“Yes,” he said, and smiled. “Next can we download Dracula?”

  Chapter 12

  DEAD AMERICAN JEWS, PART THREE:

  Turning the Page

  THE THIRD TIME THERE WAS A SHOOTING ATTACK AGAINST American Jews, the New York Times did not call me to ask for a quick op-ed, and neither did anyone else. I presume this was because when something happens three times, it is no longer news. Perhaps these news outlets realized just how un-newsworthy this story actually was. People murdering Jews, as a three-thousand-year-old global phenomenon, is pretty much the opposite of news. When no one called me, I felt profoundly relieved, because the things I wanted to say about it were no longer things that I could actually say.

  The third shooting attack, and the dozen or so other physical attacks on American Jews that followed in rapid succession after it—some barely reported—were what privately changed me, perhaps because that third shooting happened at a kosher grocery store about twenty minutes from my house.

  Unlike after the Pittsburgh and San Diego attacks, information on the Jersey City attack was slow to accumulate. The two assailants first killed a livery driver (it was later discovered that they had Googled his Jewish-sounding surname), then progressed to killing a police officer who had noticed their stolen U-Haul, and then proceeded to attack the grocery store, resulting in a protracted gun battle in which the grocery’s owner, a customer, and a store worker were killed, along with the two assailants, who were killed by police after an exchange of fire that lasted well over an hour. The scene in the city was dramatic: Entire neighborhoods swarmed with state troopers and the National Guard, and children in nearby schools were held in lockdowns until late at night.

  The event was initially reported as a kind of perp chase gone horribly wrong, during which criminals outrunning cops ducked into a random store for cover. But antisemitic screeds found in the attackers’ vehicle and in their social media postings told a different story, as did the tactical gear they wore, the massive stash of ammunition and firearms they brought along, and security camera footage showing them driving slowly down the street, checking addresses before parking and entering the market with guns blazing. Then there were the enormous quantities of explosives in their stolen truck, which an FBI agent later said had the capacity to kill people within a range of five hundred yards. Their real targets, authorities surmised, were likely the fifty Jewish children in the private elementary school at the same address, directly above the store—all of whom huddled in closets for the entire gun battle, listening to their neighbors being murdered below.

  The delayed clarity on what exactly happened in Jersey City muted some of the public empathy that instantly followed the previous attacks. So did the identities of the attackers, both of whom were Black, and their targets, who were Hasidic Jews—who, it has progressively become clear, many otherwise enlightened Americans view as absolutely fair game for bigotry.

  This was obvious from reporting within hours of the attack, which gave surprising emphasis to the murdered Jews as “gentrifying” a “minority” neighborhood. This was remarkable, given that the tiny Hasidic community in question, highly visible members of the world’s most consistently persecuted minority, in fact came to Jersey City fleeing gentrification, after being priced out of long-established Hasidic communities in Brooklyn. More tellingly, as the journalist Armin Rosen has pointed out, the apparently murderous rage against gentrification has yet to result in anyone using automatic weapons to blow away white hipsters at the newest Blue Bottle Coffee franchise. What was most remarkable about this angle, however, was how it was presented in media reports as providing “context.”

  The “context” supplied by news outlets after this attack was breathtaking in its cruelty. As the Associated Press explained in a news report about the Jersey City murders that was picked up by NBC and many other outlets, “The slayings happened in a neighborhood where Hasidic families had recently been relocating, amid pushback from some local officials who complained about representatives of the community going door to door, offering to buy homes at Brooklyn prices.” (Like many homeowners, I too have been approached by real estate agents asking me if I wanted to sell my home. I recall saying no, though I suppose murdering these people would also have made them go away.) New Jersey’s state newspaper, the Star-Ledger, helpfully pointed out that “the attack that killed two Orthodox Jews, an Ecuadorian immigrant and a Jersey City police detective has highlighted racial tension that had been simmering ever since ultra-Orthodox Jews began moving to a lower-income community”—even though the assailants never lived in Jersey City, and apparently chose their target simply through internet searches for Jewish institutions in the New York area. The Washington Post began its analysis of the murders by announcing that Jersey City “is grappling with whether the attack reflects underlying ethnic tensions locally and fears that it could spark new ones”—even though the rest of the article described in detail how “longtime black residents and ultra-Orthodox implants alike say that they haven’t experienced significant ethnic tensions here.” Nonetheless, readers were informed, “the influx of Hasidic residents comes as many of the longtime black residents feel increasingly squeezed.” This was all about gentrification, the public learned. The assailants, who wore socially acceptable clothing, were expressing an understandable communal sentiment. The newly dead Jews, on the other hand, were members of the unharassed majority, despite being the country’s top hate-crime target according to the FBI. They were also rich, despite experiencing the same poverty rates as the rest of New York and New Jersey. On top of that, they wore unfashionable hats. So it kind of made sense that people wanted to murder their children with high-impact explosives.

  I was not able to find any similar “context” in media reports after the 2015 massacre at a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, or the 2016 massacre at an LGBTQ nightclub in Orlando, Florida, or the 2019 massacre at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas frequented by Latino shoppers—all hate-crime attacks that unambiguously targeted minority groups. In each of those cases, as was true in Jersey City, media coverage included sympathetic pieces about the victims, along with investigative pieces about the perpetrators, the latter focused on how perpetrators were drawn into violent irrational hatred. But in reviewing media reports from the aftermath of these events, I found no coverage of how straight people in Orlando other than the perpetrator—in other words, reasonable, non-murderous, relatable “normal” neighbors—were understandably upset about gay couples setting up shop in the neighborhood and disrupting their “way of life,” or about how white people with deep family roots in Charleston felt understandably wistful about the Black community’s “takeover” of certain previously white neighborhoods, or about how non-Latinos in El Paso felt “squeezed” by ongoing “tensions” with Latinos who had pushed for more bilingualism in schools.

  No one covered this “context,” because doing that would be bonkers. It would be hateful victim-blaming, the equivalent of analyzing the flattering selfies of a rape victim in lurid detail in order to provide “context” for a sexual assault. That doesn’t mean that intergroup tensions (or the problems with flattering selfies) aren’t ever worth examining. It simply means that presenting such analysis as a hot take after a massacre is not merely disgusting and inhuman, but also a form of the very same hatred that caused the massacre—because the sole motivation for providing such “context” in that moment is to inform the public that those people got what was coming to them. People who think of themselves as educated and ethical don’t do this, because it is both factually untrue and morally wrong. But if we’re talking about Hasidic Jews, it is quite literally a different story, and there is one very simple reason why.

  The mental gymnastics required to get the Jersey City attack out of my head were challenging, especially when the Jewish community in the New York area was treated in the two weeks following this massacre to more than a dozen other assaults of varying degrees, most of them coming during the festival of Hanukkah. These included Jews being slapped, punched, kicked, and beaten on the streets by people who made their motives clear by shouting antisemitic insults, and many other variants on this theme that received much less attention. (One that shook me personally was when a young white man broke into my students’ dormitory at Yeshiva University at four a.m. and started a fire—using matches from the dorm lobby’s Hanukkah candle-lighting.) All this was merely an intensified version of physical assaults on Hasidic Jews in New York that had been happening regularly for over a year—incidents that ranged from run-of-the-mill acts of knocking elderly people to the ground to the rather more advanced tactic of clobbering someone over the head with a large paving stone, causing a fractured skull.

  This new normal culminated in a particularly horrifying attack, when a man entered a crowded Hanukkah party at a Hasidic rabbi’s house in Monsey, New York, wielding a four-foot machete, and stabbed or slashed five people, all of whom were hospitalized; one victim, who fell into a coma, died several months later from his wounds. Stabbing Jews was apparently in vogue in Monsey, as this was actually the second antisemitic knifing in town in just over a month. The previous attack’s victim was beaten and stabbed while walking to morning prayers, winding up in critical condition with head injuries. Media coverage of these attacks also sometimes featured “context” (read: gaslighting), mentioning heated school-board or zoning battles between Hasidic and non-Hasidic residents—even after the perpetrator was identified as a resident of a town forty minutes away. One widely syndicated Associated Press article situated the previous week’s bloodbath by informing millions of readers that “The expansion of Hasidic communities in New York’s Hudson Valley, the Catskills and northern New Jersey has led to predictable sparring over new housing development and local political control. It has also led to flare-ups of rhetoric seen by some as antisemitic.” In other words, the cause of bloodthirsty antisemitic violence is . . . Jews, living in a place! Sometimes, Jews who live in places even buy land on which to live. To be fair, there were many countries and centuries in which this Jews-owning-land monkey business was illegal, though twenty-first-century Hudson Valley, the Catskills, and northern New Jersey are sadly not among those enlightened locales. Predictably, this leads to sparring, and flare-ups. Who wouldn’t express frustration with municipal politics by hacking people with a machete?

  After the first attack in Pittsburgh, I was devastated. After the second attack in San Diego, I was angry. But after the third attack near my home and the season of horror that followed, I simply gave up.

  There was no way I could write about any of this for the New York Times, or any other mainstream news outlet. I could not stomach all the “to be sures” and other verbal garbage I would have to shovel in order to express something acceptable to a non-Jewish audience in a thousand words or less. I could no longer handle the degrading exercise of calmly explaining to the public why it was not OK to partially amputate someone’s arm with a four-foot-long blade at a holiday party, even if one had legitimate grievances with that person’s town council votes. Nor could I announce, as every non-Jewish media outlet would expect, that these people whose hairstyles one dislikes are “canaries in the coal mine,” people whose fractured skulls we all ought to care about because they serve as a warning—because when Jews get murdered or maimed, it might be an ominous sign that actual people, people who wear athleisure, might later get attacked! I was done with this sort of thing, which amounted to politely persuading people of one’s right to exist.

  The thought of writing about any of this for Jewish media outlets was sickening for a different reason. It was demoralizing to confront the American Jewish community’s ongoing and escalating panic, the completely justified intergenerational PTSD freak-out voiced constantly from every point on the political spectrum, the repetitive anxiety attacks expressed on social media, the nonstop discussion about whether this was like Berlin in 1935. This facile comparison was of course ridiculous on its face, as well as insulting to the overwhelming majority of Americans who responded to these attacks in exactly the opposite fashion from the mass state-sponsored violence of Nazi Germany. If anything, this felt more like Paris in 2005—a place where there was no shortage of legal protections and official goodwill, but where one wouldn’t be crazy to occasionally hide a yarmulke under a baseball hat. Yet the thought of explaining this was exhausting too, and also beside the point. Was I really going to expend energy delineating why this wasn’t like the Third Reich, but perhaps resembled, say, second-century Egypt or tenth-century Spain? To what end? To reassure everyone that “only” a few Jews were actually maimed or dead, so everything was cool? Nitpicking over sloppy historical analogies was a convenient distraction. The fact was that a communal memory of multiple millennia had been activated, and it was deep and real.

  Of all the tedious and self-serving explanations for why this scourge was apparently reemerging in American life (Guns! Trump! Trolls! Twitter!), the most convincing was actually the most boring, and also the most disturbing: The last few generations of American non-Jews had been chagrined by the enormity of the Holocaust—which had been perpetrated by America’s enemy, and which was grotesque enough to make antisemitism socially unacceptable, even shameful. Now that people who remembered the shock of those events were dying off, the public shame associated with expressing antisemitism was dying too. In other words, hating Jews was normal. And historically speaking, the decades in which my parents and I had grown up simply hadn’t been normal. Now, normal was coming back.

  A week after that horrific Hanukkah, the Jewish community organized a “No Fear, No Hate” march in New York City, which twenty-five thousand people attended—though almost no one from the particular Hasidic communities which had been attacked, whose adherents generally don’t go in for that sort of thing. I didn’t go in for it either, though for somewhat different reasons. It interfered with Hebrew school carpooling, for one thing. And while I knew the march was intended as an act of pride and defiance and that those who attended found it empowering and inspiring, its mere existence felt profoundly depressing to me, almost like an admission of defeat. I watched the photos and videos pouring in from the march with a kind of uncomfortable schadenfreude: happy that so many people had attended, and even happier that I was obligated to drive seven children home from Hebrew school instead.

  But another massive Jewish gathering near my home a few days earlier had also caught my attention, one whose attendance, ninety thousand people at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey’s Meadowlands, dwarfed that of the march in New York. And unlike the march, it was attended by many of the people who had been directly targeted during those horrific weeks. This event, which was mirrored in parallel events around the world, was the “Siyum HaShas,” or “Conclusion of the Talmud,” a ceremony celebrating the completion of communally studying the Babylonian Talmud in a program called Daf Yomi, or “A Page a Day.”

  Begun by a Polish rabbi in 1923 as a way to democratize Talmud study, the premise of Daf Yomi is to study one “page” of the Talmud each day—really two sides of one large physical page, which with the necessary commentaries is more like fifteen pages of dense material—thereby completing the Talmud’s 2,711 “pages” in a very reasonable seven and a half years. To those unfamiliar with Jewish text study, this probably sounds like a big commitment. But when one considers that Talmud study was traditionally a full-time affair, it was quite radical to suggest that one could actually complete the entire Talmud while still, say, holding down a job. Today, Daf Yomi, the “world’s largest book club,” consists of hundreds of thousands of people around the world who spend those seven and a half years quite literally on the same page. When they finish, most of them start right over again.

  I wouldn’t have fit in much at MetLife Stadium’s Daf Yomi ceremony, which consisted almost entirely of men wearing black hats. Since the fifth century when the Talmud was compiled (its sources span the previous six centuries), women have rarely studied it. Its study was also long deemphasized in Judaism’s more liberal modern movements, including those in which I was raised. But in recent years, both of those things have been changing. This most recent Daf Yomi cycle concluded with a large-scale women’s ceremony in Jerusalem, attended by thousands of women—many of whom had not only studied the text for the previous seven and a half years, but had also taught it, sometimes for large audiences in person and online. My brilliant friend Ilana Kurshan, an accomplished literary agent and translator in Jerusalem, published an award-winning memoir, If All the Seas Were Ink, describing how the daily routine of Talmud study carried her through challenging years in her own life—and her book inspired many less-traditional people who had previously assumed that Talmud study wasn’t for them. In the years since the last cycle began, Daf Yomi resources had also blossomed online, including a fantastic variety of podcasts, Facebook discussion groups, Instagram stories, Twitter accounts, and more, much of it geared toward people with no previous background in Talmud study. Daf Yomi was going viral.

  I had toyed with doing Daf Yomi at the start of the last cycle, but I had just given birth to my fourth baby, and the thought of slogging through fat volumes or clunky websites with mediocre translations was unappealing at best. But this time around, there was a game-changing free app called Sefaria (Hebrew for “library”), which contained nearly the entire canon of traditional Jewish texts in their original Hebrew and Aramaic, along with more accessible English translations. I’d downloaded Sefaria years earlier—it was created by an acquaintance—and I often relied on it for biblical and other references. On that frigid and depressing Sunday in January, toggling on my phone between the vast crowds of anti-hate marchers and the vast crowds of Talmud enthusiasts, I realized with utter wonder that I already had the entire Talmud in the palm of my hand.