Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza – A Meditation
The author wishes to express that they cannot provide an exhaustive explanation for every statement; their article rather seeks to show the selectivity of history and identity and the resulting antinomies. The author wishes to remain anonymous because of the political situation in America, not for the CEU community.
I have a friend who lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. His apartment is beautiful and massive; the windows in his living room let in enormous amounts of New York sun that blankets the room. This friend liked to host fancy brunch parties in our senior year of high school – luckily enough inviting me to join. During one such party in the fall of ‘23, we split off from the rest to have a chat by the windowsills. We were drinking wine before noon, floating in the voluminous warm light. At the time, both of us were taking a Jewish History class and the conversation drifted to it and its surrounding topics.
Against the backdrop of Trump's resurgence, his Nazi-reminiscent rhetoric, as well as Oct. 7th and the burgeoning war, our class, its conversations and questions had been infused with an urgent air. Our identities felt like they were being swept into the opaque bottle of world politics quickly becoming personal, impossible to know what awaited us inside.
My friend pointed out the window to the unassuming building across the street. It was where Hannah Arendt used to live - to a dingy boarding room with only a desk and a bed. It was true, you could still see it, the building and the window were the same as in the 40s, But the city, the world and life for Jews had changed; the scrappy and cramped post-war Jewish emigre existence had all but disappeared. Many Jews had done well for themselves; assimilating and building prosperous lives untethered from their terrible history; they could now stand in voluminous warm light.
After escaping Vichy France and Camp de Gurs, that dingy boarding room on West 95th Street became Arendt’s first haven outside the horrors of Europe. There she applied her intellectual upbringing to the Jewish experience and began writing the articles that became The Origins of Totalitarianism, her seminal analysis of the ideology through the lenses of antisemitism and imperialism. This perspective laid bare the foundations of prejudice, human nature, politics, and all of their perils. She wrote from the wisdom of a Jew, but for the immediate freedom of us all.
One of her main concepts was that of worldlessness – “that a man who is nothing, but a man has lost the very qualities which make it possible for other people to treat him as a fellow-man” – and thus, is ‘excised’ from the world. It was not just simple ‘eternal antisemitism’, she claimed, that contributed to the Jewish fate, but the lack of Jewish political action. The Jewish people’s historical atomization, survivalist mindset and avoidance of organized and consequential politics lent them to the first victimhood of worldlessness. She warned that this estrangement from societal participation was slowly becoming “the generalized condition of the day”, withering away everything ‘between us’ – preparing all for the falling thumb of totalitarians that thrive in such a desert.
At the time I frequented that friend’s place, the war in Gaza had just begun. I seldom thought of Arendt living in that apartment as more than a conversational trinket, a homey nod to the intellectual Jewish greats around us. But now, after over six Hiroshima’s worth of explosives have been dropped on Gaza in the name of the safety of the Jewish people, I think of her there much more.
She is what Jewishness after the Holocaust could have been like – but that hope is lost to time.
Such maturity cannot of course be expected from the everyman and everyjew. Arendt had herself chosen the path of the ‘conscious pariah’, knowingly standing outside Europe’s mainstream and threading her Jewish experience into a critique of Western and Jewish society; she strived to be outside of any ideology or organization – to selbstdenken [think for oneself].
But this war has ripped apart any individuality of mind. Simplifications abound, incapable of meshing with the complexity of history, human desires and irrationalities – driving every Jewish head into a frenzy - cleaving themselves into one group or the other.
Through their upbringings, most Jews have a base and vague attachment to Jewish self-determination and thereby Israel – irrespective of its crimes. They have woken up to a world that increasingly believes that any such attachment is immoral. They have also woken up to that Jewish state and many Jews exploiting their trauma of genocide and oppression to perpetrate the same acts; to non-Jews suspecting their stance on Israel and thereby morality without even a word; to history’s lion of antisemitism rearing its head while white nationalist governments and Israel claim to tame it for them.
This situation is heart-wrenching. As these contradictions knit themselves, I see many Jews escaping – falling inward to vague narratives, simple emotions or avoidance of the issue entirely. But the contradictions tower above; they will not sink and vanish into the ground.
Despite the darkness they cast, Jews of conscience must break through and take a stand. A stand for Palestine, a stand against antisemitism and a stand for their history.
We may not all be able to be conscious pariahs, but we must step out of simplicity. Soothing ourselves with reductive victimhood or silence will solve nothing. The boat of Jewish identity has been enough marooned by those pro-Israel, pro-Palestine, Zionist, anti-Zionist, or those unsure of what those terms even mean anymore. In times such as these therefore, it is necessary for a Jew to think for oneself.
***
By accident of my parents finding from post-Soviet Ukraine in America, I never gave much thought to Israel and Zionism. ‘Assimilation’ was here and Israel was there, remote and foreign. But this distance could not last. As for my friend and I by the Manhattan windowsill, the genocide forced the issues into the heads of diaspora Jews worldwide. I have been horrified by what Israel has committed. Not only has it leveled Gaza and slaughtered its people, its methods have been particularly sickening – and eerily reminiscent. Declaring safe zones and then bombing them. Cutting off water, electricity and aid for months. Drones firing on children and IDF soldiers shooting starving people scrambling for flour.
At the end of 2025, I met a Gazan refugee who had been evacuated from the Strip a week prior. He was skinny as a bone. He laughed so hard and so violently around the dinner table every time he started a sentence – you could hardly understand what he was saying. He looked like a gazelle thrashing in joy. When he couldn’t find food or water, he told me, he stirred protein powder into his vape for a scrap of calories. I went to sleep thinking one thing: it was as if he was freed from the camps. When the visceral horror fades, what is left for me is the nagging question – how could any Jews have done this, how could some other Jews not more broadly condemn it?
All I can speak to is the Diaspora's reaction – and its opinion is divided. Outside of knowing condonement, which, as an animal emotion, is hardly worth discussing here, there is a prevailing feeling it is impossible Israel has acted so horribly. I have time and again heard the most outlandish things. That all pro-Palestinian protestors are paid off and potential antisemites, or that ‘Free Palestine’ is a call for the deportation of Jewish Israelis. Many I know have drowned themselves into sycophantic media, believing that the IDF is only going after Hamas and the whole thing is exaggerated for antisemitism and news hype. A relative has come up to me at a family function, showing a nondescript Twitter video of Arabs eating in a restaurant. Look, there is no starvation, he says. Why are they lying, why do you believe them he asked? A large part has been subconsciously blind, too worried to find out what they might not like; carrying no opinion other than ‘it's horrible’.
These attitudes took shape as the blanket vilification of ‘Zionism’ rose. No doubt, Zionism is used to justify Israeli crimes and ethnostate ideology. But the term and, keyly, its surrounding ideas and feelings became a complete pejorative, a dangerous situation considering that most Jews are attached to its nebulous conception. For most Jews Pre-Oct 7th, such a conception at base meant that a Jews ought to have self-determination, which exists in Israel. What ignited arguments between older and younger Jews around the dinner table was Israel’s ethnostate tendency, its occupation and apartheid, hardly ever its existence. Israel was flawed, but as any historical consequence, was not essentially immoral. The external discourse however, was turning far starker and far simpler.
As far as I can come up with the term Zionism can take on or more of the following meanings and beliefs:
that Jews should have self-determination in a state, which exists in Israel
that Jews should have self-determination in a nation-state, which exists in Israel
that Jews should prevent other groups from self-determination within Israel/Palestine by force
that Jews should expel non-Jews from Israel/Palestine
that Jews should follow a genocidal program of Palestinians
For the most radical activism, and slowly for the collective mood, these had all collapsed into “Zionism”. If you did not believe that attachment to the idea of a state, even if reformed, was wrong, you were wrong, a “Zionist” and thereby a colonialist genocider.
Many Jews held at least tacit support for the first definition. This support has led some Jews to support Israel's crimes. It has also pitted a basely held Jewish attachment to Israel against broader society. The racialized trauma of Jews, the protectiveness and paranoia of one’s group has clashed with liberal sentiments that forget the irrational power of ethnic bonds and hope. I have been heartbroken by the excuses I have witnessed. It is of course not good, but I can understand it, for I have had them too. For many, growing up Jewish is lifelong conditioning for attachment to Jewish self-determination – and blindness to its faults.
We are raised hand in hand with Israel’s story. Many countries around the time of the Holocaust did not accept Europe’s Jews in significant numbers; Zionist settlements in Palestine offered the only alternative that would not subject Jews to the command of another community. It is perfectly understandable why after thousands of years of false haven, constant assimilation to backstabbing and finally when the society where Jews were “more German than the Germans” tries to eradicate them like fleas, why the only option conceivable to many Jews was self-determination. Assimilation had led them to their deaths. They felt they had to set sail for their own rock. Naturally, it was under the false pretenses of an empty desert; many Zionists leaders intended to displace the Palestinians. But many Jews could not know what was to come; they were simply seeking a home for themselves. Two thousand years of oppression and wandering do not exactly lead to trust in others for your well-being – there is a reason why Jews of Bergen-Belsen sang the Hatikvah five days after their liberation. While I loathe what Israeli society has become, its Nakba, its occupation, its genocide and the crimes in between, I forgive many of those Jews on the boats. Who, in their position, wouldn't take that chance for safety? They are a tragedy.
The painting of Israel as essentially evil ignores the justifiable attachment to a Jewish state. It may be romanticized, it may be crime-blind, but it is the reason for that Jewish attachment – not to mention the antisemitism in their lives and family histories. While young Jews like me were learning of Israeli history and crimes, the curtain of simplicity had already begun to be drawn – and not pulling it was suspicious. It was deemed history should be reversed, that Israel was just a remnant of European imperialism and (somehow) of white-brown racism that no modern person should stand.
One of my closest friends got involved in such radical activism. We agreed that the war was abhorrent, that Israeli society was sick, its history crime filled, and that a normalization of binationalism was sorely needed. There was one stickler. She thought it was justified to kick every Jewish Israeli out. In our final conversation I asked her why, after all, wouldn’t that be an ethnic cleansing seven times larger than the Nakba? She told me that ‘we shouldn’t let go of ideals’ and that ‘we have to right the wrongs of history’. I said that was immoral. The next time I asked her to hang out, she called me a ‘zio freak’ and after a year of friendship, I’ve never seen her again.
Around such simplicities antisemitic tropes have grown, opening a deep wound that tears Jews from the mainstream. While interning at a US Congressperson’s office over the summer, a conversation with my boss and others turned to Israel. He believed the state was ‘only’ a proxy for imperialist America to subjugate brown people. I perhaps, knew a little more. After mutual condemnation of the genocide, he asked me “why Judaism is the only religion that condones murder?” Two supervisors mhm’ed with the same innocent curiosity becoming of a federal work environment. Another then asked me if blood libel was real.
It has been excruciating to juggle being concerned by the resurgence of antisemitism while deploring the actors that weaponize it. There are fifteen-to-twenty daily reports of antisemitic graffiti at the City University of New York meanwhile a white-nationalist Trump administration wields ‘antisemitism’ to impose authoritarian controls on universities. Popular founder of pro-Palestinian group Within Our Lifetime Nahreen Kiswaani, criticized Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s condemnation of “a scourge of antisemitism in NYC” by saying “there is no scourge” and that “acts like these” (the painting of a swastika on a Jewish man’s kippah) “are often weaponized to justify the repression of Palestinian solidarity”. She is right that the acts are weaponized, but one must be blind or disgustingly motivated to deny antisemitisms rise – and not even comment on the horror of this act.
Most importantly, Israel has done a fantastic job deflecting their terrorism as protection of Jews, and criticism of it as antisemitic. Diaspora Jewish advocacy groups have hunted pro-Palestinian activists, blacklisted them from law-firms, paraded their names on billboards and and in some cases refferred them to ICE.
Where is one to stand in such confusion?
***
It is enormously difficult to stake out a position that protects your identity while condemning its deep exploitation. I understand that difficulty. Sometimes when I think of these things, I wish this all never was. Sometimes, I just begin to cry.
But a position must be taken. Any Jew concerned about Palestinians, our moral standing, the cheapening charge of antisemitism and the exploding racism has to speak out. Most importantly, the exploitation of Jewishness and its results needs to be confronted.
Netanyahu calls on Jews and Israelis to ‘remember what Amalek did to you’, a phrase often found in Holocaust memorials, with Amalek being ‘the foe that God ordered the ancient Israelites to a genocide’. Is this how we want our history used? There is no world in which victimhood should circumscribe a ring of fire around us; our history must urgently be reclaimed. Yes, antisemitism will likely always remain. But shrinking from the realm of action, of speech, of politics, will only lead us out of the world again.
A close friend of Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, wrote that to articulate the past was to “seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger”. Upon reading this line, I seized the memory of Hannah Arendt back in New York. We had ended up across the street from one another, but in times where to be a Jew meant completely different things. One whose identity seemed infinitely redeemable, another who must breathe life back into that redeemability. That identity is potent for good, but it is never good, nor bad. Its twisting is a reminder of identity’s and Jewish identity’s non-essentialism, that circumstances can sever, dilute and strengthen it all at once.
“The humanity, joy and warmth of oppressed peoples grow out of suffering and are the proudest possession of pariah people,” Arendt wrote to James Baldwin in 1962, “Unfortunately, they have never survived the hour of liberation by even five minutes.” I think we can all tell what informed the timing of her statement. At this moment of danger, Jews must, like her, step outside their identities, if only for a moment – and think. If this paranoia, detachment or bloodlust is not confronted, then Jews will surely inhabit the same worldlessness that helped excise them before, and leave many other victims on their way out.
In this, I cannot help but be awestruck by the prescience of Arendt’s words.
For the Jews who experienced this [the Holocaust], all gentiles became alike. This is what lies at the bottom of their present strong desire to go to Palestine. It is not that they imagine they will be safe there-it is only that they want to live among Jews alone, come what may… There is nothing in Herzlian Zionism that could act as a check on this; on the contrary; the utopian and ideological elements injected into the will to Jewish political action are only too likely to lead the Jews out of reality once more, and out of the sphere of political action.” - To Save the Jewish Homeland, There is Still Time (May 1948)
As was then with an inward retreat, as is now. The results of the growing worldlessness will not be as catastrophic, but they may very well be disastrous. As I write this, the American government presents its coastal resort vision for Gaza. Gleaming retiree community Miami-esque towers will be built on a graveyard, where two million lives have been uprooted and savaged. And it was done in our name.
I would like to look back on this time not as when Jews and everyone else lost their heads, but as what proved that it is still possible to rise above the swell of a group tide. That it is possible to breathe, and to think for oneself.
It is necessary. There is still time.
