The following excerpts present the voices of three individuals, recorded at two distinct moments in time. These narratives explore the evolution of their reflections on Jewish identity and the impact of antisemitism, offering a raw, intimate glimpse into their personal journeys. The first set of interviews was conducted in 2020/21. The second took place a few months after the October 7th terrorist attack by Hamas in 2023

The Reflective Drifter (February 2024)

Navigating between different cultural worlds, they carry a steady awareness of their Jewish identity in environments where it goes unrecognized. Though distanced from religious practice, they remain deeply connected to their Jewish heritage, guided by a sense of responsibility to preserve it in an increasingly marginalized world.

I can’t speak for everyone, obviously, but I think most Jews, and certainly almost everyone that I know, felt a collective trauma response. When I got the news I felt horrified, felt terrified, and you know what, I’ve never felt more Jewish in my life. I’ve never felt more strongly about my identity, about my people, about our safety. I will say that my initial reaction and how I feel about it now are drastically different. Over the last few months, I had to have a lot of hard conversations, and I had to do a lot of reading, and talk to other people with different experiences than mine, or even some people who have very similar experiences to mine, to try to get a bigger view on the whole thing.

And now I’m still upset about the seeming hopelessness of it all. And I’m mortified by the violence that I see. My initial thought was, Oh my God they’re coming to get us again. I think there’s a lot of antisemitism in the world and I also think there’s confusion for a lot of people between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. I think that a lot of people are really angry, justifiably so, and I’m really terrified of the sort of lack of nuance around the conversation and how it has really become a stark sort of black and white. Especially for a lot of the people that I am in circles with—young leftist people. The scariest thing to me is, I mean obviously other than the deplorable violence and murder, the scariest thing that I’m personally experiencing is just people not being able to talk to each other about it.

Right after October 7th, for the first few weeks I felt a responsibility to go on Instagram, to go on my social media and speak up for Jews. Because I saw in my circle a lot of people weren’t doing that. And a lot of people were just jumping on to say a bunch of stuff and I was just like, hey, can we take a second to maybe consider, you know, the whole picture and how other people might feel? And I had a lot of really hard conversations. I’ve had some conversations with people that were incredibly healing. And even if we disagreed, it just reaffirmed our shared humanity, which I think is really important right now. But I also have had some conversations with people where I was like, okay, I might not have the same relationship with that person ever again. I really spent the first three weeks just feeling my trauma response and taking no time to reflect on that.

At the beginning of all of this, when I saw people chanting—friends of mine chanting “Globalize the Intifada”—I was like, these people wanna kill me, these people want me dead. Seeing people wave signs [that said] “From the River to the Sea” and all this stuff that I was always taught was antisemitic, either overtly or antisemitic dog whistles. But I have sort of come to believe that 90% of the people who are walking in these protests saying “Intifada, Intifada” mean it simply to say, shrug off oppression and have Palestine be free. I really don’t think that most of those people understand that the Intifada was an actual thing that happened in Israel—the suicide bombings and the collective trauma that exists around that for Jews the world over. I think a lot of people are swept up in a tide; they feel very strongly that there is something wrong happening there. I think it’s pretty hard to look at what’s happening and say there isn’t, you know.

It’s taken me quite a bit of time to try to intellectually remove myself from some of that stuff that’s happening and say, yes, there’s tons of antisemitism. I’m really scared of people’s inability to separate Jews from Israel. I think there’s, especially in the circles that I’m in, tons of conversation about how anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. I’m like, let’s really try, if we’re gonna be anti-Israel or critical of the government, to not be antisemitic. But the Israeli flag is a huge Star of David, and 98% of the people on the planet aren’t making that distinction. And so I think it is really terrible, and really terrifying. I am trying to be more optimistic and trying to be more understanding of people who are in those protests. Because I really do believe that the majority of people who are involved in that movement are not coming from a place of antisemitism or of hatred. And even if they’re using language that we think is violent towards Jews and antisemitic . . . I wish that they were more willing to hear us say that and go, “Okay, let’s try not to use that language,” which I think they would do if it were other people that were involved in this. And I think that’s a little bit of the scary side of antisemitism

Ultimately it’s not helpful to fight with any of them at all, which I tried to do for a month. I tried to take that on. It made me miserable. It made me feel terrible to yell against, you know, a sea of people all disagreeing with me. I think a lot of young people in North America view everything through a Western settler/colonial lens, which is really hard to apply to a piece of land that’s been fought over for thousands and thousands of years and changed hands a bunch of times. I was shocked at how affected I was by this.

I would say, and I’m sure what I’m about to say comes from a place of immense privilege, but I wasn’t thinking about Israel all that much until this happened. I think one of the crazy things that happened after October 7th is that all of a sudden every Jew was forced into a conversation, and forced to have an opinion, on something that we weren’t necessarily ready for. And all of that in the midst of also going through this trauma response and needing to talk about it.

’m talking about being able to hold two things at once. It took me time and needing to do some research, and some hard conversations and hard realizations about myself. And I think that for these other people who are ripping down [hostage] posters, they feel like they are morally right. And they’re in this gigantic group—it’s clear that that is the group that has the loudest voice— and I think that that gives them a little bit of armor. I felt like I had to do more research; I had to find some humanity to hold. Because I wouldn’t be able to talk to people otherwise. And I think that for a lot of those people, they don’t feel the need to do that deep dive, or have those hard conversations, because they think they’re right already.

I feel proudly and strongly Jewish. I feel there has been a shift. Maybe it wasn’t a shift; maybe I’ve just become more aware of the way that the world thinks of Jews. But I feel any change that I have had is an external thing where I think my views on myself as a Jew, what that means to me, how I exist in that community, I don’t really think that has changed. But I do notice now that the world, I think, thinks of Jews differently. Or maybe thinks of them in the same way they always did, and I wasn’t clocking that before.

Read many other first hand accounts in Marnie Salsky's book A Peoplehood