In 1918, my grandfather Jack Walter became a fervent supporter of a Palestinian homeland for European Jews. I am staring at his photograph as I write this, an image of a pleasant-looking man poised over an American flag with three other Jews under a headline in the Dec. 10 edition of the San Francisco Bulletin that reads “Plan Palestine Homeland for Jews.”

Jack Walter was a member of the magic circle of German Jewish families who emigrated in the middle of the 19th century to California, where they helped build San Francisco and Los Angeles into the financial powerhouses they now are. They carried heavy responsibilities throughout life to promote the public good.

I am proud of many of my relatives and owe my great good fortune to them. Many continue to be generous contributors to causes of all sorts. Most supported efforts after World War I to send Jews to Palestine, heedless of the future that we have inherited. Some became ardent Zionists while others joined an anti-Zionist backlash against the creation of a Jewish homeland.

The head rabbi of the powerful Temple Emanu-El congregation became anti-Zionist in the 1930s, stating that Jews had never been more secure than they had been in America, and that support for a foreign Jewish state would call into question Jews’ loyalty to America. Still other Jews became “non-Zionists,” who backed a Jewish homeland but not a nation state.

The American Jewish response to Zionism has varied historically, mirroring the many faces of American Judaism between 1920 and 1940.

Then came the Shoah (Hebrew for catastrophe). After that, who could possibly oppose the creation of the state of Israel? Then came 1948 and the Nakba (Arabic for catastrophe), the displacement of Palestinian Arabs to make room for European Jews. Reaction to the Nakba from Western nations has, at most, been muted.

And now, where are we? I am in tears for both Jew and Palestinian. What a terrible sight history has handed us!

I ask my grandfather Jack Walter to speak to me, to advise me, but all he can do is weep with me. We can castigate the Arab side for its action and inaction, particularly the irresponsible non-intervention on the part of Middle Eastern Arab states. But we can only react as Jews.

I take heart from the writings of Peter Maass in the Washington Post in his op-ed of April 4. Maass is, like me, a privileged scion of California German Jews and an outstandingly brave journalist. He wrote: “The victims of genocide — which Jews were in the Holocaust — are not gifted with the right to perpetrate one. Of course, a war-crimes court should be the arbiter of whether Israel’s actions in Gaza qualify as genocide, but sufficient evidence for indictments appears to exist because the legal definition of genocide is ‘acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.’ The key words are ‘in part.’ Holocaust levels of killing are not required to reach the legal standard. This puts all Americans, not just American Jews, on the spot.”

Supporting Israel’s right to do whatever the Netanyahu government demands is insupportable. Allowing antisemites to spew hatred in promoting the destruction of a Jewish homeland is intolerable.

Almost all of us German Jews emigrated from small towns in Germany. Our forebears had settled in those towns after the Thirty Years’ War in the late 17th century. Before that, who knows where the diaspora scattered them? Our ever-urgent question remains: Where is our place in the world?

It’s all the places you, dear reader, and I have been. It’s the places where we grew up that frame our identities and the places to which we owe our experiences in life.

I take heart from my faith that there are more of us speaking out, forming bonds, pursuing the struggle to protect the stranger. Now is the time to speak out against hatred engendered on both sides. It is time to pressure the Biden administration to force a cease-fire in Gaza and to hire university presidents with the backbones to confront antisemitism.

Above all, understand this: Shoah and Nakba will only define our futures if we allow them to do so. I did not live 85 years to remain silent.

John Sinton lives in Florence.