Speaking from my own small experiences with antisemitism, it’s imperative for American Jewish people to say #BlackLivesMatter and do something about it.

I’m not a Black person so I cannot speak to the Black experience in the United States. However, I can speak a little about my own experience as a Jewish-American.

I’m not religious, so I don’t have a lot of experience about what goes on in the religious communities. However, being not religious but Jewish by ancestry, and having an English last name, I can relate what I’ve seen and experienced as an outsider on the inside.

When I was young in the ‘60s and ’70s, I didn’t think about race or religion much. I wasn’t confronted with much, our neighborhood had few Black people, a lot of not at all religious Jewish people and White Christians who seemed to not care much about race or religion. There was one incident when a grade school friend repeated that her parents said they were antisemitic. We were about 7-years old. Neither one of us understood what the comment meant, but boy my grandmother understood it when I repeated it to her. She strongly advised me to drop the friend. I didn’t right away. She never exhibited any hate or malice but she soon moved because her parents wanted a “different neighborhood.” We did not keep in touch.

I first learned about the Holocaust, not in school, but at camp. I went to Jewish camp (not particularly religious) and they talked about it with us. Then, they reenacted a…