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Over 80 years after my Oma left Germany, I found myself living in Dresden, in East Germany. The day I arrived, the tram stopped short of the city center as thousands of people from the German nationalist anti-Islam group PEGIDA marched through the streets bearing massive German flags and angry faces. The moment the tram stopped, the sky suddenly opened up and a fierce rain barreled down upon us as thunder echoed above. I remember musing that it looked like a history museum had come to life. It was happening again, except this time Muslims rather than Jews were the target. Wanting to see the fabled town from my Oma's childhood, I later made my way to Schlüchtern, where cobblestones and fairy tale houses with wooden slats at odd angles line the narrow streets. Soon I had settled in at the quaint, cozy house of my couchsurfing host, David, and his Mom. I began telling them the story: My Oma was one of the lucky ones. She was sent her over the sea away from Germany in the early thirties, right before things started to get real bad. By the time she had my Dad and my aunt, she had already been living in the US for a long time. I almost never heard her talk about Schlüchtern. "What was her family name?" David inquired. "Wolf". Without a word, David stood up and strode over to the bookcase, pausing as he leaned down to search for something. His face lit up as he found what he was looking for and placed a thin but heavy book on the table in front of me. Tears clouded my vision as I began to understand what was before me, right here in this stranger's house in a strange town in a strange country: A whole book all about the Wolf family, all about the history of their lives in Schlüchtern, complete with family pictures and stories. One of the pictures even depicted my great grandmother Elsa as a little girl. I poured through its pages in fascination, searching for my face in the faces of unknown ancestors. The next morning, we hopped in the car for an excursion to Steinau. A few minutes later I gazed up in awe at a towering brick building known as Dreiturm Werke, the soap factory that had been the bread and butter of the Wolf family before they were forced to leave the country and sell it for an absurdly low price. The factory had survived all these years, my hosts explained, and it had even moved to the next town in order to expand. The kindness of David and his Mom of taking me into their home struck me as beautiful yet ironic. 80 years ago, it wouldn't have been safe for me to be in Germany, and now Germany feels like a perfectly hospitable place to be as a Jewish person...yet I am quite certain that the many Muslim immigrants I saw strolling through the quaint lanes of Schlüchtern did not share that same feeling of security. Last week I took part in a hippie festival in the sultry tropical jungle of Nicaragua in which I facilitated various workshops, one of which involved asking the participants to tell their partners one thing of which they they were proud about their home countries. At the end of the workshop I sat sprawled on the colorful concrete platform chatting with an insightful German man and a sweet Israeli woman. The German gently cautioned us against using the word 'pride' to describe how we feel about our countries, and it occurred to me how beautifully ironic it was, 80 years later, that a German should educate two Jews on such matters, and that the demographics of the festival itself involved a lot of Germans and a lot of Jews, collaborating in this random jungle. From our cozy bubble in the wilderness, it was easy to feel that the problems of the past had faded away, replaced by a beautiful cooperation. But in Germany and elsewhere, nationalist movements are growing again. Will we allow our Muslim brothers and sisters to face the same discrimination?