October 7

Acrylic on canvas

16 X 20

April 2025

April 1, 2025

I felt like I couldn’t really do a piece about Oct 7 until I was able to really sit with what happened. I couldn’t sit more with what happened until the hostages started to be released and I listened to their testimonies, part horror, part hope. it is a painting of a day that changed everything for so many of us, and the horror continues. It is not clear to me whether the person is Jewish or Palestinian, and I think perhaps that is the point. A few days after Oct 7, I went to an interfaith conference, where I sat with an Palestinian imam for a few minutes before we could bear each other no longer. When we exchanged pleasantries in the beginning, he commented laughing on how I looked so much like his Palestinian wife. the semitic looks, the intermingling, the combined fate. The heaviness that sits, continuously, unbelievably.

I’ve been feeling sad about the world recently, though I know that there’s been so many times for so many different reasons that I could be sad for so long.

Sometimes things hit, and sometimes it’s about the story that’s told about the grief, sometimes it’s because it hits so close to home, and sometimes I don’t even know why a particular current event lodges in my throat and chest and makes me ache. 

The stuff going on at Columbia University has been making me sad. 

The punishing of free speech, the way a university can so quickly eschew its integrity and fall to its knees, wagging like an inane dog, desperate to make the powers that be happy. The way that Jews are caught in the middle of this one. 

The way it’s set up as a way to “protect the Jews”.

As if what is good for the Jews is separate from what is good for everyone. As if we could ever separate them. 

A few months ago, my husband and I stayed in Vegas. In an elevator we walked into, was a tall man and his son. The man was Christian, he must have told me so directly, for this I am certain.

He turned to Husband as the doors close. “Do you call that a yarmulke or a kippah?” He asked, gesturing to what was on Husband’s head. We smiled and said either was fine, though we called it a kippah. 

“We stand with Israel,” the man said to us as we were about to hit the main floor together. He said it as a way of generosity, of wanting to show that he cared for us, that he was on Our Side. 

We smiled and said thank you, and walked rigidly out of the elevator, staring straight ahead, not daring to speak to one another, walking as briskly as we could to get out of his earshot, away from his insistent kindness, his blanket assumptions, his love that really did not feel like love at all.

It felt uncomfortable. It felt confusing. It felt conditional and like he would remove it at any moment if we disagreed with him. It felt like when he was loving us, it had nothing to do with us at all. It had everything to do with who he was scared of, and how the idea of us buffered him from these fears. 

I have a college teacher right now, that’s a good - albeit complicated - person. Who does her best, you know, but there’s something I sense, from the little comments made here and there, of who she cares for and how far her mind is willing to stretch to hear from voices she has never considered.

And there’s this strange feeling I have, that she likes me, and that she likes me because I’m Jewish. She’s not - by the way - Jewish, but she spent years being mentored by Jews in her industry. 

It’s hard to explain how I intuit this but all I can say it feels wonderfully delicious to be included in this intimate circle of preference and also it feels deeply, viscerally uncomfortable, unstable, and like I’m protected even though (or because) she doesn’t really see or know me at all. It feels like once that real me comes out, that bubble of adoration may just pop. 

Because I am, of course, a person. 

And people are many things. We hold multitudes. We are not just buffers.

We are not safe unless we are all safe. That is always the only way. 

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