Not Now, Not Ever
By Sheryl Berk
As a third grader at PS 24 in Riverdale, New York, I wrote poetry and prose in a blue spiral notebook covered with puffy stickers. The year was 1979, and one brisk fall day I came back from recess and noticed my desktop was slightly ajar. I opened it and saw that my treasured notebook wasn’t in its regular spot. It was front and center with the cover down, not tucked carefully in the back left corner. I turned it over. All the stickers were there; nothing seemed amiss.
“Alright, class,” Ms. Kipnis clapped her hands to get our attention. “Let’s open up our notebooks and do some free writing for the next period.”
I took out my journal and searched for a free page. I flipped a few more pages until I came to one that I didn’t recognize: it was covered with someone else’s handwriting. Big, red block letters, all capitals, drawn with a Sharpie, bled through several pages deep. I read them over and over, reciting the letters one by one in my mind, then put them together: DIRTY JEW.
“Sheryl? Is there a problem?” my teacher asked, noticing I wasn’t scribbling passionately as usual.
“No.” I replied. I couldn’t explain it, but I felt ashamed, as if I had done something to cause this. I closed my notebook and asked the boy seated next to me for a sheet of paper. Then I stared at it. At the end of the 20-minute period, I handed my teacher a blank page.
“Writer’s block?” she asked me. “Not feeling inspired today? That’s not like you.”
I shrugged. I was distracted the rest of the day, and every so often, I would open my desk and peek inside, making sure my notebook was still mine, still there. I did nothing, said nothing. I went straight from the school bus to my room. My mom was an elementary school teacher herself and working late that afternoon, so my grandma Miriam was babysitting.
“Grammy,” I said, finally coming out to join her in the living room with my younger sister, Debbie. They were watching Gilligan’s Island and simultaneously crayoning in coloring books. “Can I ask you something?”
I opened my notebook and flipped to the page. My grandmother stopped what she was doing. “Who wrote this?” Her voice sounded sad and fragile as she traced the letters with her fingertips.
“I don’t know. What does it mean? I’m not dirty! I take a bath every night.”
She shook her head. “Of course you’re not! Whoever wrote this is not a nice person.”
I understood the “Jew” part—I went to Hebrew school every Sunday in preparation for my bat mitzvah when I turned 13. But the two words didn’t make any sense together. “Do you think I should tell Mommy?” I asked.
“I think you should. And I think she should tell your teacher. This is…wrong.”
When my mother came home and saw the page, her reaction was very different from my grandma’s. She was furious.
“I am calling Ms. Kipnis right this minute,” she said, not even bothering to take off her coat. Her face was bright red. “This is not acceptable. Not now. Not ever.”
She closed the door to her bedroom, and I could hear her talking loudly but I couldn’t make out what she was saying. When my dad came home, he wanted to know why dinner wasn’t ready, and my mom took him aside and whispered something.
“What?” he shouted. “Who? Who did it?”
“Did I do something wrong?” I asked over dinner.
“No, of course you didn’t,” she replied. “But this can’t be ignored, and we have to get to the bottom of it.”
I didn’t know what that meant, but I soon found out. The next day, Ms. Kipnis stood at the front of the room, her face stern.
“Someone took Sheryl’s notebook yesterday and wrote in it. Did anyone see someone go inside her desk?”
There were shrugs and head shaking. Then the boy who sat next to me slowly raised his hand.
“Um, I think I saw Patty taking something out,” he said.
Patty was a tall, blond, freckle-faced girl who was new to our school that year. I didn’t know much about her, only that she would push when we walked down the stairs and cut the line at lunch. When she came back from speaking to my teacher in the hall, her eyes were red and swollen. She came straight up to my desk and stopped.
“Ms. Kipnis says I have to say sorry,” she mumbled. Then she went back to her desk, crossed her arms across her chest, and sank low in her seat.
I forgot about the incident until some time later, when, in Sunday School, Rabbi Amsel taught us about something called the Holocaust and a girl named Anne Frank. I learned that she hid in an attic and wrote down her thoughts and feelings in a notebook not unlike mine. The Nazis, he explained, hated Jews, and wanted to kill as many of them as possible, so Anne and her family had to hide. It was our job, he said, to never forget.
At the end of class, I went up to Rabbi Amsel and told him what had happened to me. “Do you think Patty is a Nazi?” I asked him. He was calm and thoughtful. “No, but I think she’s not a very kind or respectful person,” he explained. “I think she doesn’t understand what antisemitism is.”
Neither did I. I had never heard the word before. As much as Rabbi Amsel tried to elaborate, antisemitism felt distant and hard to relate to.
It was my grandma who finally explained what it meant to our family. She showed me an old black and white photo of her mother Bella as a young woman, flanked by several brothers and sisters. “You see these girls and this boy?” she said, pointing to each one. “They were killed in the Holocaust along with their parents.” My grandma went on to explain that if her mother had not made it out of Poland to the United States with her husband, she would never have been born.
“I would have no Grammy,” I repeated back to her.
“That’s right, I wouldn’t be here. Nor would your mom or you. The Nazis did not want any Jews to survive, but Bella and her husband Louis escaped."
Decades later, I never thought I'd be repeating the same Holocaust stories to my 20-year-old daughter as we witness what is happening here and now. My own reaction to the surge in antisemitism in the U.S since the attack by Hamas on October 7 is a mix of my grandmother’s and mother’s: I am deeply saddened as well as livid. And I’m not alone. Several of my mom friends are terrified. They can’t sleep at night; they are on #EndJewishHate social media groups, trying to make sense of it all. Recent incidents like the ones at at Cooper Union, where Jewish students barricaded themselves in a library as protesters banged on the door, and Cornell University, where violent antisemitic threats were posted online, have parents with college-aged kids on edge. It comes as no surprise that 73% of Jewish college students say they have experienced or witnessed antisemitic incidents on their campuses since the start of the 2023-24 school year, and fewer Jewish students feel safe on campuses today than they did prior to Oct. 7.
My own reaction to the surge in antisemitism in the U.S since the attack by Hamas on October 7 is a mix of my grandmother’s and mother’s: I am deeply saddened as well as livid.
As a result, many of my friends are consumed with both fear and outrage. They don’t feel safe walking down the street, and they are afraid to go to a Kosher deli for dinner or attend Shabbat services. They have stopped wearing Star of David and Chai necklaces, and are not putting menorahs in their windows this Chanukah. They are calling non-Jewish friends to ask, if necessary, would they hide them?
It’s 2023, I tell myself. Blatant, unchecked antisemitism can’t happen here, can it? The news says otherwise. I am forced to confront the feelings of shame and humiliation I dealt with over 40 years ago when I was only nine years old, when Patty violated my precious notebook with words that are forever seared into my memory and my soul.
“What do we do?” I ask a rabbi who is also a close friend. She helped me bury my mother eight months ago this week.
“You pray. You educate people. You donate. You make your voice heard.”
So as I light the Chanukah candles this year, I pray for light in this darkness. I pray for peace and empathy and an end to hate. I also remember my mother’s voice all those years ago, strong and determined to right an injustice: “This is not acceptable. Not now, not ever.”
Sheryl Berk is a New York Times Bestselling Author and celebrity ghostwriter, as well as the former founding editor in chief of Life & Style Weekly.