Four Weeks Home

Is This the Real Life? Is This Just Fantasy?

Raina and I just passed our four-week Aliyaversary.

Four weeks of living in a Jewish rhythm that begins slowing down on Friday afternoon and doesn’t return to its usual pace until after sunset on Saturday. Granted, the difference is far more dramatic in Jerusalem and other parts of the country than it is here in Tel Aviv, but even here you can feel the shift. It’s a rhythm that nourishes the soul.

Four weeks of speaking Hebrew, often feeling like a complete moron, and then feeling just a little relieved—and yes, a little proud—when someone asks, “You only got here a month ago? How is your Hebrew this good?” Truth be told, my spoken Hebrew is nowhere near what it once was. It will come back. In the meantime, people have been remarkably patient and gracious.

Four weeks of learning how to actually live here rather than simply visit, as we had done so many times before. Every errand, every government office, every utility, every delivery has been a new adventure. That’s the immigrant experience. Fortunately, most people we’ve encountered have gone out of their way to help us navigate it.

And it has also been four weeks of relief.

Relief at no longer living in the pressure cooker of being a socially liberal, unapologetically Zionist, non-Orthodox Jew in a bright-blue American town.

I’m not sure whether the hatred directed toward Jews has increased exponentially over the past month or whether, now that I’m no longer the proverbial frog in the pot, I’ve suddenly realized just how hot the water had become.

But I cannot help being shocked by what I see every day on social media and in the news.

The overt hatred is unlike anything I have seen in my lifetime.

I cannot scroll through a single social media platform without encountering anti-Jewish rhetoric that, not so long ago, would have been confined to neo-Nazi websites or white nationalist gatherings. Today, that same ugliness is delivered by articulate, well-dressed, seemingly respectable people who know they are unlikely to pay any price for their hatred. In fact, many are rewarded for it with more followers, greater influence, and ultimately, more money.

It is grotesque.

And it seems to be accelerating.

Ironically, some well-meaning Zionists have unintentionally contributed to this by trying to expose ignorance through “person on the street” interviews. The goal is understandable: reveal the bias, expose the misinformation, embarrass the haters.

But there is a cost.

Those videos also hand extremists a microphone. They amplify messages that otherwise might never have reached such large audiences. It reminds me of the classic newspaper phenomenon: the inflammatory headline appears on the front page, while the correction is buried on page forty-six a week later. Most people remember only the original accusation.

Which leaves me wondering, with apologies to Queen:

Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?

More specifically:

Is this really the world’s new normal?

Or are we watching antisemites seize a cultural moment that social media has handed them?

Let’s consider both possibilities.

Option One: Is this really the world’s new normal?

So many of the accusations now being leveled against Israel—and often against Jews themselves, including by some Jews (“as a Jew I…) — are modern echoes of the blood libels of centuries past.

• Claims that Israel deliberately targets children as a matter of policy echo the medieval accusation that Jews intentionally murdered innocent children.

• False claims that Israel systematically murders Palestinians for organ harvesting revive one of history’s oldest antisemitic tropes.

• Conspiracy theories alleging that Israel poisons water, spreads disease, or engineers epidemics mirror medieval accusations that Jews poisoned wells during the Black Death.

And beyond these specific accusations lies an even older narrative: that Jews are uniquely evil, uniquely bloodthirsty, uniquely murderous.

Those claims would have felt perfectly at home in medieval Europe.

Then, as now, they served the same purpose—not to uncover truth, but to justify hatred. They dehumanized Jews, making discrimination, exclusion, violence, and eventually even murder seem not only acceptable but righteous.

History has shown us where that road leads.

Option Two: Is this just the fantasy of antisemites finally finding their audience?

That possibility is troubling enough.

Extremists have always existed. The difference today is that algorithms reward outrage, and social media has given people who once shouted into the void an audience of hundreds of thousands—sometimes millions.

Many people now receive their “news” almost exclusively from influencers who traffic in outrage, conspiracy theories, and hatred. They consume it uncritically and pass it along as truth.

I don’t know exactly how we solve that problem.

What I do know is this:

There are far too few people pushing back.

There are some remarkable exceptions. Nicholas “the Zionist,” for example, combines an extraordinary command of history with a calm, measured demeanor that never mirrors the emotional frenzy of those he debates. He educates rather than humiliates.

But he is the exception.

What troubles me even more than the extremists is the silence of everyone else.

After October 7, I waited for the Christian clergy in my town to respond as we had responded together so many times before. We had stood shoulder to shoulder after attacks on the LGBTQ community. We had stood together after attacks on immigrants. We had stood together after attacks on the AAPI community. We had issued statements. We had held vigils. We had made it unmistakably clear where we stood.

This time there was public silence.

I reached out privately to ask why.

Only one person responded, dismissively asking, “Oh… you want us to hold a vigil for you?”

No.

I wanted the same outrage, the same moral clarity, and the same public voice that had been offered every other time hatred was directed at another community.

When other vulnerable groups were threatened, we spoke. Why was this different? Why were Jews the one community whose pain seemed unworthy of public solidarity?

So I wrote publicly in our local newspaper. But the silence continued.

We Jews do not deserve to be ignored simply because we are Jews.

That, perhaps more than anything else, is what troubles me.

If this is simply the fantasy of antisemites finally finding microphones and algorithms, then where are the decent people?

Where are those who have spent years speaking so passionately against prejudice in every other form?

Where are those who insist that silence is complicity?

Where are you?

Because while haters will always hate, history has repeatedly shown that hatred flourishes when decent people convince themselves that this time is somehow different.

Even as many of the most sensational accusations against Israel over the past three years have been challenged, corrected, or outright disproven, the silence remains.

That silence is disgraceful.

So perhaps Freddie Mercury’s question deserves one final answer:

Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?

The hatred is real.

The lies are real.

The consequences are real.

What remains to be seen is whether the silence of good people will be real as well.

As for me, I finally live in a country where I no longer have to apologize for loving the Jewish people or believing that the Jewish people deserve a homeland.

That is a relief I cannot adequately describe. But relief is not resignation.

Moving to Israel did not lessen my obligation to speak. If anything, it strengthened it.

Because antisemitism has never been defeated by the passage of time. It has only ever been defeated when enough decent people refuse to normalize it, refuse to excuse it, and refuse to remain silent.

I hope they find their voices soon.

Until then, I’ll keep using mine.