When I wear the necklace with the star side facing out, standing in the grocery store just one town over, it feels like people are looking for my horns, a typical experience my mother described from her youth. One side is etched with a Jewish star and the Hebrew acronym stating God’s protection, the promise to keep the wearer out of harm’s way.

These days, I often wear a small mezuzah around my neck, found in my father’s nightstand after he died. With global antisemitism on the rise, I’m experimenting with what my Judaism could look like at the forefront, where it can be seen by all, just like my flamingo menorah. It was a life built on the values of tikkun olam, the deep understanding that I am connected to a greater whole.

Judaism was Mom’s brisket on Rosh Hashanah, YouTube videos from the Maccabeats, family-led Tashlich. Temple life ended with my bat mitzvah I was an adult before I rediscovered the joy of Shabbat services. Sure, once a year we’d be JEWISH for eight miraculous nights, but we were more culturally than religiously Jewish. I wasn’t afraid, exactly, to be visible, but my Judaism lived in the background. Men would drive by slowly and circle the block again and again, their pickup trucks flying Confederate flags, their mouths shouting obscenities at the Jews who dared to be seen. It wasn’t until our last Hanukkah together that Dad told me the truth: Our house was egged and our lights were stolen every single year. I remember the television helicopters flying low to capture our house in all its glory for the nightly news.Īs a child, my parents protected me from the threat just outside our door. In case there was any doubt that ours was a Jewish home, Dad added a “Happy Hanukkah” sign in dancing lights and a Star of David so big it could be seen from the air. White lights decked out the side of the house-from the roof to the lawn- in the shape of a dreidel turned to gimel, so everyone could win. While I sang “Away in a Manager” at my elementary school winter assembly, and Mom volunteered in my classroom to explain the holiday with latkes and Hanukkah gelt, Dad built a fully electric, nine-foot menorah out of copper, with orange bulbs for the flames. When we moved to a slightly more Jewish area, the menorah grew in size and scope. I begged my father for some kind of holiday decoration, and he finally acquiesced, building a six-foot menorah from wood and electrical tape and whatever parts and pieces he had lying around. She joked about burning the drapes, but I suspect her real fear was burning crosses. Mom wouldn’t even put the menorah in the window.

Throughout December, our block was lit up like Luna Park, but our house was always dark. Growing up, I lived in what seemed like the only non-Jewish pocket of South Florida. My artist-husband built the menorah as a gift that honors both my father and my unconventional Jewish upbringing. Every Hanukkah since we arrived, the centerpiece perches on our front yard, greeting the nights with a joyful exuberance that matches the holiday: an eight-foot-wide, five-foot-tall flamingo menorah. It speaks volumes that the same neighbor has never commented on our holiday decorations. A city in which a neighbor said, “Oh, I’m going to like you,” when he saw us hanging our American flag before we even unpacked our moving boxes. We moved from a building on the Lower East Side, complete with a Shabbos elevator, to a city in the news, just days before we arrived, for its antisemitic sidewalk graffiti. The year I turned 40, we left our New York City life behind us, trading it in for the picturesque Midwestern suburb where my husband grew up.

Light my menorah mama