Two Jewish Writers, a Bottle of Whiskey, and a Publish–October 7 Actuality

Hamas’s assault on October 7 had the impact of stopping time. Many Israelis and anxious Jews I’ve spoken with describe a day that has not but ended for them—a steady nightmare from which they’ll’t wake, a actuality compounded by the information that so lots of the kidnapped are nonetheless in captivity. The fiercist critics of Israel’s actions over the previous three months don’t need to hear, not to mention acknowledge, these emotions, as a result of the weeks of ongoing loss of life and destruction in Gaza have erased for them the hours of rampant torture and rape and homicide that preeceded them. Comprehensible although this response may be, it ignores the sense of rupture that many Jews now really feel.

Within the weeks simply after the assault, this was the dilemma I confronted. Attuned to Palestinian struggling, I didn’t need to lose my means to absorb what occurred that day—the ideas and sureties it shook unfastened, the troubling questions it prompted concerning the Jewish situation. And so I did what I at all times do in moments when human complexity threatens to get flattened: I turned to the writers. I invited Joshua Cohen and Ruby Namdar, two outstanding novelists I enormously admire, to The Atlantic’s New York workplace after closing hours one night in late October. Cohen received the Pulitzer Prize for his most up-to-date novel, The Netanyahus, and Namdar received the Sapir Prize, Israel’s most prestigious literary award, for his second guide, The Ruined Home.

Cohen and Namdar do what nice novelists should. They train an excessive type of empathy and observe the place it leads them. If I needed to debate the Jewish situation, these have been the folks to do it with. They’d every devoted many, many pages to obsessively circling questions of identification and belonging, diaspora and residential. I knew they might be feeling and pondering quite a bit, studying what had occurred by a literary sensibility, trying to find a vocabulary to explain the horror of all of it.

We shared a bottle of whiskey, and we talked for greater than 4 hours—I recorded it, however wasn’t positive any of it could be publishable. The dialog was uncooked and painful, but it surely additionally felt cathartic (if additionally a bit headache-inducing the subsequent day). The depth of that night produced insights nonetheless value listening to. What follows is a sequence of moments from our late-night discuss, edited and condensed in locations.

Gal Beckerman: After October 7, folks will need to have come to you and mentioned, “Write your response.”

Joshua Cohen: The individuals who write op-eds are the identical individuals who run for workplace—there’s no cash in both of these issues. They simply entice narcissists and psychopaths. My actual impulse was for a human or group connection, for being with my folks.

Ruby Namdar: It’s humorous, I infrequently write op-eds. And all I’ve been doing the previous couple of weeks is writing them as a result of, like each one that’s traumatized, I’m in a narcissistic stage and am totally centered alone ache. The considered engaged on fiction, as an illustration, feels past absurd to me proper now. I wouldn’t have the bandwidth. Additionally, what may I probably dream up as fiction that might high our actuality?

Beckerman: It appears unsuitable to ask such an educational query, however how did you learn what occurred on October 7, an occasion that felt nearly engineered to push all of the buttons of Jewish trauma?

Namdar: It was—I’m going to make use of a horrible phrase right here—fantastically orchestrated, not that there’s any magnificence in it. However there was a grotesque aesthetic to this, just like the one in every of horror and snuff movies. And I really heard an attention-grabbing comparability to what the Mongols did within the Center Ages. The Mongols used to create artwork installations of horror. Like, pyramids of skulls, mounds of severed limbs, and so forth. The Cossacks did related issues to the Jews throughout the Khmelnytsky Rebellion within the seventeenth century. They created spectacles of horror that seared themselves into the collective reminiscence of the victims.

Beckerman: To terrify?

Namdar: They needed this to be a picture that can be spoken about for generations, after which nobody would ever dare to face as much as them. What Hamas did on October 7 was not spontaneous barbarism. It was barbarous, but it surely was very rigorously deliberate. All of them had physique cameras, as a result of this was meant to turn into an set up of kinds. It wasn’t meant to be heroic; it was meant to get below our collective pores and skin. Heroic is if you stand face-to-face together with your enemy, you confront your nemesis. There are historic fashions of such bravery in Arab tradition, like Saladin, for instance, confronting the Crusaders, military to military, sword to sword, metallic to metallic. The October 7 atrocities weren’t primarily based on this mannequin, under no circumstances.

Beckerman: Then what was the last word function?

Namdar: It was, I consider, to undo the Zionist fantasy of being a part of the land, of efficiency: It was meant to ship us again to the helplessness that Diaspora Jews felt in their very own house when the Cossacks entered and destroyed their household. The rape component can’t be ignored. We have to discuss concerning the sexual component a bit, the sexual violence right here, as a result of that can also be one thing that ISIS did lately. Mass rape is a effectively know genocidal follow; we’ve seen it carried out within the ongoing civil warfare in Syria as effectively, however selected to look the opposite approach as a result of intervention appeared inconvenient. It isn’t solely about killing an enemy; it’s about defiling and invading the sanctity of the autonomous collective physique.

Beckerman: And within the face of all of this, there was a whole lot of silence. The silence was this sort of cognitive dissonance.

Cohen: In that interval of silence, there was a recalibration. And in that recalibration, the left instantly created a contradiction. It had spent a whole lot of time throughout the coronavirus pandemic, and the George Floyd protests right here, telling everybody that speech was violence, that the way in which you employ phrases can create violence. After which instantly after October 7, they mentioned, “No, really violence is speech—what Hamas was doing right here was a protest motion. This was a protest of an unjust, unlawful occupation.” And so it took these on the left 24 hours to flip the script. And that matches in with the second factor they did, which is that they instantly plugged Israelis and Palestinians into their racial binaries of white and Black.

Namdar: That fantasy of Jews as white is so attention-grabbing to me. Like, so fascinating. I imply, go stroll on the street in Israel and inform us that we’re white—it’s so humorous. Put apart even the Yemeni, the Moroccans, the Persian Jews like myself, who by no means claimed to be white. However even Ashkenazim, the Ashkenazi Jews in Europe, have been by no means thought of to be white—they have been the untouchables, nearly just like the Roma. To name somebody a Jew was to say the N-word. The entire venture of passing as white has really value the Jews a pricey value. It enabled them to achieve sure social heights. However it’s now, in my view, one of many worst issues that occurred to the Jewish collective of America, that “whiteness,” as a result of children who have been raised very liberal after which grew to become radical go to colleges the place whiteness is a slur. Whiteness is a cuss phrase. Whiteness is demonized. And now they’re white, all of the sudden, the little Yids from the shtetl; now they’re white and subsequently their existence isn’t legitimate. And so they can not assist their historic ancestral homeland that their grandparents pined for and used to plant bushes in, as a result of it’s thought of a “white nation.” And they’re instructed by their professors that they must be towards white folks. The absurdity of it’s putting. But it surely’s additionally a harmful fantasy. It’s a harmful fantasy, this whiteness enterprise.

Cohen: I feel amongst a whole lot of Jews, what you’re calling “this whiteness enterprise”  compels them to take the anti-Zionist place.

Beckerman: They should reject that a part of themselves?

Cohen: They should make themselves acceptable. “Good whites.”

Namdar: This self-loathing, which a whole lot of American Jews consider to be an genuine Jewish trait, is definitely a contemporary European Jewish trait. It isn’t a real Jewish trait. As a Persian Jew, I used to be not raised with it. It’s a really new factor, and it begins with the emancipation in Europe. The ticket to enter well mannered society was (a) you cease trying like a Jew and (b) you cease talking like a Jew. And a very powerful factor was that they needed to internalize the anti-Semitic gaze of their beneficiant hosts. So that they needed to begin loathing all issues Jewish. They needed to snort on the anti-Semitic jokes. And this self-loathing has turn into like a sacrifice, just like the well-known pound of flesh. It’s such as you lower a bit of your self. “A pound of flesh, to be by him lower off / Nearest the service provider’s coronary heart.” You principally lower out your Jewish coronary heart, current it to your ungracious Gentile hosts and say, “I now not see myself as stunning, as chosen. I see myself by your eyes, as an unwelcome visitor who’s tolerated within the salons so long as he’s amusing.”

Cohen: I’m reminded of Elias Canetti’s line the place he says the Jews won’t ever recover from the disgrace of the Shoah. As a result of they needed to cope with this propaganda in every single place that they ran the world, they owned every little thing, they have been omnipotent. And in a approach, when that’s all you hear, you may start to consider it, however the query is, how do you go from this place of being a part of an omnipotent individuals who management every little thing to being rounded up and exterminated? That fall is shaming—it’s shaming since you understand you had false self-knowledge; you have been laboring below a delusion.

Beckerman: How do you grapple with Palestinian loss of life?

Cohen: Each loss of life makes me cry. And I consider everybody’s ache. That, in a approach, is the issue. I acknowledge the novelistic urge for food I’ve to start empathizing with somebody’s ache, solely to finish up eager to channel it, eager to vocalize it—wanting to show a hurting human into one in every of my characters. Once I watch the scenes that come out of Gaza, I’m flattened. And I don’t simply see loss of life; I see the creation of the nice Jew-haters of the longer term. In order that’s the place I’m: Each loss of life is the lack of a whole world, and but everybody who stays alive can be a Jew-hater.

Beckerman: I additionally discover this explicit facet of all of the loss of life troublesome to bear. After which there’s the truth that main the warfare is a person who’s a essentially flawed character. Because you’ve thought of Netanyahu quite a bit, Josh, I ponder how you’d write Bibi’s story proper now?

Cohen: You imply if I needed to write a sequel? Regardless of what individuals who know me would say, I’ve some capability for empathy. And once I take a look at him now, I see a person coming to phrases with the truth that he has misplaced every little thing and defiled his legacy. He has gone from being the king protector, and the one man who believes he can safeguard not simply the state of Israel however the Jewish folks, to being somebody who’s simply attempting to fend off the demons—a model of Lear. He’s realizing that his total technique, his total life, has been a failure, however he has to maintain up appearances for his spouse, whereas his depraved son’s residing it up in Margaritaville.

Beckerman: I see a sequel.

Cohen: Bear in mind, Bibi’s additionally an individual with a pacemaker, with a coronary heart that isn’t pumping sufficient blood. He’s had a latest brush along with his personal mortality.

Namdar: A really Shakespearean character, however you understand, I even have one other guide in my thoughts once I consider Bibi: The Image of Dorian Grey, by Oscar Wilde. As a author, I’m fascinated by folks’s seems to be. Bibi was very, very good-looking and very seductive in his youth. There was one thing tremendous horny, tremendous compelling about his seems to be, his voice, his physique language. He was very convincing, very charming. And take a look at him now! His face, his hair, his physique language—he doesn’t look actual; he seems to be like an inexpensive knockoff of his former self. I’ve watched this man transfer from being one of the crucial good-looking, charismatic, seductive, persuasive males I’ve seen—

Cohen: To somebody with no presence in any respect.

Namdar: With no presence, and he seems to be monstrous. There’s a monstrosity to him, to his seems to be, his physique language and his speech mannerisms. It’s each stunning and interesting to see how the ethical and ideological corruption is manifested within the physique.

I’ll say, although, that even when it is extremely nice, in style, and gratifying guilty Bibi for every little thing—and I do suppose he ought to go down in infamy, and I feel he ought to resign right now—that is greater than Bibi. And that is greater than Israel. This case considerations the West, which Israel so desperately needs to be or is part of. We have been attempting to create Hamas, and radical Islam, in our picture. We have been projecting ourselves, our personal worldview and values, on them. They taught us a lesson, and I ponder if we’ll study it. If I needed to be very provocative, which I by no means am, in fact, I might say that it’s a form of conceptual colonialism, the place you suppose you understand them, and also you suppose you personal them—their mindset and their actions. However Hamas taught all of us, the complete Western world, a lesson concerning the limits of how a lot we perceive them. And many of the Western world has achieved precisely what one does when shell-shocked and having a cognitive dissonance: resort to full denial. Hamas at all times instructed us that they’re essentially a terror group that’s set on destroying Israel and getting the Jews out of Palestine. We refused to consider them. We most well-liked to maintain serious about them in phrases that match our personal pragmatic worldview. We have to begin believing them. The projection recreation should come to an finish.

Cohen: It’s obscure how Israel could be, once more, this omnipotent Jewish power—as omnipotent because the Jews of Europe have been omnipotent—and but not be in any approach in a position to forestall the violence perpetrated towards it. A lot of the rhetoric about Hamas is colonialist within the excessive: saying that Israel “fostered” Hamas, that Israel “supported” Hamas and so forth, as if Hamas itself has no company, as in the event that they’re simply wounded, misunderstood Arab boys. The reality is that Bibi used Hamas to keep away from a two-state resolution, which was prison. However Hamas wasn’t invented in some lab on the Technion.

Beckerman: Inform me what writing since October 7 has been useful for you, has offered comfort or steerage.

Namdar: I’ve been having a whole lot of flashbacks. Verse flashbacks. I at all times liked the Bible. I’m very immersed in it. I’m of the Israeli era that was privileged sufficient to get the Bible straight into the vein. And with out the spiritual baggage. I get a ton of verse flashbacks, I didn’t even know they exist in me. Verses from the Guide of Lamentations, from Jeremiah, from Deuteronomy. “The sights you see will drive you mad” is a verse that retains popping into my head. I additionally take into consideration sections within the Talmud that describe the destruction of the primary temple, just like the puddle of boiling blood on the marble ground of the holy temple. We now have loads of cultural and literary precedents to what occurred. And as we mentioned at first of this dialog, knowingly, semi-knowingly or unknowingly, these folks learn into our deep collective unconscious and tried to make the most of our deep reminiscence, our deep collective trauma, towards us.

Beckerman: Give us some particulars.

Namdar: A pal simply shared an image of one of many victims. And once more, I’m very a lot into human magnificence; it’s one thing I reply to. And … I’m going to cry. Sorry. Okay, he’s a most angelically stunning younger man that was murdered on the Nova music competition. His identify was Keshet, which suggests “rainbow” in Hebrew.

Cohen: His first identify?

Namdar: Sure! And he was an Adonis, and on this image he’s half bare. He’s stunning, and he seems to be so harmless, and he was butchered there, on the desert music competition. And I went to the Lamentations, and there’s a line through which they converse concerning the stunning boys of Zion. They have been “as if gilded with gold.” After which how they grew to become like damaged earthen vessels. This, what we’re experiencing now, is Lamentations.

Cohen: I had to do that public studying, a few week after. And I felt I couldn’t again out, as a result of an in depth pal had requested me to do it. So I bought up and skim the story of Samson, which ends with Samson’s suicide, in fact, and the road “He killed extra in loss of life than he ever killed in life.” Probably the most putting elements of the Samson story is that Samson appears complicit in his personal destruction. Delilah asks him: What’s it that makes you so robust? 3 times she asks him, and 3 times he doesn’t reply, till he lastly says, you understand, I’m a Nazirite; all you must do is lower my hair. Which she does. And it seems …

Namdar: Are you saying he was asking for it?

Cohen: I’m saying it’s a parable. And the commentary saying that he was asking for it’s surprisingly skinny.

Namdar: That may be our era’s Midrash. So you set three Jews and a bottle of schnapps in a room and look what you get …

Cohen: The Guide of Judges, which tells us that it was ever thus. And to be sincere, there may be some solace in that. Although maybe it’s extra Jewish solace than Israeli, as a result of Israelis have had their fundamental actuality undermined. My spouse is Israeli, as secular as they arrive—or so I believed. On October 7, she “transformed” to Judaism. I needed to persuade her to let me break a glass at our marriage ceremony. However now she’s breaking each cup.

Namdar: They positively touched our deep construction. I’m going to sound like an annoying outdated rabbi now, however I’ll say it anyway: I’m devastated. I’m a multitude. However as a result of I do know the Guide of Lamentations and since I do know the story of Samson, the actual fact that there have been precedents for this example is reassuring for me. Have a look at us: three middle-aged Jews with beards sitting right here ingesting schnapps in New York, many hundreds of years in any case these crises, and we’re trying again, and we’re making historic and textual connections, and we’re very invested on this. So I feel we’re one traumatized collective. However there’s additionally this bizarre superpower, some weird spiteful resilience that comes with the trauma. It’s ingrained in us. I consider Josh because the embodiment of spiteful resilience, for instance. That ought to be the identify of your biography, Spiteful Resilience.

Cohen: The embodiment of spiteful resilience: a cockroach, Kafka’s Ungeziefer. I’ve to say that I wasn’t shocked on October 7 a lot as justified. I had a childhood that was all Shoah, on a regular basis. That was my education—that the Jews have been endangered in each place, in each time—and now lastly right here’s proof, right here’s proof in my very own era. Hamas has furnished proof for the accuracy and utility of my childhood schooling, which is one more factor I would maintain towards them.

Beckerman: Do you think about artwork that may come out of this second?

Cohen: Traditionally, moments like this produce poetry, prayers. Massacres are uncommon in Jewish fiction. In all probability Lamed Shapiro did them finest, however in brief fiction, not in novels. Even the Shoah itself—there are so few nice novels by survivors. Give it some thought: a world-historical occasion of mass loss of life, 6 million folks useless, and it produced perhaps 5, perhaps six good novels by writers who survived the camps: Adler, Hilsenrath, Kertesz, Wander, Wiesel. In fact, I’m forgetting some. Lists are ugly.

Beckerman: Why is that?

Cohen: Why have been there so few survivor-writers? As a result of there have been so few survivors, interval, and since to prose that sort of struggling nearly at all times verges on kitsch.

Namdar: Do American readers even perceive the phrase kitsch?

Cohen: I like that Israelis suppose kitsch is a Hebrew phrase. I imply the public-mourning facet is kitsch, and a novel is a product of public mourning. That’s not all a novel is, in fact, however that’s a part of what it’s.

Namdar: I feel that it may be, however it could be a really unhealthy novel. Dying and horror are a horrible kitsch entice, and we noticed this entice in motion with the few Holocaust novels that have been printed in Hebrew within the ’50s and had a uncooked, overly graphic, nearly pornographic high quality to them. The extra refined, deep response got here a lot later—with novels akin to David Grossman’s See Underneath: Love and Amir Gutfreund’s Our Holocaust. That’s when the actual literary response to the collective trauma and mourning started.

Cohen: Novels could be written about these terrorized communities, however the novels that matter could be set in these communities earlier than the fear, earlier than the loss of life. As a result of books are about life. I do know this can come off as trite, but it surely’s true. Books are based on and in life. And loss of life comes with the top: the concept, which I discovered scandalous as a toddler, that past the ultimate web page, these characters don’t exist; it’s throughout for them; there’s nothing.

Namdar: I feel there’s going to be quite a bit. To begin with, I predict a sure silence. As a result of that is too loopy and too horrific. And too historic, and too modern. There’s going to be a silence, after which I predict two waves. One wave of actually unhealthy writing, actually unhealthy, horrible kitsch, on steroids—like, unhealthy, embarrassing, reductive, clear writing. However then—and it is a loopy prediction, however I’m gonna say it—Israeli literature, which has been so-so for fairly some time, may all of the sudden turn into important, attention-grabbing, searing, biting, many issues that it hasn’t been for years. That second wave of inventive response won’t contact instantly on the trauma of October 7 however can be unconsciously fueled by it, and it might significantly revitalize Jewish and Israeli artwork and literature. It stays to be seen.

Beckerman: Nicely, I used to be serious about 9/11. And simply how there was by no means a terrific novel.

Cohen: It’s troublesome to write down a novel about an occasion. As a result of nothing ever begins that morning. Nothing ever ends that evening. An occasion isn’t a topic.

Namdar: What’s extra essential is the stuff that has been achieved to the collective physique. From this sort of deep disruption, deep woundedness, any individual’s lower the stomach and pulled the newborn out, and raped and destroyed and mutilated, all this, it actually disrupts the physique. After which artistic, usually darkish supplies may circulate by these gaping wounds.

Cohen: There’s this harmful lie, which Jews themselves have helped unfold, that accuses Jews of being the standard-bearers of some amorphous humanistic custom. “We” are those who, in keeping with the best, are continually pushing leftist causes; we assist freedom of expression and open borders and oppose discrimination universally. And but to push for that agenda as of late is to push for “our” personal destruction—or so many Jews consider. As for what I consider: I feel if the noble causes you advance wind up branding you as illegitimate, then that’s nearly the top of the Enlightenment—if you advocate for an Enlightenment that denies your personal proper to exist.

Namdar: There’s something very, very risky concerning the Jewish existence that we really are doomed to be our personal destroyers and the world’s revivers. The Abrahamic journey is a tragic journey. It’s so significantly better to remain at house. Lech Lecha, the injunction to Abraham to wander, means “You’re fucked.” What loopy individual leaves their world and goes to a savage land known as Canaan after which to Egypt, after which to Europe, after which again to Palestine? What’s your drawback? Keep at house, have kids, drink wine with your pals. I feel that because of this chosenness is a curse, and a blessing, and a vocation. And you understand, it’s the primary time talking to you now, to each of you right here, the place I discover that tiny little bit of compassion for these completely unbearable children who’re protesting Israel. As a result of these children should not going to be Jewish in a era, however they may be carrying the Abrahamic custom, in a approach, as a result of they’re attempting so laborious to be a blessing to the nations. It’s very unusual. It’s irregular, to the bone.