About Last Night...

Children Of Israel Are Never Alone

Hey, beloved tribe.

So last night was the inaugural kickoff of our Never Alone Book Club. I was inexpressibly happy with how well it went. The event chat held some horror stories about the Nazi Zoom-bombing of similar events in the day or two ahead of the meeting, and I was braced for the worst. But very thankfully, nothing like that took place and well over 100 people tuned in.

Nellie could not have been lovelier. She held everyone spellbound as she read from the book’s final chapter. During the Q&A, she was warm, empathetic, candid, down-to-earth, intelligent and wise (which are really two very different qualities, and she has them both in spades).

I was inundated with a landslide of messages in the minutes after it ended. So many of you were kind enough to drop me notes of gratitude for the chance to gather with her. Many of you stressed that it was a restorative, invigorating, uplifting and even a therapeutic experience.

I hope and believe that was only the first of many such events I’ll be able to arrange for you. I will strive to make every one of them as nourishing as this one was.

My cherished friend and Never Alone community member Debbie Frank handled the tech end of having such a sizeable Zoom meeting run perfectly. Thank you, Debbie!

The truth is, I have a lot of help from this incredible community. I’m doing so much right now, from trying to build a home on the left side of the aisle for Israel-loving Jews; to planning events for my book club, with a goal of lavishly supporting as many Jewish writers and authors as humanly possible, but also with a master plan to fight the anti-Semitic ostracism in the lit community (to be revealed very soon); plus going to meetings of Jewish teachers who are fighting the anti-Semitic teacher’s union here, and a host of other things.

My friend Karen went with me to Seattle when I wanted to meet Rudy Rochman, with whom I want to collaborate in this battle. I had so many back to back meetings all over the city, which I don’t know well. Some were in hotels with no options for parking besides a very steep valet option. She continually dropped me off and picked me up and took me to wherever I needed to be next.

When I expressed my immense gratitude, she said: “You know, I want a role in this fight too. I can’t write, because writing makes me so anxious that I could never start a school paper until the last second and then I would need to pull an all-nighter. And I can’t argue with people, because I get too upset. But I know Seattle very well, and I can drive.”

This has stayed with me and stayed with me. I feel like it’s emblematic of something huge. We all have very different things to bring to the fight against anti-Semitism. Some of us have money. Some of us love to write and have a facility with it. Some of us have tech skills. A staff member of Substack recently reached out to me to offer me any help navigating the site that I might need, just because he came upon my newsletter and likes it. Without him, I wouldn’t be utilizing substack for a fraction of what I plan to use it for now. Because I just didn’t know certain features and possibilities were available to me.

Some of us are networkers who can make invaluable introductions. Some have their own platforms but see the beauty in joining forces. Here it’s worth saying that I am not in competition with anyone in the Jewish world. All I want is to support and find synergy with every other member of this gorgeous tribe. We are so much stronger together. There’s nothing we can do separately that can’t be enhanced by cross-pollination.

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So even if you’re not in the book club, I believe Nellie Bowles is a figure worth celebrating here. Her book Morning After The Revolution: Dispatches From The Wrong Side Of History is a timely, vital, often hilarious look at how the left — my home and likely yours too — lost much of its mind over the last few years.

One recurrent theme of her book is cancel culture, which is absolutely a real thing, no matter how many progressives say it’s not. One of the most striking excerpts from her book is this:

A cancellation isn’t about finding a conservative and yelling at them. It’s about finding the betrayer in your midst. It’s about sniffing them out at your coffee shop or your office.

She hails from the left herself and has taken part in her share of cancellations. She describes the warm pleasure of collective action, of doing something that feels essential on behalf of friends who say they’ve been harmed.

She contrasts the obsessive purity tests of the far left, and the vicious purging of offenders on their own side, as very often taking the place of the hard collective effort that real change demands. The organizing, the letters, phone calls, canvassing — all that tedious, unglamorous labor that isn’t fun, isn’t sexy, but is how progress is incrementally won.

In our conversation I remarked that this is entirely true if your goals are essentially achievable. Like universal health care is an ambitious goal, but it’s achievable. Ending voter suppression against the Black community, enshrining Roe v Wade in national law, passing the Marriage Equality Acts: those are long, hard fights but they’re fights that can be won.

But if your goal is to smash the patriarchy worldwide, or abolish global capitalism, or even abolish the police, your goals are not going to be achieved. Not in your lifetime, and almost certainly not ever. So if you passionately want something you can never have, you kind of live in a state of impotence. And the only power you have is not to rail at the MAGA community, because your rage and grief is entertaining to them and they love when you get upset. The only power you have is against those most like you, who care about you — and so even if fascists are breaking down the door, they’re going to focus on bullying their own allies because that’s the only way to experience the rush she describes, the warm pleasure of their own weight and power.

Another topic I made sure to touch on with her — because of the gratitude I feel for her response to it — was the anti-Israel bias in the press, and just how deep it goes.

After October 7^th, a lot of people in our community were shocked by the left-wing anti-Semitism that spiked into the stratosphere. I was less shocked because I’ve been calling out anti-semitism in my home on the left for more than 10 years. But something that did shock me was realizing just how closely the left mirrors the right when it comes to acknowledging actual facts. We on the left complain that the GOP and the right wing and their propaganda arm called Fox News make up their own facts and craft their own narrative of what’s happening, leaving out any inconvenient truth that doesn’t conform to their ideology.

Of course I knew the left-leaning press was biased against Israel, and writers like Matti Friedman were talking about that as far back as 2014. But until I started following the war as closely as I am now, I couldn’t see how deep it went.

For instance, when the IDF circled back to Al-Shifa hospital and raided it a second time, they took out a huge number of Hamas militants. In the Israeli papers, this was celebrated, and in countries like Lebanon, this was mourned. I remember one Lebanese paper said something like: “The damage done by the Zionist entity cannot be overstated but we will recover somehow.” There’s a website called MEMRI that translates these news articles so I was able to see that Israel and Lebanon agreed that a huge contingent of Hamas members were killed, even if their emotional response to that was in polar opposition to each other.

But in American papers, you would have thought the IDF raided the hospital for kicks. US outlets devoted almost all their print space to descriptions of the carnage and there might be one line like: “Israel claims that many, or most, of those killed were Hamas militants,” as if that claim were highly suspect and likely a cover for their bloodlust.

I told Nellie that what fills me with the most despair is that most Americans are absolutely never going to read a range of papers in the middle east to track what’s really happening, so they’ll never have any way to know how slanted their news is. They have nothing to compare it to. They don’t know what they don’t know.

In my most generous moments, I even ask myself whether I can fully blame my peers for hating Israel when this is what they’re reading. If I didn’t know better, I would almost definitely feel the same way.

But that’s why I’m so wildly grateful that Nellie and her wife Bari Weiss have created such a powerful news outlet as a direct response to that: The Free Press, which strives with all its might to bring the truth to the table, regardless of whether it aligns with our sensibilities.

I don’t agree with everything in the The Free Press and sometimes I’m even wildly uncomfortable or resentful in response to the articles I read there. But that’s a huge part of the point: we should all have to grapple with truths that are in tension with each other, and we should not have to agree with someone for them to be heard, if they’re reporting some facet of a complex truth.

The Israel / jihadist conflict is the most complicated topic I have ever looked at. I often feel I will never be able to peel away all the layers and distill my feelings into something simple and serviceable. But my love and loyalty for the Jewish nation are never in question. I never have to ask myself which side I’m on. My love is strong enough to withstand Israel’s flaws. And ultimately a love like this is stronger than blind faith, because it’s based on truth and can’t be shattered in the face of any new revelations.

I hope you all have the loveliest and most restorative of Sabbaths. I know I need mine! I’ll be back with you on Monday and in the meantime, I send you my fierce love.

Chazak, chazak. Shabbat Shalom. Am Yisrael Chai.