By Dinah Bucholz
Staff note: Over the course of the war in Gaza, we've sought to deliver a diversity of thought about the conflict to complement the viewpoint from Isaac and the rest of our staff. However, our stances have tended towards critical of Israeli actions (including a reader essay last week that mirrored many of the thoughts expressed in Tangle). To balance that out, today we are featuring a piece from Tangle reader Dinah Bucholz arguing that Israel has behaved morally throughout the war and that deeply biased narratives have taken hold in the media (including Tangle). Dinah has remained a Tangle reader and a thoughtful discussant throughout this conflict, even though she disagrees deeply with much of our coverage of the conflict, as have many other pro-Israeli subscribers. Turning the tables feels fair; today, we offer Dinah's piece in full, and we hope readers will engage with it inquisitively and thoroughly.
About Me.
Growing up in the Orthodox Jewish enclave of Monsey, NY, I spent my childhood in the shadow of the Holocaust. Don’t get me wrong: My childhood was happy and trauma free. But Holocaust survivors back then came a dime a dozen. Every elderly person I knew, including my own grandparents and many of my friends’ as well, spoke English with thick European accents. I remember sitting at the knee of my maternal grandmother, imbibing war stories of hair’s-breadth escapes (my grandfather jumped off a train heading to Auschwitz), as well as hearing stories on my father’s side of last-minute decisions that resulted in his family leaving Hungary before the Holocaust reached his birthplace.
So the idea of Jew hatred was sort of ever-present, in a quiet way, percolating on the back burner. As an adult, I read books on the history of Jew hatred and noticed a pattern familiar to students of Jewish history: that our history alternates between periods of peace and persecution like clockwork. So I always feared that the Golden Age of American Jewry would soon end, perhaps even in my lifetime, if history is to be any guide. Rising Jew hatred for a decade preceding October 7 presaged this ominous but hopefully never-to-happen fate.
All this is to say that the giant wave of Jew hatred unleashed after October 7, 2023, did not surprise me. Plus ça change! That doesn’t mean I accept it. No, I rage against it. I hate that the whole world has once again turned on the Jews. And following another horrifying historical pattern, a minority of Jews along with them. I hate that they believe that Jews are committing genocide, doing to others what was done to them, as they gleefully point out; that Jews are intentionally starving the population of Gaza; that Jews are indiscriminately mowing down desperately hungry civilians at aid sites — and that at last they can hate Jews openly yet virtuously (taking care to call them Zionists, of course).
I want the world to understand that it’s been propagandized against Israel and the Jewish people, that news outlets have been laundering Hamas’s narrative and reselling it as news. But how can I possibly do that on my own? It took people much smarter than me over 300 pages to do all that. It’s like paddling a paper boat into a tsunami: hopeless.
But nevertheless, I must try.
