The kill button

A letter to my fellow Jews in a week of global mourning

There are several culturally polarizing questions for modern Jews, each its own Rorschach test for the diaspora: Zabars or Barney Greengrass? Jerry or Larry? Was Jonathan Glazer’s speech antisemitic or not? My answers are Zabars, Larry, and a resounding “not.”

The day after the Oscars, this take activated a lot of “TYPING NOW” alerts in one of my (several!) Jewish mom WhatsApp groups.

I come from a long line of blue-eyed, red-haired Jews who knew how to survive. To pass. We are living testaments to hiding in plain sight, of doing what it takes. I have inherited a jumpiness from that lineage that makes me very skilled at things like getting an emergency room bed for my husband within 30 minutes of our arrival and getting everyone organized to put in a food order before a huge party flags the waiter down. This is all to say: I am awful for the good.

On October 8th, I took screenshots of every Instagram friend’s post who said “The revolution will be messy,” or “Break out of the cage,” or posted an image valorizing Hamas paratroopers. “These ones won’t save you,” my great great grandparents whispered in my ear. “Every hundred years they find a reason to kill the Jews,” my grandma told me in the months before she died. “People love dead Jews,” history makes clear.

I do not write this on October 8th.

It is April 3rd. In the months since the worst attack on Jewish life since the holocaust, the Israeli army has wrought the kind of devastation that any Jew who was handed a Diary of Anne Frank at age nine would have to put her head in the sand not to recognize.

The images are clear. The images are chilling. The reports defy language. The three holes in the three clearly marked aid trucks kilometers apart in the deconflicted zone defy explanation.