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Two weeks ago I was approached by one of our students who is dealing with a very real antisemitic situation at her school. We sat down over coffee, and at one point she looked at me and asked, “How am I supposed to have the strength to deal with this? I’m a student, I’m about to graduate, I’m trying to find a job… this feels like too much.”

I left that meeting frustrated. Frustrated with her situation, but also because I didn’t feel like I had a real answer for her. Why should she have to deal with this?

Last week, in one of the many grad campus requests that JGO funds and organizes every day, there was a Holocaust remembrance event we were supporting. A survivor was coming to speak, and the students asked if we could also order her an Uber from Brooklyn to Manhattan and back.

I immediately canceled my busy day and emailed the students and told them I would like to do the driving myself. When else am I going to have a few uninterrupted hours with a Holocaust survivor?

I do not regret my decision. 

Her name is Sally, she’s 101 years old, and she is as vibrant and full of life as anyone I’ve met.

At some point during our drive together, I asked her the same question that student had asked me: how do we have the strength to deal with antisemitism?

Sally told me that when she was 13 and the Nazis were rounding up Jews, her father sent her away to hide as a Catholic girl on a Polish farm. Before she left, he looked her in the eyes and told her, “Don’t forget you are a daughter of Israel. Don’t ever forget you are a Jew.”

She choked up as she told me this, even after all these years.

Then she looked at me and said, “Tell that young lady that she has to remember who she is. We can’t be afraid. Our strength comes from inside us, and we can’t let anyone take that away or make us forget.”

It was a simple answer, but it was also the answer.

I drove for over 5 hours that day. I got a parking ticket, even though I paid on the app, and my car got clipped on the highway by a passing gardening truck.

But I went home that day feeling like I had been given something I didn’t have before. 

Being with Sally reminded me that despite all the noise today, and the revisionist voices trying to blur, minimize or rewrite what happened to the Jewish people, we’ve been through it all, faced it all, and we are still here.

Our inner strength hasn’t disappeared, it lives inside of us.

And it’s something we have to hold onto, tight.