email #43 — an email fragment that is now out of date, on 2 years since oct. 7
Leon Kraiem
Hi friends,
I figured it would be worth putting down some thoughts on the second anniversary of Oct. 7, less so from an on-the-ground perspective — the reality is it's still Oct. 7, and it will remain Oct. 7 at least until all the hostages are home (as a news anchor said during the sort-of-official memorial ceremony yesterday, "we're still in the -trauma, not yet at the post-"), though maybe a little of that — but also in a more (literally) global way: a perspective that I don't have a terribly unique vantage point on, but that I'm thinking about a lot these days, and which sort of beggars more cognitive energy, if maybe less emotional or physical labor.
I was struck on the high holidays — as I often am — by the never-suprisedness of the liturgy; the only way liturgy becomes irrelevant is when people decide part of it is irrelevant and remove it; that's how you end up in a global pandemic with a liberal siddur that took out the word "plague" — and it's how you end up with 48 hostages and no prayer for captives, or language with which to talk about redeeming them. As long as you keep everything in there, you show up to synagogue at that Most Unprecedented of Times, and realize: Everything is extremely precedented. There is nothing new under the sun.
My feeling ever since October 7 has been that I am entering a much more precedented world. That all of the things that have always been around, but briefly sort of almost blipped out of existence for the couple of decades in which I happened to be born, were probably going to become normal parts of our ontological furniture for the rest of my days. That's true of things like plague, and war, and arbitrary power, and religious fanaticism, and the general dysfunction that comes from any state of affairs other than obsessional professionalized maintenance of mass cooperation schemes.
And it's especially true of antisemitism. I remember when I was at JPost, our editorial on October 8 was "Israel's 9/11" — that was, and remains, the go-to explainer to an American audience of what the attack was like. I realized at some point that it's a significantly less bad comparison if, rather than "Oct. 7 was to Israel as 9/11 was to America" the analogy is "Oct. 7 was to Israel as 9/11 was to New York." That's closer, I think, to the proximity of the violence; I think it's similar, also, in terms of the bonding experience, the local civilian mobilization experience, the outpouring of support experience.
But psychologically, the comparison is a trap. Both 9/11 and Oct. 7 shattered people's perception of safety, and each jolted its respective victim-nation out of complacency and back into history. But for the US — as I understand it, having grown up in its shadow, at least — 9/11 pierced certainty: we've escaped all that; things are only getting better. with doubt: maybe we're not safe after all? Maybe we are still in history? Whereas Oct. 7 pierced doubt: maybe we're finally safe? with certainty: Of course we're not safe. Of course we're still the Jews. Of course this still happens to us. What were we thinking?
It's Israel that's the exception, in the grand scheme of things, not the failure of it, on that one day, to prevent the thing that always happens to Jews from happening to Jews yet another time. As I wrote in an early email, I think on Chanuka '23: I used to imagine the Holocaust in black and white. After Oct. 7, I imagine it in full, vivid color. When I wrote that originally, I meant the actual violent acts — the ghetto, the trains, the camps, the gas chambers — but now, a couple years removed from the massacres themselves (I remember hearing from people, well past the first few days, that the bodies were still laying in situ as you drove down south), I'm thinking more about the Discourse, the in-the-air stuff — the antisemitism, as an -ism rather than an -ing.
My dad called me at 4:30am Mexico time a few weeks ago, in the midst of a sleepless night, to talk to me about a conversation he'd had over dinner with his oldest childhood friend. They'd talked about life, about what my dad was up to, about me, what things are like for me over here. And then, my dad's friend — let's call her Maria — said: "Well, are we going to talk about the other topic?" To which my dad said, "...?" "You know, what's happening in Gaza?" And what followed, my dad told me, was a sort of half-lecture, half-jeremiad, half-warning — delivered, with love, to you all (ustedes) — that you can't see what's happening, you're blinded by your ethnic loyalty, but what you all (ustedes) are doing to these people, something awful is going to come back around to you, I'm telling you out of love. And you know me. Some of my best friends are Jewish.
I pointed out to my dad that one irony of the "anti-Zionism is not antisemitism" rhetoric is that for most of Jewish history, "Jewish" wasn't necessarily a word in common usage — certainly not any specific version of it. Maybe "yahood" here, "jude" here, "yid" there; but you could get in a time (and space) machine, and go to any era (and location) in Jewish history over the last 3,000 years, and while "I have nothing against the Jews" might be gibberish to them, "I only have a problem with Israel," would immediately clarify which group of people (the Jews) you were talking about. That's our name. That's the old one. That's the forever one. And that's the one with all of the appropriately theological resonances that have finally made themselves audible, at least to those people who have the ears to hear them.
I haven't had my own version of that conversation, though so many people I know have. The reality is, my social circle these days is (regrettably) so Jewish, so Israel-related, or so otherwise philosemitic that it's extremely unrepresentative of The General Public, in the US or anywhere else. What I have had, though, are non-conversations. People I've reached out to from the past and never heard back from — or, as happened very recently — who have been really excited to hear from me, and asked in their reply: "Where are you these days?" but, upon my answering the question, stopped writing back. You never know that any one of these was about The Israel Thing, but it's hard not to think that some of them were. And those are the people you choose to reach out to.
Then, there's the internet. It's tempting to dismiss that — "the internet is not real life" — of all the porous borders that have destabilized the west over the last twenty years, the border between the internet and real life is probably the one that needed the most policing.
If you're online, at all, you just see antisemitism, everywhere. There's respectable antisemitism — that Israel is an international string-puller that you can't say anything about and maybe killed JFK, or Charlie Kirk, etc., the "this [x] was promised to him 3,000 years ago joke," that sort of thing; there's the faux-edgy antisemitism, which on the left means you're pro-Hamas and on the right means you're a Holocaust revisionist; and there's the actual edgy antisemitism, which means you're not just pro-hurting Jews, you might actually help someone do it. Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Hasan Piker — you may not like these people, but they have huge audiences. And it trickles down, at more than a trickle.
The example I think about the most — and this is embarrassing to cite, but I really think it's representative in a way others aren't – is what you see on a dating app in a big liberal city. Every time I travel
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...Yeah, this is actually where I stopped writing. I’ll finish that thought one of these days. "No Zios," etc., you can imagine it. Making the point that of course Brooklyn leftist types — the "ethereal bisexuals" for whom you read Marx in college, to use a timeless description from Barack Obama's memoirs — are the ones who are most medievally Jewish-exclusionary, because it was never the bad people who were antisemitic, it was always the virtuous ones, the Good Christians, who were upset that the Jews killed our Lord. Etc. etc.
But the time to make that point was like six hours ago, and I decided to put the computer down instead, which — all things considered — wasn't such a bad idea.
Now, it’s time for a very different email.
As always, etc.
Leon