An End And A Beginning

Children Of Israel Are Never Alone

Hey, beloved tribe.

It is the eighth and final night of Hanukkah. It is the first day of 2025. I hope your holidays have been filled with light, in every conceivable sense of the phrase.

Every year, I take inspiration from this photo, which is why I’m sharing it here.

If the Jews of Nazi Germany could keep our flame alive and visible at any cost, then surely we can.

Meanwhile, I have some secular new year’s resolutions.

One is that I’m going to respond personally to every email, message or inquiry related to Never Alone or Judith within 48 hours. My single deepest regret this year is the number of missives I just did not respond to because I felt too overwhelmed. If you reached out to me this year and didn’t hear back, I genuinely invite you to ping me again and ask your forgiveness for my previous non-response.

The second is that I’m going to resume Never Alone’s book club picks and host an author in a conversation every single month this year, without fail.

To this end, our January pick is Olive Days by Jessica Elisheva Emerson.

Here is the opening paragraph of Olive Days:

Yoni had just turned three, but Rina’s thighs and stomach were still lumpy; nothing had reverted to curves, not like after Shosh was born. She was examining the pucker of a thigh when David proposed adultery, though he refused to use the word. “A wife swap?” Rina said. It was the deviant bit of budding summer when observant Jews, unencumbered by holidays, have long stretches of time in which to practice something other than devotion to god. The purple jacaranda superbloom of May was waning, but wildflowers stretched from cracks in the concrete sidewalks, searching for a sun that would shroud itself until July. David didn’t like the word swap either. Her thigh rebuked him with a quiver; she did not look up. “Temporary,” he said. “A trade. A spouse trade.” He emphasized the word spouse, as if parity made it okay.

The Jewish Journal described Olive Days as “a brilliant exploration of the lasting power of Jewishness, of Jewishness that’s not dependent on belief.”

I would describe it as gorgeously written, incredibly candid, sensual, riveting, and beautifully Jewish in the most unusual and startling ways.

Jessica will meet with us by Zoom on Thursday, January 30th at 5 pm Pacific time, 8 pm on the east coast.

Right now, Amazon is selling it at 50% off! If you’d like to jump on this discount, you can buy it here.

And my third resolution is to broaden and deepen my Jewish advocacy through Never Alone and Judith magazine. I won’t go into every plan I have, but let it suffice to say that I’m going to re-double my efforts and do more in 2025 than in 2024.

This is the only way I’m finding to manage my fear of 2025. I’m afraid of the impending Trump presidency. I’m afraid of the levels of anti-Semitism spreading like wildfire around the globe.

Something happened last week that drove home to me how bad things are on this front. I was at a local theater to watch my Christmas movie, sitting through the staggering number of coming attractions that now precede every feature film for a full 30 minutes. One of them was a trailer for an upcoming movie titled September 5.

Instantly, in my body, I registered that bits of the iconic footage on the screen, like flashes of the announcer Jim McKay, were from the Munich Massacre of Israeli athletes at the Summer Olympic Games of 1972. And I felt my hands curl into claws on my armrests. I thought: holy fuck, holy fuck, what is this? There’s already a Munich massacre movie, so what the fuck is this?

Fam, I was seriously expecting to find out there was a new film about the Munich massacre from the point of view of the noble and valiant Black September freedom fighters.

I’m very glad to report that this wasn’t the case. But to me, the point was that it could have been. It no longer seems remotely beyond the realm of possibility.

Over the next few days, as I was taking stock of the past year, it occurred to me how often that kind of tension has taken over my body in any public setting. When I saw Chris Thile in concert last year, for instance — a gift from a friend who recognized how strung out I was in the wake of October 7 — I have the most vivid memory of being on edge throughout the show, wondering whether he would mention Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza, almost waiting for it.

As with this trailer, my fears were not realized. But they have been, so many times and in so many contexts that almost no experience of an artistic offering now is without the tension of wondering whether they will be again.

This tension recurs every time I fall in love with a new author. I like to connect with writers I love on social media. Now I do a keyword search before sending a friend request. I search their page for “Israel”. I search their page for “Palestine”. If nothing at all comes up, I’m overcome with relief. But so many writers that I used to love — whose work I still love — have been tainted for me forever, because they’ve joined anti-Semitic boycotts or posted anti-Zionist falsehoods.

It no longer seems possible to reverse this tsunami. But I still find it therapeutic to face it head-on and refuse to be swept away by it. It’s therapeutic to build this community — and here I have to say that all of you give me so much more than you likely know. It’s lonely out there, but it’s warm and beautiful in here. More than ever, I believe we need to stand together and state our case for Zionism as the most progressive of values, without equivocation and without apology. I’m renewing my commitment to doing that this year, in all the ways I’ve found until now and other ways as well.

Thank you so much for being with me. I know we can face 2025 together. Our people have been through so much worse. Let’s be like Rabbi Akiva and Rachel Posner, the owners of the menorah in the photo above, and continue to burn brightly in the face of hatred.

Mir veln zey iberlebn. We will outlive them. Chazak v’ematz.

Am Yisrael Chai.