RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/what-about-anti-semitism-in-our-high-schools/

In recent years, while much of the Jewish community has been keenly focused on antisemitism on college campuses, we have largely overlooked another growing danger. Activist teachers and administrators have increasingly injected antisemitism into American public and private high schools through expanded Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) departments and policies and by promoting radical curricula steeped in Critical Race Theory (CRT), such as the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (LESMC). Through this ideology, American Jews are implicitly and sometimes, explicitly, portrayed as privileged white oppressors. By extension, the Jewish State, Israel, is described as an oppressive ethno-state engaged in apartheid, colonialism, and ethnic cleansing.

We are starting to see the consequences of this campaign. Highschool students, both in public and private schools around the nation are engaging in antisemitic bullying and harassment toward their Jewish peers. Amplified through social media and group chats, the phenomenon has become increasingly frequent in high schools. Antisemitism also rears its head in high school sports and a there’s a spike in antisemitic graffiti, like swastikas. Physical violence rooted in antisemitism has become increasingly common in the U.S. and worldwide, from Los Angeles to Atlanta, Palm Beach, New York, and even in Australia.

Last month, a federal investigation found that during the 2018 and 2019 school years, a Tempe, Arizona, based Kyrene School District violated the civil rights of a middle schooler when she was forced to endure repeated antisemitic harassment in class. Nine students harassed and called her antisemitic names, in addition to making frequent jokes about the Holocaust.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/09/what-jonathan-chait-gets-wrong-about-the-threats-facing-american-jews/?utm_source=recirc-

EXCERPT:

He writes, “No recent development in American life has done more” than the GOP’s playing footsie with antisemites “to throw American Jews’ safety and civic equality into doubt.” That Marjorie Taylor Greene and her ilk represent the biggest threat to American Jews’ safety is nonsense; that they represent the biggest threat to our civic equality is nonsense on stilts.

As the New York Times reported in April, Orthodox Jews have borne the brunt of a new wave of antisemitic attacks, particularly concentrated in American cities. “We had Jews beaten and brutalized in broad daylight in Midtown Manhattan, in Brooklyn, in the Diamond District,” Anti-Defamation League president Jonathan Greenblatt told the Times. “What was remarkable about it was people acted with impunity. These were Jewish people wearing a kipa or who were visibly Orthodox being assaulted for being Jews, and that is brand-new.”

These vicious assaults, which constitute a large portion of the violent incidents perpetrated against Jews, are not committed by people taking their cues from Republicans. They are mostly the work of habitual offenders who’ve cycled in and out of state custody and often have histories of drug abuse or mental illness. What precisely motivates someone to punch a Hasidic yeshiva student on his way to synagogue is unclear, but it is safe to say that Trumpy conspiracy theorists have little to do with it.

Jews have also suffered as anti-Israel sentiment has boiled over into violence, with notable incidents occurring this past spring in New York and Los Angeles. While progressives continue to insist that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism — and to elect to Congress anti-Zionists who have trafficked in antisemitic conspiracies — anti-Zionists continue to have trouble with the distinction.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/college-picks-official-from-antisemitic-cair-to-investigate-antisemitism/

Who better to watch the henhouse than the CAIR fox?

The City University of New York (CUNY) is assigning a former leader of the Hamas-linked Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR) to investigate an antisemitism and anti-Zionism complaint made internally by a Jewish professor.

CUNY assigned its chief diversity officer, Saly Abd Alla, the former civil rights director of CAIR’s Minnesota chapter, to investigate an email sent by Kingsborough Community College (KCC) professor Jeffrey Lax, accusing its president of anti-Zionist antisemitic discrimination. CAIR is listed by the U.S. Department of Justice as an unindicted co-conspirator in funding millions of dollars to the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas, and their leaders have previously called for the destruction of Israel.

As John Perazzo at Discover the Networks has documented, beyond supporting Hamas, CAIR has a history of antisemitism.

Including at New York area colleges.

In 1998, CAIR co-hosted a rally at Brooklyn College where Islamic militants exhorted the attendees to carry out “jihad” and described Jews as “descendants of the apes.”

Nihad Awad, CAIR’s co-founder, had his own stellar history of hating Jews.

U.S. policy in the Middle East is faulty because of Jewish influence on the White House, he told Georgetown University students in a 1998 speech organized by the Muslim Students Association. Of President Bill Clinton’s advisors, he asked, “Now, of Clinton’s advisors, who is now, who of his advisors, who… who is opposing the latest agreement with Iraq? Look at their last names. Look at their ethnic, their ethnic or religious or racial background. You will see that these are the same groups that belong to the same interest groups in the Administration.” He later added that “many Presidents are servants to Israel, and it’s hard to see someone who is, uh, disobeying the political authority of Jewish interests.”

https://freebeacon.com/campus/university-of-vermont-faces-federal-investigation-for-fostering-severe-anti-semitic-harassment-on-campus/

The Department of Education has opened a formal investigation into the University of Vermont over allegations several Jewish students have been “subjected to severe and persistent anti-Semitic harassment and discrimination.”

A group of Jewish students who are remaining anonymous due to concerns for their safety say they have been targeted in a range of school settings merely for openly identifying themselves as Jewish. This includes Jewish students being kicked out of a support group for sexual assault victims, “online harassment against Jewish students by a Teaching Assistant,” and attacks on the university’s Hillel building, which supports Jewish life on campus.

The Education Department, which only investigates matters with substantial amounts of evidence, will review these incidents to determine if the University of Vermont “allowed a hostile environment to proliferate on its campus” in violation of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which bans discrimination based on race and religion.

“Jewish students have expressed fear about identifying publicly as Jewish, report hiding their Jewish identity and have considered transferring out of UVM due to the hostile environment toward Jews,” according to the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, a legal advocacy group that filed the complaint with the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.

https://www.danielgreenfield.org/?utm_source=MadMimi&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Daniel+Greenfield+

As another 9/11 anniversary arrives, we are not in 9/10, a world before the fall of the towers, nor 9/12, the world that was born in the aftermath of the attacks, rather we are in 9/13.

In 9/13, the attacks of September 11 are not considered especially significant. 

In 9/13, years have passed without significant Islamic terrorist attacks taking place on American soil. In past surveys, concern about Islamic terrorism ranks in the low single digits behind everything else.

In 9/13, culture wars, COVID, pronouns and other concerns have vastly eclipsed not only the barbaric mass murder of thousands, but the recognition that we are at war. And that war is far from over.

In 9/13, the people who once specialized in talking about the threat of Islam have increasingly moved on. And it’s hard to blame them. No one really wants to hear it anymore. It’s yesterday’s news.

In 9/13, Mehmet Oz is the GOP Senate candidate, and he’s not the only one, Saudi Arabia is our ally again and the vast majority of Americans polled don’t think that there’s anything wrong with Islam.

America’s Islamic population is growing. The open border doesn’t just bring in drug dealers and gang members, but massive numbers of people from the Muslim world. The Afghan airlift and visas will probably end up importing at least a quarter of a million as family reunification kicks in. Our national demographics are being transformed with the same eventual outcome as Europe.

But it’s 9/13. When I write articles about Islam, they perform worse than anything else. And I don’t have the same raw feeling toward the day that I used to. The ash used to haunt my nightmares. I snuck past the law enforcement and military presence downtown to make it to the site, the twisted mess of what was left, because I needed to know up close that what I had seen was real. But it’s not the same.

I hope it is for you. But I don’t think it is for most of us.

Back then, afterward, I wondered how it was possible to move on and to forget. I was still young then and I concluded that the answer had to be time. With time, pain dulls, what seems fresh grows stale. Such things were abstractions then. I hadn’t lived through phases of history or seen generations change. 

That’s no longer true. I’ve seen how people can change. How they can go mad. And how they can forget.

9/13 is all about forgetting.

9/13 means we’ve done it. We fought in Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s time to move on now. Maybe take a day to remember the people who died in the towers, in a field, bow our heads and go on with what really matters today.

What’s the alternative? Fighting a forever war?

After WWI, most people were done with world wars. But world wars weren’t done with them. That’s a poor analogy because the Jihad isn’t some nationalistic European grudge match. It’s a thousand-year assault on the rest of the world that will not stop just because we’ve decided to move on. 

Early on WW2, wags joked that it was the Bore War because nothing seemed to be happening on the western front. The jokes made sense at the time. But they stopped being funny really fast. 

We’re in the Bore War now. But thousand-year-old wars don’t remain boring.

Americans recalibrate quickly. We believe that the world is always changing. TikTok, machine learning, quiet quitting, this week’s trend. The past is… past. We quickly forgot about the airline hijackings once they became yesterday’s news. We’re more than ready to forget Islamic terrorism all over again.

But Islam does not forget. 

Reality is what exists even when you stop paying attention to it. Ideology and opinion don’t matter. Marxist ideologies claim to know the future and believe it will be dramatically different from the past. But the only reliable way to predict history, as Patrick Henry told a bunch of men long since dead, is with the lamp of experience. The best way to know the future is to know the past.

And sometimes that may even mean living in the past.

Living in the nanosecond has not served our sanity, our reality or our culture very well. But it means that we are always leaving things behind. History keeps vanishing in the rearview mirror. The outrage of the moment fills our minds. And then the next and the one after that. And all the others to come.

September 11 is not just a day. It was a wake- up call. And many of us woke up. But it’s easier to wake up then it is to stay awake. And yet the war we’re in isn’t going anywhere. It’s only getting worse.

Islamists and Islamic terrorists accomplished their main purposes which were to drag America into political and military engagements with them, ones that they were bound to win through sheer staying power, while they infiltrated our political system and spurred massive immigration into our country. 

Islamic terrorism became a partisan issue. And then it ceased to be even that. Democrats have embraced Islam and Republicans, as usual, are tagging along for the ride. Even the conservative landscape is dotted with apologists, truthers, conspiracists and other sympathizers. Meanwhile we’re losing. 

The demographic conditions are coming into place for a next wave of Islamic terrorism which will depend not on internationally coordinated attacks, but domestic terror cells following up on the ‘lone wolves’ like the Boston Marathon bomber and the Pulse nightclub shooter.

Every few weeks another Islamic terror plot is broken up. I wrote about them sometimes. Sometimes someone even reads the article.

It’s 9/13 after all.

Before 9/11, I had a sense of a dimly understood future rushing toward us. I still have that sense now. 

Islamic terrorism is not the only thing that matters. It’s not the only thing that will determine our survival. But it is one of those things. And it’s the one that we’ve forgotten.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/norways-comeuppance-bruce-bawer/

“The relationship between Norway and Israel,” wrote Trond Ellingsen the other day at Document, Norway’s leading alternative news website, “is now at a historically low level.” We’ll get around to the reason in a minute, but first let’s just note that that’s saying a lot, given that antisemitism on a very profound level goes back a long way in the exquisite land of the fjords.

The Norwegian Constitution, drafted in 1814, originally contained this sentence: “Jews are still excluded from admission to the kingdom.” Knut Hamsun, probably Norway’s most illustrious novelist, was a Nazi. During World War II, it was the Norwegian police who, obedient to the German occupiers, rounded up Jews to be sent to death camps; in neighboring Denmark, by contrast, the police played a key role in the valiant effort – in which virtually all Danish gentiles took part – to sequester Jews from the Nazis and then help smuggle them to safety in Sweden. As a result, while only thirty-eight of the 773 Norwegian Jews who were shipped to Auschwitz survived the war, most of Denmark’s 7800 or so Jews made it to Sweden; of the 464 who were captured and, in keeping with a special agreement with the Danish authorities, sent to the concentration camp at Theresienstadt instead of to death camps, 425 returned home alive. 

Yes, Norway was quick to recognize the state of Israel. But hatred for that country, and for Jews generally, has flourished in Norwegian politics ever since.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/open-season-jews-new-york-city-hate-crimes

The attack that sent 31-year-old Yossi Hershkop to the hospital was an unmysterious crime, the opposite of a stone-cold whodunnit. Security cameras recorded clear video of a group of four men approaching Hershkop’s car, with two of them repeatedly punching him through the driver’s side window while his 5-year-old child sat in the back seat. Another camera recorded the license plate and model of the attackers’ getaway vehicle. The assault took place around 3:40 p.m. on July 13, 2022, on a busy street in Crown Heights. Hershkop believes his assailants were identified later that evening.

In an ideal world, a victim’s personal background would be irrelevant to whether their attackers are arrested and prosecuted. But at least in theory, Hershkop is someone with enough of a profile to keep the police and prosecutors focused on his case. The young Chabad Hasid is an energetic yet shrewdly understated local political activist—the kind of person who knows the total number of newly registered voters in Crown Heights off the top of his head, or who you might WhatsApp when you need to reach a particular City Council member later that afternoon. He also manages a large urgent care center in Crown Heights, a position of real civic significance during New York’s COVID nightmare. Hershkop is also a personal friend of mine, although even people I am not friends with should expect the police to move quickly when they’re able to easily identify the people who bloodied them on camera in broad daylight in front of their child.

The police did not move quickly. No arrests were made during the two weeks after the attack, a span in which the getaway car got ticketed in a totally unrelated incident, Hershkop says. On July 27, an exasperated Hershkop tweeted: “No arrests have been made, despite the assailants’ vehicle having been seen all over the neighborhood. My son still has a lot of trauma from the incident & we now Uber instead of walk whenever we need to go out.” Perhaps not coincidentally, the first arrest in the case was made the day after that tweet, some two weeks after the attack. The first suspect was released on bail after the judge ordered a bond of $10,000, significantly less than the district attorney had requested, according to Hershkop. Hershkop is confident that after a long period of delay, the NYPD is now making efforts toward arresting the second individual who physically attacked him.

https://www.commonsense.news/p/my-post-graduation-plan-im-immigrating?utm_source=email&triedSigningIn=true

“Hello Ms. Weiss, Please excuse any typos, I’m writing this half asleep on a train…” 

Thus began a cold email I received in September 2019 from a young man named Blake Flayton. He was a student at George Washington University, he told me. He had just read my book, How to Fight Antisemitism, and he wanted to tell me more about the atmosphere he was facing as a pro-Israel, gay, progressive on campus. 

I remember forwarding the email to my editor and saying: This is exactly who I wrote my book for.

A few months later, Blake’s email resulted in an op-ed for the New York Times entitled On the Front Lines of Progressive Antisemitism, which offered a picture of the choice facing young American Jews like him: disavow Israel or be cast out from the right-side-of-history crowd.

Most choose the former. Blake chose the latter, and with the kind of social consequences you can imagine. I wish I could tell you that the situation on campus has changed in the three years since we first started corresponding. Alas, the opposite is true. 

What inspires me about Blake and his circle of young American Jews is that they aren’t waiting for the grown-ups to make things right. They’re building a new future all by themselves. For some, that means doing something they never imagined they would do: leaving America to start new lives in Israel. Blake is moving a few weeks from now. In the essay below, he explains why.

—BW

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I had always felt at home in America. It was my home and my parents’ home and my grandparents’, and it never seemed like it could be any way else. But three weeks from now, I am leaving the place where I was born and making a new life in Israel. The story of why is the story of a growing cohort of Gen Z Jews who see what the older generations cannot yet see: That the future doesn’t feel like it’s here as much as there.

When people ask me what the origin point is—when I knew I would leave—it’s not one particular moment, but a collection. Among them:

The drunk girl at my alma mater, George Washington, caught on video in November 2019, saying, “We’re going to bomb Israel, you Jewish pieces of shit.” 

The Hillel that was spray-painted with “Free Palestine” in July 2020, at the University of Wisconsin.

The Chabad House set on fire in August 2020, at the University of Delaware. 

The Jewish vice president of student government at USC who resigned in August 2020, after getting barraged with antisemitic hate.

The University of Chicago students who, in January 2022, called on their fellow students not to take “sh*tty Zionist classes” taught by Israelis or Jews. 

The Jewish fraternity at Rutgers that got egged in April 2022—during a Holocaust Remembrance Day commemoration.

The Chabad menorah that was vandalized for the fourth time in two years, in May 2022, at the University of Cincinnati.

The protester who hurled rocks at Jewish students in June 2022, at the University of Illinois.

The swastikas that turned up in July and August 2022, at Brown.

The Hillel that was vandalized in August 2022, at USC. 

The innumerable, antisemitic incidents at San Francisco State University, which the Lawfare Project, a Jewish nonprofit, has called “the most anti-Semitic college campus in the country.”

The two girls recently kicked out of a group that combats sexual assault, at SUNY New Paltz, because they had the temerity to post something positive about Israel.

The universities, which bend over backward to create safe spaces for most students, increasingly making room for antisemites in lecture halls and at graduation ceremonies (see, for example, Duke, Indiana University, the University of Denver, Arizona State University and CUNY). 

The proliferation of statements and articles and open letters proclaiming support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement—a political movement that has as its stated goal the dismantling of the Jewish state—from Harvard to Pomona to Berkeley to the University of Illinois, along with the conviction, widespread on many campuses, that Jewish students should be barred from conversations about BDS, because, well, they’re Jewish.

In college, for the first time, I began to feel the way Jews have often felt in other times and places: like The Other.

At first, I felt deeply alone in this feeling. I wondered if I was paranoid or hysterical. 

But I discovered I’m not the only one. There are many other twenty-something Jews who, like me, had never felt this kind of isolation—until suddenly we did.

CUNY students protest to demand that the university system divest from Israel in May 2021 in New York City. (Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images)

“I don’t know a single Jewish college student who hasn’t experienced antisemitism,” one student from Arizona State told me. 

“Jewish students on campus are forced to leave an integral and fundamental part of our identity at the door in order to be accepted by the community,” another wrote to me from the University of Oregon. (Both students refused to speak openly for fear of social backlash.)

“It was at Florida International University in Miami where I witnessed antisemitism firsthand in the form of anti-Zionism,” Meyer Grunberg told me. Grunberg was shocked by the leaflets distributed by the on-campus group Students for Justice in Palestine, which, he said, accused Israel of committing genocide, including the murder of Palestinian children—harkening back to the medieval blood libel.

Rob Greenberg had heard stories from his grandparents about occasional instances of antisemitism they’d experienced—his grandmother’s employer didn’t want to let her leave work in time for Shabbat, and so on. But growing up in Scarsdale, New York, in the early 21st century, he had never encountered any antisemitism himself.

Until he arrived at NYU.

“So many times,” he emailed me, “I would see gatherings outside the library with ‘progressives’ holding up signs and chanting anti-Israel slogans. I will never forget one time going up to one of those students and challenging him on his positions. Within 20 seconds, when he realized I was not on his side, he called over other members of his group, and I found myself surrounded and was told to leave before anything violent breaks out. I realized then that dialogue was not what they were looking for.”

Bridget Gottdank’s mom is Christian, and her dad is Jewish. Growing up in New York, she, too, never faced any overt antisemitism. Until she arrived at college at Coastal Carolina University. She was at a social gathering with a group of classmates near campus when Israel came up. Gottdank said something positive, and then someone she considered a friend became furious and called her a “stupid Jew.”

I met Noah Shufutinsky at G.W., where he majored in Judaic Studies. “Academically, I had a positive experience,” Shufutinsky told me. But campus progressives became increasingly strident in their denunciations of Israel, to the point that he felt they were “encouraging antisemitic activity.” 

G.W. was the kind of place where it was considered normal for protests about raising cafeteria workers’ wages to involve the Jewish state. In May 2019, for example, students rallying on the quad for a $15 minimum wage for school janitors incorporated strong condemnations of Israel into their speeches—as if janitors in Washington, D.C., not getting paid adequately was somehow the fault of Jews thousands of miles away. To Jewish students, the tethering of Israel to workers not getting their fair share felt insulting and familiar. 

Elijah Farkash grew up in a mostly non-Jewish community on Long Island. He spent nine summers at a Jewish sleep-away camp in Pennsylvania. His family was “very Zionist,” he said, and “proudly Jewish.”

Then, like Shufutinsky, Farkash went to G.W., where he’s now a senior and where Jews, he said, were widely viewed as “a core component of white elitism in this country.”

Farkash said that students were mostly ignorant of Israel, its history, and its politics—why anyone had thought to found a Jewish state in the first place. “What they think are innocent Instagram stories can actually be very dangerous and unsettling,” he told me, referring to, among other things, posts that routinely compare Israel to South Africa or the Third Reich. “Generally, I avoid discussing Israel with progressive students. It brings me too much angst.”

Then there was my own experience at G.W., in March 2020. I had been at a Shabbat dinner on campus, and I was wearing a kippah. As I was coming out, some kids started shouting, “Yahud! Yahud!”—or Jew! Jew! in Arabic—and then, for good measure, added, “You started it!”, which I could only assume meant Covid. I had never experienced anything like that growing up in Scottsdale, Arizona.

When we talk to our parents about all this, they’re baffled. They lack the vocabulary to make sense of what’s going on. They don’t get that the language they devised in the 1960s and 1970s—the language of inclusion and tolerance and everyone being free to be yourself—is now being weaponized against their own children and grandchildren.

What they know is the old-fashioned antisemitism of the right. This can be deadly and horrific: The Tree of Life massacre in Pittsburgh, in which 11 Jews were murdered as they prayed. The attack by another white supremacist six months later, at a synagogue in Poway, California.

But for the time being, that violence is on the margins. And the vast majority of Americans abhor it and support prosecuting it. In 2022, no Jew is worried about being attacked by the Klan on a country road. 

No, what Jews in 2022 fear is being visible as Jews on the streets of Brooklyn. What Jews in 2022 fear, especially if they’re in their twenties, is outing themselves as a supporter of Israel and losing all their friends. What we fear is being called apartheid lovers and colonizers and white supremacists—and how those powerful smears might affect our futures.

To be fair, it was hard for many of our Jewish peers to see this, too.

“Antisemitism from the left is hard for young people to see, because young people a lot of time align with the left,” a Jewish woman who recently graduated from the University of Pennsylvania told me. “Left-wing activists only describe Zionists and Israel, so it’s hard for young Jews to see how it threatens Jews in America.”

But we knew this wasn’t just about Israel. Why else were we always getting called Nazis? 

In college, we lost a lot. We lost friends. We lost our sense of belonging. And unbelievably, some of us lost that feeling of being permanently American. But we gained something as well: a fascination with the Jewish story.

Soon enough we all came, in our own times, to face some questions: How was this changing us? How was the thinning out of our American identities deepening our Jewish ones?  

In the face of all of this, the thought of moving to Israel became an idea that wouldn’t go away—a conversation I kept having. 

Marc Rosenberg is the vice president of partnerships at the nonprofit Nefesh B’Nefesh, which helps Jews in the United States, Canada and Britain make aliyah—that is, move to Israel, return to the Promised Land. Rosenberg told me his organization has seen a 53 percent rise in the number of single Jews under 30 moving to Israel since 2009. In 2021, Rosenberg said, 1,380 Jews in this category made aliyah. He expects that number to go up still more in 2022.

Among that number is everyone in this story.

A few years after graduating, Rob Greenberg moved to Tel Aviv. “A job opportunity in tech is what brought me out here and ultimately led to me making aliyah,” he said. Had he not felt threatened and demeaned as an observant Jew walking around Greenwich Village in his kippah, he might not have gone that route. 

After graduating in 2019, Meyer Grunberg worked for a couple years in the Miami area, and, in 2022, moved to Jerusalem.

(Noah Shufutinsky via Facebook)

Over the past few years, Shufutinsky, who is biracial, became relatively well known as a rapper who sings in English and Hebrew. (His stage name is Westside Gravy.) Unlike in the United States, he said, in Israel he didn’t feel conflicted about his two interwoven identities: his Jewish and black roots. “I love that when I got to Israel, I wasn’t hounded by people asking ‘how are you Jewish?’ and going on and on about ‘the conflict’ every time being Jewish came up,” Shufutinsky emailed me. “Instead, I was greeted by people who referred to me as ‘akh sheli’ (my brother) and encouraged me to convince my whole family to ‘come home.’”

This summer, Shufutinsky followed in the footsteps of his older brother, Dmitry, and did just that.

Bridget Gottdank finished college at West Chester University of Pennsylvania with a degree in political science—and, in early 2022, moved to Tel Aviv. She’s working at a nonprofit.  Elijah Farkash is now a senior at G.W., and is planning to make aliyah when he graduates.

(Bridget Gottdank via Facebook)

I first tried to get to Israel via a study abroad program when I was still at G.W. That was in 2020, and Covid squashed it. Then I tried to go a second time, only to be foiled again by the pandemic. I tried to go again, unsuccessfully, and then again, also to no avail—weirdly, the Post Office lost my passport. (Was America trying to hold onto me?) When I finally got to Israel—fifth time’s a charm—I didn’t intend to make aliyah. I just wanted to see it.

And then I fell in love. On a beach in Tel Aviv, I held hands with a boy, and I still felt deeply connected to the Jewish people—something I had never experienced in the United States. (If you suspect I’m alone, ask any Jew who’s dared to show up at a Pride march in New York or Los Angeles with a rainbow-colored Star of David on a flag or t-shirt.)

(The author via Facebook)

Leaving America isn’t easy—and it shouldn’t be. Right now, I live on the Lower East Side, the onetime home of the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer and of Walter Matthau and of Jackie Mason and so many others. The idea of leaving seems like a betrayal. But I’m resigned to that. It’s a resignation that feels ancient and so much bigger than me.

When I get to Israel three weeks from tomorrow, I’m putting my luggage away. I’ll be done wandering, and I’ll be done asking other people to accept my Jewishness and my Zionism. I’ll be home.