This past year, my senior year of college, I resigned from my position as a columnist at my school newspaper. I had treasured having the column, having a platform — and a push — every two weeks to try to say new and challenging things to my school community. It was a position I had worked hard to achieve; and yet, mere months before graduation, I felt I couldn’t continue with the newspaper. I had experienced repeated antisemitism from my editors, and enough was enough.
I’m reluctant to place the content of the interactions at the center of this essay, but the incidents ranged from accidentally publishing someone who had expressed blatantly Nazi views at a sensitive moment to conflating Jews and the State of Israel in a way that was deeply troubling. After multiple incidents, I became convinced that the paper’s leadership was not committed to learning and shifting their behavior. In a world where any white man with a bulky coat or bag who walks into Kabbalat Shabbat sets me on edge, I lacked the patience and capacity to continue working in that environment. Antisemitism felt too serious, too painful, and too live to be something I could look past, even for the position at the paper that I loved.
Leaving the newspaper, I was deeply hurt and angry, and as a writer, I felt drawn to write about it. I pitched an essay about the situation to a different campus publication. I drafted the piece, edited it, edited it again. But I couldn’t write something I was satisfied with. I kept adding caveat upon caveat. I was so fearful about putting such an article out into the world — why?
I realized that I was fearful that my story would be taken up and weaponized, especially coming out of a campus that had already been the focus of right-wing ire against student protestors. My editors were both people of color and progressives, who had done important work towards racial and economic justice at the paper. Watching the right’s weaponization of increasingly transparent and implausible accusations of antisemitism against progressive people of color, I didn’t want to play that game. I wasn’t going to be another click for an article about antisemitism on the left.
I still feel conflicted about this decision. Silence is, of course, often a bad strategy for confronting injustice. But the tone of conversations about antisemitism was and is so sour that it seemed to me that there was no good way to publicly speak about my experience.
I continued to stew about my exit from the paper, and my decision to not write about it, for months. It was deeply painful to have left something dear to me because of antisemitism, especially in a moment when antisemitism was at the center of multiple national news cycles — and in particular to not feel that anything productive had come of it. But I was wrong that my departure, and my decision to not be public about it, was for naught.
My decision to not write about leaving the paper had an unexpected consequence, one I hadn’t considered in my months of thought and regret: it left space for reconciliation. The editor I had been the most in conflict with emailed me to apologize after several months. This was unexpected for me. So much time had elapsed, and I had been considering that chapter closed. But here was an apology — one that demonstrated understanding of the misstep, real attentiveness to my pain and that of my beloved community, and commitment to changing and learning — sitting in my inbox.
As I considered and reconsidered the political wisdom or folly of opening a public conversation about my experience of antisemitism, not once had I thought about the interpersonal impact of such a choice. I had thought about if I would harm the causes I cared about, and the potential impact on my editors as political beings. But forgiveness wasn’t on my radar.
I emailed the editor back, and we had a clear and open conversation about the left, our pain, and how hard things are right now. I grew from her example of apology offered in good faith and after deep thought, and I hope that because of the door she opened, I was able to share more about what it’s like to be Jewish in America — the fear and the pain of it.
The Jewish month of Elul has just begun. It is traditionally understood as a time of repentance — not just repair of the relationships between people and God, but also as a period for reflection about our connections with others, and how we have acted towards them. It can be a time of reconciliation, but perhaps only if we have left space for it.
In thinking about forgiveness, it is important to not just consider how, when, and who to forgive. This year, I realized we also need to learn how to leave space for forgiveness among those who are broadly our allies, without giving up on expressing our anger or fighting for our communities; this deepens our relationships rather than harming them. The seeds we plant don’t always sprout immediately, and when we offer a callout or a critique, time and gentleness — and thoughtfulness around public spectacle — can leave space for growth that would not otherwise happen.
Avigayil Halpern graduated from Yale University in May and is beginning study toward rabbinic ordination at the Hadar Institute. Follow her on Twitter at @avigayiln.
Featured image credit: Pixabay.com/jplenio.
