Once Again, Onto the Neck

For most all? of my childhood, I wore a star of David on a necklace. I varied them--silver, gold, rounded edges, or sometimes, a chai.

It felt critically important for me to have a visual sign to the outside world that I was Jewish. "This is who I am!" I proclaimed proudly, even when my Dad suggested that perhaps I was going somewhere where such a symbol might not be warmly welcomed. 

The necklace was a part of me, in a similar way to my wedding ring today. A commitment. Part of me.

Sometime after 2009, when I made aliyah and started a life in Tel Aviv, I took off my necklace. My Jewishness was so obvious, it didn't need to be stated. The same way I didn't wear a sign reading "I breathe oxygen!" I didn't need my necklace. I lived in a place where the air was Jewish, the streets thrummed with anticipation every Friday afternoon, where the local convenience store had shabbat candles next to the cigarettes.

And then, in 2023, after That Day, we moved back to the US. 

And today, July 1, 2026, I fished out my star from deep in my closet, and clasped it to my neck once again.

Once again, I feel a need to shout my identity.

This time, I'm not an angsty teenager, desperate to identify, but rather, a suburban working Mom in her 40s. Hardly the picture of revolution.

I love my necklace, and my people. But putting on this necklace feels...deeply sad. It's all of it, the last couple of years, and those before it.

It's losing my favorite podcast when the hosts embraced Hamas, with no words for our beloved redheads, or the others brutally murdered that day. 

It's the idiots holding Palestinian flags and shouting in the middle of the only suburb with a sizable Jewish population, as that population heads to pray on Friday nights. 

It's Scott Weiner being attacked, and Josh Shapiro's house being burned, and the Temple my grandparents founded in Toronto, and the one my best friend's grandparents founded in Detroit and the woman arrested by the FBI for sending crypto to terrorists yesterday.

It's every Jewish board meeting when we have to budget for security again, when we'd rather spend on popsicles or literally anything else. It's every single person who talks about "antisemitism and Islamophobia" in one breath, even though Jews are attacked 5x than any other religious group.

It's the absolutely cruel and moronic government of the state of Israel, tearing the reputation of my beautiful country to shreds.

This Jew is exhausted, but I am not afraid. I am proud, and I will not step down. And I will not take off my necklace.

 "It's a great day for the democratic party!" That's what my Dad wrote in my card on my 18th birthday (along with a normal-ish message) in 2001. 

Our family has been proud democrats for generations. I was raised on a constant rhetoric of helping the less fortunate, of how lucky we were to be the ones helping, and not those who needed help. Paying taxes was part of our responsibility. Women's bodies belonged to the women themselves. Racism was bad.

I was the most loyal of soldiers. I took unpaid time off to volunteer for President Obama's first campaign, worked for Congresswoman Louise Slaughter, knocked doors and ran from dogs.

At our wedding, we hired only vendors who were LGBTQ friendly, and I started talking about how Black lives matter after a summer interning at the Children's Defense Fund in Washington, not when it hit the news.

I would say that other people followed sports teams, and I was a loyal fan of the democrats.

And here I sit in 2026, politically homeless. 

I am a traitor to the left, and to the right.

The left wants nothing to do with me, because I am a proud Jew. I believe that the Jews are not less than any other people, any less deserving of a state of our own. I am a Zionist, having referred to myself as "the last secular Zionist" since 2009, when I made aliyah. I lived in Israel, had my babies there, built a full life in the glorious bubble known as Tel Aviv.

I wish for a Jewish conspiracy like they imagine, because then we could probably at least agree on something. These days, the old "two Jews, three opinions" feels quaint, as it feels like every thoughtful person I know carries at least three opinions on their tired shoulders.

The right wants nothing to do with me, because I am deeply ashamed of the current Israeli government, because I deplore the innocent lives being taken in the West Bank, by people who also claim Zionism as theirs. My family protested Bibi's government for many months, every single week. I was out three days before giving birth, and not long after.

People who have never rushed their babies to a bomb shelter accuse me of not being enough, as if they know the fear of a baby at the breast as rockets fall. The Rashid Khalidi on my bookshelf is heresy, the Herzl and Gordis and Golda Meir count for nothing. So I speak Hebrew to my children. So what?

I started writing this weeks ago, and then stopped, without any idea how to end it. The truth is that there is no end. Since I started, the democratic party of Maine nominated Graham Platner for the senate, despite his Nazi tattoo. The bad news is endless, and the good news, hard to come by.

I feel gutted, torn, abandoned. So does everyone I know.