I have had conversations recently with people about why I want my daughter to continue to attend our local Jewish day school, instead of enrolling her in public school. I’ve explained that, at least for now, I want her to keep building a strong foundation with her Jewish identity, which is such an important part of who she is, even at her young age. Simply put, I’m not ready for her to have to face the harsh reality of how the rest of the world feels about Jews, outside of the safety of her day school and temple walls where she can be Jewish out loud and proud. Inside of those walls, she’s one of many Jewish kids; outside of them, the immediate shrinkage into a stereotyped minority is a huge shock to the system. And before anyone tries to tell me that antisemitism doesn’t trickle down to elementary school, I have the memories of kids pulling my hair to find my horns and scrubbing swastika graffiti off my desk to prove you wrong (and that was 30 years ago at a time nowhere near as volatile). I know I will need to teach her about how the world treats us sooner or later; I do that for a living, so it’s not that I don’t feel equipped for it. I just don’t want to crush her spirit too soon.

At least, I didn’t want to. But then this past Saturday happened.

It was at first a morning like many others; we were getting ready for a trip to the mall. She put on a shirt that is a tiny bit small for her, and I told her to either add a skirt to the outfit or change shirts. She grumbled about it and came back out in a different shirt, this one a little too big for her; it was a new shirt we’d gotten from a recent fundraiser at school, and it has big bubble letters for the Hebrew word for love, ahava, and the school name underneath it. Great shirt, love it. But I had to tell her she couldn’t wear that one either. Naturally, she got very annoyed about needing to change again and demanded to know why. I could’ve told her that she’d feel too hot in an oversized t-shirt, and that would’ve been a valid and genuine argument. But that wasn’t why I told her to change again, and I couldn’t bear the lie of omission.

I kept my tone very carefully measured, and my words as mild as possible.

“We live in a world where some people don’t like Jews, and it’s important in some places to be careful not to draw attention to the fact that we’re Jewish. We have some great places in our lives where we get to be Jewish out loud and so proud of who we are; but, there are other places where it’s safer to keep it quiet.”

Then I taught her some ways to balance our pride for our identity with making sure we’re staying safe. While maybe shirts with big Hebrew letters and stars of David on clothing or jewelry aren’t the best choice in public places right now, there are other Jewish symbols that are meaningful to us that would be less risky, such as a small hamsa necklace. Another thing we can do is wear our jewelry but tucked inside of our shirts instead of outside them. When we’re in Jewish spaces, we can wear our Jewish stuff as much as we’d like.

She was angry and sad about this reality check and asked me why people don’t like Jews. I’ve taught about antisemitism for many years now and still it’s the question to which I never feel I have a satisfactory enough answer. I told her that it’s been this way for so many centuries, and basically boils down to the fact that Jews have always been different than other groups of people, and people have a hard time with different. Then she asked me an unexpected question — why are there so many more non-Jewish people than Jews?

I was not at all prepared to explain centuries of persecution and genocide to my seven-year-old. That was not on my summer 2026 bingo card. So I figured out sufficient words to tell her that some people, over many hundreds of years, have disliked Jews enough to attack and hurt them, and in the end it’s caused our numbers all around the world to be a lot smaller than other groups of people.

I then reminded her, intensely, that we do have people who care about us, people who don’t hate us at all. I taught her the word ally. I reminded her of specific allies we have in our lives. I encouraged her to keep in mind what we can do every day to balance keeping ourselves safe with loving and honoring who we are. And, I assured her that I would always be there to help her make sense of it all.

Then we went to the mall to get a new stuffed animal to mail to her best friend in Georgia, and the store was having a sale, buy one/get one. So I got my kid a stuffed lobster lovey that she picked out. After all, nothing says screw the antisemites like buying a lobster?

You have to laugh sometimes. Laugh, hug a lobster, tuck your Star of David necklace inside your shirt, and feel validated in your convictions about giving your kid a safe space to be herself, in a world that would all in all prefer she not exist.

She doesn’t need to know that yet. My daughter is at the stage where she’s on a need-to-know basis with the Jew hate vitriol surrounding us. For now, it’s enough that I know it for her.