The New Yorker – Alexandra Schwartz: The Tree of Life Shooting and the Return of Anti-Semitism to American Life. “It is the ancient Jewish expectation of persecution—when, where, has it not been with us?—married to American reality: a country saturated with guns and habituated to quotidian massacre, plagued by age-old racism and bigotry, which have lately been expertly inflamed by the holder of the highest office in the land. For the past few years, American Jews have glanced warily at Western Europe, where anti-Semitism, never dormant, is once again on the rise. The British Labour Party has been riven by accusations of anti-Semitism among its leadership. French Jews have emigrated to Israel in unprecedented numbers. In Sweden, synagogues and Jewish centers have been firebombed. After 9/11, American synagogues and community centers became barricaded spaces, outfitted with concrete sidewalk barriers and metal detectors, so that going to services felt like going to the airport. The concern then was an external threat.”

Please note my previous post – and we all know that hatred is never sleeping, just resting a bit, here and there, but certainly, never, everywhere – we just count the days or weeks to when it will roar back with consequences that change of course of lives and families and communities, history, humanity…the future. We are all mourning – we stand together but we should not always be coming together, only, to mourn those whom we have lost to violence.