October 2024 - June 2025

A collection of moments from the last nine months.

Note: Names and specifics in this story have been changed or obscured to protect the confidentiality of individuals involved. I have exercised extreme caution to ensure I protected the integrity of anecdotes while making this effort to protect individual privacy.

Photo by Estée Janssens on Unsplash

June 2025

It’s been a long time since I’ve done this.

If you’ve been subscribed for a while, you probably already know that.

There is part of me that wants to try and explain my prolonged absence from the (digital) page. I try very hard to avoid going into details about my personal life here, and I feel like going into too much detail about why I have taken so many months off from writing would cross a line I have worked hard to maintain. So, suffice to say the reason for my long absence can generally be classified into a combination of factors under two buckets. The first is that I needed time to manage moving to a city and starting a new job. The second is that I had run out of words. Every time I started writing something, I would run out of words after a few paragraphs. My Google Drive is full of three paragraph documents, many of which I still have no idea what to do with. I was struggling with the emotional drain of talking about one topic for so long. While discussions of Jewish life and Antisemitism have always been one of the pillars of Horse of a Different Colour, prior to October 7, they were not at all the exclusive focus, nor were they intended to be.

I will be honest, I still feel torn. I continue to feel a responsibility to write about increasing Antisemitism and the fact that there are still 59 hostages in Gaza, at least 20 of whom are believed to be alive. But I also have other things that I want to talk about, because life needs to be about more than the people who hate us. I remain unsure of how to manage that.

At first, I thought my pause would only be for a week or two while I settled into my new job. Then I decided it would be for a month. But one became two, became three, and on it went. At no point in the last nine months did I ever tell myself “I guess I’m done with that”, but I did stop putting pressure on myself to try and write. I allowed things to just exist in a state of perpetual pause until the day came that I wanted to write again. Because I was sure that one day it would. And that day, as it turns out, is today (well actually Monday).

It started when I woke up to a text message from a friend. It was one of those seemingly innocuous text messages about daily life that you get from the people in your life with whom you are in a constant stream of communication. But it wasn’t entirely without substance.

The text had the subtle coding of a message that was actually asking whether or not we were still safe in the world as Jews in the wake of the firebombing of the rally for hostages in Boulder last weekend.

When I reflect on the limited writing I have done over the last nine months, it has often been in service of preserving the moments that chipped at my feeling of safety and belonging. These are the moments that have made me feel, more so with each day, that the world I knew when I was wandering the streets of Chicago with my father on the evening of October 6, 2023 is not coming back. So, after much introduction, I am finally sharing bits of what I have been recording.

October 2024

“He’s cute, go to talk to him” I nudge Sarah with my elbow, nodding in the direction of a man about my age rearranging his grip on one of the two Torah scrolls we were parading through the streets with on a cold Thursday night in late October to celebrate the first Simchat Torah since the one we will never forget.

“Don’t drop the Torah, I don’t want to fast for 40 days” Sarah said to the man, before darting back over to my side.

“Seriously? ‘Don’t drop the Torah’. That’s the best you could come up with?” I asked.

“What? I like food” Sarah shrugged. Still in her early 20’s, she is still full of the awkward excitement of Yeshivish girls talking to boys.

“I’m freezing,” I said, wrapping my arms around myself, “Rabbi needs to stop pausing this walk to give speeches”

“You should have worn tights,” said Naomi, “Can you tell what they’re singing?”

“I think it’s two different songs, but I’m not sure what they are,” Sarah replied.

“This is chaos” Naomi laughed

“Are you Israeli?” A tall man in his mid-30s walking in front of us asked Naomi

“Yes” She said

“So are we” He gestured to himself and his brother walking beside him.

Naomi stepped in line to join them in a Hebrew conversation that could hardly be heard over the sounds of the Rabbi trying to get everyone in our strange parade down Cumberland Street to sing the same song. It was approaching 10:00PM, several members of our contingent were already in the later stages of intoxication. The night felt very much like the Simchat Torah parties I had attended at Chabad during my university years.

“Palestina!” We heard the shouts coming from across the street where a cluster of men who appeared to be the same age as our group were standing shouting at us.

“Viva, viva Palestina!” they shouted again.

“I told you we shouldn’t be doing this,” Naomi said, looking back at me.

“Viva Intifada!” they shouted again

“We should say something to them” the Israeli man said

“Don’t engage with them” I cautioned, “nothing good is going to come of it”

What we’re doing has nothing to do with Israel I thought.

“Shut up!” the brother shouted at the men across the street

“Don’t engage with them” I said again, “the last thing you want is for them to cross the street and for there to be an incident right now.”

“She’s right,” said the Israeli man, putting a hand on his brother’s back and moving him along as the group across the street continued to shout at us.

A few weeks later I sat on the subway watching videos on Instagram of buildings being set on fire by a mob shouting Antisemitic slurs.

November 2024

“Is that an Israel pin on your jacket?” my friend asked, watching me from where he sat across the room, tying his shoelaces, as we prepared to go to a Young Professionals Shabbat dinner in New York.

“Oh, yeah. It’s been on there since the vigil in Halifax last year,” I looked down, shrugging at the small pin, which featured the Nova Scotia and Israel flags.

“Listen, I’m not telling you what to do, but I wouldn’t wear that out. People have been assaulted here for being visibly Jewish or identifying with Israel, so I just wouldn’t want to draw attention to myself” he said, attaching clips to his kippah before putting it in his pocket.

“But we’re in New York. There are so many Jews here. It’s not like at home” I exclaimed, hands already moving to take the pin off.

“I’m not telling you what to do. I’m just saying. I would be careful”

December 2024

“Do you hear that?” Asked the senior associate whose office I was working late in, trying to finish up some work before the holidays.

“Yeah, maybe there’s a party on another floor? Or do you think it’s coming from outside?” I said, in reference to the muffled cacophony coming from somewhere.

“I’m not sure, but I think we’re about done. You can go home and I’ll send you a message if we need to do anything else”.

Outside, on the street the shouting subsumed the regular sounds of the street. Huge Palestinian flags were waving in the air above crowds chanting the slogans of intifada while blocking the streetcar routes I rely on to get home.

January

I sat reading my book on the history of the Balfour Declaration in the seating area for diagnostic imaging, while I waited to find out if my wrist was still broken.

“Wow, I haven’t seen that book in forever” a man in his late fifties said to me. He was accompanying his mother whose arm was in a cast.

“Have you read this?” I asked, surprised. It wasn’t the kind of book I tended to get questions about.

“In university” he said.

“What did you think?” I asked, closing the book over my finger to mark my page temporarily

“I liked that it was political,” he paused, “but what a mistake that was, giving that land to the Jews. Just white people messing things up like they do best.”

Huh. I nodded at the wall and turned my head back to the book, trying to signal that I was done with the conversation.

A little while later, I returned to the fracture clinic to wait my turn to review my x-ray results. The man and his mother were seated in the waiting area when I walked in. They looked at me as I scanned for where to sit in the largely empty room.

“Do you think she’s a dirty Jew?” the mother asked the son. While it seemed unlikely she intended for me to hear, she had done nothing to moderate the tone of her voice.

I stayed quiet as I took a seat in a far corner of the room. The words punching at my stomach.

May 2025

I turned the radio on in the car. It was nearly midnight on a Wednesday. For the past two hours my father and I had been playing with the Toronto Klezmer Society.

“Dad” I said, when he picked up the phone, “are you listening to the radio?”

“No, what’s going on?” He asked. I turned up the volume of the call to hear him over the sounds of the rain that had been pouring for most of the day.

“Two people were shot by someone shouting ‘Free Palestine’ leaving an event at the Israeli Embassy in D.C.” I said

“Are they alive?” he asked

“No, I don’t think so,” I replied.

There was something about the room full of Jews proudly playing Jewish music we had only just left that made this news hit heavier - made it feel closer. Who’s to say this couldn’t be us; that this couldn’t happen here?

Four days later I was searching for my teammates at the finish line of a race. It was 3:30 in the morning and I had just completed my leg of the relay race we had been participating in since the previous morning. I spotted one of them, not someone I had known before we began our scramble for runners to participate in the relay, and immediately clocked that he was sporting a keffiyeh. I said nothing to him when he waved, trying to get my attention. I was disoriented from a course marking issue. I was tired. I had been awake for 23 hours and my patience was wearing thin. I looked for my friend in the total darkness of the rural highway.

“I’m not getting in the car unless he takes off the fucking keffiyeh” I said, when I found my friend standing by the car.

“I know,” he said, looking for my bag in the trunk to give me my sweater while I began removing my safety lights, “he’s not getting back in with us. Do you need a washroom or do you want to just get in the car?”

June 2025

I am scanning constantly. My word is an endless stream of watermelon pins, free Palestine badges, and keffiyehs in every colour of the rainbow because your Antisemitism should always match your outfit. I feel surrounded by these symbols of hate - by people who have not taken the time to understand that they are standing with the people who raped and murdered innocent people, used their own citizens as human shields, blew up their own schools and hospitals, and starved their children, or worse, have adopted the belief that these actions were a justified form of resistance. I feel surrounded by people who believe they are wearing a symbol of liberation when all I see is a symbol of hate.

More and more, I feel myself trying to hide in plain sight. I pay attention to who stands near me on public transit; to who is at the dog park. My frustration at the things I see those in my circle posting online opposing Israel or tokenizing anti-Zionist Jews increases as these posts continue to appear in the immediate wake of violence against the Jewish community.

In putting together the bits and pieces I have written over the last nine months for this post, it is hard to accept that this is what the year have been. Of course, I have had many proud Jewish moments, not least of which was our success in the UJA Bussing case in November, 2024. But the broader picture has not been one where Antisemitism is pushed back to the fringes, much the opposite, and with the assistance of those who fail to recognize their complicity in spreading these ideas.