PHILADELPHIA — My mother, Fran, is not a great one for selfies. But a few weeks ago, I was scrolling through my Facebook feed and saw a new shot of my mom, grim of face and wet of hair, wrapped in a silvery warming blanket, in front of a row full of gym lockers. “Had to take refuge outside from pool during call-in threat that caused J.C.C. evacuation,” she’d written. “Pool and nursery school evacuated.”
I went to my Facebook page to share Fran’s post and asked if anyone had more information.
People did, but not just from Connecticut, where my mom was swimming at the Jewish community center in West Hartford.
“Second time in two weeks down here at the J.C.C. in Delaware. My kids go to the preschool and have been evacuated both times,” one friend wrote. Another said: “I just got an alert that the J.C.C. in Marin, Calif., was evacuated due to a threat. The hate seems to be spreading like wildfire.” And another: “At 11:45 they evacuated our J.C.C. in West Bloomfield, Mich. I live directly across the street, and all seems quiet there.”
On the day my mom was forced to get out of the pool, Jan. 18, 26 J.C.C.s in 17 states were the targets of bomb threats. Even if my mom hadn’t posted her wet-faced selfie, it would have felt personal.
I’ve probably spent an entire year of my life in the J.C.C. in West Hartford. When I was 3 years old, I went to preschool there. When I was 15, I spent six weeks in Israel on a trip run by the J. When my first book was published, one of the first places to invite me to speak was my Jewish community center. I’ve now spoken in J.C.C.s from San Diego and San Francisco to St. Louis to Atlanta. My nanna spent the last months of her life in the Meer Apartments, on the campus of the J.C.C. in West Bloomfield. Every time I visit my mom, we drive to West Hartford to work out and swim.
If synagogue is where Jews feel the most Jewish — praying in a foreign language, celebrating holidays that aren’t always on the office calendar — the J.C.C. is where many of the nation’s estimated 5.3 million Jews feel the most Jewish American. It’s the place they go to do all kinds of nonreligious stuff.
It’s where parents drop kids off at preschool, or pick them up from summer camp. It’s where moms take yoga or Pilates, or dads relive their glory days on the basketball courts, or retirees attend lectures or cooking classes or have high-school students tell them how to work iPads.
The J is, in short, a place to go about the business of a regular, unremarkably American life. That’s why it was terrifying to watch week after week of bomb threats — a total of 68 threats at 53 different J.C.C.s in the United States and Canada. While not any of the threats were deemed credible, there was good reason to take them seriously, because J.C.C.s have been the targets of real violence. In 1999, a white supremacist wounded three children, a teenager and one adult at the North Valley Jewish Community Center in Los Angeles. In 2014, two people were shot to death, by a 73-year-old former leader of a Ku Klux Klan chapter, outside the J.C.C. of Greater Kansas City.
Newspapers published articles on the recent incidents. Jewish leaders requested that the president condemn the threats. Reporters asked about his silence. Still, it wasn’t until Tuesday that President Trump spoke directly about the bomb scares.
