Benjamin Eppel, Period 6, 9/30/22

 What are your thoughts and feelings about issues of inequity, oppression, and/or power?

How do you reflect critically on your own beliefs, assumptions, values, and experiences, and how these can influence your perception of self and others?

My whole family is Jewish. Lots of my friends are Jewish as well as I live in a heavily Jewish populated area. This means that for most of my life, I have usually been surrounded by Jewish people and have never really experienced first hand any actual oppression, and neither really has anybody that lives around me. 

This however, is not a representation for lots of the world especially nowadays. Jewish people have been oppressed for centuries, from being enslaved in Egypt to the Holocaust. (Those are just some major points in time.) But over the last few years, the rise in antisemetic crime has risen very significantly hitting an all time record high in 2021 with 2717 counts of crimes related to anti semitism. This was a 34% increase from the year before! This is something that I sadly am not surprised with as I started to get harassed online by multiple people, some of which I even knew for my beliefs and was receiving death threats from strangers. This has happened to many people and there seems to have been nothing done to prevent it, and in some places, has even been encouraged. 

There needs to be a change in the way things run. There have been so many shootings of synagogues and murders of Jews simply because people are racist. These things have got to stop and have really made me and I am sure others are very scared sometimes to do something as simple as wear my Star of David as I am scared that I could be attacked. But to put it simply, people have got to start to acknowledge the problem and deal with it because people will not stop.