Where It's At

Welcome, new subscribers who enjoyed my take on unspoken Jewishness in America! This publication started as a place for me to get my writing out after all my usual outlets refused publish anything openly Jewish.

I wanted to bear witness to the decline and erasure of American Jewish life. I first experienced the erasure of Jews as a people via my colleagues in the Obama and Biden White Houses. After 10/7, the antisemitic erasure and distortion from those colleagues turned into outright hatred of Jews. The hatred paired nicely with denials or accusations of hysteria from friends, family, my elected officials, and my Brooklyn neighbors.

At the time was researching a book - my 5th - centered on my great-grandmother. Eva Lutsky Schank came to New York from Belarus alone at age 16, ran a Jewish hotel in the Catskills and later Lakewood, NJ, and loved to smoke, drink, laugh, discuss JFK’s hotness, and go to the racetrack. My plan was to set Eva’s story against the policies and unspoken “gentlemen’s agreements” that restricted her life.

Funny story, though. While every other culture was lauded for telling similar stories — Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Stay True by Hua Hsu — no agent wanted to touch a Jewish story, despite the fact that my last book had been recommended by President Obama.

“I think the time is right for a White memoir,” said my former co-author at my think tank, incomprehensibly, while pushing me out the door of the Tank. I didn’t bother telling her a swath of my family had been massacred specifically for not being White, so if I was now White it was news to me.

Truthfully, even White people were getting to tell their stories, as long as they were the non-Jewish kind of White people. A woman I knew from graduate school published a memoir about being poor and White in Kansas, a book so popular with her fellow Kansans that she was approached to run for Senate. (I unfortunately had to unfollow her soon after 10/7, when she posted a story about the IDF training rape dogs, which are not a thing that exist or are even anatomically capable of existing, no matter how much the New York Times wishes it were thus.)

Another colleague from grad school sold a book about her White grandmother’s death from a failed abortion attempt. She balanced out the blinding Whiteness of the book by including a story about a person of color from the same era in each chapter. My think tank awarded her a writing fellowship for this book, on my recommendation.

When I applied for the same fellowship the next year for my own book, the Muslim woman who ran the program didn’t even bother inviting me for an interview, despite my six years at the tank and a recommendation from the CEO. Meanwhile, my non-Jewish agent read the first 100 pages of my memoir and told me I needed a Jewish agent.

I felt embarrassed. This was why I’d kept by Jewishness under wraps for the first 50 years of my life. No one wanted to publish a story by a big Jew. Heard it! Lower East Side, Yiddish, overbearing parents, New Jersey, university quotas, bagels, the toxicity of post-Holocaust Judaism, rye bread, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, intellectuals, Woody Allen. Tell me something I don’t know. Tell me about literally any other ethnicity than Jews, because I’m not interested. It’s also possible she found my use of the term “goyim” insulting, and didn’t like hearing that Christmas could be marginalizing rather than a joyous season for people of all faiths.

White Americans were already being made to feel bad about their treatment of Native Americans, Black Americans, Asian Americans, Queer Americans and Indian Americans. Thankfully, Me,Too was over so no one needed to feel bad about sexism any more. But Americans would be damned if Jews were going to make them feel bad. Jews were doing just fine in America, as evidenced by the fact that they control the banks and the media, hard pass.

Today, thanks in part to having this supportive space to work out my ideas, I am a different person with a different life. As our world in Brooklyn became smaller and darker, my husband and I started looking for a new home for our family. This was not the life we wanted for our children, whose friends ostracized them for being baby killers, who were excluded from universities and clubs because they recognized that Israel was country and not the physical embodiment of the worlds’ evils. We didn’t want to live in a city of fading glory, with angry neighbors certain Jews were whiny White people whose complaints were stupid at best and racist at worst, and where more people every day decided the solution was to wear clothing calling for the extermination of 10M Israelis.1 After the second Rage Play Date in Park Slope, we knew it was time to go.

Today, my family and I are living the Zionist dream in Tel Aviv, across the street from the sand dune where the city was founded in 1909. My book has been through as many transformations as I have, and is now about how I went from working on immigration in the White House to becoming an immigrant myself. I’ve been hard at work on a new section, and am reporting a few paid stories, so have been unusually quiet on here.

Going forward, I plan to explore many of the book-adjacent topics I’ve been thinking about as I turn a Jewish lens to my past life in America, and an American lens to the new life my family and I are building in Israel.

I’ll to write about what it means to be Jewish in modern America, why the de-churching of America has been dangerous for Jews, and what Jewish safety looks like in New York under Mamdani. At the same time, here in Israel I am fortunate to have a window into the stories shaping the future of the Jewish state, so I expect I’ll be writing about some of the fields I know from America — technology, defense, immigration, the economic divide, and how policy affects people’s lives. I will of course continue to write about life in Israel as an olah, or new immigrant, as I know many readers are considering making aliyah themselves, or at least dreaming about it.

I will try to include as many Jewish movie, TV and theater references as I can.

Thanks for being with me on this journey, and I just want to say, good luck, we’re all counting on you, and don’t call me Shirley.

Hana