When the world changes, what a person was doing just before the seismic event occurred lingers in the memory, a symbol of the time before. Here’s an example of what I mean:
Precise detailed memories of September 10th, 2001:
I was guest hosting The Connection, an NPR program, produced by WBUR in Boston. (The program is no longer on the air and neither am I, we were both canceled some years later but that is another story.)
The Connection was a live interview and call-in show. When she first listened to it, my wife described The Connection as the most subversive program on American radio. Subversive, she explained, because we allowed people to answer questions at length, the guests actually knew what they were talking about, and listeners were treated as if they were smart and were not spoken down to.
She made the comment after listening to tape of a show with the late American poet laureate Philip Levine in which the conversation had turned towards his poetic master, William Blake. A caller was put through and he asked Levine if he knew the poem “And Did Those Feet in Ancient Time”?
I said, “You mean Jerusalem?”
Levine corrected me, “No, the poem’s title is ‘And Did Those Feet in Ancient Time,’ ‘Jerusalem’ is the name of a hymn that set the poem to music.”
He began to recite the poem, “And did those feet in Ancient time” And I sang the next line, “Walk upon England’s mountains green,” and then the caller did the line after that and we ended up doing a round robin recital of the poem.
Live radio is a wonderful thing.
Anyway, the Connection was a two-hour show and on September 10th, 2001, the second hour guest was Salman Rushdie. His book Fury, a novel about New York City as the epicenter of the new age of globalization, had just come out. We had an interesting conversation about New York, my birthplace and the city I left for London, and which was now where the British author, who had spent most of his life in London, made his home.
We discussed exchanging our respective cities and the freedom to be ourselves we had found in these new environments. In Rushdie’s case, it was a special freedom, as he could go out and about without the same level of worry for his physical safety that his last years in London—following the fatwa pronounced against him by Ayatollah Khomeini—necessitated.
After one congenial exchange he extended his fist towards me. It took me a second to realize: Salman Rushdie wants a fist bump! Dap me! Right on!
The next morning, Tuesday September 11th, as I was preparing for that day’s show, the news director came into our office and said:
“Come into the newsroom, and see this. I think you may have to change your show, the World Trade Center has been hit by a plane.”
We went to see and while watching, the second plane hit the south tower. The world changed. And that’s why I remember the Rushdie program the day before with such clarity two decades later. It was the last interview in the time before.
For me, as a Jew, what happened on October 7th carries the same weight. There’s a clarity about what I was working on just before Hamas blew through the Gaza security wall and changed my world. For weeks I had been mulling over a couple of essays, making notes.
The first was a long piece about the constantly changing nature of Jewish identity, a fancy way of saying, what it means to be Jewish. The essay grew out of a question I asked Israeli author, Ari Shavit, at a book festival in London when his memoir, “My Promised Land”, came out nearly a decade ago.
“I’m a Jewish-American, most of the people in the audience would describe themselves as British-Jews, you are an Israeli … We are hyphenates, you are not. How does this affect your identity as a Jew?”
The question was not what he was expecting and his answer was vague. I pressed him.
“You are Israeli. You speak Hebrew. You have worn the uniform of the Jewish state, does this make you fundamentally different as a Jew to me?”
It seemed like the Jewish identity question was not something Shavit had given much thought. His Israeli identity was what the book was about, not so much the Jewish one. From the introduction to My Promised Land:
Exploring Jewish identity has been one theme of my work for many years.
I wrote a book, Emancipation, about the 140 years between the end of ghettoization which began as a result of the French Revolution and Napoleonic conquest, and the Nazi take-over of Germany. This period of “new equality” sparked a complete re-assesment of what it meant to be Jewish. Emancipation was described by Salo Baron, the leading Jewish historian of the first half of the 20th century, as the greatest “internal crisis in Jewish life” since the crisis created by “the First Exile.” He meant the exile to Babylon after the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BC.
In the search to understand my own identity as a Jew I have made radio documentaries about the philosopher Baruch Spinoza and the poet/essayist Heinrich Heine; thinkers who were considered apostates by their communities but who are more Jewish, at least in my idea of Jewishness, than those in their communities who disowned them.
For the BBC World Service, I looked at Emancipation and Assimilation, interviewing three prominent Jews of my generation, from three different countries, born in the first decade after the end of the war. None were Israeli and that was intentional because the documentary was about Jewish identity in the Diaspora.
All three had a direct connection to the Holocaust either as children of survivors or being married to someone who lost immediate family in the Nazi death machine. I do not have that connection as all branches of my family got out of the Ashkenazic heartland well before the First World War.
In the essay I was sketching out before the Hamas atrocity, I was once again exploring the difference between being a hyphenate Jew and an Israeli, but framed by the experience of being in Israel in late June.
I had interviewed an Israeli novelist and she had described herself as a “tough Odesa Jew.” She is a sabra, a native born Israeli, so an Odesa Jew by family history. But it was the first time I had heard an Israeli hyphenate themself. Part of my family line goes back to Odesa, as well, so there was an additional point of commonality.
A few days later, I went out on one of the Saturday night marches against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government’s legislation designed to neuter Israel’s courts, the only check on executive power in the country’s poorly designed variation of democratic government.
It was an exhilarating experience to see a wide cross-section of Israeli society demanding the legislation be withdrawn. Yet, interviewing people in the crowd, I was reminded this was their country, not mine. I have no vote, no voice in its affairs.
The talmudic question in my essay in progress was, How do you articulate a Jewish identity in which the lines between Diaspora Jewry and Israeli Jewry are erased? But that thinking was rendered frivolous by the events of October 7th. The upsurge of anti-Semitism has made the questions of difference between Diaspora Jews and Israelis moot. A sense of solidarity in the face of a global outbreak of Jew-hatred is what this moment requires.
The other essay was about the blessedness of the city I live in. I started roughing it out shortly after coming back from a reporting trip to Indiana and Kentucky at the end of April to make a BBC World Service documentary called Evangelical or Political Christianity?
Everytime I go back to America I come back depressed about how steeped in identity politics people are, the way conversations are stilted by the language games it imposes on normal conversations, and the suspicions people have of one another. Folks walk on egg shells around others at work or in other public places, not so much because they are worried about giving offense as just trying to avoid hassle.
About a month after I returned, I was on a panel at a private members’ club in Covent Garden discussing Trump’s prospects in 2024. It’s as fascinating a topic to London’s media types as America’s. When the discussion was over I took my time heading home. It was a lovely, long spring evening with soft, blue light lingering at the horizon well past 9:30.
It was a Thursday. Thursday is the new Friday in these post-Covid shorter work weeks. People were spilling out of pubs, cheery and beery. Mixed crowds, all races, and the only reason I remarked the fact to myself was that I had only recently been in the US and was conditioned to look at human beings through the identity politics lens.
Took the Tube back to Bow in the eastern part of the city. Once upon a time it was the Cockney heartland, the legend was you were only a true cockney if born within the sound of Bow Church’s bells. Bow is in the borough of Tower Hamlets which today has the largest percentage of Muslims in any local authority area in England: nearly 40%, mostly of Bangladeshi background. There is also a large Somali population, as well as significant numbers of other immigrant groups: Afro-Caribbean, West African. Whites make up about one-fifth of the population.
In the evening, I am often the only white person in my Tube carriage or walking along Bow Road. And no one gives a damn. 18 years ago, on the 7th of July, jihadi terrorists set off bombs on London’s public transport system in which 52 people were killed and more than 700 injured.
As I walked home on this lovely evening I thought of how the hatred that might have taken root from the 7/7 atrocity failed to flower. London really is remarkable that way and I decided to write about it.
It would have been an uncharacteristically optimistic essay for me but then October 7th happened. Now, when I see Palestinian flags hanging from street lights on Bow Road and in Roman Road Market after big demonstrations where the slogan, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free” is chanted, that optimism is diminished.
Rather than write the essay I cling to the memory of that evening walk in the time just before. A reminder that the worst times do pass, and if everyone holds on to their humanity, hatred will not take root.
Sharing far and wide.
Also, the fist bump from Mr. Rushdie was epic. So jealous. 😆