I cannot explain why I had such a visceral response to October 7th.
It’s as if some inner knowing – some deep-rooted pain passed down, I can only assume, from my great grandmother in the shtetl in the old country– opened my eyes, and I set upon the great work of mourning and survival.
All around me, people I thought were my friends, my colleagues, my allies, were admonishing Israel for bringing this on herself or denying the rapes and other atrocities that happened on 10/7 or were, seemingly instantly, finger-wagging at Israel for being too cavalier with civilian life, too aggressive. Stop the genocide, they cry, stop the genocide.
Genocide.
A word we Jews know something about.
A word created because there was no word for something as horrific and horrifyingly calculated as the Holocaust.
The dark irony of this is that 10/7 was a genocidal attempt against our people. A maniacal, glee-filled, drug-fueled pogrom intended to inflict as much harm against the Jews and the Jewish state as possible. One Hamas terrorist called his parents from Israel in the immediate aftermath of the attack to proudly brag about how many Jews he’d killed with his own hands (Times of Israel): Jews, not Israelis. Jews.
We know this was pure Jew hatred from the reportage that came out of Israel.
We also know this in our bones. We have not survived some 3,000 odd years by being naïve to the many ways the world chooses to hate us.
Mourning and survival.
The past 10 months have been a painful reminder of just how vulnerable Jews are to this hatred. For many of us, this feels like a truly existential moment.
I could site more data here, but my goal is not to convince you to think the way that I think. I don’t actually give a fuck what you think about this war. Since 10/7, I’ve seen the media turn with ease against Israel. I’ve seen smart people fall into the trap of easy binaries: of oppressed and oppressor, of revisionist histories. I’ve watched protests march down the streets of New York City – mobs of people who think that freeing Gaza involves dismantling the sole Jewish state. I’ve seen images of college kids glorifying Hamas, of protestors remixing some of the greatest antisemitic hits of all times: we are, once again, baby killers, running the media, leveraging outsized financial influence. Sometimes, even, we have horns! It’s so stereotypically on point that it might be amusing if the whole damn thing weren’t so damn frightening.
I have no interest in debating. I feel no burning need to prove my point.
The Holocaust, as we know, didn’t begin with the death camps, but with propaganda.
My entire adult life, I voted for progressive values – same-sex marriage, freedom of choice, healthcare for all – and against the seemingly clear danger of the far right – the neo-Nazis, the KKK, the Proud Boys. The fact that Trump appeased them or, at the very least, refused to denounce them made me distrust him even more.
But now, I’m seeing something perhaps even more terrifying on the far left – protestors taking on a seemingly well-intentioned cause that’s rooted in an anti-Zionism that boils down to simple Jew-hatred. A perversion of truth. Cancel culture, but Jews are the ones canceled. And this anti-Zionist rhetoric is being legitimized: in books, in the media, in my office where colleagues wear keffiyehs.
Throughout these past 10 months, I have inched into an ever deeper, darker, and lonelier space.
I can no longer speak my mind with some friends and most colleagues. My relentless Zionism – the belief that Jews have the right to self-determination in their ancient homeland – is too far outside of the progressive’s code of acceptable conduct. If I express my support for Israel, I have to explain that of course I’m not a fan of Bibi’s and I’m pro a two-state solution. Even as I resist the mainstreaming of the right kind of Jew (an anti-Zionist Jew), I am still contorting myself into as tolerable a Jew as possible.
I watched with dismay as more than 50 democrats – including Vice President (and now Democratic Presidential candidate) Kamala Harris – boycotted and missed Bibi’s speech in July in Washington. I watched a smear campaign laced with anti-Semitism take the potential Democratic candidate for Vice President Josh Shapiro out of the running.
For years, we skewered the Republicans for their failure to rebuke the radical far right. And now, the Democrats are just as bad – perhaps worse – in their normalization and embrace of the far left.
I witnessed – with what can only be described as relief – the Republican National Convention open with prayers for Israel and calls to bring home our hostages. Such outright, unapologetic, uncompromising support for Israel – it turns out, that was all that I wanted. It just came from the wrong elected officials.
This is how I – as a lifelong progressive democrat on the precipice of what’s bound to be one of the most monumental elections of our era – find myself facing an impossible and untenable choice.
On the Republican ticket, we have a candidate who has historically been a true friend to Israel – moving the embassy to Jerusalem and helping to architect the Abraham Accords – and who also, perhaps, has fascist yearnings and wants to dismantle our very democracy (let us not forget January 6).
On the Democratic ticket, we have a candidate who is something of a blank slate when it comes to Israel, but has expressed great empathy for the protestors and the Palestinian cause and is joined by a Vice President who seems to be quite popular with the Israel-hating “Squad” in Congress.
Mourning and survival.
Whether the Ottomans, the Romans, the Greeks, the destruction of the first Temple and then the second, Haman!, the Spanish Inquisition, the Crusades, the (decades of) pogroms in Europe, Stalinist Russia, the Holocaust – we are a people who know from survival.
We know the stealth of the far left, recruiting Jews to join the Bolshevik ranks only to slaughter them mercilessly. We know the terror of the far right, for whom even one drop of Jewish blood made us always and forever a Jew and, therefore, a rot against humanity.
I think back to my great grandmother who perished in the Holocaust. She implored my grandfather to run, to fight in order to survive. But by then, it was too late. The dark cloud was on their doorstep. There was no fleeing, no safe harbor across an ocean. There was just sheer, blind survival until the bitter end when those who remained were able to make their way out.
And now? How will we know when the tide has shifted so far that we’re no longer safe in our diaspora homes?
What do the next four years look like, and where will Israel be at the end of it?
Mourning. Survival. G-d willing, joy.
Because the stories we tell about the Ottomans and Hellenist Greeks, about Haman and the pogroms and the Nazis include mourning and holidays of fasting, but ultimately end with joy and wonder: because we survived. Our people, whose ties go back, incredibly, to a small tribe in Judea thousands of years ago, have survived all of this time against all of these odds.
We are the Jews who survived the gas chambers, the pogroms, the ethnic cleansing from countless diaspora nations we once called home. This didn’t happen by chance. We promised to never forget and we vowed never again. We carry these memories. They may have been buried and latent during these past few decades of relative safety and prosperity, but now they are ever-present, a worrying knot in our centers.
I am a Jew in 2024 and yet here I am, remembering Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany, weighing the future against the terrors of the past.
The far right and the far left: I cannot tell you which is more dangerous, which to fear most. I cannot tell you if we will have to flee, or when. But I can tell you this: if this country was never truly ours, there is only one place left for us to go.
However we cast our ballot, I fear we face dark times ahead. I pray we have the strength to face them. Am Yisrael Chai.
Written anonymously by a member of our GGA community
Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash