reflections on remembrance and democracy

On January 6, 2022, I woke up at 4:00 a.m., finally giving up on sleep after six restless hours of insomniac angst. The day before, I expected to face the anniversary of the Capitol insurrection with reflection and relief – my friends working in the building were OK, the National Guardsmen patrolling my neighborhood kept me safe, the Inauguration concluded without incident. But this year, January 6 was the Groundhog Day of collective trauma: we just entered year three of an ongoing mass-casualty event, and the issue-attention cycle shifted from the Omicron surge to the impending promise of filibustered voting rights bills. Last year, when the Capitol was cleared and the election finally certified, I felt overwhelmed with hope; this year, I logged-in to work, ready to restore trust faith in our sacred, representative government, but feeling as though I was rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.  

For the last 9 months, I’ve served as Chief of Staff for the Partnership for American Democracy. I was recruited by the CEO in April 2021 – three months after the Capitol insurrection – to join as the first hire of this new, nonpartisan social venture charged with accelerating democratic renewal. In the middle of a pandemic, I transitioned from a stable and rewarding job influencing antiracism interventions at a large professional services firm to join a brand new nonprofit. The edifice of our democracy was burning, and the virus of authoritarianism felt increasingly existential as the one overwhelming our hospitals. Our nation’s attempt at public health mitigation and my corporate DE&I work were becoming more obscure in the smoke, and I felt no choice but to run into the flames. 

My call to fight authoritarianism transcends this moment in American governance. As a third-generation Holocaust survivor, part of what pulls me to this work is the inextricable link between antisemitism and the degradation of democracy. As the Atlantic’s Yair Rosenberg so poignantly put it in his recent response to the hostage crisis at Beth Israel Congregation in Colleyville, Texas, antisemitism is “not merely a social prejudice; it is a conspiracy theory about how the world operates.” The conspiratorial currents that characterize Jews as omnipotent puppeteers of public life means that to be antisemitic is to be anti-democratic. Last January, I was reminded how years before the Holocaust, Hitler, too led an attempted coup that failed to overthrow the government but succeeded in fortifying Nazi propaganda. Last week, I panicked for 11 hours while a gunman, emboldened by the antisemitic rhetoric undeniably reverberating in anarchist threads on 4Chan and Telegram, held my brethren hostage in their house of worship. Every year growing up, my Savta (grandmother) shared her Holocaust story with my class, recalling with unwavering resilience her trauma in Auschwitz; now, every day at work, I fight to stave off the worst outcomes of democratic backsliding undoubtedly capable of similar atrocity. Some days, it feels as though we’ve already failed.   

For this reason, I’ve broadened my definition of democracy beyond institutional channels to include interpersonal experiences. Just as my generational trauma implores me to make “Never Again” more than a maxim, so does my Jewish identity remind me that the notion of belonging is as inherent to a thriving democracy as political practices. Biblically, I am commanded to always welcome the stranger; personally, I feel a responsibility not only to befriend but to empathize, understand, and advocate. At work, I strive to model in our team the pluralism and inclusion we aim to achieve beyond our workplace. When so much of our time is spent isolated – physically at the home office, or politically in our own echo chambers – the workplace provides an organic forum for democracy in action. Outside work, I am president of Jewish Women International’s Young Women’s Impact Network, dedicated to women’s empowerment, safety, and economic mobility. I lead a space for social cohesion and affirmation that women’s voices belong in the decisions affecting their futures. 

Today is January 27, 2022 – International Holocaust Remembrance Day. It’s been 21 days since the first anniversary of the insurrection, 12 days since the attack on the Colleyville congregation, and 77 years since the liberation of Auschwitz. Whenever and wherever my Savta spoke about the Holocaust, she would end on the same anecdote. “Equilibrium” was one of the first English words Savta read, and its scientific definition was eclipsed to become her enduring philosophy:

“I promised I would live a life in equilibrium. I would remember my past and keep it alive so that future generations would not allow another Holocaust to happen anywhere in the world. But, at the same time, I would live each day to the fullest and enjoy life and try to be happy.”

Today, I recommit to Savta’s pursuit of equilibrium. On International Holocaust Remembrance Day, against the rising twin tides of authoritarianism and antisemitism, I vow to live her legacy. I will dare to be vocal in my Jewish joy even – especially – when doing so is a vulnerability.

If my grandmother’s memory is to be for a blessing – zichrona l’vracha – I’m reminded that maintaining conviction in this uphill battle for democracy is not a professional calling but a moral imperative. I am fully enfranchised by my birthplace, the color of my skin, and my economic status, and this privilege is power if we wield it collectively. Democracy is created in our communities, bolstered in our boardrooms, and modeled in the exchanges of our relationships. I will continue my advocacy in the citadels of government, knowing I belong in our democratic processes. And when I get to the negotiating table, I’ll pull out a chair for someone whose perspective belongs in the design of our democracy but has never before been offered a seat. 

Enough (Dayenu)

FROM APRIL 2020

If by the end you emerge

Body like dough, pliant for transformation,

Let the softness remind you how you nurtured yourself

Found pleasure in your palette

When the world seemed scary.

If the peach fuzz above your lip is long enough to tickle the crisp edges of a brownie

As you indulge in chocolate comfort you can control within your kitchen,

Watch as it protects your skin

Marvel at your innately human superpower to protect your insides

From the pathogens that destroy us through the same entrance.

If your unfiled nails snag on the open weave of the crocheted sweater forced into a warmer season than you planned for its debut, 

forced over a size medium of last season’s small,

You’ll polish them later, like the pint of peppermint ice cream of the changing weather, crisp and sweet like the air your lungs ached for but only your tongue could taste.

If your hair grazes your breasts like you’ve grazed the kitchen

Notches longer than the shoulder-length pleats you prepared for the spring,

Braid it like the challah you kneaded when you needed to feel

Connection to the before, the enduring, and the weekly routine.

If by the end of this we emerge

Doughier, softer, human, alive.

The world will be sweeter, like the pastries we baked when we couldn’t ask our neighbors for a cup of sugar.

Rounder,

We are more whole.

Fuller,

We have more to give.

A letter to my future daughters

FROM NOVEMBER 2016

“Where were you when the first woman president was elected?”

Last night was supposed to be the night you asked me about in 20 years.

I would tell you about the 60 friends your Aunt Lindsay and I crammed into our little living room, how we streamed election coverage on our laptops hooked up to the TV because we couldn’t afford cable, how we sprinted the three blocks from our building to the White House where we danced and cheered and cried on the same pavement that Alice Paul and Lucy Burns stood with signs that said, “Mr. President, how long must women wait for liberty?”

I thought you’d never know an America that pays you less than your brothers, one that says your body isn’t your own, or your voice not worth hearing. When your teachers asked what you wanted to be when you grow up, I was so sure you’d be able to say “president,” never knowing there was a time that wasn’t possible.

I was four years old when I started telling people I wanted to be “the first girl president” when I grew up. One day I’ll take you to the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. to show you what used to be my favorite exhibit: an homage to past presidents’ policy accomplishments, with their wives’ inaugural gowns and china patterns displayed in the adjoining showroom. I longed to take you through time until we approached President Hillary Clinton’s inaugural cocktail suit, where you’d see our first president who ever looked like you. I was positive you’d never experience the manufactured role-modeling that stifled my own aspirations as a four-year-old presidential hopeful.

Last night our heads were to be anointed with shards of shattered glass as we welcomed an era of progressivism pioneered by the woman who dedicated her entire career to cracking glass ceilings so one day you can shatter another. Last night, I was going to take a picture with my “I Voted” sticker and my Clinton/Kaine pin, and one day we’d bring it to Susan B. Anthony’s grave as together we’d glorify the woman who made it possible. This victory would’ve belonged as much to her as it would to you.

Instead of a glass ceiling raining down, the floor was ripped out from under us, rocking the foundation in which we had so firmly planted our soles, our souls, grounded in the progress paved by the suffragettes and the civil rights activists, the Lucretia Motts and the Ruth Bader Ginsburgs, the Rosa Parks and the Madeline Albrights. By Michelle and Barack Obama.

I will not tell you the story of how we flooded the White House last night. Many of our guests I had never met, but no one in our apartment was a stranger. Not one got out of watching me cry. Not one escaped the palpable vulnerability that overcame the room. No one sat in solitude — we stood in solidarity.

Aunt Lindsay and I restocked on tissues that morning. I had spent the three days before the election bursting into tears at any given moment, just knowing I’d get to tell you about how Hillary Clinton changed the world that day. The Saturday before, I cried on the phone with an elderly, disabled voter in New Hampshire who was petrified to tell her grandchildren she was part of the reason if we lost the election, because she couldn’t leave her home to get to polls. She cried after I put her on hold and connected her with an organizer who could find her a ride. We shared tears and the blessing we were in it together.

I cried when I when I woke up on Election Day and realized that was the day we were going to change the world — to change the world for you.

I cried when Aunt Lindsay and I knocked on our second-to-last door in Virginia on election day, and were welcomed with open arms by a woman who squealed that we were finally going to “have a PRESIDENT with a vagina!”

But when 60 of my newfound allies and I watched CNN call Ohio, then Georgia, then Florida in Trump’s favor, my tears, filled with hope, became tears of heartbreak and terror. I hit the ground at North Carolina. At one point, I hid in my bed heaving sobs of complete failure that we were going to have to concede, before sneaking back into the living room and encouraging guests we still had Virginia. And Wisconsin. And Michigan. That not every poll could be wrong, not every forecast so egregiously and dangerously mistaken.

We were supposed to have our first woman president by 11:30 p.m. At 2:37 a.m., puffy-eyed partygoers trickled out our front door, some home to mourn in private, some to the White House as they had planned to — but in dissent and fear and grief, not celebration.

I went to bed. A friend stayed over because we couldn’t be alone with my thoughts. We cried ourselves to sleep. This morning we couldn’t talk, couldn’t believe it was real. We cried on the couch. I never got dressed. As a woman in America, I took a sick day.

I’m scared to wake up everyday for four years and feel like I did today. I didn’t want you to grow up with a shadow of a doubt that any man who touched you without your consent could be exalted with the presidency for his abhorrent behavior. Your great grandmother didn’t survive Auschwitz for America to elect a president who touts policies of interning our Muslim brothers and deporting our Mexican sisters. They said this election gave the silent majority a voice, but that couldn’t be more backwards; the Trump majority always had a voice, they just never chose to be heard until the true voiceless — Americans who have been shouting for decades while we haven’t been listening — finally broke the sound barrier.

My dear future daughters, Eleanor and Hillary: one day you’ll play dress-up in pantsuits and the “H” logo tee I ordered for Hillary Clinton’s Inauguration Day. One day you won’t just play house — you’ll play White House.

Yesterday was supposed to be the day that changed your world for the better. I can’t wait to tell you about what happens in four.