Two writers whose work I admire. Two pieces about genocide: a book written by a man with a complicated Middle Eastern-immigrant background, and an article by a Jewish woman born in the U.S. Both centre on the author’s own people and the great evils perpetrated against them. Both are written in great upset and outrage, which I share. 

Omar El Akkad’s book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, is about the Israeli war on Gaza, in which upwards of 50,000 Palestinians have died, many of them women and children. While I was reading it, The Sunday New York Times thudded onto our doorstep with a magazine piece by Taffy Brodesser-Akner. Her article, “The Last Survivors,” details why she finally decided to interview a friend’s father about surviving the horrors of the Holocaust, in which six million Jews were killed.

As I wrote last time, both writers focus in hard on their own people: su gente, as Spanish-speakers say. El Akkad gives a scant paragraph to the immediate reason for the Israeli invasion of Gaza: the surprise attack by Hamas terrorists on October 7, 2023, in which they killed about 1,200 Israelis, including 815 civilians, while taking 250 people hostage. 

Meanwhile, Brodesser-Akner writes that part of her reason for ending her long-standing refusal to engage with the Holocaust involves a pair of nasty acts of antisemitism suffered by her sons. As she documents, these are part of a recent, reprehensible increase in violence against Jews. Perhaps this isn’t entirely unconnected to what’s happening to Palestinians, yet Brodesser-Akner only glances at Gaza in a couple of sentences—about the same amount of space that El Akkad gives to October 7.  

Opposite positions, yet similar approaches. Because in arguing their different positions, both also write primarily about themselves. I’m not criticizing them for it. Editors and publishers believe it sells, and I imagine it does. But what does that say about us as a society, that writing is so often about me, me, mi gente, my people, and not us?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a smart and lively writer with a gift for snark, and I always brighten when I see her byline on an article. Early in the pandemic, she did a hilarious takedown of Gwyneth Paltrow and her wellness empire. I still think about it five years later, especially now that anti-vaxx, anti-science, pro-woo woo Robert Kennedy Jr. has a seat in Donald Trump’s cabinet. 

Even though she’s tackling a far more sombre subject, Brodesser-Akner opens her latest article with a personal anecdote and a series of her trademarked wacky run-on sentences. In this case, she dreams that one her oldest friends has got engaged. “I called her up and asked if there was something I didn’t know, because I inherited a witchy quality from my mother: I occasionally have dreams about people and it turns out that they’re predictive or at least thematically correct. She laughed sadly and told me that she wasn’t engaged, no, but that her father was dying.”

Over the years, her friend, Ilana, has often asked Brodesser-Akner to interview her father, a Jewish Hungarian who lived through the Holocaust as a child. But Brodesser-Akner has always refused. Because, “let me tell you: on the matter of the Holocaust we were educated. I need to disclose to you that yes, I am hyperbolic and that I know that hyperbole combined with the way the brain rounds down when it has been trying to make a point for too many years is deadly, but here it is anyway: In my most bitter moments, in times when I realize how much of my foundational education was given over to the (Second World) war and how little was given over to, say, gym or art or other humanities that would have helped me in life or at the very least in work meetings, I say I went to a Holocaust high school, a magnet school for Jewish death studies.”

Eventually she rebels. During a gap year at university in Tel Aviv, she realizes she has just spent several hours of her scant and precious spare time watching the Steven Spielberg film, “Schindler’s List,” and eavesdropping on two Holocaust survivors debating whether Spielberg’s actors were skinny enough. 

“And just like that, I thought: Never again. No. I would survive my education and try to live like a real American, to enjoy the life that liberation had granted me, to see what that was like.”

And she does. Until the night she learns that her friend’s father, Jehuda Lindblatt, is dying. 

“Yes,” she writes, “all the Holocaust survivors were dying, and we were locked in debates over whether a salute given by a newly installed government official was a Nazi dog-whistle or a Nazi Nazi-whistle or maybe just an awkward wave or a weird shout-out to his buds.”

So she interviews Lindblatt. His story is deeply moving, and told between Brodesser-Akner’s dissection of her own refusal to live in the shadow of genocide for much of her adult life. Slowly, angrily, she unpacks her motives, meanwhile berating both herself and the world for a collective refusal to face the reality of both the Holocaust and antisemitism, which refuses to go away. 

“Is there any rational way to explain why,” she writes, “from 2018 to 2023, right here in New York State, where the largest number of Jews outside of Israel live, hate crimes against Jews rose by 89 per cent, so that in 2023 they made up 44 percent of all hate crimes?

“And did you see the swastika they spray-painted on the Romemu synagogue on the Upper West Side? Or ‘DIE JEW;’ on a random wall in Riverside Park… And did I tell you that my son was called a kike on the basketball court in Riverside Park? Did I tell you my other son went to Times Square with a friend and had a caricature done, just because they were goofing around, and the picture that was made for them had their faces distorted into those antisemitic cartoons of the 1930s, with hook noses and beady eyes, laughing and carrying bags of money while the twin towers burned in the background?”

In the end, Brodesser-Akner feels that much of her adulthood marked a golden age in post-war Jewish life. But, she writes, “is there any way the world can experience economic or political turmoil without deciding to lay it at the feet of the Jews? And why am I sitting here… when maybe I should be running through the streets screaming that the danger is here, that it’s happening, that it’s over for us? That we lived through this golden age and nobody ever warns you when a golden age is over, nobody will agree upon the metrics that declare it so?”

Reading this, I thought about having a drink in a bar last year with some friends, including a woman I know casually and like very much. She’s Jewish, and she was talking about how her son had found three swastikas painted on the stalls in the boys bathroom in his Toronto high school, and how there was a great deal of talk in his school about Gaza that stopped when her son walked by. I was horrified, since of course there is an enormous difference between being against the actions of Bejamin Netanyahu’s government and being antisemitic, not to mention using Nazi symbols. 

Yet it’s also true that the next time I saw this lovely woman was when I was driving by a park and glimpsed her at a demonstration literally wrapped in an Israeli flag, occupying another extreme that I, personally, find horrifying as well. 

“And how about me?” Brodesser-Akner asks. “How am I supposed to live? That’s my real question, maybe my only one…Does a life have to be meaningful? Can’t it just be a life?” 

Maybe, she says, for Jews that’s never allowed. 

This is the second part of a three-part series. You can read the first part here.

In the third part, I’ll write more about Omar El Akkad’s book, One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.