Tension Inside My Own Trench
Children Of Israel Are Never Alone
Hey, beloved tribe.
I have to tell you, being a Zionist on the left is a lonely thing, a never-ending ice pick in the heart.
Especially this past week, as so many of the voices I cherish have delivered wildly distressing takes in response to Trump’s re-election.
Take Eve Barlow for instance, whom I read on a weekly basis. To whom I am a paying subscriber. Whom I appreciate very deeply a great deal of the time.
For anyone who reads what I’m about to say and is tempted to write me off as just another of Eve Barlow’s huge mob of haters, please read the previous paragraph again, or better yet, I will repeat it here:
I read Eve. I’m a paying supporter of Eve. I appreciate Eve very deeply a great deal of the time.
And yet I could not disagree more with her today. Let me count the ways:
“What I have attempted to say this week, to borrow an old meme, is that if Britney survived 2007, you will survive a Trump presidency,” she wrote early in her most recent Blacklisted post.
“My advice to those suffering still, almost a week after the news: tune out the noise and focus on yourself. And don’t make the mistake of avoiding the lessons to be learned,” she adds in the same paragraph.
Wow.
Eve, YOU will survive a Trump presidency. Of that, there can be little doubt.
But two of my sons’ closest friends will bear the direct brunt of his promised mass deportation. One has been here since her first year of life, another was born here but his parents aren’t citizens.
Women in red states across the country will bleed out on the table in botched back-alley abortions. Twelve-year-old rape victims in the same red states will be forced to carry their rapists’ seed to term.
All climate-protecting measures will be rolled back. Clean energy investments will be decimated. Fossil fuel industries will roar back to dominance.
The Black vote will be suppressed to the same levels of decades ago. And the next time the Black community succeeds in coloring a state blue, as Georgia did in 2020, there will be nothing to stop Trump’s hand-picked cronies from certifying false election results this time around.
Ukraine will be handed to Putin, which will likely lead to China seizing Taiwan, and there will be nothing to stop Russia from continuing to annex an array of other European states.
Transpeople will be unable to get treatment in too many places. They will be stripped of their humanity and dignity in classrooms and countless other public venues.
My mother who has spent 80-90 hours a week working like a dog in service of public health for the last 50 years will now be serving under the batshit RFK Jr who will be America's new health czar. And I could go on all freaking day.
And sneering at those who are “still suffering almost a week after the news"? Is that a joke? Honestly, I can hardly imagine anything more privileged, tone-deaf, callous, or ridiculous. She is [rightfully, understandably!] incredibly bitter toward the left, but she is allowing that bitterness to triumph over moral clarity, and compassion for the justified grief and terror of the most vulnerable on our side.
Later, she wrote: “America is inherently a racist society, mired in a rape culture, and everyone who is a victim of such crimes knows that it doesn’t make a difference who is in office.”
I don’t know which victims of racism she is talking to, but 8 out of 10 Black men and more than 9 out of 10 Black women voted for Kamala Harris, and all the Black people I know believe there is a great deal of difference who is in office, even if they have countless issues with both sides. And saying rape victims don’t believe there’s a difference is equally ludicrous. There are millions of people in both categories and presuming to speak for them all is breathtakingly delusional.
And I’m not just responding to one post of hers. A couple of days ago, just a few days after the election, she opened another with: “I’m optimistic. This week America rejected hate.”
So electing Trump, who invited Nick Fuentes to Mar-A-Lago for dinner, fantasized on camera about shooting Liz Cheney in the face, lied about Hatian immigrants eating people’s pets, killed a legion of his own supporters by discouraging masking in a pandemic, calls Democrats and members of the media enemies of the people, tried to murder half of Congress, stokes hatred and persecution of the trans community, and again, I could go on all freaking day — electing him is rejecting hate?
Yet again, because I’m sure I need to say it several more times, I like Eve Barlow quite a lot. At her best, she’s brilliant, incisive, hilarious and a sanity-saver. As of now, I plan to keep reading her and supporting her. But her election post-mortem has been seriously off the rails.
And there are a lot of other people I consider my allies the vast majority of the time, whose take on the election is equally distressing. It’s a painfully familiar and soul-crushing disappointment that so many of the most eloquent voices in defense of Israel overlook the same crimes they accuse the left of when they’re committed by the right, wherever they say their sympathies lie.
Here’s the ultimate irony: Trump won the majority of Dearborn’s vote because a huge number of its Arab and Muslim residents see Kamala Harris as too supportive of Israel. So that supposed protest vote against leftist hate? Is backing the same candidate that they’re backing.
Sometimes I feel like a polar bear, standing on an ice floe that’s shrinking by the day, with no other life-sustaining patch of terrain in sight as so many of the people I consider my allies the majority of the time seem fine with a Trump victory. It’s almost as hard as seeing so many of the other people I consider my allies the majority of the time (when it comes to racism, misogyny, LGBTQ+ rights, the climate, and nearly every other issue) seem fine with the mass rape and murder of civilians, as long as they’re Jews.
Then again, if there were more people dropping anchor in this particular spot, I wouldn’t need to be here.
I’ll be back with you Wednesday, to keep nailing my flag to my left-leaning Zionist mast, and I’ll continue to trust that there are people out there who need someone standing precisely where I stand.
Fierce love to you all in the meantime.
Chazak v’ematz.
Am Yisrael Chai.
She couldn't be more wrong that in a nation mired in rape culture, it doesn't matter who is president. There are thousands of people… Probably millions… Across the nation who are reliving their formative traumas knowing that he is coming back into office. Those of us who grew up in repressive authoritarian households with a delusional figurehead are triggered almost beyond the point of being able to function. This is no exaggeration. And I say this as a highly privileged white woman. It must be almost unendurably terrifying for the many people who don't have my level of privilege.
One of the many things I appreciate about you is that you never gloss over or dismiss how hard things are for people. I mean, for anyone to say that a week is long enough to recover from the news that the country is going to be destroyed… Objectively batshit crazy and cruel, but this particularly egregious example aside, you are always evenhanded and alert to the ways in which people are hurting. I feel like you're clear that bearing witness is an act of service even if you are unable to personally relieve that suffering. And I think dismissal of suffering is the inability to stand in the discomfort of bearing witness. So. Thanks for standing there… On your ice floe.
Elissa, I commented to you on Facebook last week before the election that having you in my corner has been instrumental to my survival and I can tell you that since last Tuesday, that feeling has only grown.
I have watched people say things like "it's going to be fine" "it was fine the first time" and make light of the impending doom. And with my big, deep mother heart I scream back at them "it wasn't fine. It isn't fine.".
I am a heart broken mother of 4 biracial Jewish kids, who now has to make good on my promise to my husband that we will move to Canada - his homeland - because Trump won and we cannot raise our children here. My soul is being crushed. It's as if someone has died and that someone is the last bit of fucking safety our democracy has.
My husband, a Canadian, has lots of friends commentating "what's the big deal" and he is dumbfounded. He finally understands what privileged people sound like. Our lives are ones of sheer terror at the moment as we try to plan next steps, how to fight, how to stay, how to protect our family. And others sit around joking that it's tantamount to a mental health episode (which is problematic in its own awful ways).
So again, thank you for being in my corners. As a Jew, a woman, a mom, a human living on planet earth. Thank you for not collapsing into a spineless wretch as so many others seem to be doing this past week.
The work is now. We will work and fight and we will keep fucking pushing.