Can We Find a Way to Bring Peace to Gaza?

I was born in Washington, D.C. during World War II, and raised there through the mid-1950’s. I was educated in segregated public schools until I was in the 5th grade, when the Brown v. Board of Education decision forced the D.C. schools to integrate in 1954.

All of a sudden, my classmates and my class friends were black instead of white. My neighborhood quickly became majority black as well. Believe it or not, being Jewish made me the minority student in my class and I was aware that my religion made me different from everyone else in the class, regardless of their race.

Not only was I the only Jewish kid in the 5th grade, but I knew from what my parents taught me that being Jewish in those days meant keeping my head down and my mouth shut. I remember we once came up to New York and I was absolutely astonished to see two kids wearing yarmulkes on their heads as they walked down the street.

How could these kids draw attention to their Jewishness like that? How could they walk in public and let everyone know that they were Jews? Maybe you could behave like that in New York which had certain neighborhoods that were overwhelmingly Jewish, but you couldn’t behave like that anywhere else.

Outside of one book on Jewish history that we had in our house, I never saw any mention in pictures or language…