These are unbelievable times and so we put out a call asking “How are you feeling?” Sit in the feelings of this heartened group below and find out how it feels being Jewish for some today.
Tense
On the day before October 7, a writer friend invites me to a reading at a bookstore in downtown Toronto. She will be sharing a piece about her decision to leave Israel for Canada.
On October 18, the day of the reading, we hear news about the explosion at a hospital in Gaza. Hamas blames Israel. My friend asks whether I am still coming to the bookstore that evening. Yes, I reply.
I’m glad, she says. I’m nervous. I need the support. None of my Israeli friends will be there. They barely leave their homes.
My anxiety grows as the hour approaches. I don my blue-and-white Hanukkah socks decorated with menorahs and dreidels and Jewish stars, channeling the Maccabees perhaps. I walk through the dry autumn evening to the bookstore.
The place is almost full but I find a seat near the back. My friend reads first and beautifully, with perfect pace and prosody, about weighing the difficulties of living as an immigrant against those of choosing to stay in Israel. The audience applauds. Afterward we go to an all-night diner and order grilled cheese sandwiches. A story with a happy ending. A little miracle.
Before October 7, it would not have been a story at all.
Underground
November 11, 2023. Yesterday beneath a clouded sky in downtown Toronto I walked along tables set for Shabbat dinner, so many tables that they stretched across David Pecault Square. Wrapped challahs dotted the lengths of white linen. Volunteers had set places for the 239 hostages held in Gaza; at each place, a framed face. Highchairs and sippy cups marked the seats of babies and toddlers. We spoke in hushed voices. We were not many. Not enough.
Lately I find myself thinking of the Thai boys who became trapped underground in a flooded network of caves in 2018. Their plight dominated the world news. “Are they out yet?” people asked one another before a work meeting, or over dinner. During those weeks the whole world came together sending help and hope and prayers and thoughts. We cared; we bore witness. Finally, a massive rescue operation succeeded in bringing the victims out on the eighteenth day of their captivity. Eighteen: chai.
Right now in Gaza are 239 captives, mainly Jews, trapped underground in a network of tunnels. They have been there—so far—two times eighteen days.
Who is bearing witness? Who speaks? The silence deafens me.
How does it feel to be a Jewish Canadian feminist woman right now?
As a sexual violence survivor, it feels like minimization; there is acknowledgement of pain of some, but not a community I am part of.
It feels like there is no space in public for the complexity I am negotiating in my identities.
It feels like I must hide my Jewishness to belong, recreating the generational trauma of my ancestors. Like I am forced to choose between advocating for myself or others, but NOT both.
It feels like I must deny the existence of antisemitism due to knee-jerk reactions, due to misuse of this from the right, or because my friends do not understand how antisemitism operates.
It feels like people are speaking over or for me. Like Jewish identity is reduced online in progressive and feminist spaces as a tool to show “there are Jews that support our side.”
I want to scream that Jewish life and identity is complex, rich, diverse, full of joy, healing, and wisdom.
I want to scream that Judaism informs my feminist and progressive values, following the principle of tikkun olam.
I want to scream that an anti-colonial framework applied rigidly to this complex conflict serves no one.
Jewish identity transcends boundaries of religion, race, ethnicity and culture. Not all of us are from the United States.
I want my friends to know and embrace the both/and complexity of my Jewish identity.
Every day I can’t stop looking at my phone, looking up the news from Gaza, tapping through
Instagram stories that show what the news won’t. Half my family won’t talk to the other half after I share an article by a scholar of Holocaust and genocide studies who says Israel is committing a genocide. My dad makes a comment that compares Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto.
This gets him in trouble. My aunt says I must have learned this antisemitism at university, but there is no excuse for my dad.
Yesterday I was told by someone, who is a teacher, that there is no proof of these rape claims and that “testimonies are the weakest form of evidence.” We are living in a very scary world, where it’s easier for people to justify terrorists who butchered babies and gang raped innocent women before shooting them than it is to acknowledge Israeli and Jewish trauma.
I haven't had a good night’s sleep since October 7. I haven’t looked at my kids and not thought of those killed, left orphaned, or kidnapped. I can’t go an hour without feeling immense pain.
This is true for every single Jew I know.
Being a teacher I feel an immense responsibility to have empathy and see oppression in all forms. I pray every single day for the babies and children in Gaza, like I do for the babies and children in Israel. Knowing that a teacher in Toronto said these things to me, while also posting that Hamas terrorists treated the hostages better than the Israeli government, deeply scares me. I fear for her students, and for the next generation of people learning from a form of warped social justice where everything is oppression unless it’s done to an Israeli or a Jew. We have seen it first hand this week as the presidents of Ivy League schools openly and without fear stated that calls for genocide on Jews are context-dependent.
These are unbelievable times and so we put out a call asking “How are you feeling?” Sit in the feelings of this heartened group below and find out how it feels being Jewish for some today.
Tense
On the day before October 7, a writer friend invites me to a reading at a bookstore in downtown Toronto. She will be sharing a piece about her decision to leave Israel for Canada.
On October 18, the day of the reading, we hear news about the explosion at a hospital in Gaza. Hamas blames Israel. My friend asks whether I am still coming to the bookstore that evening. Yes, I reply.
I’m glad, she says. I’m nervous. I need the support. None of my Israeli friends will be there. They barely leave their homes.
My anxiety grows as the hour approaches. I don my blue-and-white Hanukkah socks decorated with menorahs and dreidels and Jewish stars, channeling the Maccabees perhaps. I walk through the dry autumn evening to the bookstore.
The place is almost full but I find a seat near the back. My friend reads first and beautifully, with perfect pace and prosody, about weighing the difficulties of living as an immigrant against those of choosing to stay in Israel. The audience applauds. Afterward we go to an all-night diner and order grilled cheese sandwiches. A story with a happy ending. A little miracle.
Before October 7, it would not have been a story at all.
Underground
November 11, 2023. Yesterday beneath a clouded sky in downtown Toronto I walked along tables set for Shabbat dinner, so many tables that they stretched across David Pecault Square. Wrapped challahs dotted the lengths of white linen. Volunteers had set places for the 239 hostages held in Gaza; at each place, a framed face. Highchairs and sippy cups marked the seats of babies and toddlers. We spoke in hushed voices. We were not many. Not enough.
Lately I find myself thinking of the Thai boys who became trapped underground in a flooded network of caves in 2018. Their plight dominated the world news. “Are they out yet?” people asked one another before a work meeting, or over dinner. During those weeks the whole world came together sending help and hope and prayers and thoughts. We cared; we bore witness. Finally, a massive rescue operation succeeded in bringing the victims out on the eighteenth day of their captivity. Eighteen: chai.
Right now in Gaza are 239 captives, mainly Jews, trapped underground in a network of tunnels. They have been there—so far—two times eighteen days.
Who is bearing witness? Who speaks? The silence deafens me.
How does it feel to be a Jewish Canadian feminist woman right now?
As a sexual violence survivor, it feels like minimization; there is acknowledgement of pain of some, but not a community I am part of.
It feels like there is no space in public for the complexity I am negotiating in my identities.
It feels like I must hide my Jewishness to belong, recreating the generational trauma of my ancestors. Like I am forced to choose between advocating for myself or others, but NOT both.
It feels like I must deny the existence of antisemitism due to knee-jerk reactions, due to misuse of this from the right, or because my friends do not understand how antisemitism operates.
It feels like people are speaking over or for me. Like Jewish identity is reduced online in progressive and feminist spaces as a tool to show “there are Jews that support our side.”
I want to scream that Jewish life and identity is complex, rich, diverse, full of joy, healing, and wisdom.
I want to scream that Judaism informs my feminist and progressive values, following the principle of tikkun olam.
I want to scream that an anti-colonial framework applied rigidly to this complex conflict serves no one.
Jewish identity transcends boundaries of religion, race, ethnicity and culture. Not all of us are from the United States.
I want my friends to know and embrace the both/and complexity of my Jewish identity.
Every day I can’t stop looking at my phone, looking up the news from Gaza, tapping through
Instagram stories that show what the news won’t. Half my family won’t talk to the other half after I share an article by a scholar of Holocaust and genocide studies who says Israel is committing a genocide. My dad makes a comment that compares Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto.
This gets him in trouble. My aunt says I must have learned this antisemitism at university, but there is no excuse for my dad.
Yesterday I was told by someone, who is a teacher, that there is no proof of these rape claims and that “testimonies are the weakest form of evidence.” We are living in a very scary world, where it’s easier for people to justify terrorists who butchered babies and gang raped innocent women before shooting them than it is to acknowledge Israeli and Jewish trauma.
I haven't had a good night’s sleep since October 7. I haven’t looked at my kids and not thought of those killed, left orphaned, or kidnapped. I can’t go an hour without feeling immense pain.
This is true for every single Jew I know.
Being a teacher I feel an immense responsibility to have empathy and see oppression in all forms. I pray every single day for the babies and children in Gaza, like I do for the babies and children in Israel. Knowing that a teacher in Toronto said these things to me, while also posting that Hamas terrorists treated the hostages better than the Israeli government, deeply scares me. I fear for her students, and for the next generation of people learning from a form of warped social justice where everything is oppression unless it’s done to an Israeli or a Jew. We have seen it first hand this week as the presidents of Ivy League schools openly and without fear stated that calls for genocide on Jews are context-dependent.