October 7 Did Not End on October 7
Three years ago, Jews went to sleep on October 6 and woke up in a different world.
Not because hatred of Jews had suddenly returned. It had never left. Not because Israel had suddenly acquired enemies. It had always had them. And not even because Jews had forgotten that terrible things could happen to us. Our history has never allowed that luxury for very long.
What changed was that a set of assumptions many of us had spent our lives depending upon collapsed in a matter of hours.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists crossed into Israel and murdered families, slaughtered young people at a music festival, burned homes, raped women, kidnapped children, elderly people and entire families, and dragged human beings, alive and dead, back into Gaza as trophies.
That was the horror of October 7.
But it was not the only revelation.
The second revelation came afterward.
Before the bodies had been identified, people were already explaining why the Jews had it coming. Before families knew whether their loved ones were dead or kidnapped, people thousands of miles away were celebrating. Before Israel had even buried its dead, the machinery of excuse, inversion and denial was already running.
I knew antisemitism existed on October 6. I knew Jews had enemies. I knew there were people who hated Israel.
But knowing something intellectually is not the same as watching it happen in front of you.
Jews were murdered, and within hours the murderers were being romanticized. Jews were raped, and people who had built entire moral identities around believing women discovered exceptions. Jews were kidnapped, and posters bearing their faces were torn from walls in American and European cities.
The victims were put on trial before the killers were.
There is a version of Jewish life in which you can convince yourself that antisemitism is mostly a historical subject. You visit the museum. You read the books. You shake your head at photographs of crowds cheering things no civilized person could possibly cheer today.
Then you walk outside and return to modern life.
October 7 destroyed that distance.
I watched people discover elaborate political theories that somehow always arrived at the same ancient conclusion: when Jews are attacked, first ask what the Jews did to cause it.
That instinct is older than Zionism.
Zionism merely gave it a new vocabulary.
For three years I have watched people insist that their hostility is not directed at Jews. It is only directed at Zionists. Only Israel. Only Israelis. Only Jewish institutions that support Israel. Only Jewish students who refuse to denounce Israel. Only synagogues whose congregants raise money for Israel. Only Jewish businesses whose owners are Zionists. Only Jews who will not perform the required political confession.
At some point, the word “only” becomes ridiculous.
You do not get to construct a political category containing most of the world's Jews, attach collective guilt to it, demand its public repudiation, make its members legitimate targets for intimidation and exclusion, and then become offended when Jews recognize what you are doing.
We have seen this movie before. The subtitles are different.
October 7 also ended something else for me: the desire to make Jewish survival understandable to people determined not to understand it.
I no longer believe Jews need to audition for sympathy.
I do not need to prove that every Israeli government decision has been wise before saying that Jewish families should not be murdered in their homes. I do not need to produce a dissertation on Middle Eastern history before saying that rape is evil. I do not need to establish the political opinions of a kidnapped child before believing that child should be brought home.
Those should have been the easy moral questions.
The fact that they were not was the lesson.
And that is why October 7 still feels so close three years later.
It is not simply because we remember the dead.
It is because the argument that began while they were still lying where they were murdered never really stopped.
October 7 became a test that much of the world somehow failed.
Not a test of whether you supported a particular Israeli government. Not a test of whether you agreed with every military operation that followed. Not a test of whether you cared about Palestinian civilians.
The test was much simpler.
Could you look at Jews who had just experienced the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust and allow them, for one moment, to be victims without immediately putting them in the defendant's chair?
A frightening number of people could not.
I learned that Jewish memory is not paranoia.
And I learned that Jewish survival cannot depend upon being liked.
That may be the illusion October 7 finally killed.
We should have friends. We should build alliances where those alliances are real. We should persuade people when persuasion is possible. But our existence cannot be contingent upon somebody else's approval.
Neither can Israel's.
The Jewish people do not need to explain why, after thousands of years of exile, persecution, expulsion and massacre, we intend to remain capable of defending ourselves.
October 7 showed what happens when Jews cannot defend themselves for even a few hours.
I will never forget that lesson.
Tomorrow I will remember the people murdered on October 7. I will remember the people taken from their homes. I will remember the families that began that morning whole and ended it shattered. I will remember the soldiers, police officers, first responders and ordinary Israelis who ran toward danger because other Jews needed them.
But remembrance cannot mean only grief.
Jewish memory has never been merely an archive of suffering. We remember in order to know who we are.
Three years later, that is what October 7 means to me.
I know more about the world than I wanted to know.
I know more about hatred than I wanted to know.
I know more about how quickly civilized language can be used to excuse barbarism than I wanted to know.
But I also know something about us.
We are still here.
October 7 did not end on October 7.
Neither did we.