To tell them or not: parenting, post-October 7

“I know how to end the war,” one of my boys says. He’s referring to Russian invasion of Ukraine, where I lived as a child. “The Russian people should run away from Russia and move to Ukraine, to help them fight Putin…”

Putin is the reference point for evil in our home. (Is China’s president worse than Putin? Is Putin the biggest baddie?) Not Hitler. Not Hamas. In our family’s version of “don’t mention the war” – on my insistence, not my husband’s, I should clarify – we don’t talk about the enemies of Jews.

And we don’t talk about the war that began with the October 7 massacre. For as long as possible, I want my boys to grow up free of the dark cloud of antisemitism that has hovered above my head since my childhood.

I am ashamed to say this, but I will: I never wanted my children to be Jewish. In the Soviet Union, where I grew up, I couldn’t move around without bumping into my Jewishness. My classmates liked pointing it out to me accompanied with foul language and sometimes pinches or shoves.

The kids in hospitals, where I spent much time then, enjoyed telling me antisemitic jokes. Then my parents turned religious and there was much talk at home about destroyed temples and enslaved Jews.

Later, when we moved to Israel, the school curriculum teemed with Holocaust memoirs and fiction. As a teen, I had recurring dreams about people running through a kind of giant meat mincer. Being Jewish, I learned early, was synonymous with being in pain.

I didn’t want my children to be in pain. I enrolled them into a public school. We want to support public education and for the boys to have diverse friendships, I told everyone who cared to hear. This was true. But it was the surface truth. Really, I didn’t want the boys to think of themselves as Jewish. Without religion or Jewish education, why should they?