Since the war against Hamas began in October 2023, I’ve had to get used to the fact that back in my hometown of New York, crowds have been chanting for my death and the deaths of my children.
This pro-Hamas chanting in New York City has been going on since October 8, 2023, and most recently, outside a synagogue in Kew Gardens Hills, Queens, where protesters called out, “Say it loud, say it clear, we support Hamas here.” It was hailed as a great sign of moderation that New York’s recently elected Mayor Zohran Mamdani condemned the slogan praising this terror group, which calls for killing Jews worldwide and eradicating Israel, more than a day later.
Which shows just how low the bar has gotten in America in this worldwide war on the Jews.
I have lived in Israel for decades, but I grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, being told by my parents, “There isn’t really any antisemitism in America anymore.” There had been once, they told me. My grandparents had to deal with discrimination, but that was a long time ago.
As a child, I would see elderly people on the subway reading Yiddish newspapers, with no fear of harassment. A number of families in the building where I grew up were ultra-Orthodox, and there were several German-Jewish refugees and Holocaust survivors who lived there. My grandparents lived a block from the headquarters of the Lubavitcher movement, 770 Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where crowds swarmed every Friday and Saturday, trying to get a glimpse of the rebbe.
In the world of culture, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Barbra Streisand, Itzhak Perlman, Woody Allen, and dozens of other Jews were major figures. A little later, there was an influx of Israelis opening businesses all over the neighborhood. More and more, Hebrew was spoken on the streets, and all these different kinds of Jews felt comfortable.
But when I took a trip from Jerusalem to New York last year, my family in Israel begged me not to go out with the yellow-ribbon pin calling for the return of the hostages, which I wore every day.
They had read the warnings of the Israeli government, that Israelis visiting the US should not do anything to call attention to the fact that they are Jewish. They cited reports of harassment and violence against Jews, like the Molotov cocktail attack at a hostage demonstration in Colorado that killed Karen Diamond in June. Not wanting to worry them, I shocked myself by giving in.
I grew up totally secular, so I had never worn anything that would have tipped people off to my religion or my connection to Israel before. It had never been an issue.
But it is now. I worry about the Jewish friends I grew up with, even though I really don’t need to, since there is no way for anyone on the street to know that they are Jewish. Almost all of them voted for Mamdani and support him wholeheartedly. They think that I am crazy, to put it mildly, to be concerned for their well-being.
The only Jews I know there who didn’t vote for him have lived in Israel or have family in Israel. Interestingly, those who seem to feel most fervently that I am deranged on this subject had parents who were Holocaust survivors. Go figure.
Reading Gershom Scholem's memoir, From Berlin to Jerusalem
INSPIRED BY my increasingly frustrating conversations with these friends, I recently re-read the memoir, From Berlin to Jerusalem, by Gershom Scholem, the great scholar and author, whose decision to research Jewish mysticism in a serious way created a new field of academic study. He was born in Berlin in 1897 and quickly became a Zionist, moving to Palestine as soon as he could, in 1923.
I don’t know much about mysticism, but I avidly read this memoir after I came to Israel for the first time at the age of 22, right after graduating college. My parents were Zionists who had never visited Israel, which was common among the people with whom I grew up.
I went because I was curious about Israel and didn’t know what else to do after I graduated, and I returned to New York after a year. Eventually, I became an Israeli citizen and moved here permanently, but I did so not out of a fear of antisemitism but because I was married to an Israeli.
When I first read From Berlin to Jerusalem, I was interested in the fact that Scholem was an intellectual who had abandoned the universities of Europe for a place where higher learning was just beginning, and that despite this, he managed to do ground-breaking research in Israel that was eventually recognized around the world.
I was also fascinated by his passionate intellectual friendship with another young German-Jewish writer, Walter Benjamin, who left Germany with the greatest reluctance and took his own life in a hotel room in Spain after the group he was traveling with was about to be sent back to Nazi-occupied France. Scholem wrote about his relationship with Benjamin in another memoir, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, which is also well worth reading.
What really stopped me in my tracks when I re-read From Berlin to Jerusalem last year was this passage, which refers to the years between 1919 and 1922, when he was a student in Munich:
“In Munich, I had a chance to get acquainted with incipient Nazism at the university from close up. The atmosphere in the city was unbearable; this is something that is often disregarded today and presented in more muted colors than it actually was. There was no disregarding the huge, blood-red posters with their no less bloodthirsty text, inviting people to attend Hitler’s speeches: ‘Fellow Germans are welcome; Jews will not be admitted.’
“I was little affected by this, for I had long since made my decision to leave Germany. But it was frightening to encounter the blindness of the Jews who refused to see and acknowledge all that. This greatly encumbered my relations with Munich Jews, for they became extremely jumpy and angry when someone broached that subject. Thus, my association with Jews was limited to a small circle of like-minded people.”
The parallels between 1920s Munich and New York (and other places around the US and the world) are glaringly obvious and ominous. Now, it’s Zionists who are not welcome in any number of settings, and the Jews I know in New York ignore this, as if Judaism and Zionism were not inextricably linked. And while Scholem managed to find his small circle of the like-minded, he never totally severed his emotional connection with those he had left behind, just as I can’t forget my friends.
It’s telling that this memoir is dedicated to the memory of his older brother, Werner Scholem, a German Communist leader who was killed in Buchenwald in 1940, after seven hellish years in prisons and concentration camps.
CLEARLY, JEWS in present-day New York are nowhere near as powerless as they were in Germany during Scholem’s youth. The high rate of intermarriage in the US, which many Jewish leaders condemn, nevertheless shows just how much Jews are accepted. But US Jews who don’t want to blend in to the point of disappearing completely into the crowd face a tough road right now.
After October 7, I quickly became aware that American Jews with a public profile were afraid and were keeping their heads down. I’m talking about journalists and writers who are politically outspoken on every other issue but have nothing to say about antisemitism or Israel.
As I type this, they are posting frequently about the killing of Renee Good by an ICE agent in Minnesota last week, and a number of other issues. But when it comes to Jewish and Israeli issues, they are quiet. I realized quickly it was a silence born of fear.
I began to see just how scared they were during the first few days of the war. I was approached by a woman I know in Israel whose son, like mine, is on the autism spectrum. Her son was in a bilingual program for Arab and Jewish young adults with autism at Kibbutz Ramat Rachel, where the participants work with animals. She told me that the director of the program, Gabriela Leimberg, had been kidnapped into Gaza on October 7, along with her 17-year-old daughter, Mia, and that they were among the 251 hostages who were being held by Hamas.
The parents of the participants in the Ramat Rachel program had made a video with English subtitles showing their children speaking as best they could in Hebrew and Arabic, talking about how much they loved Leimberg and how much they missed her. They didn’t understand why she wasn’t with them. Knowing I was a journalist, this mother asked me to get the video out there, as much as I could, to bring attention to the plight of Leimberg and all the hostages.
Because I have written about my son and special-needs issues, I know some writers and activists with an interest in special-needs issues in the US via social media, many of whom are Jewish, and I sent them the video. I also sent them articles about Noya Dan, a 13-year-old on the autism spectrum who was missing, and, along with her grandmother, Carmela Dan, was believed to be held by Hamas. Tragically, it later turned out that she and her grandmother had been murdered on October 7, and their bodies were eventually found, but for a time it was thought that they were in Gaza.
Of the dozens of American Jewish autism parents and writers I contacted, three Jewish parents of children with autism posted the video on their social media, as well as one Jewish writer with no particular special-needs connection, who was simply concerned, and two autism activists who were not Jewish.
Most of the rest, as you’ve probably guessed, didn’t respond, which is not surprising. People ignore messages all the time. But a prominent Jewish-American journalist with a son on the spectrum about the same age as mine, with whom I had often chatted in friendly terms in the past, said he didn’t feel he could post the clip or the article, because he didn’t want to be thought to be supporting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
God knows, about half of the Israeli electorate are no fans of the prime minister. At first, I tried to convince him of this, explaining that just as many Americans are critical of their government, a huge number of Israelis are fiercely opposed to Netanyahu and his coalition. His response was that he “didn’t know enough” about the war to post anything. I had never known him not to weigh in on any subject that was in the headlines, but suddenly, in this instance, he “didn’t know enough.”
What I sensed in his response to the utterly apolitical clip and article I sent was fear. This writer often publishes in mainstream US publications and has written books for major publishing houses, and he knew all too well that the gatekeepers at many of these places would not approve of his support for the return of the hostages and that they would likely not look kindly on any show of sympathy for Israelis, no matter what the circumstances.
I can certainly understand that someone might not want to risk his livelihood, but perhaps the most disturbing part of this is that he could not admit the real reason for his decision. He could have ignored me, as others did, but something in him, I think, made him feel the need to justify his choice. It’s no accident that although his defense was ignorance, he did not ask me any questions about the subject.
When Gabriela Leimberg and Mia Leimberg were released, he did not celebrate, of course, nor did he mourn when Noya Dan and Carmela Dan’s bodies were discovered. On this issue and this issue only, he was silent. His career is still flourishing, and he frequently posts adulatory messages about Mamdani. He and his cohort didn’t rip down hostage posters, but they didn’t think it was interesting or noteworthy when others did.
Another line from Scholem’s memoir describes the attitude I encountered among American Jews like him post-October 7. Scholem wrote: “… It is safe to say that the overwhelming majority of those who went to Eretz Yisrael from Germany in the early Twenties were motivated by moral rather than political considerations. It was a decision against what was perceived as a helter-skelter, dishonest and undignified game of hide-and-seek… Germany was a vacuum in which we would choke. This is what drove people like myself and my friends to Zionism.”
Certainly, this New York writer’s attitude could be described as dishonest and undignified, as could many of the pro-Mamdani New York Jews.
I HAVE READ in the pages of this newspaper about Jews becoming more observant following October 7, and of Jews in the Diaspora considering aliyah in greater numbers. That is the opposite of the attitude I have observed among my friends and acquaintances. Their Jewish identity was never an important part of their lives before, and now it is a badge of shame, embarrassing at best, something to be ignored or hidden. They think about it as little as is humanly possible.
I spent about a month in the US this year, and only the most fervent Zionists in my family thought to ask even one question about what it was like for my children and me to live through the war, or how my special-needs son, who has a noise phobia, coped with the frequent missile alerts. The rest of the Jews I met there managed not to know or think about what was going on here.
Sometimes, I wish I believed they were right about everything, that the increase in antisemitic assaults since 2023 in New York is irrelevant, that my family members who begged me not to wear the yellow ribbon pin were hysterical, and that Jewish schools and synagogues do not really need to increase their security measures in the face of the increase in threats and assaults.
I find myself hoping that Mamdani will soon cut ties with people like Alvaro Lopez, a member of his inaugural committee, who posted a now-deleted tweet on X showing women tearing down hostage posters with the comment, “All I see are heroes.”
Maybe the mayor will admit in clear, unambiguous language that the phrase, “Globalize the Intifada,” is a call to kill Jews around the world. Perhaps he will soon clarify why he said that an event in November at the Park East Synagogue in New York, run by Nefesh B’Nefesh, an organization that helped me years ago with the paperwork so that my mother could move to Israel, was a violation of international law.
But it would be naive to think that any of this will happen. What I do think is highly likely is that Jews who are “visibly Jewish,” a phrase I don’t recall ever hearing before 2023, will be the ones to pay the price for the normalization of antisemitism and the demonization of Zionism in the next few years in New York.
An uptick in antisemitic violence will barely register with my friends and acquaintances, but now and then they’ll hear or see something that will upset them. Some non-Jew they know will make an antisemitic remark in front of them, not knowing or caring that they are Jewish, and they’ll stay quiet. It will happen again. And again.
Keeping your head down too long can make you develop a crick in your neck. I wouldn’t want to live like that.
Because I loved growing up in New York, I’m sad that the place I once regarded as home is no longer welcoming, that what I perceived as normal was a bubble that has burst. I guess I’m especially sad because I feel there is now a shadow between me and my closest friends.
Right now, to return to Scholem’s quote about the Jews he knew in Munich who ignored Nazism in the 1920s, it is I, and not my friends, who have become “extremely jumpy and angry” as I have failed repeatedly to make them understand why I am alarmed. It’s as if I am on the beach with them, and I can see a tsunami heading straight for the shore, but they won’t look up.
If they’re right, it will dissipate long before it reaches them. But I wish they would at least take me seriously enough to invest in a couple of life jackets.