Just the title of that article: All the World Wants the Jews Dead, is enough to make a Jew worried, depressed. We should all be emotional wrecks.
Cynthia Ozick wrote it in 1974 following the Yom Kippur War, a war intent upon Jewish annihilation.
Jews should have been depressed then, for sure, but after a solid victory they waved such realities away. They are born to a greater purpose, this is the narrative they live by. We are different. Our fate is different.
Cynthia Ozick is brilliant.
Me? I'm energized, writing letter after letter to dean after dean to combat antisemitism on college campuses. It can feel a hopeless cause, at this point, but it is a cause and it gives me something to do when I wake up at four a.m.
More on that another day, fighting antisemitism, I mean, not my wake time.
I'm overwhelmed, honestly, with the need for my services here in the United States, am so busy. Then I imagine the workload for therapists in Israel, how the need must be extraordinary. Trauma following a massacre, the sounds of missiles and the Iron Dome, all that rushing to the bomb shelter, it is bad for kids, bad for parents. Bad for everyone.
Things apparently haven't improved for the Jews, they were never really good except for a few years. We call these respites our Golden Age, Golden Ages, never long enough.
Not that we're sitting around feeling sorry for ourselves. No time for that. (Smiley emoticon) here.
therapydoc
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