In the decades that followed, Jews from other places joined American synagogues, many bringing memories that American Jews had forgotten. Those memories were waiting for them in the synagogue’s books. On the holiday of Purim, they recited the Book of Esther, about an ancient Persian leader’s failed attempt at a Jewish genocide. It’s a time for costumes and levity, for shaking noisemakers to blot out the evildoer’s name. One year my brother dressed as the ayatollah, and the Persians in our congregation laughed. Another year someone dressed as Gorbachev; the Russians loved it. The evildoers seemed defeated.

  In 2000, when Ms. Mallinger was seventy-nine, a Jewish senator was his party’s nominee for vice president. A year later the White House hosted its first official Hanukkah party. About a decade later I attended one myself. In the White House we recited ancient words thanking God for rescuing us from hatred. To older Jews, this felt miraculous: My parents and grandfather gawked at my photos, awestruck. But at the party I met younger Jewish leaders who often attended these events. To them, this was normal. The ancient hatred was a memory, words on a page.

  Or maybe it wasn’t. In 2001, after terrorists attacked American cities, concrete barriers sprouted in front of my family’s synagogue, police cruisers parked in the lot. This felt practical in a nation on edge; we assumed it affected everyone. As my children were born and grew, the barriers and guards became their normal. When I took my children to an interfaith Thanksgiving service at a church down the street from our synagogue, one of them asked me why no one was guarding the door.

  In the years that followed, the internet suddenly allowed anyone to say whatever they wanted, rewarding the most outrageous from every political stripe. Soon, comments sections became an open sewer, flowing with centuries-old garbage—and as social media exploded, those comments evolved into open vitriol, as abstract hate scaled up to direct verbal attacks on Jewish institutions and individuals. To young Jews this felt confusing. To old Jews it must have felt familiar, a memory passed down and echoed in the holy books.

  When Ms. Mallinger was ninety-seven, she and ten other Jews were murdered in their synagogue. There are words for this too, a Hebrew phrase for 2,500 years’ worth of people murdered for being Jews: kiddush hashem, death in sanctification of God’s name.

  My children were right: This story is old, with far too many words. Yet they were wrong about one thing. In the old stories, those outside the community rarely helped or cared; our ancestors’ consolation came only from one another and from God. But in this horrific new reality, perhaps our old words might mean something new.

  When they return to synagogue, mourners are greeted with more ancient words: “May God comfort you among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.” In that verse, the word used for God is hamakom—literally, “the place.” May the place comfort you.

  May the people in this place comfort you: the first responders who rush to your rescue, the neighbors who overwhelm evil with kindness, the Americans of every background who inspire more optimism than Jewish history allows. May this country comfort you, with its infinite promise. As George Washington vowed in his 1790 letter to a Rhode Island synagogue, America shall be a place where “every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.” Those words aren’t his. They’re from the Hebrew prophet Micah, on the shelves of every synagogue in the world.

  In synagogue as always, we read from the scroll we call the Tree of Life, and the place will comfort us. As we put the book away, we repeat the words from Lamentations: “Renew our days as of old.”

  Chapter 4

  EXECUTED JEWS

  ALA ZUSKIN PERELMAN AND I HAD BEEN IN TOUCH online before I finally met her in person, and I still cannot quite believe that she exists. Years ago, I wrote a novel about Marc Chagall and the Yiddish-language artists whom he once knew in Russia, all of whom were eventually murdered by the Soviet regime. While researching the novel, I found myself sucked into the bizarre story of these people’s exploitation and destruction: how the Soviet Union first welcomed these artists as exemplars of universal human ideals, then used them for its own purposes, and finally executed them. I named my main character after the executed Yiddish actor Benjamin Zuskin, a comic performer known for playing fools. After the book came out, I heard from Ala in an email written in halting English: “I am Benjamin Zuskin’s daughter.” That winter I was speaking at a literary conference in Israel, where Ala lived, and she and I arranged to meet. It was like meeting a character from a book.

  My hosts had generously put me up with other writers in a beautiful stone house in Jerusalem. We were there during Hanukkah, the celebration of Jewish independence. On the first night of the holiday, I walked to Jerusalem’s Old City and watched as people lit enormous Hanukkah torches at the Western Wall. I thought of my home in New Jersey, where in school growing up I sang fake English Hanukkah songs created by American music education companies at school Christmas concerts, with lyrics describing Hanukkah as being about “joy and peace and love.” Joy and peace and love describe Hanukkah, a commemoration of an underdog military victory over a powerful empire, about as well as they describe the Fourth of July. I remembered challenging a chorus teacher about one such song, and being told that I was a poor sport for disliking joy and peace and love. (Imagine a “Christmas song” with lyrics celebrating Christmas, the holiday of freedom. Doesn’t everyone like freedom? What pedant would reject such a song?) I sang those words in front of hundreds of people to satisfy my neighbors that my tradition was universal—meaning, just like theirs. The night before meeting Ala, I walked back to the house through the dense stone streets of the Old City’s Jewish Quarter, where every home had a glass case by its door, displaying the holiday’s oil lamps. It was strange to see those hundreds of glowing lights. They were like a shining announcement that this night of celebration was shared by all these strangers around me, that it was universal. The experience was so unfamiliar that I didn’t know what to make of it.

  The next morning, Ala knocked on the door of the stone house and sat down in its living room, with its view of the Old City. She was a small dark-haired woman whose perfect posture showed a firmness that belied her age. She looked at me and said in Hebrew, “I feel as if you knew my father, like you understood what he went through. How did you know?”

  The answer to that question goes back several thousand years.

  The teenage boys who participated in competitive athletics in the gymnasium in Jerusalem 2,200 years ago had their circumcisions reversed, because otherwise they wouldn’t have been allowed to play. In the Hellenistic empire that had conquered Judea, sports were sacred, the entry point to being a person who mattered, the ultimate height of cool—and sports, of course, were always played in the nude. As one can imagine, ancient genital surgery of this nature was excruciating and potentially fatal. But the boys did not want to miss out.

  I learned this fun fact in seventh grade, from a Hebrew school teacher who was instructing me and my pubescent classmates about the Hanukkah story—about how Hellenistic tyranny gained a foothold in ancient Judea with the help of Jews who wanted to fit in. This teacher seemed overly jazzed to talk about penises with a bunch of adolescents, and I suspected he’d made the whole thing up. At home, I decided to fact-check. I pulled a dusty old book off my parents’ shelf, Volume One of Heinrich Graetz’s opus History of the Jews.

  In nineteenth-century academic prose, Graetz explained how the leaders of Judea demonstrated their loyalty to the occupying Hellenistic empire by building a gymnasium and recruiting teenage athletes—only to discover that “in uncovering their bodies they could immediately be recognized as Judeans. But were they to take part in the Olympian games, and expose themselves to the mockery of Greek scoffers? Even this difficulty they evaded by undergoing a painful operation, so as to disguise the fact that they were Judeans.” Their Zeus-worshiping overlords were not fooled. Within a few years, the regime outlawed not only circumcision but all of Jewish religious practice, and put to death anyone who didn’t comply.

  Sometime after that, the Maccabees showed up. That’s the part of the story we usually hear.

  Those ancient Jewish teenagers were on my mind that Hanukkah when Ala came to tell me about her father’s terrifying life, because I sensed that something profound united them—something that doesn’t match what we’re usually taught about what bigotry looks or feels like. It doesn’t involve “intolerance” or “persecution,” at least not at first. Instead, it looks likes the Jews themselves are choosing to reject their own traditions. It is a form of weaponized shame.

  Two distinct patterns of antisemitism can be identified by the Jewish holidays that celebrate triumphs over them: Purim and Hanukkah. In the Purim version of antisemitism, exemplified by the Persian genocidal decrees in the biblical Book of Esther, the goal is openly stated and unambiguous: Kill all the Jews. In the Hanukkah version of antisemitism, whose appearances range from the Spanish Inquisition to the Soviet regime, the goal is still to eliminate Jewish civilization. But in the Hanukkah version, this goal could theoretically be accomplished simply by destroying Jewish civilization, while leaving the warm, de-Jewed bodies of its former practitioners intact.

  For this reason, the Hanukkah version of antisemitism often employs Jews as its agents. It requires not dead Jews but cool Jews: those willing to give up whatever specific aspect of Jewish civilization is currently uncool. Of course, Judaism has always been uncool, going back to its origins as the planet’s only monotheism, featuring a bossy and unsexy invisible God. Uncoolness is pretty much Judaism’s brand, which is why cool people find it so threatening—and why Jews who are willing to become cool are absolutely necessary to Hanukkah antisemitism’s success. These “converted” Jews are used to demonstrate the good intentions of the regime—which of course isn’t antisemitic but merely requires that its Jews publicly flush thousands of years of Jewish civilization down the toilet in exchange for the worthy prize of not being treated like dirt, or not being murdered. For a few years. Maybe.

  I wish I could tell the story of Ala’s father concisely, compellingly, the way everyone prefers to hear about dead Jews. I regret to say that Benjamin Zuskin wasn’t minding his own business and then randomly stuffed into a gas chamber, that his thirteen-year-old daughter did not sit in a closet writing an uplifting diary about the inherent goodness of humanity, that he did not leave behind sad-but-beautiful aphorisms pondering the absence of God while conveniently letting his fellow humans off the hook. He didn’t even get crucified for his beliefs. Instead, he and his fellow Soviet Jewish artists—extraordinarily intelligent, creative, talented, and empathetic adults—were played for fools, falling into a slow-motion psychological horror story brimming with suspense and twisted self-blame. They were lured into a long game of appeasing and accommodating, giving up one inch after another of who they were in order to win that grand prize of being allowed to live.

  Spoiler alert: they lost.

  I was in graduate school studying Yiddish literature, itself a rich vein of discussion about such impossible choices, when I became interested in Soviet Jewish artists like Ala’s father. As I dug through library collections of early-twentieth-century Yiddish works, I came across a startling number of poetry books illustrated by Marc Chagall. I wondered if Chagall had known these Yiddish writers whose works he illustrated, and it turned out that he had. One of Chagall’s first jobs as a young man was as an art teacher at a Jewish orphanage near Moscow, built for children orphaned by Russia’s 1919–1920 civil war pogroms. This orphanage had a rather renowned faculty, populated by famous Yiddish writers who trained these traumatized children in the healing art of creativity.

  It all sounded very lovely, until I noticed something else. That Chagall’s art did not rely on a Jewish language—that it had, to use that insidious phrase, “universal appeal”—allowed him a chance to succeed as an artist in the West. The rest of the faculty, like Chagall, had also spent years in western Europe before the Russian revolution, but they chose to return to Russia because of the Soviet Union’s policy of endorsing Yiddish as a “national Soviet language.” In the 1920s and ’30s, the USSR offered unprecedented material support to Yiddish culture, paying for Yiddish-language schools, theaters, publishing houses, and more, to the extent that there were Yiddish literary critics who were salaried by the Soviet government. This support led the major Yiddish novelist Dovid Bergelson to publish his landmark 1926 essay “Three Centers,” about New York, Warsaw, and Moscow as centers of Yiddish-speaking culture, asking which city offered Yiddish writers the brightest prospects. His unequivocal answer was Moscow, a choice that brought him back to Russia the following year, where many other Jewish artists joined him.

  But Soviet support for Jewish culture was part of a larger plan to brainwash and coerce national minorities into submitting to the Soviet regime—and for Jews, it came at a very specific price. From the beginning, the regime eliminated anything in the celebrated Jewish “nationality” that didn’t suit its needs. Jews were awesome, provided they weren’t practicing the Jewish religion, studying traditional Jewish texts, using Hebrew, or supporting Zionism. The Soviet Union thus pioneered a versatile gaslighting slogan, which it later spread through its client states in the developing world and which remains popular today: it was not antisemitic, merely anti-Zionist. (In the process of not being antisemitic and merely being anti-Zionist, the regime managed to persecute, imprison, torture, and murder thousands of Jews.) What’s left of Jewish culture once you surgically remove religious practice, traditional texts, Hebrew, and Zionism? In the Soviet Empire, one answer was Yiddish, but Yiddish was also suspect for its supposedly backward elements. Nearly 15 percent of its words came directly from biblical and rabbinic Hebrew, so Soviet Yiddish schools and publishers, under the guise of “simplifying” spelling, implemented a new and quite literally antisemitic spelling system that eliminated those words’ ancient Near Eastern roots. Another answer was “folklore”—music, visual art, theater, and other creative work reflecting Jewish life—but of course most of that cultural material was also deeply rooted in biblical and rabbinic sources, or reflected common religious practices like Jewish holidays and customs, so that was treacherous too.

  No, what the regime required were Yiddish stories that showed how horrible traditional Jewish practice was, stories in which happy, enlightened Yiddish-speaking heroes rejected both religion and Zionism (which, aside from its modern political form, is also a fundamental feature of ancient Jewish texts and prayers traditionally recited at least three times daily). This de-Jewing process is clear from the repertoire of the government-sponsored Moscow State Yiddish Theater, which could only present or adapt Yiddish plays that denounced traditional Judaism as backward, bourgeois, corrupt, or even more explicitly—as in the many productions involving ghosts and graveyard scenes—as dead. As its actors would be, soon enough.

  The Soviet Union’s destruction of Jewish culture commenced, in a calculated move, with Jews positioned as the destroyers. It began with the Yevsektsiya, committees of Jewish Bolsheviks whose paid government jobs from 1918 through 1930 were to persecute, imprison, and occasionally murder Jews who participated in religious or Zionist institutions—categories that included everything from synagogues to sports clubs, all of which were shut down and their leaders either exiled or “purged.” This went on, of course, until the regime purged the Yevsektsiya members themselves.

  The pattern repeated in the 1940s. As sordid as the Yevsektsiya chapter was, I found myself more intrigued by the undoing of the Jewish Antifascist Committee, a board of prominent Soviet Jewish artists and intellectuals established by Joseph Stalin in 1942 to drum up financial support from Jews overseas for the Soviet war effort. Two of the more prominent names on the JAC’s roster of talent were Solomon Mikhoels, the director of the Moscow State Yiddish Theater, and Ala’s father Benjamin Zuskin, the theater’s leading actor. After promoting these people during the war, Stalin decided these loyal Soviet Jews were no longer useful, and charged them all with treason. He had decided that this committee he himself had created was in fact a secret Zionist cabal, designed to bring down the Soviet state. Mikhoels was murdered first, in a 1948 hit staged to look like a traffic accident. Nearly all the others—Zuskin and twelve more Jewish luminaries, including the novelist Dovid Bergelson, who had proclaimed Moscow as the center of the Yiddish future—were executed by firing squad on August 12, 1952.

  Just as the regime accused these Jewish artists and intellectuals of being too “nationalist” (read: Jewish), today’s long hindsight makes it strangely tempting to read this history and accuse them of not being “nationalist” enough—that is, of being so foolishly committed to the Soviet regime that they were unable to see the writing on the wall. Many works on this subject have said as much. In Stalin’s Secret Pogrom, the indispensable English translation of transcripts from the JAC “trial,” Russia scholar Joshua Rubenstein concludes his lengthy introduction with the following:

  As for the defendants at the trial, it is not clear what they believed about the system they each served. Their lives darkly embodied the tragedy of Soviet Jewry. A combination of revolutionary commitment and naïve idealism had tied them to a system they could not renounce. Whatever doubts or misgivings they had, they kept to themselves, and served the Kremlin with the required enthusiasm. They were not dissidents. They were Jewish martyrs. They were also Soviet patriots. Stalin repaid their loyalty by destroying them.

  This is completely true, and also completely unfair. The tragedy—even the term seems unjust, with its implied blaming of the victim—was not that these Soviet Jews sold their souls to the devil, though many clearly did. The tragedy was that integrity was never an option in the first place.

  Ala was almost thirteen years old when her father was arrested, and until that moment she was immersed in the Soviet Yiddish artistic scene. Her mother was also an actor in the Moscow State Yiddish Theater; her family lived in the same building as the murdered theater director Solomon Mikhoels, and moved in the same circles as other Jewish actors and writers. After seeing her parents perform countless times, Ala had a front-row seat to the destruction of their world. She attended Mikhoels’s state funeral, heard about the arrest of the brilliant Yiddish author Der Nister from an actor friend who witnessed it from her apartment across the hall, and was present when secret police ransacked her home in conjunction with her father’s arrest. In her biography of her father, The Travels of Benjamin Zuskin, she provides for her readers what she gave me that morning in Jerusalem: an emotional recounting, with the benefit of hindsight, of what it was really like to live through the Soviet Jewish nightmare.