The surreal reality of life in the Diaspora

Reflections on the broken promise of Never Again.

Photo by Tristan Sosteric on Unsplash

As I approach the city center on my Saturday afternoon walk, I begin to hear the chanting. I make a mental note not to turn downtown, chastising myself for yet again forgetting to go out earlier in the day when I could have been home by the time the protests started. 

I am scanning, constantly, for stickers, posters, sidewalk-chalk - the small signs spread throughout the city causing me to question my safety. I contemplate purchasing earbuds with better noise canceling to overwhelm the fundraisers for Doctors Without Borders standing on street corners asking passersby if they have a moment to talk about Gaza. I try to gauge how close I will need to come to parents doing school drop-off at the elementary school across the street from my home before I will be able to determine if they are wearing a keffiyeh or just a black and white scarf. 

We should all move to Israel. It’s the only option for us. My rabbi says to my friends and I, the observant young professionals in his congregation. You’re young. You’ll adjust. It’s the only place it will be safe to be observant soon. This was not the kind of conversation we had about making Aliyah - moving to Israel - six months ago, back when it was a question of  ‘would you ever’ rather than ‘can you not’. 

I watch the video of Columbia University Business School Assistant Professor Shai Davidai demonstrating how his university ID card has been deactivated as he is no longer permitted on campus, while faculty who espouse support for the encampments overtaking the lawn, and even support for Hamas itself continue to be allowed through the now secured gates. I watched a video of protestors at an anti-Israel rally in Toronto, my hometown, cheering at the news that Iran, a country many took to the same streets to rally against a year ago, had sent drones to bomb Israel. 

I am amazed at the power of six months to normalize this for me. I have come to expect my Jewish friends to wind our conversations around the safety of the Jewish world, and my non-Jewish friends to already be forgetting the specifics of what took place on October 7. I am taken aback by the ways that we have normalized something that has never been normal in many of our lifetimes. 

I say “our lifetimes”, because as Bari Weiss plainly stated in a recent talk at the 92nd Street Y in New York, we have been living in a break from history. And that break has come to an end. The respite from overt Jew-hatred that we have enjoyed for the past several decades appears to be over. 

I firmly believe, though admittedly based purely upon conjecture, that the protests on city streets and campuses will peter out at some point, just as they did during the summer of 2020. Energy and interest will eventually die off. This is not the part that concerns me. What I worry about with increasing frequency and sincerity is the normalization of Antisemitism that will be left behind. 

The rhetoric, some of which has been present on university campuses for several years now, of “Zionists Not Welcome” is merely the Soviet-propaganda fueled reincarnation of the “Jews Not Welcome” policies that kept our grandparents off golf-courses, set quotas on their attendance at top universities, and turned back a ship of Jewish refugees because none was too many. 

There is little to no consequence for standing on a corner proclaiming the world needs to be cleansed of Jews, as a woman with a megaphone did a month ago in Halifax. There is no consequence for stating that Zionist students are incapable of learning and not welcome in your classroom, as took place several months ago at an Ontario university. When videos and photos are shared of Jewish students trapped in classrooms and Hillel by protestors or barred from entering buildings on university campuses, it is never framed in the context of racism towards a long-persecuted minority. It is brushed off as the right to engage in civil protest and freedom of speech rather than an unequivocal declaration that one group is not welcome because of an immutable characteristic: their faith.

We are witnessing the re-normalization of something the world promised us in 1945 would never be normal again. Is 79 years all that we get? All that could reasonably have been expected? How was this promise so easily broken? 

In the past few days, as I have sat with these thoughts and considered how to provide them with a voice, I have had disappointing moments of gratitude for the nearly 28 years of my life I lived during our interlude from the regularly scheduled programming of Antisemitism that has been the Jewish experience for centuries. 

The tsunami that is currently consuming us has been long approaching. We watched the waters pull back from the shore as rhetoric around the illegitimacy of the Jewish State and the equation of Zionists to White Supremacists permeated out of our universities and into our public and professional spaces. When the Jewish community began sounding the alarm, there was no wider urgency to flee the rushing water or pull those clearly in danger to safety. And so here we are. Speedily approaching the reality the world promised us would never be real again.