Sometimes dads screw up. I screw up all the time, as a dad, and even in my non-dad functions. One way my dad screwed up is that he changed his name from Hirschkind to Hickins. Rhymes with chickens, not quite Dickens, as American as apple pie and Doinkuss. Slim pickins indeed; no American would have thought of Americanizing himself with a moniker like that.

So my name is Hickins – a nondescript, Irish-adjacent, potentially Scottish, but definitely not Jewish name. And that was the point: don’t let anyone know you’re Jewish. Don’t tell people (especially neighbors) that you’re Jewish, and keep your politics to yourself. History had taught my father that people (especially neighbors) would turn on you, turn you in, and kill your mother, if you weren’t careful.

My father lost his mother, his uncle, his aunt, and many friends, to the Holocaust, as I describe in my memoir, The Silk Factory: Finding Threads of My Family’s True Holocaust Story.

He brought his wife Hilde and son Walter to safety, ending up in Cuba (where she died). If not for his steadiness and courage in the face of near-certain disaster, I would not be here.

He got to Cuba as a Hirschkind. Some years later, he and Walter deplaned in Miami as Hickins.

By the time I thought seriously about changing it back to Hirschkind, I was already Hickins to my friends – and enemies. And let me tell you, I desperately wanted those a-holes to know that it was I, Michael Hickins, who was not only living rent free in their brains with my glorious fame; I was throwing parties, and I wanted them to have no doubt that the boy they once tormented was the famous man they were now forced to gaze upon as their wives and unsuspecting friends praised his genius and his incredible looks.

As I said, I have screwed up a lot.

Being Jew-nonymous, as it were, has put me in a very strange position: to other Jews, I’m the gentile in the room, the one who probably won’t get their inside jokes or understand the reference to an obscure Jewish holiday, while to non-Jews, I can be sometimes privy to their casual, not entirely malevolent antisemitism. There are very fine people with whom I wish I could have remained friends, people whom I wish had kept their opinions about Jews to themselves.

I’ve also felt like my Jewishness was somehow surreptitious, as if I were a spy listening in on conversations under false pretenses.

How many times, and how much I hate, hearing “I didn’t know you were Jewish!” As if I had been keeping a pernicious secret to myself – and how dare I come out of the closet now!

The terrorist attack on October 7, 2023 by Hamas – the brutal murder of hundreds, the gleeful rape and torture of Jewish people of all ages – horrified me. And I knew it foreshadowed much worse – that it would become Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s principal way of remaining in power, indefinitely so long as he could continue prosecuting the vengeful war.

And indeed, he has done everything he could to scorch the earth of any near-term possibility for peace. He has acted with wanton disregard for human life. He has embittered not only generations of Palestinians but generations of Westerners who could be allies of Israel, if not for his desperate need to remain in power (and thus avoid jail – I wonder if that sounds remotely familiar).

Some people describe Israel’s actions as genocide. But genocide is a very specific crime; the Genocide Convention of 1948 identifies genocide as acts committed with “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, religious or racial group, as such.” According to the United Nations Office of Genocide Prevention, “to constitute genocide, there must be a proven intent on the part of perpetrators to physically destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. Cultural destruction does not suffice, nor does an intention to simply disperse a group. It is this special intent, or dolus specialis, that makes the crime of genocide so unique.”

So, for example, “from the river to the sea” is a genocidal intention – it means eliminating Jews from anywhere between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Slaughtering thousands of innocent Palestinians is a crime against humanity, a war crime, but it isn’t genocide.

Now, I understand and expect that people may disagree with me – there are plenty of Jews who believe Israel is committing genocide.

And many people who say Israel is committing genocide aren’t Jewish, and are saying it as a cover for their own antisemitic purposes.

When I, a Hickins, says that Israel is at fault, is committing atrocities in Gaza, it might seem like I’m just another goy with an ax to grind against Jews.

This winter, as the horrible war dragged on, I decided that I wanted some way of clearly identifying myself as Jewish.

I don’t wear a yarmulka – given my ambivalence about the existence of God, that would be hypocritical – and I haven’t figured out how to bring up my circumcision in casual conversation. Not to mention that here in the US, being circumcised is hardly a defining characteristic.

And so I decided to buy myself some jewelry, a bracelet to be exact, with a silver Mogen David shining on my wrist. Happy Father’s Day to me.

Now I only have to figure out how to make sure people can see it without shoving my right fist under their noses. They might take that the wrong way.