Zionist, Journalist, Zionist. Also Zionist.
A pleasure to meet you.
THERE is a dream which keeps coming back to me at almost regular intervals; it is dark and I am being murdered in some kind of thicket or brushwood; there is a busy road at no more than ten yards distance; I scream for help but nobody hears me, the crowd walks past laughing and chatting.
-- Arthur Koestler, “The Nightmare That Is a Reality,” The New York Times, Jan. 9, 1944
SO, perhaps, it is the other way round: perhaps it is we, the screamers, who react in a sound and healthy way to the reality which surrounds us, whereas you are the neurotics who totter about in a screened fantasy world because you lack the faculty to face the facts.
-- Koestler
I had worked in print newsrooms for nearly two decades, covering crime, general assignment, and finally fashion, before my husband and I decamped to leafy North Carolina to raise our two daughters. I figured my days of deadlines were over. Perhaps I'd write a romance novel...
And then the Durham City Council in 2018 unanimously passed a boycott of Israel. It was shocking. And toxic.
The resolution enshrined antisemitism in Durham's municipal books for posterity. But more: It served as a national prototype for embracing the grotesque illiberalism of anti-Zionism.
In "progressive" strongholds, #doitlikedurham became a thing.
It was then that I felt Jew-hatred in my bones. Something had arrived--old, dark, un-dead.
But finally, I stopped crying and started fighting, and in the most inconvenient of places. City hall. The kids' prep school. Our synagogue.
We could forget invitations to birthday parties, New Year's fetes, even Passover break-fasts, I told Jeff.
He had one question.
"Is that a promise?"