Kermit first sang those words in 1970, his felt forehead creased with existential gloom. It was a melancholy little number about feeling invisible, overlooked, burdened by a difference no one seemed to value. Green, he sang, “blends in with so many other ordinary things.”

More than half a century later, that lament has taken on a different resonance.

For diaspora Jews today, the problem is no longer invisibility. It is exposure.

In just the past week, a truck was driven into a synagogue in Michigan during preschool hours. Jewish institutions in Europe were attacked again, including an explosion outside a Jewish school in Amsterdam. In Belgium, the government has deployed military personnel to protect Jewish communities. What once would have been extraordinary now passes as routine.

These are not isolated incidents. They form a pattern. And that pattern is becoming harder, and more exhausting, to explain away. At the same time, this moment is unfolding against the backdrop of an expanding war between Israel and Iran, a conflict that has once again placed Jews at the center of a global confrontation.

Even now, even after everything, there remains a persistent expectation that Jews should contextualize their fear, soften their outrage, and explain their vulnerability in ways that make it more palatable to others.

It is not easy being green.

What feels different now is not only fear. It is fatigue. There is fatigue from vigilance and fatigue from having to explain ourselves. There is fatigue from watching acts of violence against Jews immediately reframed through someone else’s ideological lens. There is fatigue from being told, implicitly or explicitly, that Jewish vulnerability is conditional, that it must be weighed or contextualized before it can be acknowledged.

There is a particular exhaustion that comes from having to argue for the legitimacy of one’s own fear. That exhaustion is becoming a defining feature of Jewish life in this moment.

There was........

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