Since October Seventh
I was raised on stories of the Holocaust. In Sunday school, we would debate who would have escaped the Nazis because of their looks. “Well you have blonde hair, but your nose looks too big. But you have brown hair and a small nose…”
I remember ruminating on the Germans. How anybody could stand by and watch as the worst of humanity, or complete lack of humanity, could happen to an entire people. I learned that anybody’s heart could turn cold. That anybody was capable of harm. “Don’t think this can’t happen again…” I heard my mom echo warnings passed on from her father. “Everybody hates the Jews.”
And yet for the most part, I felt safe. We were well off, comfortably housed, never experienced food insecurity, my parents always could access employment, bank loans, travel and freedom of movement. My most uncomfortable experiences of being Jewish growing up in Portland, Maine had to do with the inconvenience of having to retake tests that were scheduled on Yom Kippur or another high holiday.
In 2014, as the country confronted extreme police brutality and anti-Blackness with the news of Trayvon Martin’s murder and the uprisings in Ferguson, an article called “Why I’ll Never Apologize for My White Male Privilege” circulated among college campuses. The author essentially used his own family’s history of oppression as Jews to justify his refusal of acknowledging his present day privileges as a white man. I read it and felt sick.
His piece promoted with pride a complete lack of awareness of systemic racism, anti-blackness and sexism. He used one oppression, antisemitism, to ignore many others. And honestly, it was a sentiment I had seen in mainstream Jewish institutions — a complete lack of holding multiple truths. And a complete lack of accountability to the fact that so many Ashkenazi white Jews had experienced both anti-semitism in Europe and the US, and also had experienced economic and societal privileges in the US, since the 1940s in particular. This attitude held a level of hubris and selective prioritization of history and pain that I found to be so callous, selfish, and flat out racist that it turned me off of wanting to have anything to do with being Jewish. I didn’t engage with Judaism or Jewish community for the next five years.
I spent that time instead dedicating myself to projects that aimed to dismantle systems of white supremacy and racism. Eventually, I found myself working full time at an immigrant rights organization led by undocumented and formerly undocumented immigrants. Then, in 2019, I saw news of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez going down to the border and calling the detention centers there “concentration camps.” All of a sudden my newsfeed was filled with debates of Jews and non-Jewish people alike about whether or not it was fair or anti-semitic to call detention centers concentration camps. I felt in my bones a question I’d been asking myself since I was in middle school: “What was the responsibility of non-Jewish Germans in the 1920s, 1930 and 1940s?”
Later that night I was on the phone with other Jewish organizers who were asking similar questions and six days later, 36 Jews got arrested blocking the entrance to a detention center in Elizabeth, NJ saying “Never Again means Never Again for Anybody.”
All of a sudden, I found Jewish community who shared my values, who could hold the duality of holding intergenerational trauma and holding an immense amount of privilege in the US. I was surrounded by Jews who felt a responsibility to fight systemic oppression in all its forms.
Jewish culture thus returned to my life. I sang songs I learned in my childhood — Hebrew words not uttered for years, but that felt so comforting on my tongue. I learned new songs I had never heard before, but that felt so right in my bones. I cried on Rosh Hoshannah. I marveled at the sky under a sukkah during Sukkot. I learned how powerful the Jewish calendar and Jewish notion of time is. I felt a softening in my body I hadn’t felt for a long time. As I learned more about Jewish culture, values, rituals and traditions, I confronted how much white supremacy and assimilation had stolen from me. Had stolen from Jews across the US and across the globe.
Returning to Jewish community felt like a homecoming. And as I felt more Jewish again, I also began to notice antisemitism in the US more, and how little awareness there was in progressive spaces of how antisemitism functioned in the US to divide communities and blame Jews for widespread problems. I saw the Christian far-right claim to love the state of Israel, but then use antisemitic dog-whistles to make it seem like Jews “control the media.” I saw, and continue to see, real violence targeting Jews — Jewish people getting stabbed, synagogues being targeted with gun violence and bombs. The reality and necessity of holding multiple truths increased further. I once again had to contend with multiple truths: antisemitism exists, the right uses it to obscure and gain power, the left often doesn’t understand it or think it’s real. And Israel has everything to do with both of these truths.
It is one month since October 7th, 2023 And my mind and body are awash with multiple truths:
Israel has made Palestinian life a living nightmare since the Nakba in 1948. 75 years of occupation, backed first by the British and now by the US.
On October 7th, An image of a bulldozer breaking down a massive chain-link fence sparked momentary hope throughout Palestine, the Palestinian diaspora and throughout the world that supports a free Palestine. A monumental but fleeting symbol of potential liberation from Israel’s terrorizing 16 year siege on Gaza. For a moment, I felt a sliver of hope.
On October 7th and the days following, Hamas fighters murdered over 1000 people living in Israel, both Israeli citizens and those visiting Israel, some for an international trance music festival. Hope turned to heartbreak and dread.
Immediately following Hamas’s attacks, Israel heightened its military reign of terror within Gaza, cutting off food, water and fuel, and carpet bombing Gaza. Over ten thousand people have been killed in the last month. My heart keeps breaking.
I hear news of violence escalating in the West Bank, Israeli officers arresting thousands of Palestinians, and of heightened risks for Israeli citizens who speak out against the genocidal activity. Jewish right-wing settlers terrorizing Palestinians, destroying their homes, threatening murder.
It’s been one month.
It’s been 16 years.
It’s been 75 years.
Both my mother’s parents were born in Germany. My Great uncle recounted once how my family had been in Germany for generations, 300–400 years, and how anti-semitism had always felt present there, far before the terrors of the Holocaust.
I think about the choice my grandparent’s parents had to make, in 1930 and 1938 respectively, as they chose to leave Germany with their families. Where to go? My grandmother first went to Yugslavia, but six years later, in 1936, as she put, “the writing was on the wall.” It was time to leave Europe. My great grandparents essentially had two known choices at the time: Go to the United States or go to Palestine.
That is to say, move to Turtle Island, a land that had been experiencing genocide of Indigenous people by European settlers for over 400 years; or go to Palestine, where European Jews were taught to feel a biblical claim to land through ideology of Zionism. But in reality, my ancestors hadn’t lived on Palestinian land in over 400 years, or a thousand years. Millennia of complex relationships to land forced into 3 minute tiktok videos to justify the IDF bulldozing Palestinians homes — people who can track generations back in that same house.
My family was forced to leave Europe because the German government was creating policies to kill all Jews.
My family was going to be settlers on land not our own wherever we went.
It’s an impossible choice, and one they had no context for making. They were just trying to survive.
My mind races between. present. past. future?
The bombs falling in Gaza. The terror in the West Bank.
My grandparents forced to make an impossible choice to survive. Palestinians forced off their land in 1948 by Israeli soldiers using guns bought by Europeans.
On Yom Kippur we practice Teshuvah. We learn to ask if we have caused harm. To listen if someone says we have. To apologize. To commit to not repeat the harm. To repair.
Why aren’t we listening?
More things that are true:
There are more Christian zionists in the US than there are Jews in the world
Christian zionists believe the return of the messiah depends on Jews returning to “the Holy Land”
The largest scale genocide of Jews happened in Europe
I want to know what it’s like to grow up without genocide in my bones
I don’t want anyone else to grow up with genocide in their bones
I want to talk about prophecy.
In what we now call the United States, people wrote about “manifest destiny” and created the Doctrine of Discovery. People internalized this as divine prophecy. People murdered and displaced millions of people. People thought it was their right. Their prophecy.
“A land without a people for a people without a land.” It’s the zionist slogan. Another… European-created prophecy. Of erasure. Of genocide.
What is actually inevitable? And what is a story conditioned into our bodies to justify ethnic cleansing?
Teshuvah.
The past happened. Over 10,000 people are dead. But 10,500 deaths is not inevitable. Every moment we have a choice. None of this is destined to be.
Where do we go from here?
Teshuvah.
Let’s practice, shall we?
First let’s take stock of where we are.
In November 2023. Tishrei 5784. Rabi II 1445.
Can we really look around? No instagram graphic will ever hold the devastation, the grief, the wailing bodies on the shrapnell-covered ground. No instagram post can hold the ocean.
(pause. breathe. pause)
Real talk: Who benefits from endless war?
Arms dealers. Oil and gas executives. The Politicians they buy.
Real talk: We’ve been caught in a web of propaganda and hate so deep just so that a couple hundred men with wealth greater than I can comprehend can make more money?!
Real talk: Our souls are dying. The planet is dying.
Real talk: What the fuck is a two state solution? Why do US politicians still want to support two ethnostates? When did ethnostates ever keep anyone safe?
(uh oh, maybe I just lost the crowd)
As a Jewish person descended from Jewish Germans who fled in the 1930s, why would an ethnostate over 2,000 miles from the land my great grandmother tended ever feel like an inevitable or sensical way to keep me safe??
Real talk. Why is European prophecy and state-sponsored propaganda so fucking powerful? How did the world let 11 million people be displaced and murdered in the 1930s and 1940s? How have we justified over 10,000 people being murdered in Palestine in the last month? Why are the major news channels barely talking about the Congo and Sudan? Why did I learn about the Holocaust in middle school but didn’t learn about what happened in Rwanda, the genocide of the Kurds or Armenians or Indigenous peoples throughout Central America until college? Why are there so many other genocides that I still don’t know about?
How does empire shape a worldview? How does empire maintain and grow power?
I don’t believe in prophecy. But I do believe in power. I believe we can all fall victim to a worldview that is so small that our souls contract, our hearts close, and empire wins.
Teshuvah.
There is no prophecy, but we need a pathway forward. We need a vision.
To real multiracial democracy. To Jews and Palestinians living together. Accountable. Unsure. But trying. Trying something new.
Apologizing. Forgiving.
Can we forgive?
I don’t know. In so many ways, I’d understand if that isn’t possible.
Have I forgiven the Nazis? What a terrifying question.
There’s a difference between government and people. Is there? Is it too soon for all of this? Is the wound too tender? I can’t say these things yet. But I think one day we will ask these questions. And we won’t like the answers.
We can let empire write the script. Or we can write on our own. Our bloody, messy, multi-truth, beautiful, forgiveness, weeping on the floor, swimming through an ocean, harvesting the olive trees, questioning everything, doubting everything, painting our own pathway forward. Where we are all just a little more free.
I write these words, not as prophecy, but as breathing life into an abyss of destruction. As a prayer. Palestine will be free.