Sacred Rage

Forgive me if I swear...

I haven’t forgotten the sound of that boom. I was in my building’s piece-of-trash “underground” shelter (it’s just one floor below the entrance), which, I’ve suspected since October 7th, is not really capable of protecting anyone from anything. But when the siren blared, I accepted that it would have to make do, having left my friend’s home with the better shelter only an hour before. Horrible timing. After the siren came the whooshing — the bone-chilling noise of air defenses going to work. And then the boom. The terrible, terrible boom. The boom that instantly made me cry, and my legs instantly, without any direction from my brain, stood up and ran to the other side of the “shelter.” My body was afraid for its life, and it took over. A nice Russian woman held my hand as I cried. I was certain that the windows of my building had been blown out. They weren’t, which could only have meant that all of Tel Aviv had heard that terrible boom, and all of Tel Aviv had just felt what I had felt: the heart dropping to the stomach, the feeling of pins and needles in the veins, a head-rush like I had just snorted a narcotic and been told I had cancer all at once.

We are now in the midst of what many are calling “war whiplash.” The ceasefire is holding, all the shops, restaurants, and beaches are open, and the less neurotic among us are “going back to normal.” But I’m certainly not, and nobody I associate with regularly is, because our bodies haven’t recovered in the slightest from those twelve days of hell, when everything seemed to hang in the balance: our homes, our lives, our friends' lives.

I wish I could “go back to normal.” I wish I could feel the sun on my skin and the salt of the Mediterranean in my hair and convince myself that it was going to be okay. But I’ve come to terms with the fact that I can’t. I couldn’t after October 7th for quite a while, and I can’t now. And the person responsible for this is not Benjamin Netanyahu, it’s not the Ayatollah Khamenei, it’s not Donald Trump. I have rage in my heart, rage that shows no sign of abating, due to the Jews in New York City who had the fucking audacity to rank Zohran Mamdani for Mayor.

Should this New York City mayoral election have occurred during any other time, when ballistic missiles weren’t raining down on my head, I don’t think I’d be feeling this way. I don’t think I would have unfollowed over forty people on Instagram, including dear friends from the past, who sported Mamdani infographics on their pages. I don’t think I would feel so wounded by family members who ranked him, and then told me over the phone: “I don’t think he (he who was condemned by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum) is an antisemite.” But unfortunately, these events coincided, and it has left me, without exaggeration, an emotional, overwhelmed wreck.

What I’ve felt this week strongly echoes what I experienced in college, and those who know my story are aware of just how dramatic those emotions were. When the double standard of the left sits on your chest like an elephant. When the gaslighting feels like domestic abuse. When all you feel capable of doing is to beg—beg of your peers, those who believe in justice and equality like you do, to understand that they are being manipulated, deceived, and led into the same hatred that they claim to vehemently oppose. The house is on fire, but the firefighters are standing outside, perhaps lamenting the inconvenience of the heat instead of admitting that all their possessions are in immediate danger.

But therein, I think, lies the source of this rage: their possessions are not in immediate danger.

Every Jew whom I’ve argued with over the past week about Zohran Mamdani (and they have mostly been Jews, because non-Jews acting as handmaidens for antisemitism fail to elicit the same feeling of betrayal) is far away from Judaism. Yet, predictably, they feel entitled to comment on politics, Judaism, Israel, and antisemitism “as Jews.” Most don’t go to synagogue. They don’t keep kosher. Many don’t even have a mezuzah on their door. They’ve never been to Israel. They know little, if anything, about Jewish history or contemporary Jewish life, because they’ve never been in a position where it was necessary to learn. They are, as Benjamin Kerstein wrote in Tablet years ago, the “Jews of privilege.” The extent of their knowledge about the Middle East comes from MSNBC, where complex and emotionally-charged developments are boiled down to “Netanyahu = bad.” Yet it is these very people who have spent the last few days in the most condescending manner saying things like “Criticism of Israel isn’t antisemitism,” You can disagree with the Israeli government and still be a proud Jew,” “I know plenty of Jews who voted for him,” “Do you recognize that Islamophobia is a problem?”

They have all bought into — some willingly, some reluctantly — the outright lie that antisemitism, whether it takes the form of marching with Hamas supporters (as Mamdani has), legitimizing the phrase “globalize the intifada” (as Mamdani has), working with and even founding organizations that call for the violent “liberation” of Palestine from the river to the sea (as Mamdani has), and saying that Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish state (as Mamdani has), are all legitimate forms of political debate, of “criticizing Israel.” David Hirsh calls this phenomenon “The Livingstone Formulation,” named after Ken Livingstone, former Mayor of London, who routinely compared Zionists to Nazis and justified this with the refrain: “I was only criticizing Israel,” and, “Why are ‘Zionists’ trying to silence criticism of Israel?”

As I’ve written about many times before, and as I wrote my undergraduate thesis on, the goal of the Livingstone Formulation — the goal of Zohran Mamdani and his supporters, which has now been tragically fulfilled — is to paint the “uppity” Jews, the Jews who object to extremism, as being part of a racist, right-wing, reactionary conspiracy. The goal is to marginalize Jews for simply raising the issue of antisemitism — to push them out of the left, what Hirsh calls “the community of the good.” The goal is to reward the Jews who know their place, who are assimilated, who are not Zionists, who do not believe that Jews should have national independence or political power, and punish those who do believe in these things, who dare to have learned a lesson from our history other than “let’s all love each other.” And this “pushing out” takes, as the tone of this piece suggests, and as you can read all about in Hirsh’s Contemporary Left Antisemitism, an emotional toll. It taxes one’s mental health. It feels, I’ll repeat, like domestic abuse.

Now, a word about socialism.

There are those whose commentary about New York’s latest election has centered around so-called “luxury beliefs.” And there is truth to this argument, as it is accurate that Mamdani performed the best among wealthy New Yorkers, slightly beat Cuomo among those in the middle-income bracket, but fell far behind among lower-class and working-class voters. The assertion of those who talk about “luxury beliefs” is that to vote for a socialist today requires a certain amount of privilege — a relationship with politics that is impersonal, revolving around more abstract concerns, such as the fate of democracy and the structural failures of capitalism, rather than every-day working-class concerns like not getting robbed, or sexually assaulted at your subway stop, or feeding children on a paycheck-to-paycheck basis.

But I’d like to push back on this just a bit. To be clear, I do not have any sympathy for wealthy people who vote for socialists. I feel nothing in my heart but grievance for people who have, or whose parents have, houses in the Hamptons, yet somehow feel victimized by the American political climate (because if and when shit hits the fan due to disastrous policies, they will hardly be affected, or they can leave.) My grievance toward such whining has grown sharper after being in a bomb shelter for twelve days and understanding, for the second time, what real victimization looks like.

But I don’t think middle-class people who vote for socialists can be written off as carrying “luxury beliefs.” And I do carry sympathy for them. The fact of the matter is that centrist Democrats have not been able to address real, legitimate problems faced by New Yorkers. I lived in New York for two years, paying $2,000 for a fifth-floor walk-up apartment the size of my kitchen in Tel Aviv, and I can attest that to “make it” in New York is, for many people, impossible. New Yorkers are paying more for less: a city that is less affordable, less safe, and increasingly impractical — even absurd — for raising a family. Socialism, and any form of populist politics, becomes a very real possibility once the moderate, liberal parties, Democrats and Republicans, are unable to ease the valid struggles of ordinary people.

The majority of middle-class people who voted for Mamdani did so because of cost-of-living anxieties that cannot be overlooked, not because they support antisemitic politics. But the tragic truth is that antisemitic politics always, without fail, find a home in those who traffic in radical, revolutionary beliefs, as it is an ideology of conspiracy that meshes nicely with calls to tear down power structures, from the right or left. Many who support these populist movements are unaware of their consequences for the Jewish community — a failure that lies as much with centrists, who are blatantly incapable of improving their communities (hello, sex pest Andrew Cuomo), as with those who sweep antisemitism under the rug or work to justify and soften it (hello, Brad Lander).

This populist movement is what broke me. The convergence of progressive politics with antisemitic conspiracy, tolerated or excused by those who should have been its fiercest opponents, left no place for Jews like me in the political movements I once believed in. And so, I did what Jews have done throughout history: I left. I moved to Israel in 2022. As most of you know, I’m a lefty — I like universal healthcare, subsidized education, redistribution of wealth, secularism and social equality, but I will not stand for a movement that champions these values while regarding Jewish particularism and political independence as an inherent affront to human rights, a relic of the past. Outside the borders of Israel, I feel antagonized by my ideological compatriots. And so I left.

But, even considering this, there is still a large place in my heart reserved for New York City. New York is in my blood. I was the first generation in my family to be born and raised outside of it, something I’ve never forgiven my parents for. Yet, nevertheless, I was indoctrinated with the lore and mythology of New York before I ever got the chance to move there. The tired and weary yearning to breathe free under the Statue of Liberty will forever inspire me, as it is a story of Jewish rebirth and renewal. Tenement homes, Yiddish, delicatessens, even radical socialist politics — all of this elicits nostalgia and pride within me.

How I square these deep feelings with my disappointment and even contempt for the city in this moment can be expressed best by a piece I wrote in December of last year, “Where Have All The Socialists Gone?”, in which I raise the argument that the primary difference between the convictions of yesterday’s Jews in the Lower East Side and the Jews of today is the presence of authentic Jewish culture. Progressive Jews in Manhattan and Brooklyn today may think they are carrying the proud tradition of the leftist politics of their ancestors. But they’re surely mistaken. They don't have Yiddish. They don’t have education in Talmud or Tanakh like even the most atheistic Jews of the early twentieth century. They don’t have antisemitic discrimination in the workplace, leading to communal solidarity. They don’t even have holidays — Passover is ceaselessly universalized to reflect everyone’s struggle for liberation, and Hanukkah is a blue and yellow Christmas, if not outright condemned for being too Zionist. They carry no tradition — only the facade and fragments of it.

To these Jews, I conclude this piece by saying: I am furious with you. And I am allowed to be furious with you. Like an immigrant or a trans person who just found out their friend voted for Trump, I am not prepared to forgive you yet. I will not accept your double standard and refrain from being “dramatic,” for I know you would never ask this of a minority community that expressed similar feelings of anxiety and despair. I am not prepared to forgive you, because I was genuinely afraid for my life in Tel Aviv when I heard that terrible boom, an experience that came from my decision to assert my Jewishness proudly in the Jewish homeland — an experience you will never have. After all, your ancestors happened to have ended up on the other side of the planet, and for some reason, you are under the impression that this renders you morally superior to my friends and neighbors. I hope you lose sleep over what you have unleashed. I hope you see the statistics of how antisemitism has exploded in New York over the last several years (2024 bore the highest number of incidents on record), and feel a sinking lump in your throat, because, for some reason, the problem never seemed as pressing as other minority communities under attack.

The rage I feel now, the rage that I will carry with me as I enlist in the IDF in eight weeks to defend my people and my country, is sacred. It’s sacred because it places me in the bloodstream of Jewish politics and Jewish history, something that you, so far, have had the privilege of avoiding. But not anymore. If I have lost friends and strained relationships because of my decisions regarding the Jewish community, so now, will you. Welcome to Jewish history. Your actions have consequences.