What It’s Like Being Jewish 3 Years After October 7th

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Hi, I hope this message finds you well

As your friend, there's some stuff I really need you to hear, and I wanna make sure I say everything that needs to be said, so I've written it all down in this letter in hopes it will reach you

In the aftermath of Gaza's horrific October 7th attack on Israel, I received words of support from many of you

It meant so much to me, and I'll never forget it

At that time, I posted on social media that those of you who were uninformed or confused or disconnected shouldn't have felt obligated to weigh in

I saw your hesitation for what it was, not cowardice or lack of care, but feeling out of your depth in the midst of a polarizing conflict playing out thousands of miles away

But here we are, three years later, and I'm afraid I have a very different message for you now

I, my family, and my beloved Jewish brothers and sisters can no longer afford to let you sit this one out

We need you desperately to understand what is happening to us here in the West in real time, and I need you to hear it from me, not from the news or social media or some movie star or politician or an anti-Zionist, but from the mouth of a run-of-the-mill, traditional establishment American Jew who also happens to be decently tapped into the broader Jewish experience My dear friends, there is just so much I need you to understand I need you to understand that October seventh absolutely shattered and traumatized the entire Jewish world, that we all still carry that ongoing trauma and conflict presently in a big way

And for those of us here in the West, the world's response to October seventh has been even worse, shattering not just our hearts, but our understanding of this world and our place in it

It was the cataclysmic event of our lifetimes

For us, there was life before October seventh and life after it

I need you to understand that overnight I went from being a person who had never experienced bigotry in my life to someone who experiences it multiple times a day every day, that we are being absolutely pummeled with anti-Jew bigotry from the right and the left, at work, at school, in public spaces, on social media, and much of it appears in forms you've not been trained to recognize

Believe us

I need you to understand that Jews have been cut off by our best friends, colleagues, family members, not for anything we did, but for simply continuing to be the same Jews we've always been, the same Jews we've been for thousands of years, Jews with a connection to the people and land of Israel

It's everybody around us who suddenly decided it's no longer permissible to be that kind of Jew

I need you to understand that we are being pushed out of entire industries: academia, art, medicine, publishing, psychology, yoga, to name just a few, and that we once again find ourselves having to create our own enterprises in order to feel safe

Often that ostracization comes not from outright hate, but from a chilling effect of people being afraid to even associate with us, not because of any specific stance necessarily, but because we're Jewish, and that feels risky right now

I need you to understand how ubiquitous and messed up that sentiment is

I need you to understand that being a Jew today means watching in dismay as your friends and family and respected public figures are swept into a manipulated unreality without realizing it, swept by a carefully seeded, decades-long, billion-dollar jihadist propaganda campaign along the tide of public consensus with no resistance, as millions have been likewise manipulated by the hidden hand of authoritarian regimes in every age

Definitions no longer matter

Data doesn't matter

Evidence doesn't matter

Only the narrative, the repetition, the slogans, the purity tests, the self-righteousness

I need you to understand that even many Western liberal Jews have fallen prey to this propaganda

The line isn't so much Jew and non-Jew as it is those who are awake to the scheme and its machinery and those who remain ignorant I need you to understand the pain Jews are carrying around every day from all this hostility, from the erosion of social norms, from the fear that being publicly identified as Jewish might result in our physical harm or death

And that as rare as that might be, it's not irrational because it has happened repeatedly and continues to happen with increasing frequency all over the world

And I need you to understand I'm not being hyperbolic I need you to understand that once a Jew is identified as a Jew, they are treated as a Jew, regardless of their skin color, and that Jews are victims of more hate crimes in this country by percentage than any other minority group

To assert that a white-presenting Jew cannot be the target of bigotry is as preposterous and hurtful as saying a white-presenting gay person cannot be the target of bigotry either

I need you to understand that there are only sixteen million Jews on planet Earth, or one million less than Kai Cenat, who most of you don't even know, has followers on Instagram

Though we may look and live differently, we are one people, a tribe, like Native Americans, like Avatar's Na'vi, a tribe that first emerged as a collective in the land of Israel eons ago, and that like any tribe, we share far more than religious belief

We share language, history, homeland, laws, customs, a calendar, an ethos

We are Am Yisrael

And with our comically small number, our voice cannot ever hope to be as loud as everybody else's

So if truth is measured by volume, we will always lose, and the millions who seek our destruction will always win

They say Jews control the world, but the reality is we're too small to control anything, except for the first time in centuries, in one tiny strip of land, ourselves

Which leads me to this

Of all the things I need you to understand, this is one of the most important

Every negative thing you've been taught about Jews is not only a lie, but an inversion of truth, a specific pointing of the finger meant to distract you from the evil forces who are actually perpetuating those exact crimes

"Uh, hey, look over there," that continues to hook unsuspecting minds all over the world

Colonizers? Only one country on Earth speaks Hebrew

Twenty-two speak Arabic

Egypt, Turkey, Lebanon, they used to be all Christian, remember? Islam's third holiest site is built directly on top of Judaism's holiest

Muslims are, of course, allowed to visit the Temple Mount and worship there

Jews are not

Supremacist? There are sixteen million of us, four hundred forty million Arab Muslims, many of whom openly desire to turn the entire world into one caliphate under Sharia law

Baby killers? While thousands of innocent children have been killed as a result of the horrible Gaza War, it is Gazans who use child soldiers, Gazans who refuse to let a single child shelter underground, Gazans who hide weapons in schools and kids' bedrooms, Gazans who use children to move their weapons, and Gazans who methodically moved from house to house, shooting Israeli babies point-blank in their cribs, stabbed them to death inside their mothers' wombs, kidnapped them to a foreign country, choked them to death with their bare hands

The pain of that nightmare isn't enough? We also need random Westerners calling us baby killers while the actual gleeful by design killers of children are never even discussed? I need you to understand that when somebody says there is an ongoing genocide happening in Gaza when there's barely even armed conflict there at all, they are straight up lying, and no one but us seems to care

If their argument is so sound, why do they have to lie about it? I need you to understand that these libels are not criticism of Israel, which is in fact just another inversion because not only are they not criticism, but they function by actually removing the requirement to provide any sort of argument at all

You just have to say the word, which you only know because you heard someone else say it, and that's enough for the charge to be levied without attaching anything that could be considered actual criticism at all

I need you to understand that Hamas functions like the mafia, that every NGO or UN worker or journalist who operates there does so as either a member of Hamas themselves, a collaborator, or tightly controlled under threat of death

There is no free press or circulation of information in Gaza

There is only Hamas

I need you to understand that there is no such thing as a war without innocent suffering or without weak-minded soldiers who commit horrific crimes

Neither of these affronts is unique to Israel nor constitutes a genocide

I need you to understand that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are two branches of the same tree

They both exist to create socially acceptable permission structures by which to hate Jews

Saying, "I'm not antisemitic because I don't hate Jews, I just hate this uniquely evil and horrible thing that I only accuse Jews of doing," is Jew hate

Saying, "I don't hate Jews, I just want them to deny a core aspect of their personhood in order to be accepted socially," is Jew hate

Saying, "I don't hate Jews, I just hate the Jewish state, which justifies my rabid hostility towards any Jew or even non-Jew anywhere who so much as appears to be in some way connected to it," is Jew hate

Saying, "I don't hate Jews, I just force them to publicly agree to a set of demonizing lies about themselves crafted decades ago by the Soviets, exported to the Arabs, and laundered through the Western lens of social justice," is Jew hate too

I need you to understand that this is what 1930s Europe looked like

When we ask, "How could all those people have believed those horrible things about Jews? How could they be so willing to turn on their own neighbors, business partners, lovers, friends?" This is how

This is what it looks like

It is happening now

Politicians, news media, celebrities, friends scooping up the bullshit talking points being blasted through the mass communication of the day and uncritically parroting these lies, accepting them as fact, allowing them to feed into centuries of preexisting anti-Jew prejudice before blossoming into a suddenly completely acceptable social environment of anti-Jew racism and bigotry

I need you to understand that every society who has come for the Jews thought that they too were on the right side of history

I need you to understand that when we say that the UN and Amnesty International and The New York Times and Wikipedia are anti-Jew organizations, it's because they are backed by mountains of data and proof and historical record and experience and easily verifiable facts

Believe us

Google it

I need you to understand that aside from a handful of privileged Westerners and ultra-Orthodox extremists, the vast majority of the world's Jews identify as Zionist, which for us simply means that we believe Jews deserve sovereignty and self-determination in some part of our homeland

That's it

So please understand that those who decide they do not hold this view, the ones who are anti-Jewish sovereignty or anti-connection to Israel, are the ones adopting the radical and extreme view that should require the most explanation

Yet it's the rest of us constantly being put on trial to defend our position

Do you see how backwards that is? That the ones who've decided our ancestral, religious, and familial ties to Israel are suddenly excisable from Jewish identity, these people should be questioning us? Their view should be adopted as normative or mainstream? They're allowed to think what they want, but please understand this is a shocking and highly unusual position

Please understand that before the world forced us to, most of us in the West never called ourselves Zionists at all

We're just Jews for whom a fundamental love of Israel is baked into the very foundation of our being

I need you to understand that for us, Free Palestine is like hearing All Lives Matter or Sieg Heil, because we always hear it when it's being used to silence us or intimidate us or call for the erasure of our people

We hear it yelled at our children walking to class

We get it spammed in our comments, thrown down like a gauntlet to end a conversation or a speech, shouted at our dead bodies after we've been murdered

I need you to understand that whenever I bring this racism to light, I am met with more racism

Bigots who tell me I'm a liar, or I'm weaponizing antisemitism, or I'm playing the victim card

That instead of being met with remorse or curiosity or belief, I'm met with more hostility, like I have some sort of ulterior motive

What could that agenda possibly be? You think I wanna talk about this stuff? You think this is fun for us? I need you to understand that there will be people who attack me for this letter

They will use terrible slurs, they will mock my appearance or intelligence or my family, or call me nepo baby or a failed actor

They'll dismiss what I'm saying as just propaganda or defensive genocide or hasbara, while providing no evidence to support these assertions or doing any work to see if perhaps what I'm saying might in fact be true

This is getting long, friend, so let me wrap it up here

I'm sure there's something I forgot, and for that I apologize

There's just so much to try to explain, so much to carry around, and yet we have no choice

But you do, and so what I need you to understand most of all is that I need you desperately to believe me

I need to know that you know that I am not making this up

These aren't talking points

I'm not being paid for saying this

This isn't hearsay

It's just me

This is happening to me and to everyone I know

I need you to understand what I and other Jews are enduring because it is only through your friendship and solidarity that we will come out the other side of this okay

We need you to stand with us when we're together and speak up for us when we are not

We need the comfort of knowing you get it, that you're not blind to what's happening, that you care enough about us to want to understand the truth and get this right, no matter what the media and smoke says

Our stakes are existential

They're the reason why I and thousands of people like me have completely remade our lives to align with the sole purpose of strengthening the Jewish collective to ensure we can weather this once-in-a-lifetime shitstorm

This is the moment

Now

This is it

Be the friend we need

Please, if not now, when? If not you, then who? Most sincerely, your hopeful friend, Jonah