Somewhere along the way we forgot that no one owes us anything.
In 2003/4 when I was gearing up to leave NYC and move to Israel, I wrote this ‘manifesto’ of my rationale for making aliyah. (Wish I could find it, but alas, there was a time before digital hoarding was automated to clouds.) I remember feeling like I was perhaps being ‘extra’ about it (also alas, we didn’t have that word in that way back then) but I also felt like I wasn’t wrong.
If it could happen any time, any place, it could happen here.
Perhaps dumb, naive young people are also correct once in a while?
Either way, early 40s me is not sorry about the way early 20s me felt. Never has been for a single day. There were mainly meh feelings that led me to leave NYC – it was inevitable, aliyah or not – and mainly positive reasons for me to choose to move to Israel.
But the underlying foundation, the one I’d be saying if I had never even left, stood then and stands taller now: It could happen anywhere. Where will you be when it does?
I don’t know what any of this means today, in the now. I really don’t think a mayoral election is something to fear on its own. (I don’t like hyperbole, as much as I wrote a ‘manifesto’ in my early 20s.) No, our demons don’t come after us one at a time. It’s a lot of surrounding context, of cascading criteria.
And, well. There is a lot of cascading criteria at the moment.
Recently, my son asked if we have any relatives who survived or were murdered in the Holocaust. We told him no. He raised it again, and again – he is going on מסע פולין this year, so you know.
“Are you guys sure that there’s no one from our family that was in the holocaust? Not even maybe someone?”
“Listen u come from a long line of ppl who knew when the fuck to leave a party…”
Again, I really don’t think a mayoral election is something to fear on its own. NYC has survived terrible mayors (everyone is a terrible mayor in NYC until the next one comes along), and I don’t know of this one will be terrible or ok or legendary.
I know that a mayor alone doesn’t make us unsafe, and the conditions are already set, sprouting from an unstable terrain below the sidewalk.
Chances are, there will be dog whistling (flags in the background, turns of phrase), changing status quo through canceling familiar institutions and norms of Jewish NYC (heavens, what of the Israeli Pride Parade?! but also Technion, what?), less security allocation (mmm yeah, not good), and, mostly, 22/7, a very tedious process of learning how to manage a very complex and cynical city.
Jews will get shot at either way. It’s already ‘ok’. It takes more than one voice to do that. And the choir is already singing.
Sorry.
Whadya got: