Day School Bullies
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While growing up in the Detroit suburbs during the 1980s, I often heard my father warn me to be careful around gentiles. They might seem pleasant at first, but scratch a bit under the surface, and their anti-Semitism would surely emerge.
So when my older brother was punched in the face by a non-Jewish classmate at our local school, it seemed to confirm my father’s suspicions. My parents decided to move to a more predominantly Jewish area and to enroll me, at the age of 8, in a Jewish day school. They hoped that in a close-knit Jewish community I’d be safe from outsiders and that I would cement my attachment to Judaism.