Published: 3 October 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
THROUGH STORIES WE BUILD our lives and our communities and become agents of our future. Now that I am socially distanced from my Budapest community, I realise the value of our work in revising and reclaiming stories that empower us and make our voice heard in the global Jewish discourse.
My previous job in Budapest involved networking and fundraising. I met hundreds of visiting groups: philanthropists, Jewish professionals and tourists. They came from North America, Israel, Argentina, Australia and beyond. Budapest became a hotspot for Jewish explorations. Most came with presumptions about Jewish life in Central-Eastern Europe and during their brief visits we told them our stories, hoping to touch their minds and hearts.
To be fair, it’s noisy out there even if our stories are interesting. We hear hundreds of stories every day, tailor-made in the echo-chamber of social media bubbles and the attention economy.
According to Marshall Ganz, a Harvard lecturer in leadership and civil society, we all have great stories that articulate who we are: our shared values, hopes and experiences, the difficult choices we face, why we do what we do. A good story engages us and captures our interest. It inspires us to act, and others too.
I grew up in a family where the Holocaust was a reference in every gathering. My four survivor grandparents felt at ease to open up and tell us about their experiences in detail. I’m not alone in this, many from my generation grew up with the only connection to our ancestry coming from the stories of what was lost.
It became part of our DNA. The visitors expected to hear those stories and rightly so. However, the stories overshadowed our new story of personal and communal renewal.
We wanted to tell how in the past two decades young Jews found their way back to Judaism and to the Jewish community, discovering their roots as teenagers or students, and how this generation created a vibrant Jewish community of young adults. But as much as our story was compelling, it was insufficient and did not provide a convincing vision for the future.
And there is a third prevailing story that is often heard: the renewed anti-Semitism. I remember attending a meeting in the US and being asked if Hungarian Jews would need an “evacuation fund” should they be forced to flee.
It’s hard not to become frustrated. Everyone wants to hear how our safety is at risk. This story lies in everyone’s comfort zone: a victimised Jewish community in Eastern Europe, threatened by its very existence, feeds well into mainstream Jewish narratives; the Zionist that assumes Israel is the safe homeland; or the American lens that looks at Eastern Europe as a place our ancestry escaped from.
I admit that being perpetual victims is also comfortable for us, Hungarian Jews. In survival mode, we wait for the next pogrom to start, feeling passive and powerless, dependent on the help of outsiders. As long as we are in this position, we can avoid issues such as communal responsibility and self-reliance. We neglect to ensure inclusion of LGBTQ+, women’s leadership, people with disabilities and so on. Victimhood allows us to be blinded and not see our own privileges.
Don’t get me wrong, anti-Semitism is real, and its ugly face shows up in academia, politics, sport and media. Anti-Semitic hate speech and hate crimes are real, too, and require reporting and monitoring. However, the current narrative offers only one perception of anti-Semitism: a physical threat on our lives. Within this distorted view, the only adequate answer is increased security. More armed guards, police protection and detecting equipment.
Anti-Semitism is not only about security, and rarely it manifests in violent attacks. We need to focus on the more subtle and implicit manifestations of hate, such as bias at school or the workplace, which is widely present. Tackling anti-Semitism in Europe through security measures is important, but it’s only a technical quick fix for a bigger adaptive challenge.
Happily, the European Commission is funding a historic initiative lead by CEJI – A Jewish Contribution to an Inclusive Europe, to combat anti-Semitism on a systemic level. Within this, Networks Overcoming Antisemitism aims to make an impact through education and training, culture, dialogue, social media campaigns, sports and mapping the hundreds of initiatives that are already doing great work.
In Hungary we are not victims anymore. Rather, we are the most privileged minority group in Hungarian society. With help from global Jewry, we have built a vibrant and exciting community, with Jewish culture, sport clubs, JCC, student organisations, youth camps, social innovation hubs, museums, and even new synagogues.
When we take off our protective masks and resume social contact, we will need to look into the future. Today, Jews in Europe are in the forefront of building a more inclusive society: in social justice, human rights, democracy, interfaith dialogue, welcoming refugees, reducing poverty, advancing LGBTQ+ rights, and combatting systemic racism. As we reflect on the New Year, we should recognise that it’s not anti-Semitism that defines us, but our shared purpose.
Illustration: Avi Katz
