This Is What It Feels Like to Be a Zionist Jew in Boston
This beautiful place failed to become my home. This is a place where hatred is polite, footnoted, intellectualized, where contempt arrives dressed as scholarship and exclusion calls itself justice. And this is where the timelines begin to deceive me. I stand before a university in Boston, but somewhere inside its walls I see Prague; I see Germany; I see the same human ugliness rearranging itself across centuries. Different faces, different clothes, different words, but the same roles, the same certainty, the same ancient choreography of hatred. For a moment, I no longer know which universe I am standing in, or what year it is. Perhaps that is the cruelty of parallel timelines: history does not return looking exactly as we remember it. It changes its clothes, its language. You see it now: the Jew becomes the Zionist. No longer a swastika; now, a keffiyeh.
I could replace Boston with NYC, add a few pointed paragraphs in the theme of paradise lost and it would all come together for me too. NYC was the Jewish city. It was the shining beacon on the hill for us. And now, it’s gone. I am constantly reminded of how the events played out in Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant”. From the moment the beast was first hit, its death was assured but it took so terribly long to die. That’s NYC today. The blow has landed and the big magnificent animal, this once amazing Jewish city, is now expiring. Like Orwell’s elephant, it is taking time-a little loss here, a further retreat there. The end is no longer in doubt though. And it’s just so damn depressing. If there is a place in this would, outside of Israel, where we Jews poured our hearts and souls into, NYC was it. And it just wasn’t enough.