D-Day and the Vineyard Shtetl

6/6/2025

If you close your eyes and imagine the most stereotypical Orthodox visual possible, you’ll probably see a bearded man wearing a long black coat—or, as it’s called in Yiddish, a kapota.

It’s not really the Vineyard look, per se.

So while I own a kapota and tend to wear it on Shabbat and holidays, I usually leave it at home when heading out.

It’s not that I’m embarrassed to look Orthodox—I look pretty Orthodox even without the kapota—but I guess I don’t like feeling that out of place.

But when I took a walk this past Monday morning, before Shavuot services, I felt that this time I wanted to wear my long, black, and archaic coat.

It was the morning after a pro-Palestinian terrorist lit a group of Jews on fire in Boulder, and I had a deep urge to be as visibly Jewish as possible.

So feeling a tad out of place but with my head held high, I left the house looking like I mistook Martha’s Vineyard for the shtetl.

What happened in Boulder this week is so frighteningly dangerous because it shows there are people in the United States who feel comfortable burning Jews alive in the name of freeing Palestine.

And what’s even more frightening is that too many educated and otherwise liberal-minded people will justify such behavior in the name of standing with the oppressed.

How does this end for the Jews? Who knows. But for me, it meant I wanted to be more visibly Jewish than ever.

As we mark D-Day today, I’m reminded of Hal Baumgarten, a Jewish American soldier who stormed the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944.

Every US soldier carried a dog tag around their neck, with identification details in case they were killed or found. The tags also listed religion: a C if the soldier was Catholic, a P if Protestant, and an H—Hebrew—if Jewish.

As they prepared to storm Normandy, Jewish soldiers were advised that if they wanted to, they could scrape off the H. That way, if they were captured by the Nazis, they’d be treated like regular POWs—not singled out for the extra fatal brutality reserved for Jews.

But when Hal Baumgarten heard this suggestion, he decided otherwise. Not only did he leave the H intact, he painted a huge Star of David on the outside of his uniform.

Like millions of Jews before him, Hal felt that if he was going down, he wanted to go down as a proud Jew.

We’re not storming Normandy, and we’re not being captured by Nazis. But there’s no question that the open hatred of Jews in the US recently has awakened the deep Jewish spark inside all of us.

The neshama, the pintele yid, the Jewish soul that may have lied dormant for too long, is waking up like a lion—roaring in its will to reconnect to itself and to its people.

In honor of the elderly Jews who were burned alive in Boulder, and in memory of Hal Baumgarten who was wounded in Normandy, let’s not scrape the H off our dog tags.

Let’s paint it all over our uniforms.