Why Are You Here?

On Belonging and Loss

Karnak (Thèbes), Palais - Partie Posterieure, Félix Teynard

I’ve been away from this newsletter for a while. The reasons are tangled together in ways that resist clean separation, but the simplest version is that my mother passed away and I lost the ability to write about collective questions while processing a private one. I was also deep inside a long piece for The Nation that consumed my thoughts for months. More on that soon.

I want to start here, with my mother, even though writing about her in this space feels more exposed than I’m used to. Her relationship to the questions this newsletter explores, from the political to the psychological, illuminates them in ways I didn’t fully appreciate while she was alive.

My mother grew up in a smallish town where the Jewish community always felt cloistering to her. She was ambivalent yet proud of her Jewishness. Her grandmother had served as the national president of Hadassah, the major Zionist women’s organization. We have family stories describing how my great grandmother would take Golda Meir clothes shopping when Meir visited New York because Meir had such terrible taste. This was the world my mother inherited, deeply secular but thoroughly Jewish American. It was saturated in the institutional life that connected diaspora Jews to the idea of Israel without requiring much contact with the place itself. She absorbed all of it and ultimately didn’t see herself in any of it, particularly as it extended toward Zionism.

When I set out on my own path of Jewish discovery, which led me to embrace Zionism and eventually to reject it, she was not especially enthusiastic, to say the least. She recognized something in my search that she couldn’t deny since I was a fatherless child. Yet, the pull of belonging that Zionism seemed to offer never sat well with her. She didn’t try to talk me out of anything but she also didn’t pretend to share my conviction. In fact, she thought I lost my mind.

I remember one of her first visits to Israel when I was living there. We had to go to the DMV to collect my freshly minted Israeli driver’s license. The behavior in the building was less than easy, as DMVs are around the world. But it was that particular flavor of bureaucratic hostility that Israelis accept as normal and newcomers experience as bewildering that seemed to push her over the edge. At one point she turned to look at me and simply said, why are you here? Why do you want to live here?

The question landed harder than she probably intended. Most diaspora Jews who actually spend time living in Israel undergo some version of this realization, even if they suppress it. Outside of the aggressive politics of Zionism and the ideological architecture that makes Israel feel necessary and urgent from a distance, actually living in the country is difficult compared with most other options in the world. The gap between the Israel that exists in the diaspora imagination and the Israel that meets you at the DMV on a Tuesday morning is enormous. My mother saw it immediately and honestly thought the whole thing was nuts.

Once I left Israel for the West Bank and eventually beyond, we were able to bond over what we both came to see as the hysterical nature of diaspora Jewish attachment to Israel. It was clear from both of our lived experiences that Israel occupies a space in the minds of diaspora Jewry that bears little resemblance to the actual country. It is basically a make-believe place sustained by distance and selective attention. When you go inside and live there, the fantasy collapses into what it has always been underneath, which is a nightmare that most supporters have the luxury of never confronting because they don’t stay long enough or bother to learn the language.

My mother understood this without needing to theorize it or even really engaging with it directly. She carried an ambivalence about Israel and Zionism that predated my own by decades, rooted not in politics or scholarship but in a basic instinct that something about the whole enterprise didn’t add up.

I don’t want to make her into something she wasn’t. She didn’t write essays about Zionism. Her dissent, if you could even call it that, was quieter than mine, expressed in raised eyebrows and shrugs. But it was there, and it was real, and losing her has made me think about what gets passed between generations when it comes to these questions. Not the ideological inheritance of organizations like Hadassah, which transmit loyalty to Israel as a kind of communal duty. I am thinking about the other inheritance. The doubt. The sense that the story doesn’t hold together.

This newsletter has dived into that doubt to try and find where it leads. I’m back now, and I have a lot to share. The piece I’ve been writing for The Nation examines the questions Both/And has explored from its beginning, but on a larger canvas and through a deeper historical lens. The piece will be out very soon and I will have an essay later this week setting it up. In the meantime, I wanted to return to this space with the thing that kept me away, which is also the thing that keeps pulling me back.

I have been writing a longer essay about grieving that isn’t ready yet and may not be for a while. When it is, I will send it to the paid list. The paid list isn’t a paywall so much as a way of not flooding your inbox with material that you might not have signed up for. And as always, the paid tier doesn’t require money. Send me a book recommendation and I’ll add you free of charge.