The Weight of the Unthinkable
Why a childhood epiphany and a debt of love have led me to speak out now.
There is a specific kind of silence that follows the realization that the world hasn’t learned what we thought it had.
Lately, I don’t feel a burning rage. Instead, I feel a profound, hollow devastation. I look at the descendants of those who crawled out of the ash of Auschwitz—people whose very existence is a miracle of survival—and I see them being forced to defend their humanity all over again. As a writer, I know that stories have power, but even I am finding it hard to find the words for how easily we have allowed cruelty to become “thinkable” once more.
The Mystery of Age Eight
My journey to this conviction didn’t start with a headline or a political debate. It started when I was eight years old.
It is a mysterious thing, the clarity of a child. At that age, I realized—with a certainty I still carry decades later—that Israel existed because it had to. I understood that for the Jewish people, a homeland wasn’t a political luxury; it was a baseline for survival.
This wasn’t an abstract discovery. It was rooted in the presence of a man who was, for all intents and purposes, my grandfather. He was Jewish, and through him, the Jewish experience wasn’t “other”—it was home. He taught me, through his very being, that humanity is not a default setting; it is a choice we must make every single day.
A Choice Made for Decades
Because of him, I have supported Zionism by choice for decades. It is a part of my moral marrow.
But for a long time, that support was quiet. After October 7th, that luxury of silence vanished. To see propaganda used to justify dehumanization against a people who have already lost so much—hundreds of relatives, entire family lineages, the very “traces” of their ancestors—is a betrayal of everything we promised when we said “Never Again.”
This cruelty cannot be tolerated. It cannot be “contextualized” away. It must be condemned in every way possible.
The Living Traces
In honor of Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), I have invited guests to this space whose families were systematically murdered or survived in Auschwitz.
When you hear them speak, I ask you to look past the “history.” These guests carry the “traces” of those who were nearly erased from the earth. They are the living evidence of why a homeland matters, and why the protection of the Jewish people is a global moral imperative.
We aren’t just looking back at the 1940s; we are looking at the person standing next to us today. We are choosing, as I did at eight years old, to see their humanity as our own.