On the stabbings

A note from an 84th Street Jew

Today, a man on Instagram, that forum for nuance and measured discourse, wrote that yesterday’s stabbings were “[my] fault.”

I grew up half a block from the attacks, on 84th Street and Central Park West. There is a synagogue on that block, where I went to nursery school. It’s unsettling to read that Raul Morales shouted “Allahu akbar” before stabbing an Asian man and then a kippah-wearing Jewish man yesterday. Any Jew reading this news — and certainly this Jew — felt a familiar rush of white hot fear in our bodies.