I miss my younger years when resolutions for the coming year included getting more physically fit, reading a certain number of books, helping others in need and being kinder to bad drivers. While some people eschew the ritual, I continue to appreciate reflection and goals at the year’s end.

In more recent years, I have embraced goals similar to the ones I had in my teen era while I also feel a responsibility to model informed citizenry and an activated moral compass. I have always believed that the smallest of ethical efforts can reverberate beyond the one kind deed, and I encourage each of us to remember this when our hearts and minds are flooded with concern for the world, accompanied by political paralysis. Be kind to a family member, friend, colleague or stranger in need when you also need kindness.

It sounds clichéd to say “be the light,” yet it seems to help both giver and receiver in that moment. It’s better than wallowing in darkness.

There are countless injustices in the world, and if I ruminated on them during all of my waking hours, I would not be able to function. My theme for 2025 will be addressing old and persistent societal wounds lest they be forgotten. Complacency is not an option for me.

Medical and mental health professionals offer guidance for healing old wounds that individuals carry from abuse or random traumatic events. How do we reconcile old large-scale wounds? I believe we have to acknowledge the validity of the wounds first. Then a strategy to disrupt the pattern of injustice can be developed.

Antisemitism is often referred to as the oldest form of hatred. The term is recognizable while a more specific and accurate description is hatred against Jews. The term antisemitism was coined in 1879 by German journalist and race theorist Wilhelm Marr in his pamphlet, “The Path to Victory of Germanism Over Judaism.” Marr warned that “Semites” (Jews) — were infiltrating and diluting pure German culture.

European countries developed nationalistic themes in the 19th century that we would recognize as xenophobia today — where the “others” who were not considered native were deemed dangerous outsiders. Jews were high on that list.

It did not matter that many of them had been loyal to their resident countries for several generations or that they did not have the rights others had. It was a set-up. First, don’t consider Jews citizens, then accuse them of not being citizens. When winning is not an option, survival and flexibility are primary modus operandi.

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The made-up term, Semites, was also used to distinguish “Aryan” people from Middle East and northeast African regions from people such as Arabs, Phoenicians, Arkadians and others; however, the German nationalists used the term “anti-Semitism” in reference to Jews. Today’s Jewish advocacy organizations use the word without the hyphen and capital “S” intentionally to delegitimize Nazi ideology with its pseudo-scientific racial classification.

While the word is less than 150 years old, the hatred is much older. It predates Christianity (Babylonian enslavement 597 BCE), and when Catholics ruled much of Europe, Jews were always at risk. The Christian Crusades (11th, 12th and 13th centuries) were brutal for Muslims and Jews, and the Spanish Inquisition (1478-1834) involved sadistic torture and the mass murder of Jews. The Eastern European pogroms that took place for much of a century (1821-1917) may not have been government-sanctioned but when mobs raped, tortured and killed Jews in unprecedented numbers, the state looked the other way.

Given the trajectory of centuries of scapegoating and dehumanizing Jews, it did not take a stretch of the imagination for Germans and their collaborating countries to decide to eliminate them. Modern philosophers have much to say about the Holocaust. Yes, millions of others were killed while 6 million Jews — two-thirds of the European Jewish population — were murdered as a primary demographic in the horrors. Hannah Arendt wrote that this extreme crime provoked an eclipse of the human species.

Hatred directed at Jews for being, well, Jews, adapts to fit the times. The willful ignorance about the progressive tenets of Zionism means it can be repackaged as an insult. Bernard-Henri Lévy’s book, “Israel Alone,” is just 146 pages long and it is dense with historical and ethical considerations. He does not waste a word. Lévy chillingly notes that “October 7 marks the alignment, for the worse, of Israel with the diaspora.” The reality of a shelter or safe place for Jews is gone. The world blamed Jews for Hamas’ pogrom into Israel! Never again was only for a little while. Denouncing this old hatred in all forms remains a priority in 2025.

J.M. Sorrell is a feminist at her core. She agrees with Saul Bellow: “A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”