Category Archives: history

November 4, 2024 · 7:30 am

Baby-Boomer Blues

by Howard Wach (New York, NY)

I’m a baby-boomer, Bronx-born, a grandchild of immigrants from Poland and Lithuania, raised in a 1960s Long Island suburb, which was half Jewish and half other white ethnics, everyone newly migrated from city neighborhoods. I matured in the ‘70s, when Jew-barring (or Jew-counting) barriers collapsed across all kinds of American institutions. 

But sudden indifference to Jewish catastrophe and open Jew-hating—the post October 7 legacy—has pushed me and my boomer peers to revisit what we thought were rock-solid certainties. The last eight months changed everything.  

I’m a knowledgeable guy, a teacher, a scholar in my own modest way. But now I wonder what I’ve ever really known. History lulled me to sleep, then woke me with a klop. My everyday worries—money, family, health—have new company, a dangerous twist on the tribalism splintering our civil society. Suddenly, the hyphen connecting “Jewish-American” feels frayed, eroded, anything but certain. 

All my life that hyphen signaled a balance I had no reason to doubt. A birthright, if you will. It never felt conditional or one-sided.  

**********   

In 1906 Shai Wach, an 18-year-old immigrant from Warsaw, arrived in New York and renamed himself Charles. Eleven years later he returned to Europe, a doughboy drafted into the 77th infantry division, the “Melting Pot” division, a polyglot mix of immigrants from lower Manhattan. Charlie fought with the Lost Battalion in the Argonne Forest and returned to New York with a fistful of medals, his patriotism signed and sealed. He marched up Fifth Avenue with his old unit every Armistice Day for decades. Growing up in the Depression-era Bronx, my father Daniel, Charlie’s older son, absorbed the lessons of those parades. 

I never heard my grandfather talk about Israel. New York was his home. The United States was his homeland, and he had the medals to prove it. But his brother perished in Auschwitz (also never discussed); his sister disappeared forever into a wartime Polish convent. I suspect that like his Workmen’s Circle comrades, he had no personal Zionist convictions but believed that the Shoah made Israel necessary. Just not for him, or for his son, or for me. 

********** 

My father spoke more often about his World War II service as he aged. Before he became too frail to travel, he eagerly embarked on a veterans’ “Honor Flight” to visit war monuments in Washington. The day he died a biography of Churchill lay open on the magnifying reading device the VA had given him.  

I turned eighteen just as the Vietnam-era draft ended. A graduate of my high school was killed at Kent State. Some classmates sewed peace symbols on their jeans and joined antiwar protests. Others sneered at the “footprint of the American chicken” and enlisted the moment they could. My peacenik mother hated the war; my proud veteran father defended it. I didn’t know what I believed, but I acted the teenage antiwar hippie, singing along with Country Joe and the Fish and listening to Hendrix tear through the national anthem.  

It never occurred to me—or to anyone I knew—that Jewishness could have any relevance to that all-American strife. National identity was properly a civic affair. We all belonged to this country. I had no Zionist feelings, no desire to make aliyah. But I knew—even through the fog of adolescence—that Israel was a fulfillment, a source of ethnic pride heightened by the miraculous Six-Day War.  I grasped its importance and celebrated the victory, but we were Jewish Americans, secure in that solid identity, feeling no unsettling contradiction or tension. All the old barriers were falling. Wartime dissension aside, what could disturb our happy condition? 

**********

I have a different question now. What made me think I’d escape the history I studied and taught? I’m a lucky Jewish baby-boomer born into the post-Holocaust truce that sidetracked Jew-hating and enabled some of us to vault into corporate suites and institutional power. The truce has faltered for a while, but the October 7 aftermath blew it apart.  

We disappeared into benign, assimilated invisibility. Or so I thought. That dreamy moment in the American empire is over. The sudden disregard for Jewish lives unearthed my half-buried boomer memories: Charlie’s brutal, unspoken knowledge of genocide, my parents looking sideways at goyim, their memory of “Gentiles Only” warnings in employment and real estate ads. Blue numbers tattooed on the forearm of my friend Paul’s father. It all flooded back when I saw torn, defaced posters of Israeli hostages and heard noxious chants rising from massive rallies. I was rudely yanked back into history. 

The shock unleashed a stew of unwelcome emotions in me: anger at “progressives” who abandoned moral sense, who preach simple-minded theories of power, seduce the ignorant, and make Israel the centerpiece of global evil; anger at Israeli zealots who reinforce that corrosive lie—lunatic settlers running wild and the politicians who coddle them; fear for my children, who witness Jewishness embroiled in today’s American strife and may never recover the assurance that “Jewish-American” once meant, the hard-won allegiance my grandfather and father gifted to me. 

**********

In the 1980s I wrote a Ph.D dissertation at Brandeis University about civil society in nineteenth-century Britain. One day I was sitting with friends in a common room when a professor in the History Department, a brash and funny character, dropped by to share his latest insight. “Brandeis has a new theme song,” he announced, “a medley of Hatikvah and Yankee Doodle Dandy.” Then he laughed and walked away. 

Until recently the joke made playful, ironic Jewish sense. It fit perfectly at Brandeis, that model of postwar Jewish-American identity and ambition. In the last eight months I think of it more than any time in the last forty years. But its playfulness is gone, its irony soured. 

Here’s a sign of the times. Brandeis is recruiting Jewish students feeling displaced or frightened at campuses where keffiyehs are fashionable and Zionism is a seven-letter version of a four-letter word.  

That old joke isn’t funny at all anymore. 

Howard Wach is a semi-retired City University of New York academic. He’s written and published articles on educational technology and academic history in various journals, and now writes creative nonfiction and short stories. Palisades Review published his short humorous piece about not buying a time share. 

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October 21, 2024 · 7:03 am

Dancing the Night Away

by Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca (Calgary, Canada)

I was born and raised in a Bene Israeli Jewish family in Bombay, India.  The mezuzah on our door and the menorah on the shelf were to me the sweet and meaningful symbols of my Jewish identity. I lived with my paternal grandparents since the age of ten, and I loved raising my fingers to touch the mezuzah on the door of their home and bringing them in a kiss to my lips. The elders in my family explained that when I made that gesture, it meant that I was taking the name of God as I left the home and when I returned home safely. I felt protected and blessed. I didn’t know then that there was a scroll inside the mezuzah with the words of The Shema “Hear O Israel, The Lord is our God, the Lord is One,” a prayer I recited on waking each morning and going to bed at night. An aunt of mine sent me a mezuzah from Israel and even my husband who is not Jewish, never leaves the home or returns home without kissing the mezuzah. 

On that fateful Saturday in October, I happened to turn on the TV and watched in horror as a young girl, with her arms waving frantically, was calling out for help sitting sandwiched between two masked men on a motorcycle taking her away to where I had no idea at the time. They were shouting the name of their God, a chant familiar to me as there was a mosque just a few steps from my grandmother’s home in Bombay. I had grown up listening to the muezzin’s call to prayer five times a day over the loudspeaker. The neighborhood had Muslim, Christian, Parsi and Jewish families living side by side in peace and harmony. At home we were taught respect for the customs and traditions of each of the different faiths and actually took part in their celebrations. 

Continuing to watch the TV, I soon learned what had taken place and that the young girl was at a dance festival and was being taken hostage.  In Gaza and in some Muslim countries as the news of the tragic events of the day began pouring in, I watched people in the streets rejoicing, chanting the name of their God.  Soon after I saw a clip of a crowd of people marching towards the Opera House in Australia, with banners reading “Kill the Jews!!! Gas the Jews!!!” My mind at once went back to the Holocaust.  The murder of six million Jews was not enough for them. The real aim of the protestors was the annihilation of the Jews, not their support of the Palestinian people.

In India, growing up in the sixties, nobody ever mentioned the Holocaust and there never was any talk about what was happening on such a large scale to the Jewish people in Europe. The Indian Jews were free from persecution and blended in completely with the local population of India, the majority of whom are Hindu.  I entered college in my mid-teens into the Arts stream, and along with other subjects like Logic and Economics, World History was also taught. I cannot recall a single mention of the Holocaust in our textbooks. Only much later, I watched a film on the Diary of Anne Frank, and a movie called Schindler’s List. In fact, the movie had such a powerful impact on me that I watched it twice, weeping throughout the film. I prayed that there would be more ‘Schindlers’ in the world. My mother always spoke about ‘the basic goodness of mankind.’ I believed there were as many good people in the world as there were who brought harm to others.

In the seventies, a discotheque called Blow Up was located in the basement of the Taj Mahal Hotel. That name would be considered taboo in the context of today’s world. Many of my cousins were musicians and played in the bands at the disco. I loved music and loved to dance, often dancing the night away till the early hours of the morning. The waiters would toggle the lights on and off in quick succession, to signal us to leave. A cousin of mine still remembers that I did not sit out a single dance!  The next morning in college, I attended the first lecture of the day with the green eyeshadow still prominently showing up on my eyelids. Those days we didn’t have access to make up remover and the soap we used did not do a decent job! 

The murder of so many innocent young people at the Dance festival touched a deep nerve in me. I had danced freely and without fear, at so many music festivals, it was beyond belief what I was seeing.   My love of dance will forever be colored by the tragic scenes playing out on the TV screen… I was contorted, frozen in that moment, unable to move, let alone dance.

 All I could do was pray…

In a career spanning over four decades, Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca has taught English in Indian colleges, AP English in an International School nestled in the foothills of the Himalayan mountains in India, and French and Spanish in private schools in Canada. Her poems are featured in various journals and anthologies, including the Sahitya Akademi Journal Of Indian Literature, the three issues of the Yearbooks of Indian Poetry in English, Verse-Virtual, The Madras Courier, and the Lothlorien Poetry Journal, among others. Kavita has authored two collections of poetry, Family Sunday and Other Poems and Light of The Sabbath. Her poem ‘How To Light Up a Poem,’ was nominated for a Pushcart prize in 2020.  Her poems celebrate Bombay, the city of her birth, Nature, and her Bene Israel Indian Jewish heritage. She is the daughter of the late poet Nissim Ezekiel.  She currently resides in Calgary, Canada.

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October 14, 2024 · 7:30 am

Lord’s Prayer in Lebensgarten

by Miriam Bassuk (Seattle, WA)

Compassionate Listening Training 

between Germans and Jewish Americans

Lebensgarten – September 27 through October 7, 2002

Attic room full of light,

the Lord’s prayer written

in careful German letters 

on the back wall.

Vater unser im Himmel

Lebensgarten, once a munitions 

factory, now a community 

devoted to peace.

Our circle is thirty-five strong, 

half Germans, half Jews. We 

hold hands, pass the peace feather 

to speak what is most alive in us. 

Sounds of German translated to English, 

English to German. Make space for 

the wound, now layered by several 

generations, a curse that wants to be 

forgotten, yet keeps leaking out.

Together we move, the first grief cry,

afraid for so long to release it. 

Hold me sister, hold me 

brother. Embrace the child in me 

who still can’t understand.

Miriam Bassuk’s poems have appeared in Snapdragon, Between the Lines, PoetsWest Literary Journal, and 3 Elements Review. She was one of the featured poets in WA 129, a project sponsored by Tod Marshall, the Washington State poet laureate. As an avid poet, she has been charting the journey of living in these uncertain times beyond Covid.

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September 30, 2024 · 7:30 am

Hatikvah

by Dennis Gura (Santa Monica, CA)

Back behind the school, under a corrugated

tin awning, propping ourselves up against

the half-filled bike rack, the late spring days

already too hot for most to ride bikes to school,

A.V. and I practice singing Hatikvah off

a transliterated sheet.

We had carefully chosen the place, distant

from the hubbub of our lunchtime recess. 

For the other kids — A.V. was in fifth grade,

me in fourth — would likely have razzed us

practicing a Hebrew song.  We two were the only

Jews in the school, and we kept it on the QT.

We lived on egg ranches with parents

who did not fit the mold of either farmers nor

So Cal rural residents in the 1950’s.  My folks,

Manhattanites, came post-war to California, my 

mother to escape the cold, my father dutiful.

A.V.’s folks, on the other hand, had the more

dramatic story. His mother, elegant and French, 

his father, a Litvak, off to Zion, then to fight in Spain,

barely surviving and repatriated to the Proletarian

Homeland, later air-dropped into Poland.

The two met in, and survived, Auschwitz.  And ended

up in the San Gabriel Valley (LA’s other one!). 

Raising chickens and two kids, and, like my

folks in the ’50’s, keeping their politics —

Left, more Left, yet even more Left — under

wraps in a town whose most famous boast of

the day was as the headquarters of 

America’s only homegrown Fascist group.

Some old Israel contact of A.V.’s dad placed a kibbutznik,

sent to California to help out a local

Zionist-Marxist group, on their ranch. He corralled

as many Jewish children as he could find locally for 

membership.  As the parents were often close to,

or members of, the Party, Zionism was viewed

with suspicion, but, on the other hand (always another

hand), even the most reluctant nationalist Jew in 1960 

was hollowed out by the oh-so recent events, and

thus was scintillated by the stories of pioneers and

survivors creating a state and refuge.  So the 

emissary kibbutznik worked the farm, organized

the kids for the youth group, and encouraged the romance

of redeeming the land and people with discipline and

song.  To earn our membership and the coveted

blue shirt — hultza khula — A.V. and I needed to 

sing Hatikva.  We neither knew nor read

Hebrew, so we worked off the transliteration.

We spent a week at the bike rack, managing 

to memorize a foreign song which only had

a distant meaning, if that.  Years later, I finally 

figured out the meaning of the line that 

cracked us up: Our Hope Is Two Thousand Years 

Old.  The word “Years” was transliterated as

“Shnot.” What’s this song about “shnot”?

What else does a nine year-old think?

That Friday night at our meeting, A.V. and I

sang, likely off-key, from memory, the

words, and didn’t even start laughing

when we got to the “shnot.”

The leaders, only teenagers themselves,

loosely supervised by the kibbutznik emissary,

who could not have been more than in his twenties,

presented us with the blue shirt, signifying

our membership in the youth movement to

build the Zionist future.

Neither A.V. nor I made it to kibbutz life, although

some of our friends did for longer and shorter

durations.  And we’ve lost track of each other,

more or less.  But I learned the words to the song,

and eventually even the meaning, and,

now, especially now, I’m glad I have it

imprinted in my heart.

Dennis Gura is a father, husband, and an engaged and serious Jew who tries to understand a complex and confusing world as best as possible. A native Angeleno, he has been deeply engaged in Jewish thought and experiences his entire life–the ethnic, the ethical, the secular, and the religious.  He was privileged to study at Machon Pardes in 1982-83, and has since bounced around various LA synagogues and Jewish groups.

If you’d like to read more of his work, visit his Substack page:https://dennisgura.substack.com

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September 16, 2024 · 6:31 am

The Back of Our Hands                 

by Annette Friend (Del Mar, CA)

My nephew’s afternoon wedding in upgraded

Jersey City— a rose covered Chuppah overlooks

the sun-speckled Hudson River, the jagged NYC skyline.

My granddaughter, six, sits on my lap,

in a flowered pink dress, beige patent leather

shoes with tiny bows, softly touches the back

of my hand, traces brown liver spots, blue veins,

red splotches of skin damaged by too much sun,

baby oil slathered teenage skin at the Jersey Shore.

Her pure, pink skin, unblemished, smooth

as rose petals, in stark contrast to my time splattered

covering.  She maps the spots up and down my arm

as if trying to decipher clues about my life.

“What happened here?” she whispers,

points to a thin white scar on my thumb.

“Cut myself with a knife making latkes.

I’ll be more careful when I come to visit,

and we make latkes for Hanukkah.”

Her pearly fingertips march up my saggy arm,

“Your skin is squishy like Jello, Granny A.”

I laugh, she giggles snuggling against me.

Does it matter if my skin tells tales of time

passing when she’s here with me in the sunshine

smiling on this happy, sparkling day?

We watch the bride and groom parade

back down the aisle to applause, the groom

has finally smashed the glass after five tries.

All Jewish celebrations are tinged with ancient

adversity, the broken glass, some say, a reminder

of the Temple we lost thousands of years ago

When I was young these customs

made me shrug my shoulders, annoyed, we Jews

can never just kick up our heels, relax and enjoy.

Now my skin proclaims me an old relic as I watch

fresh young lives around me begin to bloom, I realize

stories of the past show us our strength, the beauty

and pain all of our history contains, the past

entwined in all the moments that we are alive,

part of a tradition that teaches us how to survive.

In this moment, the past, the present, the young

and the old, the sun sets, yet rises, on a new marriage,

and our two hands, my granddaughter’s and mine,

side by side, woven in gold.

Annette Friend, a retired occupational therapist and elementary school teacher, taught both Hebrew and Judaica to a wide range of students. In 2008, she was honored as the Grinspoon-Steinhardt Jewish Educator of the Year from San Diego. Her work has been published in The California Quarterly, Tidepools, Summation, and The San Diego Poetry Annual.

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August 12, 2024 · 7:30 am

With love, always

by Annette Friend (Del Mar, CA)

I picture my mother

white shmata cleaning rag

like an eternal light in her hand

seeking to brighten the furniture

in our little used dining room,

shining the up-right piano

I practiced on so badly,

I’ll be loving you, always,

Irving Berlin’s ode to enduring love

always on her lips.

I miss her voice, tremulous, soft,

but always on tune.

I miss her nut cake, her famous

desert that friends, loved ones,

neighbors adored and scarfed down

as soon as it emerged from the oven.

Seven sticks of butter and lord knows

how many cups of sugar

slithered down our grateful throats.

I take out her well-loved serving dishes

when my mahjong friends gather.

Red and white ceramic with pictures

of stately castles in Europe never visible

from the shtetl she came from.

They could even be worth something

but I’d never sell them, I still see her hands

scrubbing their delicate surfaces clean.

We always fought, she and I,

her frame of reference

always Europe and the devastation

of the Jews she left behind.

Mine, trying to dwell

and inhabit this brave new world

of America where she had come.

We always fought and I thought

maybe I didn’t love her enough,

maybe she loved me too much,

always wanting to protect me from

the alien world she found herself in.

I always loved her,

I know that now,

maybe as much as she loved me.

In my mind, she wears a red babushka,

slips it off her grey hair

to wave at the bus we wait for.

signals the bus driver to stop.

She yells, “Yoo Hoo, Yoo Hoo”.

Instead of cringing and looking where to hide,

today in my mind, my lips rush up

to graze her lined cheek, with love always.

Annette Friend, a retired occupational therapist and elementary school teacher, taught both Hebrew and Judaica to a wide range of students. In 2008, she was honored as the Grinspoon-Steinhardt Jewish Educator of the Year from San Diego. Her work has been published in The California Quarterly, Tidepools, Summation, and The San Diego Poetry Annual.

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July 22, 2024 · 7:30 am

A Home With Dignity

by Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca (Calgary, Canada)

(A poem about belonging)

 I want six million Jews back to their homes

To their hat shops, their loved ones, and their bright mornings,

To awake in their beds with soft sheets and warm slippers

To put their feet into, and cross the threshold to kitchens 

Smelling warm with the baking of Challah bread.

I want sisters to whisper to each other from bunk beds

Scurrying up and down the ladder to exchange places

Laughing without fear of being muffled,

Like we did many nights with sleeping parents who

Unaware of our sibling shenanigans, dreamed in peace.

I want six million Jews to watch the butterflies 

Flitting across a kind sun that warmed their hearts

With promises of hope, of births, graduations, weddings 

Dressed in satin gowns with silver stars, the yellow ones 

Out of stock, discontinued, banned forever.

I want six million Jews to look out at the fields with cattle grazing

From train windows, with the fresh air blowing on their faces

Going on a family holiday to the beach with free minds

Surfing the waves, swimming with the dolphins,

Returning to their homes to wash off the sand from their happy feet

To wear shoes of the right size with no holes in them.

 In a career spanning over four decades, Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca has taught English in Indian colleges, AP English in an International School nestled in the foothills of the Himalayan mountains in India, and French and Spanish in private schools in Canada. Her poems are featured in various journals and anthologies, including the Sahitya Akademi Journal Of Indian Literature, the three issues of the Yearbooks of Indian Poetry in English, Verse-Virtual, The Madras Courier, and the Lothlorien Poetry Journal, among others. Kavita has authored two collections of poetry, Family Sunday and Other Poems and Light of The Sabbath. Her poem ‘How To Light Up a Poem,’ was nominated for a Pushcart prize in 2020.  Her poems celebrate Bombay, the city of her birth, Nature, and her Bene Israel Indian Jewish heritage. She is the daughter of the late poet Nissim Ezekiel. 

Author’s note: Challah is a special bread in Jewish cuisine, usually braided and typically eaten on ceremonial occasions such as Shabbat and major Jewish holidays. Ritually-acceptable challah is made of dough from which a small portion has been set aside as an offering. The word is Biblical in origin. (Wikipedia)

(Editor’s Note: “A Home with Dignity was published in “Light of the Sabbath,” the author’s chapbook, as well as in the anthology “Heartstrings,” an anthology edited by Sanjula Sharma). It also appeared in the 25th Annual Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) Poetry Issue of Poetry Super Highway, April 2023, and is reprinted here with permission of the author.)

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July 8, 2024 · 7:30 am

Safety for Jews

by Annette Friend (Del Mar, CA)

For the challah baking event at my synagogue,

a gathering to bring us together during these terrible times,

I carry in two extra bags of flour, four jars of honey,

sesame and poppy seeds we need at the last moment.

I am stopped at the gate of our building, a police cruiser

parked at the entrance, the two, armed guards,

glocks ready at their waists, know me, I am here often,

but still say, “We need to check your bags.”

They poke the grocery bags with a long stick,

find flour, honey, sesame and poppy seeds, scour

my purse for any hidden weapons, then wand me

in search of anything dangerous they might have missed.

I thank the two young guards, too young for such weapons,

tell them how grateful I am for their thoroughness

in protecting us, try not to think of the thugs

with AK-47’s that these innocents might have to face.

How did it come to this? Swastikas painted in the bathrooms

of my sons’ high school.  Friends tell me

they are removing mezuzahs from their front doors.

Do we need to hide all over again, here in America?

A parent tells me her daughter who wears a Jewish star

on her college campus was surrounded by a vicious group,

fellow students, yelling for her to leave, a dirty Jew, she no longer

belonged, shades of Nazi Germany.

We Jews are damned when we are weak, maligned as sheep

led to slaughter, but also damned when we fight back

and told we should take the high road, forgive and forget.

Just make peace.  What hostages?  What massacre of innocents?

As Jews, we thought if there comes a day when we need

to run, there is finally a safe place to take us in, the land of Israel,

our own Jewish state, our homeland.  Now Israel herself cries

for her captives, her dead.  

Safety for Jews is always an elusive dream.

Annette Friend, a retired occupational therapist and elementary school teacher, taught both Hebrew and Judaica to a wide range of students. In 2008, she was honored as the Grinspoon-Steinhardt Jewish Educator of the Year from San Diego. Her work has been published in The California Quarterly, Tidepools, Summation, and The San Diego Poetry Annual.

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June 24, 2024 · 6:22 am

Things I need to hear right now (after nine days in Jerusalem)

by Evonne Marzouk (Maryland)

Tell me

I’ll feel better

when my body heals

when jet lag subsides

tell me I’ll sleep normally

when the war ends

when the hostages return home

when my son comes back

and (please G-d) goes to college

as planned.

Tell me 

I’ll rise from this 

confusion and fear

this time 

of antisemitic attacks 

and biased reporting

that slam against me

unexpected

(but now, more expected)

flinching

every time I turn on the news

or walk by graffiti

in my neighborhood and my city

or pass the police car

guarding 

in front of my shul.

Tell me

I won’t need to fear

what I say

or what I wear,

where I go

or what comes next

that a time will come

when I’ll feel safe again

to be who I am.

Tell me

I’ll again wake 

in the morning

with prayers of gratitude

(and not fear)

and my mind will be clear

for possibilities

empowering others

healing our planet

and living our biggest dreams.

After

the war ends

and my body heals

and jet lag fades

and the world moves on

(although some will never

be able to move on)

tell me, please, 

we’ll use all this

darkness

to find clarity, 

to be a shining light,

to heal the world.

Tell me, please

(though right now

it feels impossible)

we will find a way

together

to create lasting peace.

Evonne Marzouk’s writings have appeared in Newsweek, the Jewish News Syndicate, JTA, RitualWell, the Washington Post, and The Wisdom Daily, and her novel, “The Prophetess,” came out in paperback edition last fall. To learn more about Evonne and her work, visit her website: https://www.evonnemarzouk.com

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June 17, 2024 · 7:30 am

My People

by Marcie Geffner (Ventura, CA)

I lay on the narrow exam table with “everything off” except the blue-and-white hospital gown tied at my neck and open to the back.

It was early morning in Los Angeles and I was hungry—empty, really—and tired from the clear liquid diet—apple juice, vegetable broth, ten lemon JELLOs—and the routine colonoscopy “prep” I’d endured the day before.

A surgical assistant approached me with a wristband.

Inwardly, I moaned. Did I have to do this? Answer: yes.

“Hold out your arm,” the assistant instructed. “Just think of this like you’re at a music concert.”

At my side, the stocky, dyed-blond nurse stiffened.

As did I.

It had been only four days since Hamas militants massacred two hundred and sixty people at a dance party in Israel’s Negev Desert. Israeli soldiers now stood guard at the site, strewn with mattresses, tents, food, clothing, and one militant’s dead body, left there as a warning. In Israel, 1,200 people were dead with another 2,800 wounded. In Gaza, the death toll surpassed 1,500. The war had only just begun.

Could anyone be as clueless as this surgical assistant seemed to be? Apparently so.

“That’s…maybe not the best comment right now,” I said.

The nurse murmured, “I am half-Russian, half-Ukrainian.” Her thickly accented voice came low, as if for my ears only.

She sounded like my grandmother. Born in Kishinev, my father’s mother immigrated first to Panama, then to Los Angeles as a young woman.

I was born Jewish and brought up Jewish. As a teenager, I’d spent one glorious, fearless summer in Israel, studying Hebrew, harvesting potatoes, traveling throughout the state and visiting my great-aunt and great-uncle, who lived part-time in Netanya.

Later, though, my feelings toward my religious heritage changed. As an atheist, I had no interest in prayer. As an adult without children, I felt marginalized, even unwelcome, in synagogue life. But I don’t celebrate Christmas, either. No Christmas tree. No Christmas lights. No Christmas cards. I’m an outsider in almost any religious space.

So why did this Hamas massacre in Eretz Yisrael feel so personal?

Because even without formal religion, I’m still a member of the tribe. I’m not always sure what that means, but I’ve never denied it and can’t imagine that I ever would. Jewish values, history and culture are visible threads woven through the fabric of my life. I don’t know whether I still have distant relatives in Israel, but really, everyone who lives there feels to me like my family. Those vicious attacks? Those people murdered? They could’ve been my loved ones. Or me.

I extended my arm toward the surgical assistant.

“I don’t watch all that stuff happening on the news,” she declared, as if “all that stuff” could not have been of less interest to her. Or to anyone.

She snapped the band around my wrist.

I withdrew my arm.

“It’s easy to look away,” I said, “when it’s not your people.”

Marcie Geffner is a writer, editor and book critic in Ventura, Calif. If you’d like to learn more about her and her work, visit her website: www.marciegeffner.com

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