I’m selling my family home because the neighbourhood feels too hostile

Our lives have been divided into before and after.

I could fill a book with all that has changed: how I still wake in cold sweats dreaming of our people held captive; how the horrors of that day never leave me; how I am selling my family home this weekend because my neighbourhood feels too hostile; how I have become active in Jewish civil rights advocacy; how I am getting through each day thanks to the anti-anxiety pills my GP insisted I take; how I try to block my fears for the future when I see the distortions about Israel students from prep to university are being fed by their educators; how I wear my Jewish jewellery with pride (but sometimes tuck it in when I feel unsafe); how I despair that our voices are being shunned from the arts circles; how my family have been fulfilling more mitzvot as a shield from the antisemitism … but here I will focus on how the landscape of my friendships has changed.

I had a friend of two decades who didn’t reach out after, even though she knows half my family are from a kibbutz in the south, and after living in Israel for two years, I have many loved ones there. Her silence was so painful to me, so dehumanising … that she couldn’t even find the compassion to reach out and ask me if I was okay, because the victims were Israeli, and she has her opinions about some of the Israeli government’s actions.

After I was viciously doxxed, my university friendship group wrote to say they did not feel comfortable having contact with me anymore because I was “part of the group trying to silence pro-Palestinian voices”—a vindictive mischaracterisation of the group’s purpose, a conclusion they could have only come to from, not by actually reading the group chat, but only by reading the commentary on the chat. Commentary provided by people who called us ‘Zios’, a name for Jews coined by the Ku Klux Klan. I wrote a letter to them, sharing what we have experienced since the massacres, but they did not even open it.

There are more stories of friendships lost. Friendships I do not need or want anymore.

I am so grateful to my non-Jewish friends who stuck by me, supported me, checked in on me. I will never forget their support, ever. I now know who would hide me.

I have also become deeply connected with Jewish advocates, creatives and academics. This collective trauma has bound us together; we all feel this pain etched into our bones, a trauma that also connects us to our ancestors.

Earlier this year, my psychologist asked me to find the silver linings of this heart-wrenching time. I told her that after, I will always walk this earth with what feels like a hole in my chest … but that it is the friendships that have been strengthened, and the friendships that have been made that hold me through.