have been studying fascism since I was 10¶

I have been studying fascism since I was 10. I was taught "never forget" and "it could happen here." I feel like I am one of the only ones of my peers to take that seriously. Not as an academic "Wow, no one saw the Nazis coming!" exercise, but a real call to arms. I studied them, learned to recognize their mentality, taught myself not to rely on "democratic norms" to stop them: they didn't last time.

I learned that the Nazis saw themselves as protectors of "civilized society," which they defined to include ethnic purity. It didn't take long to recognize that they have always been here in America. That there was nothing special about their hatred for Jews, and that racism against black, immigrant, and indigenous communities was one and the same as ancestral antisemitism. I saw the racism within my own community. Saw just how many spoke in almost the exact same way as the people I recognized as our biggest threat. In Baltimore, it was mostly directed at "shvartzes," who were seen as almost an unavoidable nuisance in this majority-black city. I saw it in the treatment of Palestinians, whose existence in the "Jewish state" was treated as an existential threat. Side-by-side with my crash course in the hatred of Nazism, I was taught that Palestinians were destructive, were abusing the land, wanted to destroy our people. It took me a long time to challenge the "obvious" fact that Israel, as our ancestral homeland, ought to be an ethnostate. It took me literally becoming an atheist to shrug off the "god-given truth" that Palestine was nothing more than a brief interstitial between Jewish states. I always wanted peace--I imagine most Jews do--but for my first 5 or so years as an antifascist, I couldn't see past the propaganda.

"Ours by birthright" is what the Nazis said.

"Threat to our race" is what the Nazis said.

"Death is the price of peace" is what the Nazis said. The project is one of victimization: because we have been persecuted as a people for so long, we need an ethnic homeland.

It took me years to realize that the actual solution was to stomp out ethnonationalism WHEREVER it shows up. Even among my own people.