Leadership Is About More than Sowing the Seeds of Fear and Division

Growing up Jewish and my recent encounter with hate

Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash

This article was written in September, 2024.

---

I’ve spent most of my life in a diverse town just outside of Philadelphia. It wasn’t until middle school, though, that I’d begun to appreciate that fact. The quiet, lightly forested suburbia was a microcosm of the cultural melting pot that was our nearby city.

In our modestly sized municipality were churches and mosques and more synagogues than in our ten nearest towns combined. I’m ethnically Jewish, but Judaism was never a significant part of my identity. My father was Jewish, and my mother Christian.

Growing up, my family made a point to celebrate both end-of-the-year holidays in our household. But we were secular enough that we were content letting the less important yearly religious events pass without so much as a cursory mention.

I went to a Jewish preschool, but the tales of Adam and Eve and arks and floods never made it with me into the early days of elementary school. By the time I’d reached middle school, I was an avowed atheist. But something I didn’t quite understand then was that our culture runs deeper than our beliefs. I was happy to sidestep all “Jewish” labels, simply because I didn’t believe that the words in those sanctified holy texts were literally true.

In our district, some degree of racism was always present. Despite being a technically desegregated school, there were discrepancies between our lunch tables and sports teams. There was an inescapable homogeneity when you walked into certain classes. The hallways between them told a pride-worthy tale of diversity, but the rooms into which we sorted ourselves often still reeked of subtle segregation. Our honors and AP classes appeared different in their construction than their grade-level counterparts.

We were aware of these disparities, and in spite of the inarguable strides toward inclusivity our school district had made since the 1950s, insidious biases were never far from sight. We harbored certain stereotypes and preconceptions of one another. Occasionally, I was singled out for being Jewish.

We learned about the holocaust as early as middle school. My 6th-grade teacher devised a unique way to introduce the unit to her students.

One day, early on in the school year, we clambered into her room after recess. The forgiving September breeze was replaced by the stagnant air of her social studies class. Seated at each of our specially assigned desks, we were a whole ten degrees hotter. Half of us were still catching our breaths from games of kickball and soccer that concluded only minutes prior. Sweat trickled down our foreheads as we adjusted to the thermocline and resigned ourselves to the next forty-five minutes in chairs.

There was an uncharacteristic sobriety on our teacher’s face as she stood in front of her chalkboard and instructed that we each begin drawing stick figures. Some of us questioned the directive. Others shrugged, reasoning the task was still a few tiers less tedious than learning.

The activity took place at the beginning of each class without fail. As sultry September air gave way to autumn leaves, we continued drawing. The verdant fronds of oaks and maples wrinkled and changed colors until they rattled free from their desiccated captors, and still, we continued drawing stick men as our pencils dulled. Sometimes, a quiet line grew behind the sharpener. Most of us were perplexed by the whole ordeal. But some of us remained as subordinate as soldiers as seasons continued to shift.

My friend James, Justin, and I decided one day to throw a few octopi into our daily queue of scribbled stick figures. Our teacher scolded us and we each exchanged confused glances — unsure what could have bothered our normally lighthearted educator about our seemingly trivial offense. When I explained the use of class time to my father, I think he may have even gotten as far as emailing our teacher, questioning her on how she could excuse such a time-wasting departure from the curriculum.

It was when the New Year’s revelry ended and we returned from winter break to a frigid January that we began to learn about the Holocaust. And it was then that she explained why we’d been drawing 2-D figures on pieces of paper for all of this time. Each stick man written on each of the pages we’d spent whole months drawing was a stand-in for someone whose life was taken during the Holocaust.

She wanted us to understand who Adolf Hitler was, what genocide meant, and what could happen when enough people complied with evil. She wanted us to understand that through obedience, ordinary people can do unspeakable things.

In laboriously amassing stick figures, we’d been continuing a years-long project our teacher had started. She began instructing her students to compile these stick men over a decade before we ever even sat in her room.

Those years and years worth of painstaking stick man tallying culminated in an unexpected assembly one day. Our whole student body sat on bleachers within the crowded auditorium as we watched our social studies teacher walk into the room with a few boxes stacked on top of each other. She struggled from the sheer weight, but it was an onerous load that she was intent to bear.

She took the boxes worth of paper and solemnly spread them across the auditorium floor — the stick men carefully facing up. She wanted to illustrate the magnitude of a number like six million. She wanted us to see the colossal crime against humanity that it represented when Hitler nearly ended an entire race of people. A sour combination of shock, dread, awe, and dismay overtook the room as we tried to process a travesty too huge to grasp.

In junior high, our bar and bat mitzvah phase emerged from an adolescent sea of angst. As children began turning 12 and 13 and celebrating generously early arrivals of adulthood, our hallways were taken over in chatter about these ecstatic jamborees that signified growing up. Invitations would arrive at our doors, and select venues and synagogues on specially designated Saturdays would burst into life as we watched our Black and Indian and Hispanic friends dip their feet into Jewish traditions for the first time.

We danced on the dance floor with an integrated majesty as the DJ played our favorite songs. The frenzied sight was enough to elicit side-eyes from our most conservative grandparents. And the lascivious lyrics of our generation’s favorite songs occasionally brought forth a chorus of discernible gasps. The clash of cultures was a joyous spectacle to experience.

Sean Kingston, Katy Perry, Kesha, and the Black Eyed Peas gave way to a full-throated “Hava Nagila” chant as the bar/bat mitzvah boys and girls were hoisted high above the gathering. Our friends who’d never set foot inside a synagogue in their lives exchanged shrugs before helping to facilitate the seated crowd surf. Some couldn’t help but ask for turns themselves; the adults never gave in to their desperate pleas.

For Jews and non-Jews alike, the pre-alcohol, seemingly all-night parties constituted some of our happiest nights from those fraught and transitional years.

In high school, I fell in with a bad crowd and became friends with someone who frequently teased me for being Jewish. Sometimes, the comments felt innocuous. “Aw, c’mon, Ben! Don’t be a Jew,” he’d say. “He’s trying to Jew me down,” he’d point out. The specific moment at hand rarely made a difference in whether he found these remarks necessary. I generally took the insults lightly.

But they did their damage.

Growing up on South Park, I had a healthily self-deprecating sense of humor. I knew how to laugh at the occasional joke made about my culture. But from time to time, those lighter comments that people made about those unique components of my heritage — that I had no means to ever change — were enough to cause pain. At worst, the criticisms made me feel shame over my appearance and the very way that I presented to the world around me.

It wasn’t until college that I realized just how uncommon Jews were. Even at the upstate university mere hours from my home, there was such a limited representation of other people who shared my heritage that, at times, I faced a very real prejudice. Fortunately, I never dealt with actual violence as a consequence. But many people on the campus had never knowingly seen another Jew before in their entire lives. And some of them made that very clear.

Before the war in Gaza broke out, I had the chance to visit Israel. Touring the country during a brief interim between tensions, it was a nation with its war-torn remnants on its sleeves. I saw people who were proud of all the ways in which they’d persevered, and of each small stride they’d made toward coexistence with their neighbors. Some hid scars beneath world-weary smiles. But others considered themselves blessed to be a part of such a country, and that the fears of conflict that lingered overhead were all worth it to simply call themselves citizens there.

It was a strange novelty to be around so many other people who shared my background. Despite growing up in my little melting pot and having a healthy smattering of Jewish friends, Israel was the first time I ever found myself surrounded by others who each shared something with me as integral to who I am as my ancestry.

Seeing the inside of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum brought our past to life in a way that was too grating to be believed. And it brought that middle school lesson our teacher went to such painstaking lengths to teach in a terrible new light for me. Walking free from the bleak and concave structure, it was with an appreciation for the miracle that our people had survived Hitler’s genocide at all. And it was with a hard-wrought understanding of the sacrifices that those ancestors of the not-so-distant past were forced into making.

As Jewish hate has reached new heights in recent years, it’s difficult not to feel a certain vulnerability as Jews sometimes. With all that Netanyahu’s administration has done in Gaza, there have been times recently when I’ve been almost ashamed to call myself a Jew. I’ve opposed the war since the beginning, and the terrible irony in Gaza’s plight haunts me. But just as heritage runs deeper than our beliefs, Jews and the Israeli state are not one and the same.

Synagogues are being vandalized with swastikas, and people of Semitic descent, many of whom have never been to Israel before in their lives, are being attacked on and off of campuses with a heightened regularity. For so much of that time, I’ve been fortunate to sit on the sidelines.

The other day, I spoke online to someone I thought might be a friend-in-the-making. He was undecided about the 2024 election, and after a few minutes, we began to explore some of our disagreements about the two candidates running. He explained that he saw deficits in both Trump and Harris. But he argued that, looking past all of Trump’s shortcomings, he was a strong leader.

I disagreed.

I explained that from Trump’s understanding of policy and behavior during the debate to all of his crimes, the insurrection, and his two impeachment convictions, his leadership was anything but strong.

He tried to expand on what he meant. But nothing could quite prepare me for what he said next. The words “Hitler was a great leader” appeared on the screen before me, and I stared at them in disbelief. I wasn’t sure how to respond to such a statement, and I sat there blankly for a good few minutes.

Against my better judgment, I took a deep breath and allowed him to clarify what he meant. He explained that he wasn’t a Nazi, only that like he did in Donald Trump, he saw something admirable in Hitler’s ability to lead. He said that he didn’t hate Jews, but still contended that there was greatness in the man who worked them to death and ushered them into ovens like cattle. He said that the way Hitler’s people were horrified by him was something to be commended.

Throughout our brief conversation, he continued to repeat those jarring words: “Hitler was a great leader.”

He repeatedly explained that Hitler was an influential commander and statesman — despite his shortcomings. And I failed to conceal my emotions as a primal and unfamiliar fury overtook me. I labored to formulate words in the face of that statement that punctured my being like a horrible slur. And I remembered those stick men stretched across our middle school auditorium floor.

The exchange continued to roll around inside me for the remainder of the night. I’ve always known that there are Nazis in the world. Each time I open Twitter, I’m reminded that millions of them are still around today. But it’s never been a challenge for me to dismiss people who hate others for their heritage alone as simply beyond my reach and reasoning.

But rare are those instances where I find seemingly rational people who house such neutral views toward history’s most infamous tyrants. Rare are those times when I’ve seen firsthand that hatred hides in even prospective friends.

In skinheads and mask-wearing Klan members, it’s easy to see a threat. Yet sometimes in life, even among masses of seemingly like-minded people, there are those who would downplay our demise. There are those who would applaud the achievements of a man who pulled our ancestors from their homes. Who would look the other way again today if their fellow citizens were systematically starved and murdered. Who would shower praise and “great leader” labels onto the despot who carried out those most heinous crimes.

Sometimes, even the friendliest faces in crowds can be voices among lynch mobs.

---

This article was originally published on Medium.

---

If you enjoyed this article, you can support my work on here for under $2.00 a month. It would make an enormous difference in helping me to bring you the quality writing you deserve during these times when journalism is under attack.