s one that simultaneously fills me with pride and crushes me with dread and depression. Depression about our past, and dread for our future. The more I learn about the global diasporic Jewish experience, the more I realize that the ghost of the fascism, the imperialism, the racism that has haunted our people since the days of Abraham and Isaac is inescapable. Even our promised land is being used a chess piece by the West, while we are called the puppet masters. The race science that the fascists used to justify the destruction of our peoples was written not by the Germans, but by the Americans. The ideas didn’t stop in Berlin, they spread to London, where Winston Churchill wrote the order to lock us out of The Mandate, sealing our fate in the cattle cars and gas chambers. It spread to Paris, where the leader of the National Front nearly took power. It’s spread to America and Canada, where we have allowed the far right to spew rhetoric that would make Hitler blush.

And yet, those that have read up to here, I am still filled with pride. For it is the tumbalaika and fiddle that ring out on the holy holidays, it is our prayers that still reach the ears of Hashem, it is our children, our parents, our siblings and friends who we sit next to in the synagogues. All while the brains of the pathetic man who sought our destruction lay splattered in an abandoned bunker, underneath a German parking lot. We, my friends, my brothers, my sisters and everything in between, we have survived inquisitions, expulsions, a diaspora, a holocaust. We will survive any and all obstacles. On this Yom Hashoah, remember the 6 million, for we must persevere in their memories