I did not attend the dueling “Ceasefire Now” and “Stand Up to Antisemitism” rallies last Friday afternoon. I was home editing a news story about a monument to a Ukrainian unit that fought with the Nazis during World War II being removed from a Canadian cemetery. Later, I took my teenaged daughter to Shabbat services and a potluck dinner. All less than a mile from this ugliness.
But since I saw the above video posted on Facebook Monday morning, I have not been able to get it out of my head — or, actually, my gut. Because it really makes me feel a little sick.
I know a lot of my neighbors, the folks that were on an adjacent corner with Israeli flags and signs like “Denying Jewish history and our connection to Israel is an act of hate,” heard the “No Zionists here” chant as equivalent to “No Jews.” They rightfully point out that it’s impossible to imagine a similar scenario in Montclair targeting any other religious or ethnic group.
I tried giving the most generous benefit of the doubt to the chanters, and thus imagined what other political philosophy might be subjected to a similar dictum. We don’t want no socialists here? No proponents of D.C. statehood? No Black Power advocates, no supporters — or opponents — of Falun Gong or Uyghur rights or Critical Race Theory or Ukrainian sovereignty or Objectivism or veganism?
The only thing I could come up with was “white supremacists.” Nazis.
Which is exactly what Lani Sommer-Padilla, the Montclair mom who posted the video to Facebook, thought about when she heard the chant, only more personally — and in reverse.
She was thinking about her Grandma Irma, who was born in Berlin in 1918. When Hitler came to power, Sommer-Padilla told me, Irma’s non-Jewish friends “turned on her and her best friend spat in her face.”
“It was just like a knife through the heart,” she told me of seeing the “no Zionists” video. “I knew people who were there, in that crowd. I just feel it so viscerally, partly because of my family’s history. Seeing people standing on a corner in my town, where I live and where I raise my children, calling for our expulsion, has shaken me to my core.”
Sommer-Padilla, 44, is a social worker who grew up in New Jersey and said she and her husband, who is Puerto Rican and not Jewish, moved to Montclair in 2018 in large part because its reputation for inclusivity made it seem like a place where “we can have JewRican kids and it can be OK.” Their son is 10 and their daughter turned 13 today; it was “heartbreaking,” Sommer-Padilla said, to have “to explain to her it might not be safe” for her to hang out with her friends on Church Street after school last Friday because of the protest.
Sommer-Padilla helped organize local Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, Stop Asian Hate rallies in 2021, and petitions against draconian cuts to our schools last spring. When former President Donald Trump proposed the ban on Muslim immigrants, she “ran in the middle of the night to Newark Airport to be a watchdog.” Her 2017 Honda Pilot has a big bumper sticker on it that says RESIST.
She was with the anti-antisemitism group last Friday, holding a “Black and Jewish Lives Matter” sign she made featuring a photo of Tiffany Haddish. She was one of several people who told a fellow protester to put down a sign that said the Israeli flag was the only one that should be seen “from the river to the sea.”
She has been to Israel twice, in 1986 and 1994, to visit relatives of her father, who was born in 1945 in Hungary to Holocaust survivors and also lives in Montclair. She said she’s “never been involved in anything related to Israel until now” but always identified as a Zionist, just like Grandma Irma — her mom’s mom — whose Florida apartment was filled with plaques honoring her donations to Israeli causes until she died at age 102.
“I identify as a Zionist in its root definition, not the way it’s been corrupted by extremist fundamentalists,” Sommer-Padilla told me. “At its core, what Zionism means is that Jews have a right to self determination. It means that we have a right to exist just like anybody else with dignity, etc., etc. And a right to a homeland, as well. Just like every other ethnic and religious group in the world.” | 