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This is a guest essay written by Karol Markowicz, a columnist and podcaster.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
If you’re on a group chat, which includes more than two Jews, know your Jewish friends have a secret side chat.
At last count I am on more than 10 group chats like this, most with the word “Jew,” “Jewish” or “Israel” in the name, that have splintered off from main chats. Some of the secret side chats have a secret side-side chat; of course, two Jews, three opinions and all that.
It’s (probably) not because we’re a secret cabal ruling the world and we need you out of the way to discuss it. It’s that after October 7th Jews have found we needed to talk about it, a lot. The horrific attacks, the war, the violent protests aimed at upending our safety in the West, all of it, and we didn’t want to drag our non-Jewish friends down.
I’ve felt very lucky to be in my conservative world. Friends have been so supportive, some of you amazingly so. But we know it’s a lot. It often feels like a lot even to us.
On the secret side chats, we discuss big things: United Nations votes, troop movements, the status of the hostages, bigotry, violence. But we also talk the small shifts in conversations, moods, details. A friend’s odd post, color patterns on designer shirts, the sickening silence of Jewish celebrities, the intent of influencers posting vague commentary and what it means.
Why do we delve?
Because it has happened before. We know the stories of a culture shifting underneath our feet and our fellow Jews realizing it too late.
When my family travels, we seek out the places where Jews used to live. It’s not just Eastern Europe. It wasn’t just the Holocaust. There we are in Lisbon, Malaga, Girona Venice, so on. There we were. We walk where they walked, secure in their lives, imagining nothing could upend them.
We take a selfie on the Street of Jews, the Rua da Judiaria, the Via De’ Giudei, Plaza De La Juderia, or in front of the old synagogue or at the gates that used to lock the Jews in at night. In Bologna, we translate a commemorative sign that notes the Jews were taken and “annihilated far away, who knows where, who knows when.”
The important part, to us, is less to see where Jews lived and died. It isn’t the “woe is us.” It’s what comes next. We look at our Jewish children and say “Am Yisrael Chai,” “the nation of Israel lives” because it does in us, in them. They didn’t wipe us out. They didn’t win. We’re still here. We’re not taking that for granted. We come to see it so we remember.
But we also want things to be different this time. We’re not going who knows where, not this time. This time we are armed, either here in America or there in Israel. This time, it won’t be so easy.
Which takes us back to the group chats. We didn’t want to overwhelm our friends with our (well-founded or not) neuroses. So we took the conversation elsewhere and we discussed our worries about whether our kids could be safe on campus, or the weird “likes” of internet acquaintances, or the security we feel we have only in Florida, on our own time.
But the result of that is that your Jewish friends are on high alert for our safety and you may not even know why. “Wait, what happened with Candace Owens?” went one of my mixed chats recently. It’s very easy not to know all the minutiae. And it is all minutiae right up until it’s not. It’s all crazy worries, things that could never happen here, until your kids are skipping down the street in Toledo, Spain, where Jews used to live but don’t anymore.
I believe America is different, yes, better, but I’ve been worried about the path America has been on for the last few years in so many ways and, to me, this is just an extension of that. The loudest, dumbest, voices have been directing the conversations and shutting down everyone else.
I’m not worried about Jew-hatred catching on, exactly, but that the forced conformity of the pandemic years, the fear of speaking up, has set a perfect stage for people to keep quiet lest they want their Facebook pages filled with rage and their employment targeted. People didn’t feel they could say the obvious, that schools should be open and that their kids should be attending.
I am not sure I can count on people saying the obvious when it won’t even benefit their own children. Now everyone believes schools should have been open and of course it was a mistake to close them. It turns out everybody thought so all along!
And everyone’s grandpa in Europe hid Jews in World War II. I don’t want to be commemorated on the street I used to live on after I’ve been killed for being a Jew. Save the plaque. I don’t need to be right in retrospect.
In 2019, writing about, yes, antisemitism shortly after a stabbing attack on Jews in Monsey, New York, I wrote in the New York Post:
“Like many of you, I’m thinking, ‘Not this subject again.’ How many columns can be devoted to it? I’ve read them. I’ve written them. It’s exhausting, and it’s dreary. Jews are being beaten up, anti-Semitism flows some years and ebbs in others.”
It is exhausting. I am exhausted. But I can’t look away and pretend it’s not happening. There’s an intense amount of hate aimed at us right now.
In the New York Post last weekend, I wrote about regular riots happening in the very Jewish suburb of Teaneck, New Jersey. I just picked one place, but this kind of thing is happening everywhere. All of the secret side chats are lit up, all the time, with insane stories of what is going on. It’s hard to sum up because it’s constant and I can write a different column daily.
This delicate dance, speaking our worries but not too much, wanting to tell our friends but not want to bury them under our fears, it’s on the minds of your Jewish friends. Just be glad you’re not in the secret side chats.
Although it's easy to see how being part of a "secret side chat" can make one crazy - those of us with fertile minds (and which Jewish mind ISN'T fertile?) must be able to express ourselves. I, too, am grateful for my politically conservative leanings. However, I staunchly refuse to limit my thinking about Israel to secular ideology from the galut. Because the galut lacks the G-d given wisdom of our Jewish scriptures. Because Israel - the Israel that emerges from this horrific war - must be something new; something that not only secures Israel better than we have secured her for the last 75-odd years but also brings the world closer to the Redemption.
Some of my ramblings about this "new Israel" expressed in this forum have not been liked, even by readers who typically “like” my comments. In fact one reader - a non-Jew claiming to be a friend of Israel - called me delusional because I emphasized the strengthening of a Jewish majority in the Jewish homeland. Because I called for considering the needs of the many Diaspora Jews fleeing 1930s style anti-Semitism over the needs of non-Jewish refugees from Syria, Lebanon and such.
Our scriptures describe the Messianic era as one involving an ingathering of Jews to the Holy Land. But I fear the world (even our friends) will do all it can to “shrink” Israel - both geographically and in terms of Jewish influence. Karol, I would appreciate your asking the folks in your “secret side chat” to answer this question: Is there anything wrong with an Israel that puts Jews - and Judaism - first? Clearly, this is a matter to be discussed privately, and certainly feverishly. My brain needs a rest.
In 2011 Israel did a prisoner exchange for a single hostage IDF soldier named Gilad Shalit in exchange for hundreds of Hamas terrorists including one Yahya Sinwar.
We knew this would happen we just didn't know when.
Rabbi Shifren talked about it on this song we recorded together in 2011:
https://www.soundclick.com/share.cfm?id=11201087