I Was Raped Because I Am Jewish

In June, three teenage boys in France dragged a 12-year-old girl into a shed in a park not far from her home. They made death threats and antisemitic comments, called her a “dirty Jew,” beat her, and gang-raped her.

While news of the hate crime circled the globe, I recognized myself in her story. One of the French girl’s attackers, her former boyfriend, confessed to have been seeking revenge because she allegedly did not tell him she was Jewish. While she was raped for hiding her Jewish identity, I was raped for sharing it. Both of us were raped for being Jews.

After Thanksgiving 2023, I met a man on a dating app. He was passing through Texas, where I live, and we decided to meet at a dive bar near my house. I recognized him from his pictures and gave him a loose hug hello. After I bought a beer, I sat down with him. All we really had in common was that we both once lived in London, but we made small talk about travel and work. He was soft-spoken and smiled when I made jokes, and had friendly questions about the U.S. He didn’t touch me sexually—my knee, my palm—or suggest hooking up, so after a while, I assumed he was only interested in meeting local people as much, if not more than, anything romantic or sexual.

When meeting somebody new, whether a date or a potential friend, I let them know I’m Jewish early. There’s too much antisemitism in the world right now to waste time on people only to find out later they might be a threat. When I mentioned I was Jewish to my date, he looked away, then squinted at me and replied, “So, it would be offensive if I played a Kanye song around you, right?” He was referring to Kanye West’s history of antisemitic statements.

It seemed like a strange response, but I thought he was processing out loud that Jewish people might be offended by different things than him. I said, “Yeah, don’t do that, I guess.” He made a joke about something else, changing the topic, and any hesitation I felt passed—like most people who learn I’m Jewish, he didn’t seem to care. When he invited me to join him at his nearby Airbnb for a glass of wine, I assumed he wanted to continue our conversation, and agreed.

At his Airbnb, he was much quieter. He gestured for me to sit on the couch and took a bottle of wine out of the refrigerator. He picked up the TV remote. “Let’s listen to some music,” he said. He put on a Christmas song, too loudly to talk over, and a music video played across the TV.

He turned the volume up. “That’s too loud—” I began to say, my eyes on the flashes of white and red light cast against the wall.

I didn’t finish my sentence before he pinned me down. Not looking directly at me, he gripped my neck and tried to strangle me. “You don’t like that?” he asked, laughing—and let go of my neck. He pulled my clothes off and raped me by force. I begged him to stop, but he ignored me, even when I tried to fight him off. Later, I would recognize I felt dehumanized, like he saw me as an animal, but in the moment I only felt panic. The Christmas music played on loop.

An hour later he released me back into the night. I barely made it back to my car before curling up in pain, hands gripping the steering wheel so tightly I thought my skin would tear.

I told few people about the rape, and for a long time, I didn’t tell anybody about the rapist’s antisemitism. I was certain nobody, especially my non-Jewish community, would understand.

Many survivors choose not to report sexual assault because we believe we are to blame, or fear retaliation—or want to try to forget about what happened. I did not report the rape because of the negative effect I knew that process would have on my mental health, a toll which did not feel worth paying at the time, and still does not today.

Sexual violence against Jewish people has been used as a tool of oppression, silencing, and ethnocide for millennia. There is a very quiet history of antisemitic sexual violence in my family, and a long history of it in all the communities we migrated to America from. The silent echo has traveled down my ancestral line, underreported, underrecorded, until it reached me. In the weeks after the rape I searched for stories of Jewish people raped in the diaspora, and couldn’t find anything recent. I felt isolated, unable to tap into a collective narrative to add context to what had happened to me.

A couple of months after the rape, as my acute anxiety wore off, I became severely depressed. I reached out to one of my few local Jewish friends. He could tell I was having trouble articulating the connection between the rape and my Jewish identity. He asked, “If this happened to a friend, what would you tell them?”

“That sounds like a hate crime,” I said without missing a beat. Once I made the connection out loud, I couldn’t unsee it: He had asked me if it would bother me to play music that might be offensive to someone with my ethnic and religious background, and armed with the information, he turned it into a plan to hurt me. The Christmas music, months after the traumatic event, still played on loop in my mind.

In the wake of the rape I drifted away from many non-Jewish friends, and gravitated more toward my Jewish community; it felt safer. While a silent version of the rape clearly shows violence, when you add the sound back in, not everybody’s ears are trained to hear this particular hate. And while it’s possible this man would have tried to rape me no matter my background, he weaponized my Jewish identity to make the rape hurt more.

At the same time, I watched longtime feminist activists and progressive influencers try to undermine the trauma of Oct. 7 victims who experienced sexual violence. Time and again, evidence of violence against Jewish and Israeli victims emerges and is disregarded or disbelieved, largely, it seems, because it is inconvenient to non-Jews’ worldviews. But I experienced how easily a supposedly faraway phenomenon can strike much closer to home.

I believe more Jewish people, especially women, are being raped because of their Jewishness than we know—or maybe than we want to accept. Rape is underreported, hate crimes are underreported, and antisemitic incidents are underreported. What all three of these have in common is how often outsiders cast doubt on whether or not they ever even occurred.

While dealing with rape is traumatic, I felt like I was also wrestling with a world bent on denying this kind of rape even occurred. The Anti-Defamation League, an organization that keeps records of hate crimes, didn’t mention anything about sexual assault on its website, so I contacted an ADL spokesman. He replied, “We do track all antisemitic incidents in the United States, but we currently are not aware of any incidents involving sexual assault in the U.S. If you’re looking for data on assaults that occurred in Israel on Oct. 7, I’d advise you to be in contact with the Israeli government.” If there is no archive in which to gather our stories—if we’re told this type of thing is only happening halfway around the world, during extreme circumstances—it’s not that we don’t control our own narrative: It’s that the narrative doesn’t exist.

I write about sexual violence for a living, and I know what it feels like to have accounts of violence publicly doubted for internet clout or because of readers’ discomfort. It would be easier for me, personally, to stay silent, for people in my community and life not to know this particular story. But I don’t want anybody to go through something similar and feel as alone as I was made to feel.

Among Jewish women in my community, I hear what goes mostly unspoken: While any Jewish person can experience violence, women are more afraid of antisemitism escalating into sexual violence. I am certain that there are more of us in the U.S.—likely including on college campuses where antisemitism has become not just tolerated, but popular—who are being sexually violated for being Jewish, like me, like the 12-year-old girl in France. It would be easier for me to hide in silence. But to me, that kind of silence is deafening. When I hear testimony from victims of antisemitism, and particularly Oct. 7 survivors’ accounts of sexual violence, I believe these victims are brave. It’s not just because they have chosen to speak out against violence, but because they know before they speak that the world already doubts our stories, because we are Jews. We are telling them anyway. That is how, in the face of gaslighting on a global scale, we build a new narrative.