After an antisemitic attack, my AEPi brothers and I are choosing community, leadership, and Jewish pride.
By Josh Greenwood, (California-San Diego, 2029)
It was late on a Saturday night when my roommate Michael and I returned to the house where several of us had been living. Our lease had ended that day, but we realized we had left something behind and thought we could quickly stop in to get it.
As soon as we arrived, something felt wrong.
The electricity was out. The door was cracked open. We stood outside for a moment, listening and wondering whether someone might still be inside. Eventually, we slowly entered and began to see spray paint on the walls. At first, it looked like random vandalism. Then we saw the slurs. We saw “KKK.” When we reached the garage, we found swastikas covering the wall.
In that moment, the antisemitism I had seen in the news was no longer distant. It was no longer something happening somewhere else, to someone else. It was directly in front of me, painted on the walls of a place where my Jewish fraternity brothers and I had lived.
Michael and I barely spoke during the drive home. We were both in shock, trying to understand what we had just seen and decide what we were supposed to do next. It was after midnight when I called the police non-emergency line and filed a report.
That was when the silence began to give way to something else: support.
I texted my big brother, Aidan Zusin (now an AEPi Educational Leadership Consultant), and Noah Levinson, our Associate Regional Director. Both called me immediately to make sure we were all safe. Over the next two days, I heard from brothers from across North America, rabbis, Hillel professionals, university representatives, members of other Jewish organizations, police officers, and detectives. My parents were thousands of miles away in New Jersey, but I knew I was not facing this alone.
Those calls mattered more than I can explain.
After seeing something so hateful, it is easy to feel isolated. It is easy to wonder who might have done it, whether they had been watching us and how they knew Jewish students had lived there. We lived in a safe, residential neighborhood. I had never experienced anything close to this on campus. Like many people, I knew antisemitism was rising, but part of me still believed, “That isn’t going to happen to me.”
Then it did.
The most frightening part was realizing that this did not feel random. Whoever vandalized the house appeared to know that we were Jewish and that we had just moved out. Antisemitism feels different when you read about it on a screen than when you stand in a dark room and see its symbols on the walls around you.
At first, I could see only the bad that would come from the incident: the police reports, the questions, the conversations with the landlord and the emotional toll on our brothers. But as people continued to reach out to provide support, I began to see that we had a choice.
We could let this become one more antisemitic incident that people discussed briefly and then forgot. Or, we could decide that this moment would mean something.
My brothers and I do not want what happened to be dismissed as just another act of hate. When incidents like this happen without a meaningful response, they become easier to repeat. We want to build something from this. We want to bring our community closer together. We want to show that AEPi will not simply accept intimidation and retreat.
We are going to be strong in this moment. We are going to advocate for the Jewish community.
Strength does not mean pretending we were not scared or hurt. Resilience does not mean forgetting what happened. To me, resilience means deciding that the people who painted those symbols do not get to determine what we do next. Our response will not be to hide our Jewish identity. It will be to live it more openly.
Even with many brothers away during the summer, we began discussing ways to serve the surrounding community and volunteer with Jewish organizations. When everyone returns to campus in a few weeks, we hope to host a large Shabbat dinner at our beautiful new house and invite brothers, alumni and members of the community.
I want that Shabbat to be more than an event. I want it to be a statement.
Although this happened to us, we are not going anywhere. We will continue gathering. We will continue celebrating. We will continue being proud of who we are.
This experience has also changed the way I – and, I think, many of my brothers — think about leadership.
I did not hold an executive board position when this happened. I was simply the person who found the vandalism, filed the police report, and began answering calls. Suddenly, people had my number. Rabbis and community leaders were inviting me into conversations. A rabbi invited several of us to his home for Shabbat, and I found myself encouraging other brothers to come with me and become involved.
Leadership does not always begin with a title. Sometimes it begins in a moment of distress, when something has to be done and someone decides to step forward.
I also learned that a good leader does not stand alone. A good leader builds other leaders around him. That is what we are all trying to do now, asking brothers to come to an event, join with some of us at a rabbi’s home, volunteer in the community, or participate in planning our response. This cannot be one person’s story. It has to become an opportunity for all of us in the Chi Sigma chapter of AEPi to grow.
The people who vandalized our house tried to leave behind fear. Instead, they reminded me how much love exists within our community.
They left swastikas on a wall. My brothers around the world called to make sure we were safe.
They tried to make us feel alone. Alumni, Rabbis, Jewish organizations, and university leaders reached out to stand with us.
They tried to make us ashamed of being Jewish. We are planning to fill our new house with brothers, friends, food, prayer, laughter and Jewish pride.
I cannot understand the kind of hatred that would lead someone to do what they did. In a way, I feel sadness for people who carry that much anger. In AEPi, we are building something completely different. We are building brotherhood and community.
We cannot always control what happens to us. We can control how we respond and what we build from it.
We are choosing to build connection. We are choosing community service. We are choosing leadership. We are choosing to celebrate Shabbat and our Jewish identity more proudly, not less.
Hate may leave a mark on a wall, but it does not get to define us.
We are still here. We are together. And we are not going anywhere.
(Editor’s Note1: To support the brothers of AEPi at California-San Diego as they put together programs to fight antisemitism in their community and build bridges with others, please click here to make a tax-deductible donation to their chapter fund at the Alpha Epsilon Pi Foundation).
(Editor’s Note 2: Do you have something to say or a story to tell? Submit your own Voices piece for consideration to [email protected] and we’d be happy to work with you and publish your story!)