My Father Hid Our True Identity. He Felt the U.S. Was too Dangerous

I was 17 years old in May 1985 when I walked into our living room and found my father on his knees, sobbing as he watched President Ronald Reagan and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl in some formal ceremony at a seemingly random cemetery in Germany.

I was taken aback and found my father’s emotions jarring and unsettling. When I asked if he was okay, he brushed it off as sadness associated with his disgust with Reagan—he was a Kennedy Democrat—but that explanation didn’t add up. I walked away troubled but gave him his space.

Seven years later, my father almost died of a heart attack and my mother decided to share one of our family’s darkest secrets.

My Mom said that she needed to tell me something and declared: “Your father is Jewish”.

The words hung off me like an emotional anvil. She told me that my father and his brother had been raised in Brooklyn in the 1930s, where they had been subjected to relentless bullying and antisemitic harassment and discrimination.

Harkening back, my father cloaked these fights to me in misrepresented, heroic tales of youth—alleged fisticuffs with Brooklyn Dodgers fans since he loved the New York Yankees while living in Brooklyn.

She said that my father and uncle decided to hide their ethnicity, and their faith, and raise their families under the umbrella of Christianity so that their children would never have to endure such discrimination and humiliation. My mother was already Lutheran, we were a church-going family, at least at Christmas and Easter.

My initial reaction was one of fury. This was an important part of who he was, yet he hid it in shame. It was an important part of who I was, but I had no idea. Over the years, the anger subsided as my children were born and my father became a loving grandfather.

But in place of my anger lingered sadness. I was unable to share in my father’s grief, or help with his healing. So many moments of deep connection were missed.

To be honest, I never understood my father’s grief and despair until October 7.

I woke to the news of the horror visited on innocent people in Israel by Hamas, and my mind recoiled to that day in May 1985. Minutes on my phone confirmed what I already suspected. What happened then was related to what was happening now.

My father was crying because a U.S. president had knowingly visited a famous German cemetery where dozens of SS agents were buried. The grief that made no sense to me in 1985 sadly made so much sense 38 years later.

Growing up in Montgomery County Maryland, I had no notion of antisemitism. That was in the past, I thought. And while I knew that there existed unabashed evil in the world, I never believed the hate of the Holocaust could be revived in our modern society, and certainly not in our American Democracy.

Even the horrid march on Charlottesville in August of 2017 seemed somewhat isolated. And yet, today, I fear that history repeats itself. A ruling form of government in Gaza, in a similar vein to the Nazis of the 1930s and 40s, publicly and proudly proclaimed its mission to eliminate Israel and as many Jews as possible.

And, as in the 1930s, antisemitism rises within our borders as the same evil threads of hatred coarse throughout our campuses and on our city streets. In the days and weeks after the despicable Hamas massacre, we have witnessed a tsunami of antisemitism in the most revered educational institutions in America.

Nazi slurs which in the past seemed to be only in history books are thrust all over social media. We have watched in stunned silence videos of protesters with signs bearing swastikas.

A federally elected member of Congress has endorsed the bigoted and bone-chilling creed: “From the River to the Sea.”

When duly elected members of Congress speak words that call for the elimination of Israel; when tenured scholars celebrate the butchering of youth at a music festival, and the kidnapping of over 240 innocents, 32 of whom are children (as young as 9 months old); when the presidents of some of our most respected universities turn a blind eye to antisemitism and hide behind “free speech rights”—something has gone gravely wrong in America.

My father served our country in the U.S. Army and in the Clinton Administration. His America rose up to defeat these sentiments no matter the sacrifice.

I wonder now, with three of my own children and a stepson, what it must have been like for him to decide to hide his own truth, his own past, his own ethnicity, and his own religion.

How he must have suffered denouncing a huge part of his identity, restlessly awaiting the day he would be found out—perhaps anticipating his own remorse and humiliation, or possibly welcoming the relief and freedom it would bring.

I realize now he did this to protect his family from the hate he had personally felt, and to protect himself. He had seen a U.S. president visit the graves of Nazi war criminals.

Today, as hatred toward Jews is being covered almost every evening on cable news, I sadly and finally understand the sacrifice he made to protect me.

A few years ago, I told my Maryland Senator Ben Cardin, who chairs the Foreign Relations Committee, the story of my father. He nodded in complete understanding and told me that a lot of folks in my father’s generation hid their backgrounds for similar reasons. That gave me calm and peace.

But today, I am neither calm nor peaceful.

How long have these hateful sentiments gone unchecked? When did this undercurrent of bigotry begin in our country? Was it always there in the shadows, given our embrace of religious freedom? Had I been either too removed from it, or too caught up in my east coast world to notice what was in all likelihood out there, just not in my face?

Perhaps I’d missed antisemitism, woven into subtleties that my Jewish friends would have picked up on. I suddenly felt disconnected, yet also wide awake.

There must be countless other parents who made similar sacrifices to protect their children. How many of their children know what I know?

I hope my story causes others to tell theirs too, and for some, I hope it triggers questions that they may have harbored but failed to ask until now. Regardless, we must do better as a society.

If we fail, we risk forcing another generation of young parents to consider the same difficult decision my father made. I hope it does not come to that again.

Alfred Mottur is an executive committee member and attorney at Brownstein Hyatt.

All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

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