From Severed to Salvaged: A Happy Ending To Last Month's Story Of Collegiate Friendship

Children Of Israel Are Never Alone

Hey, beloved tribe.

A belated shavua tov. I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday weekend.

First, I want to briefly depart from my own policy of keeping JUDITH’s content separate from this newsletter, with the exception of my Jews Of The Universe column on Fridays.

These venues overlap in some ways, including the fact that they share a considerable swath of readers. But they also have innate differences, so that trying to combine them further would be, in my current opinion, not the best course of action.

For one thing, this newsletter is explicitly partisan — it’s primarily for left-leaning Zionists who feel politically homeless — while JUDITH and the Never Alone Book Club are at least nominally non-partisan. That is, Jews of any stripe are more than welcome in both communities (they are welcome here in this community too, but I make no pretense of being non-partisan here and I accept that some readers will be put off by this, sometimes even to the point of leaving in a huff).

In any case, today’s magazine essay is so relevant to the themes of this newsletter that I feel compelled to make an exception and share it here. An Open Letter To The Editor Of The New York Times Book Review by the luminous Erika Dreifus speaks to the issues all of us care about, especially the overwhelming anti-Israel bias in the mainstream media, which shows up in ways both overt and covert.

If you have a few minutes, please give it a read, and if you know of a way to make it more likely to reach the New York Times Book Review editor in question, please feel free to forward or tag or tweet it to them.

Okay, so the other thing I want to share with you today is the incredible outcome of the two-part story I reported on last month, the one involving the rift between K (a young Jewish woman) and D (her longtime non-Jewish friend) within the current political cauldron of their college campus. Anyone who missed parts I and II of this saga can read them here and here.

The last time I wrote, the plan was that I would have both young women over in mid-December so they could hopefully process what had unfolded between them in a safe and supportive space. I had the (admittedly, perhaps grandiose) hope of being able to mediate a conversation between them away from the pressures of their peer group and campus politics.

Who the hell was I to think I could mediate such a discussion? Just someone who has invested many years in learning a thing or two about this very complicated topic (even if I don’t know nearly as much as many other people). Someone who’s had such conversations with young people many times before; someone who’s known both K and D for a long time; someone who loves them both.

At any rate, I’d initially invited D over during the holiday weekend, and she had declined. However, after I’d taken a walk with her mom, and sent the latter around 5 or 6 of the 125+ essays I’ve written here over the course of this year — the ones most relevant to the college climate right now — D agreed to meet with me during winter break in a couple of weeks.

I was wildly gratified by this. It was, in fact, more than I’d hoped for by that point. If I had to wait a few weeks and meet with D apart from K, dayenu, that would be enough.

So I was incredibly surprised and pleased when I received a text from D herself just after Thanksgiving had come and gone. She had changed her mind about waiting, and asked if we could meet that weekend after all.

I invited her over on Saturday morning and half expected that she’d get cold feet and find a reason to default to the original plan, or beg off altogether. But she arrived at my door at the appointed minute and we sat down at the dining room table with coffee.

What followed did so much to restore my faith in these overtures. D was her lovely, soft-spoken, gentle, thoughtful self. She is truly one of the kids who’d gotten caught up in something she didn’t understand, but whose intentions were never malicious.

I had privately resolved beforehand, in a very heartfelt way, not to do anything to corner or embarrass her. I was very moved that she had decided to come talk to me. I did not want to abuse that trust.

And yet I still needed to take the measure of where she was coming from. So in a very low-key way, I asked whether she knew her (very anti-Zionist) roommate’s position regarding Hamas, since it has been the roommate driving the excommunication of Jews from their shared dorm. Was that roommate explicitly pro-Hamas, as many protest leaders are? Or was her stance more peace-centric?

D looked bewildered and said that — shocker! — Hamas never came up in any campus discussion of the conflict. In fact, D had only the vaguest idea of who Hamas was.

My next question was aimed at finding out whether D was among those who routinely conflate the different issues related to the separate Palestinian territories. For instance, young people regularly tell me that Israel needs to stop occupying Gaza. When I tell them that there are no Jewish residents left in Gaza and there haven’t been any since 2005, they are surprised and confused.

“Do you know where the Palestinian territories are in the region?” I asked D, and waited for her to name Gaza and the West Bank. Instead she said something like, “Umm… I think… in, like, the lower left corner?”

I sat there for a baffled moment and then tried again. “Let me rephrase the question: are you aware that the West Bank and Gaza are two separate territories under different forms of Palestinian leadership?”

“Uh… no.”

To D’s credit, I didn’t need to ask anything else. She understood within a literal minute that she did not know enough to have an opinion about the conflict. She readily admitted she had no strong convictions on the situation herself. She said, “I think I was just trying to support my roommate’s activism.”

Very carefully and gently, I pointed out that her roommate — who was neither Palestinian nor Arab nor even Muslim — actually had nothing truly personal at stake here. On the other hand, K and the other Israeli girl were D’s longtime friends and they were both in profound distress. If anyone needed her support, it was them. Meanwhile, I also suggested, no unaffected person — and certainly no one without any knowledge or history of the I/P conflict — had any right to dictate how Jews should respond to the war.

D had no argument with this at all. She readily admitted to me that she had handled the whole thing badly, and that in this respect, she hadn’t been a good friend to K. To my overwhelming delight, she asked if she could meet with K at my house during that very day or the next.

In very short order, it was arranged that they would both return to my home that evening at 6 — an outcome beyond my wildest dreams.

And they did. I had no idea what would happen but I wanted to create the warmest, most welcoming, safest space I could for them to connect. I put out home-baked challah, a hearty kale salad, and a tray of freshly roasted winter squash. Both of these women are very creative and artistic, so I put a jumble of art supplies on the table. I got a fire going in the fireplace and lit a lot of candles and brewed a lot of tea.

They arrived at 6. We all did artwork at the table together. I’m not gonna lie — it was awkward at first. An hour went by where we didn’t touch on the topic at hand and I became inwardly anxious about what my rightful role was within this picture.

I wanted to let them lead and come to the heart of their struggle in their own time and in their own way, but I also didn’t want to let the entire evening go by without creating an opening for that conversation in case they were relying on me to provide it.

Finally, I just decided to acknowledge the elephant in the room. Around 90 minutes in, I said: “Listen, I don’t want to be intrusive or overbearing and I know I can’t achieve any specific outcome here without your investment. But I just want you to know that if I can assist in any way in a conversation you might be hoping to have, I’m here for you.”

Awkward silence. Averted eyes. Excruciating tension. But what the hell, I didn’t feel I could let the whole night unfold without offering them a way into the dialogue they’d come to have.

Eventually, on their own, they kind of drifted from the table to the sofa in front of the fireplace. I took a seat on the divan against a wall off to the side. K began talking about the pain and grief of being Jewish on a progressive college campus right now. When she started to cry, D wrapped her arms tightly around K and rested her head on K’s shoulder.

Not long after this, my own daughter wanted me to go over an essay she was writing for school, so I left the room and sat down with her in my office.

From time to time, I drifted in and out of the living room on my way to the kitchen for more tea. K and D were immersed in their own intimate conversation space. And they stayed and stayed and stayed. 9 pm came and went, then 10, then 11.

I was not the least bit put out by this. They could have stayed all night and fallen asleep beneath my roof for all I cared. I felt deeply honored and happy that they were comfortable enough in my house to hang out so late into the evening. In the end, they left at close to midnight, after almost 6 straight hours of time together.

There is absolutely no way to overstate what a gift this was to me. How often can our interventions make any difference at all, let alone yield such a desirable outcome? If I could scale this kind of interpersonal curation to some kind of national level, I’d do it in a flat second. And when I devote around 10 hours to a situation like this one, I do not consider it time away from my work, but a different facet of my work, maybe even the most important part of it.

Once in a while, self-identified anti-Zionists will surprise us. If we know them and love them, I feel we have to give them every chance to do that.

Okay, fam. I know this was a long story but hopefully it’s an uplifting one. I feel it added a few years back to my life, renewed my commitment to these efforts and gave me the kind of joy that I no longer expect inside this arena.

I’ll be back with you on Wednesday. I hope your week is off to a good start.

In the meantime, much love and strength to you all. Chazak, chazak.

Am Yisrael Chai.