It's hard to read the news these days without encountering evidence of a significant rise in anti-Semitism. Defaced gravestones in France. A Belgian carnival float featuring puppet caricatures of ultra-Orthodox Jews. Here in the US, protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting "Jews will not replace us." And, of course the continuing specter of the shootings at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.
What's going on? Should Jews be worried in this country, as many are in Europe? We need to step back from the near-daily barrage of incidents and think seriously—as we have not in some time—about the renewed and age-old practice of singling out Jews for attack.
Even as a child I knew that the power of the Passover story lay in the fact that it was true. Jews had been persecuted, expelled, and killed time and again over the course of history. Just 10 years before the first Passover Seder I remember, Jewish children like me had been killed by the Nazis alongside their parents.
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