Miriam Abrams
Sapir Journal, Oct. 2023 – Feb. 2024
“I know these people. I go to class with them. The same intersectional feminists who claim to oppose misogyny in all its forms are supporting the mass rape and brutalization of Jewish women. They’d never be caught dead victim-blaming — except when it comes to brutally violated Jewish women. They glory in our pain.”
We were up late celebrating Jewish life at Columbia the night before the attacks. Our Chabad House hosted one of its largest-ever Shabbat and holiday dinners for Shemini Atzeret, a Jewish festival. It was an overflow crowd. So many Jews from the United States and Israel — and everywhere in between — came out to dance at this autumn Jewish festival that we had to bring out extra tables. As we danced, we felt joy in our faith and sense of peoplehood. We felt that Jewish life and Jewish lives were treasured here.
My friends came over afterward to play sheshbesh. It’s called backgammon here in America, but many of my friends are Sephardic Jews from the Mideast, so we call the game by its Middle Eastern name. We stayed up late enough for someone to mention that there was a rocket attack on Israel, though we didn’t feel especially concerned about it — we knew that Hamas’s rockets are awful, but they’re only run-of-the-mill awful for Hamas, a terrorist organization dedicated to killing Jews. They don’t usually hurt people — Iron Dome intercepts the ones headed for civilian targets, and the rest fall in empty desert (and sometimes in Gaza itself). So we didn’t make much of it. We said we hoped that our close friend who had recently enlisted in the IDF was safe, and we went back to our board game. We went to bed happily, comfortably, as Jews at Columbia.
It was only in the morning that I saw the atrocities. I innocently opened Instagram and was greeted by videos and images of barbaric acts of pure Jew-hatred. Rape, murder, torture. Massacres. Innocent children butchered. Young people, the same age as us, riddled with bullets as they danced at a music festival.