Several years ago, I was flying through the Munich airport making a connection on the way home to Israel. For some reason, I was selected for additional and what felt like particularly obnoxious screening inside the airport. Admittedly, until that point, passing through the Munich airport was the closest I had ever been to “visiting” Germany, a place that I never really wanted to go, and where I was uncomfortable being at all.

Hearing airport announcements in German sounded to me particularly severe and was triggering in a way I did not anticipate. For many, maybe most Jews, it is impossible to separate that history not so long ago from a range of feelings still today. Hearing German in the airport made me realize that this same language was what my own relatives heard shouted at them in their final moments, as commands to dig the ditches and then remove valuables and all their clothes, before being lined up and shot on August 22, 1942.

Despite being uncomfortable and having my back up, the security screening was particularly harsh. I couldn’t help but feel that among all the other passengers, I was being singled out as an identifiable Jew. Maybe I was wrong, but my instincts are typically good on such things.

As things progressed unpleasantly, at one point I said to the German police/guards, “If you had cared this much about security in 1972, nobody would have ever heard of Munich.” Admittedly, this was not a page out of “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” To put it mildly, my reference to the security ineptitude, if not outright collaboration of certain German authorities leading up to and during the Palestinian Arab........

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