My Neighbors, the White Nationalists.

• Author: Cohen, Jamie Beth
• Position: FIRST-PERSON SINGULAR

The text from my friend, a fellow local social justice activist, came through on a Saturday afternoon. I was in the basement of my townhouse in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. It was the end of a long week, one that marked three years since I had returned home to Pittsburgh to attend my relatives' funeral. They were killed at the Pittsburgh Tree of Life mass shooting in 2018. Eleven worshippers had been shot and killed by a man shouting antisemitic slurs.

My friends text included a link to an article in our local newspaper. The headline read: "A group of notorious white nationalists met secretly in historic Lancaster County barn last year. Why here?"

Apparently, in August 2020, a new political entity called the National Justice Party was launched less than eight miles from my house, less than five minutes from my children's school, and right down the street from the convenience store where my former student's immigrant parents serve the best egg rolls in town.

The article reported that the National Justice Party's leader, Mike Peinovich, in his speech in the barn, made clear the purpose of the new party. "You cannot have a nation of justice, a nation of liberty, without a white majority forever," he said. According to Peinovich, the new party's enemy "is capitalism, Zionism, and the international Jewish oligarchy. These are the people that are oppressing us."

The fact is, the meeting in the barn was part of a problem on a national scale. But the bigger problem for me and my family--as the headline suggests--is that Lancaster County is such a desirable, even obvious, place for a rally like this. I've known for years that a conservative, white, Christian hegemony is pervasive in my community, and that Christian hegemony leads to antisemitism.

I have been sounding alarm bells in Lancaster with my writing and activism for years. Sometimes I get through to people, like when I represented local Jews at an NAACP rally at the Lancaster County Courthouse in 2017. It was organized in response to a Ku Klux Klan rally in our county and, though I was wary, I thought it was important to self-identify as a white Jew and stand with the Black and brown members of our community who grew up here and were raised in the shadow of this hate.

When we moved to Lancaster more than a decade ago, the mover who was tasked with putting together my daughter's crib had a swastika the size of my face tattooed on his upper arm. Six months later, my nineteen-month-old...