By Joan Joanne Greene

My grandparents lived through pogroms – organized massacres where bands of men, seething with hatred of Jews, rode into Jewish villages on horseback, looting, raping, killing, and burning down their homes. I’ve known this the same way I’ve known about the killing fields in Cambodia and the Armenian genocide. Unimaginable evil that happened to someone else, people who didn’t speak my language, who didn’t live like I did, safe and with boundless opportunity in late 20th and early 21st century America. 

In Hebrew school they showed us newsreels from the war, the Holocaust, the Shoah. So many names for something that happened far away at another time. I and my friends had nightmares from seeing the grainy, black-and-white images of emaciated naked dead bodies piled high. But that was history, I told myself…like the slaughter by Syrian-Greeks, the annihilation decreed by Egyptian Pharoahs. Except that the murder of 6 million Jews had taken place only twenty years earlier. Twenty years, I now know, is an instant. I’ve read countless books, seen innumerable films, been privileged to hear many first-person testimonies, but these atrocities were things that happened to other Jews, at other times, in other places. 

Until now. “Never again is now.” It’s what we chant at rallies, our minds filled with images of kids who look like our children, brutally murdered at a music festival, parents, and grandparents, just like us, mowed down in their homes. “Bring them home,” we chant of the 200 hostages perhaps held in tunnels filled with weapons, being used as human shields as Israel fights for its very existence against an enemy that doesn’t protect its people, that is known to use relief money to buy weapons, that teaches its children that judgement day will only come when every Jew is killed.

For the first time in my life, I fear for Jewish American college students enduring vicious threats that scare them into remaining inside their dorm rooms, that cause the closure of kosher dining halls because they’re no longer safe. Yes, I’m taking this personally because reason seems absent from much of the discourse. The left with which I’ve marched and identified over so many issues for decades – reproductive rights, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, human rights – seems not to care about Israeli hostages from more than twenty-five different nations held by a group of people that celebrate the beheadings of Jewish infants. 

I am sad and confused and feel the need to be counted among those who stand up for Israel’s right to exist. I support the Israel that has continued to try to negotiate a Palestinian state, that, while imperfect, is still the closest thing to a democracy in the middle east. I take great pride in knowing that hundreds of thousands of Israelis turned out every Saturday after the Sabbath to protest judicial reforms that would have changed the makeup of the Jewish state. I, like so many around the world, yearn for a free and independent place for Palestinians to live peacefully, to cultivate land, to build infrastructure and to educate their children, not just about Jihad but about science and mathematics, art, and economics. This isn’t a fight against the Palestinian people; it’s a fight against the Islamic Resistance movement that is committed to killing Jews until Israel is wiped off the map.

Anti-Semitism pre-dates the printing press and, at this point, it may even be inevitable. And perhaps I should have been feeling it’s ugliness more deeply, more personally, all along. Instead, I’ve acted by upholding Jewish values and traditions, learning and teaching about our people’s history and struggles, visiting sites where Judaism thrived and Jews were murdered throughout the world, celebrating our rituals, telling our jokes, eating our foods. 

Today’s geopolitical issues in the Middle East are complex and nuanced and the more I read and listen to experts, the more complicated I understand the path to peace to be. What galls me is that most people, with little to no appreciation for history, reduce this and all conflict to good and evil, us and them, the haves and the have nots. In this terrifying, quickly moving scenario in which we find ourselves, the narrative has shifted in mere moments from Israel as victim to Israel as all-powerful master of brutality. 

I have no answers, only pain punctuated by moments of joy and guilt that, still, even now, I and my immediate family have it so good.

November 1, 2023