by Matt Brandstein
I live in Rogers Park, a block from the Red Line, the brainstem at the top of Chicago, carrying people in and out, everyone's comings and goings threaded along the same rattling tracks, its low metallic hum reaching every corner of the neighborhood, so constant it stops sounding like noise and starts feeling like its own pulse.
That rhythm has borders. Chicago has drawn them right into the map, the city carved into fifty wards, each with its own alderperson wielding something close to mini-mayoral power, conducting itself like a micronation, a hyper-localized patriotism baked into city ordinance.
The wards speak their own dialects, keep their own customs, distinct enough that moving from one into the next can feel less like crossing a street than crossing a border, the way a traveler notices the air itself change between countries.
And yet underneath all that particularity runs something universal: actually knowing your neighbors, a real closeness, their lesser curated selves, the versions separate from work and social media; and knowing exactly who'd notice if you went quiet for a week.
Rogers Park bends that closeness toward geography: a proprietary pride, an unspoken this-is-mine that owes less to turf than to the lake at the end of every street and the particular slant of light off the water. The place reads less like a neighborhood than a secret beach village within the third most populated city in America, so quaint that the same strangers become recognizable fixtures of your daily walk, faces you'd know anywhere without ever learning their names.
Conversations start organically here, simply by proximity, by the habit of circling the same paths through the parks and along the beaches until you learn a whole cast of regulars. They greet each other on the sidewalk, warmly, like they mean it, and mostly they do. Dogs meet dogs and their people linger a beat longer than the dogs require.
I overcompensate, a reflex against my own social anxiety, the irony being that the harder I work not to seem anxious, the more energy it takes. I make small talk with half the people I pass, because that's part of the surface charm of this place: a kind of practiced cordiality, people genuinely interested in engaging with each other, stopping, asking how you are and meaning it, for as long as the conversation lasts. I never actually answer, not really. There's no version of the truth short enough to fit on a sidewalk.
Underneath all that warmth sits a political monoculture, hard left and reflexively anti-Israel. It surfaces in the small talk people make about the news, and what it reveals never stays abstract for long. It becomes personal, fast. Sometimes people name it outright, proudly calling themselves anti-Zionist or pro-BDS. More often it's simply assumed, a consensus so complete that nobody seems to notice they're all saying the same thing. Either way, in my experience, the conversation turns forceful fast the moment I push back.
* * *
My grandparents carried two things out of Eastern Europe when they left it. One was the antisemitism that forced them out and murdered those who couldn't leave. The other was an interconnectivity to other Jews, already instinctual back home, that simply carried over into their buildings, their neighborhoods, their work, their social lives here, never needing to be rebuilt the way everything else in America did.
My mother's parents settled into a less religious life, perhaps a subconscious retreat from the incalculable loss the Holocaust had cost them. My father's parents kept frumkeit within a heimishe home. Both sides spoke the same Yiddish-inflected broken English. They were steeped in a Jewishness that governed how their lives were conducted. Everyone around them was a landsman, a cadence underneath everything else they did, a density of belonging that assimilation would water down by the time I arrived.
I never lived the kehilah, the communal side of that inheritance, the total interconnectivity my grandparents were born into. I was given a secular private school education and carried a secular first name into that world, the kind of thing that should have assimilated me completely, exactly as intended. There were plenty of Jews there, but the Judaism on offer was stripped down and performative, holidays observed with the depth of a Jewish greeting card seemingly designed by those who skimmed a brief article on Judaism from the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Even so, I come from a people with its own way of life, bound to Klal Yisroel, the Jewish people entire, a bond never meant to be sublimated. That isn't a rejection of the gentiles in my life, the friends I love with gratitude for their presence since the beginning.
What reached me of my birthright from the start, though, was faint, an outline rather than the thing itself, just enough to recognize when it was missing. What I inherited, louder than any of it, was an awareness of antisemitism. Not as memory, but as my gut, an early-warning system I can't turn off.
* * *
I know a great many people here. Almost none of them are mine, a distinction that stopped being abstract the moment Hamas carried out, in a single day, the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust.
What came back to me in the aftermath wasn't just indifference. It was something closer to excitement, the same rhetoric metastasizing across social media and so much of the rest of the world, except here it had a face, a voice, a sidewalk. I could hear it in the small talk, in the tone underneath ordinary conversation: their so-called resistance was finally, actually happening. Standing outside exchanging pleasantries with neighbors who seemed almost pleased before the bodies were even counted was disorienting in a way I still haven't fully shaken.
Roughly 1,200 people were murdered within hours, some shot, some burned alive, a number of them beheaded, women, girls, and men among them sexually assaulted, all of it confirmed afterward by Israeli forensic teams and international investigators. Roughly 250 more were taken hostage into Gaza, Holocaust survivors and a nine-month-old baby among the group. Dozens were murdered in captivity, and the last of the living hostages weren't freed until 738 days had passed.
All of it got repackaged as a righteous cause, delivered in the same breath as a tidy, surgical disclaimer meant to extricate Zionism from Jewishness itself. It demoralized me then, and it hasn't stopped since.
Zionism is simply a people's claim to their own ancestral homeland, a place the Jewish people never stopped living in even during the centuries they were scattered from it, and a claim the world eventually recognized in law, after generations of a people organizing, building, and when necessary defending it themselves.
That disclaimer became a kind of ritual around me, always the same script: I'm not antisemitic, it's not about Jews or Judaism, it's about Zionism. Said as though the sentence absolved itself just by being spoken. Once you actually know what Zionism is, the distinction collapses on its own. Telling that same people they have no right to a homeland, while insisting it has nothing to do with how you feel about them, isn't a distinction at all. It's the antisemitism, wearing a disclaimer as a disguise.
What has had the most harm wasn't any single comment. It was watching antisemitism stop registering as antisemitism at all, becoming just another permissible opinion, normalized as quickly and worn as easily as anything else people believe around here.
I've met a handful of Jews, too, on the very marginalized fringe, who reject the idea that Israel should exist as a Jewish state at all. It breaks my heart every time, not because I doubt their sincerity, but because it reveals just how disconnected they've become from what we actually are.
Saying Israel shouldn't be a Jewish state is like saying a body doesn't need a heart, as though some organ could simply be excised and the rest would carry on unchanged. We aren't a loose collection of interests that happened to align, we're one interwoven body, and asking it not to be Jewish is asking us to sever a vein and call it healthy.
None of this is an argument against others living there too. Plenty already do, and that was never the question. The question is only whether the place remains Jewish at its core, non-negotiable, fundamental to who we are. For the ones who've lost sight of that, I don't feel anger so much as something closer to grief, and I mean it when I wish them a refuah shleima, a full and speedy recovery.
Call the Jewish return to the land of Israel what it actually is: the most successful decolonization project in modern history, undertaken by an indigenous people, and watch how quickly that same return gets recast here as the crime instead.
The Holocaust remains modern history's most brutal proof that this right was never only spiritual. It is a matter of survival, demonstrated again and again by a world that keeps proving, plainly, that it wants our extinction, not through one ideology but an entire ecosystem of them, left and right, foreign and homegrown, each with its own justification and all arriving at the same conclusion.
These are the threats active right now: Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthi Movement, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, ISIS, Al-Qaeda, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Samidoun, the Goyim Defense League, the National Socialist Movement, Patriot Front, The Base, Atomwaffen Division, the Nation of Islam, and radical factions of the Black Hebrew Israelites.
And beneath even that frightening list sits something larger still: the ordinary people, scattered across the world, who never join any of them but absorb their language anyway, until hatred that used to require an organization behind it now travels just fine on its own.
The last two years have seen the highest concentration of antisemitic murders and terror attacks worldwide in decades [1]. In 2025 alone, twenty Jews were killed in four separate attacks across three continents: fifteen at a Hanukkah gathering near Sydney, Australia; two Israeli embassy staffers shot dead outside a Jewish museum in Washington, D.C.; an eighty-two-year-old woman killed by a Molotov cocktail thrown into a march for the hostages in Boulder, Colorado, by a man who told police he wanted to kill all Zionists; and two men killed in an attack on a synagogue in Manchester, England, on Yom Kippur, Judaism's holiest day. It didn't stop there. In March 2026, a man drove a truck through the entrance of a synagogue outside Detroit and opened fire with a rifle before killing himself, an attack the FBI called Hezbollah-inspired terrorism; a religious school on-site with more than a hundred children had to be evacuated [2]. The following month, a man in London stabbed two Jewish men in Golders Green within minutes of each other, telling police he'd gone out looking for people who looked "visibly Jewish" [3]. None of it was unforeseen: after the Washington and Boulder attacks, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security had already issued a joint public warning of an elevated threat to Jewish and Israeli communities nationwide, months before Detroit and Golders Green followed [4]. None of this happened in some distant decade. It happened recently, and it's still happening, to people lighting a menorah, walking into a museum, marching for hostages, praying on the holiest day of the calendar, sending their kids to religious school, walking down the street looking like what they are. Organized or not, it's the same permission structure underneath: hatred that travels freely enough to reach anyone, anywhere, on any given day.
* * *
Neither Rogers Park nor Chicago as a whole has seen anything as overt as Sydney, Manchester, or Detroit, and I don't take that for granted. Some Jews, myself included, still live in Rogers Park, but our presence is barely showcased anymore, down to a lone Romanian Kosher, a vestige of an earlier time, that now serves Jews scattered elsewhere more than it serves anyone still living here.
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| The vintage interior of Romanian Kosher harkens back to a more heimishe era. |
Whatever warmth Rogers Park still likes to advertise, whatever concern it claims for every vulnerable group under the sun, descends from values that were always ours: chesed, welcoming the stranger, the belief that every human being carries a spark worth protecting.
It is a strange inheritance to watch turned against you, redefined now by people who insist they aren't antisemitic even as they condemn our homeland, laundering the same old blood libel, now the false claim of genocide, through the pretentious language of a graduate seminar, and aiming it at the very people who survived an actual one.
None of it was ever really aimed at me. It's aimed at persuading everyone else, and on that front, it's working exactly as intended. What it hasn't touched is who I am: not the silence from the people here, not the automatic hostility the moment Israel comes up, a place inseparable from who I am. If anything, my Jewish heartbeat only grew stronger.
I was raised with secularity as a forceful engine, holding an awareness of assimilation that never fully switches off, a current beneath everything. In Rogers Park it runs at a much higher throttle, because the neighborhood, since my arrival, has become so thoroughly detached from Jewish community that the contrast is impossible to ignore.
* * *
I hadn't come here by careful design so much as by necessity. I moved to Rogers Park in 2012, in the middle of financial instability that made the decision for me: this was what I could afford, an accessible foothold along the lake when the rest of the city wasn't offering one. I told myself it read as an investment. Really it was need, dressed up as a refuge.
I was forty, still learning how to outrun a chaos that had trailed me into adulthood. The decade that followed didn't cooperate. My father's death, of blessed memory. My mother's cancer, a fight she won, B"H. My own cancer, a fight I won too, B"H. A pandemic that threw the entire world into its own kind of chaos.
But I needed quiet, while the volume kept rising. Rogers Park added its own register of noise entirely. Buildings here are rarely insulated the way they should be, so the sounds of other people's lives bleed constantly into your own, layering onto whatever anxiety already lives in you until you can't always tell which noise is coming from outside your head and which isn't.
The noise, it turned out, was the appropriate soundtrack, fitting almost too well for the horror unfolding below me. I live on the first floor, one flight up from the garden unit, the kind of space prospective buyers and qualified tenants often pass over: flood risk, security issues, pests, low light. Its previous owner had rented it out to men who turned out to be gangsters, a radical shift for the building and especially for me. One night, a shooting broke out down there. I could have been hit.
A few hours later, someone set the unit on fire, deliberately, whether as revenge or to destroy evidence or both, and it tore through the building, destroying the bed where I would have been sleeping had I been home. I wasn't. Baruch Hashem. The damage was severe enough that my apartment stayed uninhabitable for over a year.
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| The garden unit after the fire, sealed for arson investigation. |
Rogers Park likes to present itself as gentle, and so often it is, but when it turns, it turns hard: gang activity, an undercurrent of addiction, people wandering through their own private sadness in numbers that would surprise anyone who only sees the friendly version of this place.
In October 2024, a twenty-seven-year-old man was shot and killed standing outside the Morse Red Line stop, a block from my building. I was walking my dog when it happened. I heard it before I understood what I was hearing.
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| The report about the incident the next morning. |
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| The station entrance, boarded up in the aftermath. |
There have been many shootings during my time here. Once, at Loyola Park, I ran from bullets during a drive-by aimed at people playing basketball at the top of the park. It happened on a day when kids were organized into their Park District camp groups. I wasn't affected until I experienced their crying and screaming as counselors rushed them into the fieldhouse, where the rest of us stayed too, until the police arrived and told us it was safe to leave. It reminded me of what I saw the morning of September 11th in New York, frightened children crying on 8th Avenue while people covered head to toe in building chemicals and soot made their way somberly away from Ground Zero.
* * *
For religious reasons, I keep a beard, and most days a hat stands in for a yarmulke, not because I'd rather not wear one but because a hat actually stays on my bald head in a windy city that truly is. When the weather allows, I dress in small ways of being visibly, unmistakably Jewish: t-shirts that say Israel, carry Hebrew text, or feature a Star of David. The latter carries its own complication here that has nothing to do with antisemitism: the Gangster Disciples use the same symbol, and more than once someone has asked me, seriously, about my affiliation.
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| A six-pointed star etched into the sidewalk at Lunt and Paulina, a few blocks from my apartment. |
This summer alone, in Loyola Park, strangers have singled me out for being Jewish enough times that I've lost count. A man looked directly at me, clocked the shirt that read Israel, and with alarming contempt called me a fucking Jew. Another time, wearing nothing more provocative than a Star of David, I was told I should be ashamed of myself. I don't answer, not really, not anymore, but I haven't forgotten any of it. Smaller moments have piled up: too many ugly looks of disgust to mention, and more for the medallion reading Bring Them Home Now, the kind so many of us wore until, thank G-d, we no longer had to.
There are multiple instances of graffiti near my apartment insisting the Holocaust never happened, alongside calls for intifada and from the river to the sea, phrases that read as liberation to whoever posted them but that I read for what they actually are: a call for actual genocide against my people and against anyone who opposes Islamist fundamentalism.
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| Written on a garbage bin at Loyola Park, a few feet from where families were setting up for the day. |
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| Attached to a pole on Sheridan Road, directly in front of a Chipotle. |
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| This one isn't just a lone crank with a marker. The web address traces back to an actual organization that sells Holocaust denial literature, layered directly beneath a flyer calling for solidarity against fascism on the same pole, the kind of movement the ADL has documented repeatedly folding classic antisemitic tropes into its own rhetoric, sometimes while organizing explicitly against fascism. |
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| Found on a mailbox a few blocks from my apartment. This is one of many, not an outlier. |
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| A poster taped to a pole on Sheridan Road outside Loyola's campus lists BlackRock's founders by name and net worth under a Star of David stamped with a dollar sign, captioned "Every Single Aspect of BlackRock IS JEWISH." |
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| A second poster on a Sheridan Road pole by Loyola's campus frames a grid of unrelated photos between two Stars of David, inviting viewers to "Make Your Own Conclusions." |
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| Posted on the same stretch of Sheridan Road near Loyola, a third poster lines up a Star of David against a pentagram and names media executives under the claim that "6 Jewish Corporations Own 96% of the Media." |
Countless messages plaster nearly every lamppost and traffic sign, anything that can be vandalized with a sticker, falsely labeling Israel as genocidal. This is a country whose army is by all honest measures the most ethical, which means being the most careful, in a deeply uncareful part of the world, whose citizenry includes roughly two million Arab Israelis (Muslim, Christian, and Druze) serving fully, and often voluntarily, in its military and government.
That carefulness isn't rhetorical. Before strikes, the IDF has routinely dropped Arabic-language leaflets and placed phone calls and text alerts to residents in the strike zone, urging them to evacuate, and when people don't leave, it will fire a small non-lethal munition onto the roof as a final warning before the real strike comes, a tactic known as "knocking on the roof," meant to give civilians one last chance to get clear.
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| The mascot is smiling. It's also holding a slingshot, weaponized cheerfulness aimed at making violence look cute. |
Meanwhile, Hamas does the opposite by design, building military infrastructure inside civilian neighborhoods, encouraging residents to ignore Israeli evacuation warnings, and weaponizing protected sites like schools and mosques for military use. No army fighting to erase a people warns its targets before every strike, sends them a phone call telling them to run. That instinct, to warn an enemy embedded in your enemy's civilians before you fire, is the opposite of genocidal intent, not incidental to it.
Most people shouting genocide at Israel have no clear sense of its history, or of who the term was built to describe, or who they're actually aiming it at now, and the ones who do know are weaponizing it anyway, aiming the most charged word in the human vocabulary at the very people who survived an actual one.
* * *
And I've noticed something else lately that troubles me more than any single slogan: a rising tolerance, within the far left, for the idea that violence toward people they've decided are irredeemable is somehow understandable, even earned. There's a real irony in that, a movement that built its identity on opposing fascism growing at ease with the same logic fascism runs on, sorting people into categories and deciding some of those categories forfeit their humanity.
A gentile acquaintance recently told me that if he had superpowers, the first thing he'd do is kill billionaires. I've watched an assassinated commentator's death get quietly excused in casual conversation, and a murdered healthcare executive's killing treated by people I know as something closer to justice than tragedy.
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| Also found in the neighborhood. Whatever grievance underlies it, "wanted" posters for a man already dead aren't argument. They're permission. |
That "billionaires" framing rarely stays abstract for long. It slides, often without anyone even noticing, into the oldest antisemitic trope there is: shadowy Jewish control of banks and media and governments, the same conspiracy that, in recent antisemitic conversation, finds its way back to Israel. In Rogers Park specifically, this isn't a fringe voice shouting from the margins. It's the dominant one, louder here than any other political current in the neighborhood, which is exactly why it's so hard to escape.
History has taught my family, with total clarity, how these permissions start small and casual before they stop being either.
What unsettles me most, though, isn't even the antisemitism on its own, real and tiring as it is. It's the totalizing shape of the thinking underneath it. This is a place that will mobilize thoughtfully, loudly, for nearly any group it perceives as vulnerable. It rarely extends that same reflex to Jews.
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| Taped to the inside of a storefront window on my block, someone's deliberate choice to display it, not street graffiti. |
It has, instead, built an elaborate, often academically dressed sympathy for the leadership of an organization that would kill most of its own sympathizers, their opinions on gender, their pride flags, their politics, without hesitation, if those sympathizers ever set foot in Gaza.
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| "Explore the legacy of a revolutionary icon" reads the poster's own description of Leila Khaled, a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine operative who hijacked one plane in 1969 and attempted to hijack a second in 1970. The PFLP has been a U.S.-designated terrorist organization since 1997. The event promises a bike ride after the presentation. |
I want peace for the people of Gaza, sincerely. I want them freed from an indoctrination that starts as early as preschool, children rehearsing mock executions of Israeli soldiers in ceremonies that have been documented on video [5], textbooks and children's programming built around martyrdom and jihad instead of a future.
That ideology has real, documented roots in European antisemitism. Hamas's founding charter explicitly cites the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the same forged conspiracy text that fed Nazi propaganda [6], and the movement's intellectual lineage runs back through Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who met with Hitler in Berlin in 1941, broadcast Nazi propaganda in Arabic throughout the war, and sought Germany's help blocking a Jewish presence in the British Mandate for Palestine [7].
I don't want the people of Gaza used as human shields by Hamas or as leverage by Iran, and wanting that has never struck me as being in any tension with loving Israel or defending its right to exist and protect itself.
But a significant nuance like that doesn't have a home in the orthodoxy that governs conversation here. Disagreement isn't treated as disagreement. It's treated as evidence of which side you're really on.
Maybe it's age, or maybe what passes for liberal these days has curdled into something with real fascistic tendencies that frighten me, but either way my politics have drifted rightward from where they used to sit.
President Trump had a significant hand in bringing our hostages home, after 738 days during which Jews around the world held their breath, waiting, and buried the ones who didn't make it back alive. My grievances with him are plentiful, but I won't withhold credit for that, not because it's inconvenient, and not because people I know have already decided what kind of person says it.
I don't experience the world in the binary terms this village seems to require of everyone in it, which is its own irony, given how fiercely the same village rejects binary thinking in nearly every other construct it's willing to interrogate, and increasingly, I don't want to live somewhere that does either.
* * *
For a short while I had something closer to what I was actually yearning for. A close friend, a rabbi, lived nearby, an emissary doing Jewish outreach in the neighborhood alongside his wife, two of the loveliest people I've ever known, and the ease of that friendship kept me connected to my own Jewish self more than I understood at the time.
They eventually moved a few miles west, to West Ridge, colloquially known as West Rogers Park, as their family grew and their life recentered, rightly, around the frum world there. I respect that completely, and I don't feel abandoned by it, though what took its place is a quieter, more persistent kind of aloneness, the last accessible model of a Yiddishe Heim now gone from a neighborhood that no longer has one to offer, however small.
This isn't new, either. Most of Rogers Park's Jews left in the sixties looking for more space, and what they rebuilt elsewhere ended up denser and more sustaining than what they left behind. I didn't lose a community so much as arrive after the tide had already gone out, and I feel that timing every day.
* * *
Rogers Park has real beauty in it: the lake, the walkability, the luxurious intimacy of an almost-village.
It's been a genuine salve against the lunacy within it. But a salve isn't a cure.
What I need isn't abstract, it's my own people close enough to actually commiserate with, in person, by proximity, not a text thread or a shared article. New York spoiled me for this without my realizing it at the time. Jewish presence there was woven into daily life itself, something I took entirely for granted until I left.
Even accounting for how little I participate in person these days, due to my own mishigass, something I have every intention of working through, I still want to know Jews are there, accessible, close enough that some measure of mishpacha exists around me if I ever needed it. I also want to be of service to them when I can, a purpose that grounds me in ways little else does.
None of this comes from anywhere close to hatred for this place. What I feel isn't animosity, it's discomfort, and the difference matters. I'm not someone who happens to be Jewish the way a person happens to have brown eyes, an incidental trait riding on top of an otherwise assimilated life. For me it's load-bearing, the thing everything else rests on, whether I tend to it or not. A neighborhood can be genuinely lovely and still not be what holds me up.
My neighbors don't have a Jewish lens, so there's no reason they'd notice what's missing for me the way I do. Why would they? It isn't visible from where they're standing. What's harder to sit with is knowing I'm probably not the only one out here feeling this, a handful of others going through the same quiet isolation, with no shared place to actually find each other in it. That has its own sadness to it, distinct from anger, the sense that this stopped feeling like home.
I need my people.
* * *
Notes
[1] Tel Aviv University, Antisemitism Worldwide 2025 report, on the highest number of Jews killed in antisemitic attacks worldwide in over three decades: https://english.tau.ac.il/news/antisemitism-report-2026
[2] Wikipedia, "2026 Michigan synagogue attack," on the March 12, 2026 attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield Township, Michigan, which the FBI determined was a Hezbollah-inspired act of terrorism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Michigan_synagogue_attack
[3] Wikipedia, "2026 Golders Green attack," on the April 29, 2026 stabbing of two Jewish men in Golders Green, London, which police classified as terrorism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Golders_Green_attack
[4] FBI and U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Public Service Announcement, "Recent Attacks Highlight Elevated Threat to Israeli and Jewish Communities," June 5, 2025: https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/cyber/alerts/2025/recent-attacks-highlight-elevated-threat-to-israeli-and-jewish-communities
[5] Fox News, reporting on MEMRI's documentation of a mock execution ceremony at Al-Hoda preschool in Gaza: https://www.foxnews.com/world/gaza-preschoolers-seen-performing-mock-execution-of-israeli-soldier
[6] ADL, "Hamas in Its Own Words," documenting the citation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in both the 1988 and 2017 Hamas charters: https://www.adl.org/resources/article/hamas-its-own-words
[7] U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, on the November 1941 meeting between Haj Amin al-Husseini and Hitler in Berlin: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/film/hajj-amin-al-husayni-meets-hitler
