Cynthia Ozick: A New York Jewish Life of Letters
(snip)
Although she attends an Orthodox synagogue, Ms. Ozick prefers to describe herself as “just generically Jewish.” If there’s a theme that dominates her oeuvre, it’s Jewishness, particularly Jewish life in America, which has of late infected her with sorrow. Jewishness, she says, is “co-extensive, or coterminous, with American life. You couldn’t pull Jews and America apart. Until now.” She means the period since Oct. 7, 2023.
Seated at her dining table, Ms. Ozick trembles as she speaks of “the mystery of that day in October.” On the very morrow, “it was as if, in this country and everywhere in the world, permission was suddenly given.” She means permission for antisemitism. Her consternation is “profound,” she says: “How could an event like that, a terrible massacre so minutely recorded by the perps, open these permissive floodgates?”
The question torments her. “It’s a greater puzzle than antisemitism itself. The whole world was standing there, suppressing antisemitism, and when Oct. 7 happened, it said, ‘Oh, look. It happened. So we can do it, too.’ ” Her last published commentary, which appeared on these pages, addressed these events. Titled “Antisemitism and the Politics of the Chant,” it asked whether we’ve “come to the end of a Golden Age” in America, especially for its Jewish citizens. She fears we have. The massacre gave a green light for “Jew-hate,” she says. “But for some exceptions, there was no sympathy. It was as if this country changed overnight.
(snip)
After Oct. 7, she confronted a question about the country to which her Jewish parents fled from Russia, and where they found great happiness in their lives as Americans. “Is it now the beginning, little by little, of the disintegration of what we’ve come to call the Judeo-Christian in America. Is the legacy of the Founding Fathers coming to an end?” (After that question, she apologizes for using a “cliché.”)
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https://www.wsj.com/opinion/cynthia-ozick-a-new-york-jewish-life-of-letters-52aff38e?st=sZPMcc&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
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Pure ice-cold antisemitism is guiding a lot of what you're reading and seeing in the last week. It's a crude hatred of Jews for being Jews, and it is as old as the hills.
Tom Watson
Oct 14, 2023
When I was a young reporter in the Bronx, I often interviewed survivors of The Shoah - the Holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany, an ordered and relentless human extermination program that shipped Jews of all ages to vast death camps, where they were gassed or otherwise murdered. The men and women I interviewed had been mostly children or young adults at the time (this was the late 80s and early 90s) and the camp survivors among them bore Nazi tattoos on their wrists. Numbers, like tags on livestock.
These people emigrated to the United States and made their way to the northwest Bronx. Some were observant Jews of one denomination or another; many were not. I interviewed them in either late middle age or their dotages, and they’d all mostly had full lives - teachers, business people, professionals, involved community members. I was amazed at how soft-spoken and matter of fact these interviews were. The Kristallnacht happened, and then my neighbors turned me in, and then my entire family died, and then I came to America and went to school and got married. And so on. There was an underlying intensity like a large rubber band whose vibration you could sometimes feel when you asked a difficult question but always sensed was there. Today, they’d call that emotional trauma. But at that time, I sensed both a willingness to discuss the past tangled tightly with the human desire to move forward. Which I could understand: the people I was interviewing had (by luck or intervention) received a second chance that six million did not.
And of course, the overall abiding theme of all of these interviews (indeed the special annual Holocaust Remembrance issue of The Riverdale Press in those days) was Never Again.
Well, we have arrived at Again...
https://theliberaltomwatson.substack.com/p/a-time-for-choosing
