We must insist on drawing connections across time and place — from the Holocaust to Gaza, or ICE detention to Israeli prisons — to disrupt the normalization of authoritarianism at every turn.
“These times make me think of 1933,” my neighbor commented as our sons zoomed down a hill on their bikes. This was a commonsentimentin the early months of President Donald Trump’s second term — how to stop a leader with fascist tendencies who had gained power through a democratic process.
But it wasn’t our usual neighborhood conversation. Rümeysa Öztürk, a graduate student at Tufts University, where I teach, had recently been kidnapped by masked U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents for writing an op-ed in our student newspaper in support of Palestinian rights and student governance. The alarming video of the incident had left us all shaken.
My neighbor explained that his great-grandparents had come to the United States from Europe in the decades before the Holocaust. But other branches of his Jewish family had stayed and were entirely wiped out. This time, he expected, my publicly Palestinian family was more at risk than his. I think I nodded blandly. For many months, my mind had been with Palestinians in Gaza, where a genocide was underway. His concern for my family seemed to me both alarming and abstract.
