Antisemitism is a charged word these days. Like many charged words, it means different things to different people. When I was a child growing up in Mountain Brook, Alabama, I associated the word more with what happened to European Jews in the 1930s and 1940s than with my own experiences as a Jew in the South.

Now I know better.

I have never written this story out, but I’ve talked about it often enough. Usually it’s on my own terms. This past Hanukkah it was not—during a community day at my congregation’s religious school, I received a lesson plan documenting an act of vandalism in the 90s that targeted a Jewish home. I am not ashamed to say I was triggered. You see, vandals targeted my childhood home in the 90s as well. 

It happened overnight. I was in third grade. When I left my bedroom that morning, I could tell there was a tension in the air. I was told not to go outside.

I looked out my bedroom window and saw that someone had thrown eggs all over my parents’ cars.

Eventually, I did go outside—to the front yard, where most of the commotion was. I saw what the big deal was about.

Spray-painted onto the street in front of our house were the words “Heil Hitler.”

Something along the lines of “All Jews Must Die” was spray-painted onto the grass.

They had smashed our mailbox.

My brother says the local TV news station came by. I don’t remember that. My sister says other Jewish houses on the street were hit as well. I don’t remember that. What I do remember is that the city could barely be bothered to pave over the words on the street. For years there were two censorship blocks in front of our house. A stark reminder that something about our house was different.

The perpetrators were never caught.

The house I grew up in was built by a Jewish man, passed down to his Jewish son, and located in a part of the suburb of Mountain Brook that used to be known as “Little Jerusalem.” Despite being the first suburb of Birmingham to allow Jews to move in, a strain of antisemitism has run through the Mountain Brook community for decades.

This was not my first encounter with antisemitism.

I was exposed early on in childhood to the specifically Evangelical Christian brew of othering their Jewish neighbors. I was at my brother’s little league soccer game. He played on the Birmingham JCC’s team and the team was part of the local “church” league. I was wandering on one of the smaller nearby fields and came across a young boy and girl—probably my age, under 10.

I don’t know if I was the first Jewish person these children had met, but I certainly felt like a object being observed and questioned by curious outsiders.

The boy took the lead in questioning me:

“Are you really Jewish?” 

Yes.

“What does it feel like to know you’re going to Hell?”

Record scratch.

Truly, I had no idea how to answer that question. I barely understood it. I attended a private Jewish school. We didn’t talk about Hell. That was a Christian afterlife thing. It did not apply to me. Or so I thought.

According to this kid, Hell was a place I was destined for.

When I didn’t answer, the boy bravely pushed on with his next question: If you had to pick between the Devil and Jesus, who would you choose?

Oof. At the time I didn’t know this was a classic “gotcha” question for Christian antisemites from days of yore. As a budding know-it-all, I couldn’t avoid two questions in a row and I needed this kid to know that I was not evil, that I would not choose the bad guy in his narrative. I carefully couched my answer in this language of “good guy versus bad guy” so that I could avoid attributing any divine powers to Jesus.

I didn’t know what to think of the interaction back then, beyond that I didn’t like how it made me feel. Now, I wonder if that kid thought he saved me. Or if he was just trying to bother me. 

These are formative experiences for a young Jew. The kind of thing that sticks with you, even 30 years later.

It makes witnessing the eye-opening astonishment of certain segments of the U.S. Jewish population at the “recent rise” in antisemitism in the United States seem a little…delayed.

From my lived experience, antisemitism has always been here.