My sense of self has fundamentally changed

Rivers of ink have been spilled since the October 7 attacks and we are none the wiser for it. Indeed, almost a year on and we are locked in an intractable war. In Israel, yes. In Gaza. But also at home. With our friends. With our families. With ourselves.

To be honest, I am still struggling to process it. The only thing I can say for sure is that my sense of self has fundamentally changed. Judaism has always been at the core of my identity. It has come to define my artistic life. My music was Jewish. My writing is Jewish. I spent eight years writing a book that interrogated my own third generation Holocaust trauma. When it was done, I felt I had reconciled myself to my past. Now, I feel I’m living it. Watching the veneer of tolerance be so summarily ripped from a country my grandparents fled to because it was the furthest from the hatred they’d lived has been heartbreaking. I try not to succumb to the dread, to the comparisons desperately vying for currency. But yes, I’ve thought of contingencies. Escape routes.

To me, October 7 and the subsequent horrors of Gaza have been the litmus test for sophisticated thinking. How frightening it is, then, to realise how few people are capable of holding multiple truths at once. How quickly people jump on bandwagons, swallow entire narratives, sacrifice any sense of intellectual or humanitarian rigour to newfound idols. And, oh, the anger. Seething. Raging. A storm of angers, really. Coming from every direction. Fellow writers, people I’d considered my friends, all but erasing my grief. Spouting tropes I had thought consigned to the post-War litter trays of Germany. And then there were my Jewish friends, leaning into the kind of violent nationalism that ought to give them pause for thought.

Those of us who have long identified as left-wing Jews, who have advocated for a Palestinian state, who have criticised Israel not because we thought it should not exist but because we thought it should hold true to Jewish values, suddenly found ourselves at the centre of the maelstrom. I was a traitor, a kappo. I was a genocidal apologist. A child murderer.

I have desperately wanted to join the conversation. To speak up. To write. But who that I wish would hear what I have to say is going to listen? Entry into this new progressive conversation comes at too high a price: the complete repudiation of Israel. An acceptance of an historically ignorant anti-colonial narrative. I am not willing to do that. I love that ferkakta place even if I despair at what it has become. And so, I’ve stayed silent. Impotent. Wondering who I am when I have no words.

I have fought the temptation to switch on Sky News. I have yet to subscribe to The Australian. But I’ve left social media. I’ve resigned from all the Australian writers’ organisations. I don’t go to literary dos anymore. Instead, I’ve planted a vegetable garden with my daughter. It’s portable, though. Just in case we need to move it into a friend’s secret annex.