[ [link removed] ] [ [link removed] ]J Street[ [link removed] ]
Friends,

My parents were 14 years old when Nazis tried to march through their
hometown.

It was 1977, and they were eighth graders in Skokie, Illinois – a
community of roughly 40,000 people, nearly half of them Jewish and
thousands of them Holocaust survivors.

My parents remember how quickly the planned march consumed the world
around them. It started on the local news before jumping to national
television. Kids talked about it at their middle school lockers and later
with their Hebrew school classmates. The whole community waited to see
what would happen as lawyers hashed it out in court.

Ultimately, the neo-Nazis rallied in Chicago instead of Skokie. But they
accomplished their goal of frightening and antagonizing an entire Jewish
community.

That story was on my mind as I watched what recently happened in Dearborn,
Michigan.

A white nationalist and anti-Muslim provocateur organized a “Christian
Crusader March” in Dearborn and sent hundreds of his supporters to descend
on the majority Arab city that has become a frequent target for
Islamophobes.

At the City Council meeting, the rally’s leader told Muslims that “your
time in this country is running short,” rhetoric that’s also found a home
among Republican politicians. 

There’s a photograph from Skokie in 1977. In a swelling crowd of
protesters, two people hold up signs. The first says “Fight Antisemitism
and Racism,” and the other “Jews and Other Minorities Unite Against
Fascism.”

[ [link removed] ]ALT TEXT FOR IMAGEProtesters in Skokie, Illinois, July 4, 1977 | AP

The people holding those understood that fighting the Nazis meant fighting
more than antisemitism alone. I think that’s something worth holding onto.

The fight against antisemitism and the fight against Islamophobia are not
competing causes. Our communities are both safer when we refuse to look
away from hatred directed at our neighbors.

And right now, it’s a particularly precarious moment for all of us. Both
Jews and Muslims are carrying the pain of violence thousands of miles
away. Too often, that violence spills into animosity between and toward
our two communities.

We saw it earlier this year in West Bloomfield, Michigan, when a man drove
a truck into Temple Israel, the largest synagogue in the state, while
children were inside. The attack was targeted at Jews. The man, who was
born in Lebanon, had lost family in an Israeli strike.

None of that makes the attack less antisemitic. Nor does it make an entire
group of people responsible for what he did.

Months later, two teenagers attacked the Islamic Center of San Diego,
killing three people. The attackers’ manifesto was a sprawling mess of
hatred moving between anti-Muslim and antisemitic conspiracy theories
alongside racism, misogyny and homophobia. The FBI said the attackers “did
not discriminate in who they hated.”

I grew up hearing the story about the time the Nazis came to Skokie. And I
keep coming back to those signs because they feel strikingly relevant now.

Fight antisemitism and racism.

Jews and other minorities unite against fascism.

Those words were written by people defending their own Jewish community.
But they understood that standing up for Jews was part of standing up
against something bigger.

That’s a tradition worth carrying forward.

I hope we can commit to doing so together, 

Eliza Schloss
Content Strategist and Producer, J Street


[ [link removed] ]MAKE A ONE-TIME DONATION »
[ [link removed] ]MAKE A MONTHLY RECURRING DONATION »
[ [link removed] ]Threads [ [link removed] ]Facebook [ [link removed] ]Instagram [ [link removed] ]Twitter
© 2026 J Street | [ [link removed] ]www.jstreet.org | [email protected]

J Street is the political home for pro-Israel, pro-peace, pro-democracy
Americans who want Israel to be secure, democratic and the national home of the
Jewish people. Working in American politics and the Jewish community, we
advocate policies that advance shared US and Israeli interests as well as Jewish
and democratic values, leading to a 23-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict.



You can unsubscribe from this mailing list at any time:
[link removed]