Poem

Last night I had a dream I was trying to escape from a group of people

Who had already killed a lot of people all over the world and wanted

To kill all the rest of them,

And I was in danger.

I wish this was a poetic vehicle,

But I really did dream this

Last night.

In the dream I was with a group of friends who had survived and

I was playing dead so I would somehow be spared.

The killers found me and for the rest of the seemingly-endless dream

They caused me physical pain in a variety of ways

To make sure I was really dead.

–

In 2014 I stepped out of a taxi in Jerusalem

And saw the face of my cousin Yehuda for the first time.

He is my mother’s first cousin,

Son of one of my grandfather’s brothers.

He looked just like the photographs I have seen of my

Grandfather whom I never met,

He looked a lot like me.

And he told me he had been born in Tel Aviv in 1937,

And at that moment I felt the whole Earth shift

And my stomach sort of turned inside out

And I knew I would never again be able 

To pretend I wasn’t involved.

–

Every day of my life

In the country I call my home

I walk on stolen land.

I live in cities built by the shackled.

My home is a country

Built on top of graves.

–

I can’t remember a time I didn’t know

People wanted me dead.

I can’t remember a time

I haven’t thought about where I would go

Or how I would know it was the right time to leave,

A time when I haven’t wondered how the people who did escape

Knew it was time.

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t wonder

If I could be as wise or brave

When the time comes.

–

I remember asking my mother

As a child,

Well, but if your mother isn’t Jewish,

Doesn’t that mean

You’re not really Jewish,

Even though your father is?

Which means I’m not really Jewish

Even though your father

And both of my father’s parents

Were Jewish?

So, they wouldn’t have killed me, right?

They wouldn’t have killed you?

And she said, no,

They would have wanted to kill us too,

We are plenty Jewish enough.

–

This is true:

In 2017 my cousin here in the USA

Made a spreadsheet with her husband

With a list of all the things that needed to happen in order for them

To make the decision to flee.

I became party to her plan

And we decided,

After she had done a lot of research,

New Zealand,

Even though I have no idea if that plan would work.

This is true:

I had to sit down and tell my girlfriend,

This isn’t a joke,

You don’t know what it’s like

To spend your entire life ready to flee,

You can’t make fun of this anymore

It’s deadly serious for us.

–

I remember

A friend in my youth telling me she “hated Jewishness,”

And the time she and her mother made fun of the chai necklace I was wearing,

Given to me by my grandmother.

I remember

When my ex and I went to visit his family in Virginia Beach,

And when I told his aunt that my dad and stepmom lived near Miami,

She said why would they want to live there,

There’s only Cubans and Jews there.

I remember

Going to Germany with that same ex

Because he had grown up there some years, in a military family,

Even though my whole family said

You should never go to Germany.

And I remember

During that trip the ex and I were staying with a German grad student I knew

And my ex laughed during a conversation and pointed at me and said

Of course she’s Jewish look at her nose.

These things really happened,

They happened to me.

–

The only reason I was in Israel in 2014 was to find Yehuda,

Him and the rest of my cousins there.

I had always known they existed and lived in Israel,

But my family here had lost contact with him

In the mid 1950’s.

–

For as long as I can remember I had declared I could never go to Israel

Because of the occupation, because of the apartheid.

I could no longer discuss the subject of Israel with my stepmother

Because of my beliefs.

When I was asked to speak at a Holocaust memorial in college,

As a leader of queer activism on campus,

I spoke about Palestinian self determination.

–

I have spent dozens of hours reading

Anti-Zionist curricula and histories,

Talking with other Jews,

Trying to untangle the claims on all sides,

To clean myself from brainwashing.

I learned about British Mandated Palestine,

The neverending colonialism in the Middle East,

I learned about the Balfour Declaration,

About how it was some old White gentile British man

Who thought it was his right to declare

That the Jews get Palestine.

I learned what the Naqba was,

About Arabs driven from their homes,

Killed, forced on death marches.

I learned that evangelical Christians

Had a huge role in

Supporting the establishment of the State of Israel

Because Christ can't come again

Unless the Jews are back in Jerusalem

Or something.

Ain't that a kicker?

I also learned that during World War II

No one wanted us, no one freed us, no one protected us,

Not for a long time.

I was naively shocked to learn

That after the Holocaust

When Jewish survivors went back home to Poland

Some were killed in pogroms,

When Jewish survivors went back home to Ukraine

Their neighbors killed some of them by the thousands.

I learned

That after the Holocaust

Surviving Jews who went to Palestine

Were put in concentration camps there

By the British

Because by that time

The British didn’t know what to do

About the situation they had created,

What to do with all these Jews who thought they had nowhere else to go.

I learned 

That they almost gave us parts of South America,

Almost gave us Madagascar.

After all, that way we’d still be far away,

And no Europeans would be

Inconvenienced by us,

No Europeans would have to be

Persuaded to be our neighbors

Ever again.

–

A few years ago I watched a short film

In which a young queer Jewish person

Decided to see what the number six million looked like,

So they counted out six million grains of rice

And put them in jars,

Thinking that six million grains of rice

Couldn’t look like that much.

But it took them months,

And the jars kept multiplying,

And I had to stop watching the film

Because I couldn’t bear it.

–

Last January I sat in Yehuda’s kitchen in Jerusalem

And looked at his old family photographs again 

For the fourth time,

And I finally asked him,

Why did my grandfather’s brothers

In 1929

When they fled the pogroms in Poland

Decide to go to Palestine

Instead of the United States like my grandfather did?

And he looked at me and said, “they were Zionists,”

And my heart twisted a bit.

He told me that his father,

My great uncle Yitzhak,

Lived in the first ever Jewish kibbutz in Palestine,

That’s where Yehuda’s parents met.

I asked Yehuda

Why he fought

In the Six Day War

Even though he was in his thirties,

Old for military conscription,

And he said everyone had to fight.

I asked him what happened to him,

What it was like

Fighting in the Six Day War,

But he wouldn’t talk about it.

–

That first time I went to Israel

After a few days it dawned on me

That somehow

A part of myself that had never relaxed before

Felt soothed.

And I realized it was because everyone,

The Israelis

The Arabs

The Jews

The Muslims

Everyone kind of looked like me,

And I finally understood

What Semitic really is,

That Jews aren’t the only Semites.

For the first time ever,

With my big nose and dark hair

And big dark eyebrows,

I finally felt normal.

And I was horrified because

That wasn’t supposed to happen.

But it did and I still feel that way

When I am there.

Yet I never wanted to feel comfortable there,

Or familiar,

Because just behind all the people who look like me

Is a wall

Running through Jerusalem

With barbed wire

And military checkpoints.

–

I wish I hadn’t read 

The New York Times articles

About the women and girls

Who were raped and mutilated

On October 7th,

I knew I shouldn’t read those articles,

And now I can’t stop seeing

Behind my eyes

A dead woman’s body with nails driven into her crotch and thighs.

And it’s mixed with all the images

Behind my eyes

Of the rubble that is now Gaza,

And the dead bodies of

Thousands of innocent people,

And the voices in my ears

Of the Palestinian families

That have had almost every member

Of every generation

Killed,

Whole families wiped out

In one day.

And it’s mixed with all the images

Behind my eyes

Of men with machine guns

Breaking down the doors

Of bomb shelters in houses at kibbutzim.

And it’s mixed with the images

Behind my eyes

Of piles and piles of bodies

In Rwanda,

And it’s mixed with the words

In my ears

Of the story my grad school friend told me,

Her last name was Begovic,

About the Serbian grad student

Who passed her in the hallways of UC Berkeley

And said to her under his breath,

Soon all your people will be dead.

And it’s mixed with the image

Behind my eyes

Of a photograph in the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem

Of a Jewish woman

In 1940

In a town square in Poland

Wearing only a disheveled brassiere

And a skirt half torn off,

With the most stark look of terror on her face

I have ever seen,

Her mouth open in a scream,

Her arm being grabbed violently

By a hand attached to an unseen arm,

And in the background

Slumped on the ground,

Another woman,

Her underwear around her hips

And her legs askew in an unnatural position,

And you can’t tell

Whether she is alive or dead.

I have always wished

I had never seen that photograph

Because it’s been behind my eyes ever since,

And I wonder how far that was

From places my family lived.

–

I recently learned

That a lot of people

Who believe many things I believe

Might not vote for Biden this coming November

Because he hasn’t done what they want

Or said what they wanted

During this horrific war.

And ever since then,

I have felt terror crawling further up my throat every day.

I have been having these nightmares

About people trying to kill me.

I have been reading in the news

About women who have died

Because they couldn’t get abortions in Texas.

I have been completing the training

To become a crisis counselor for the Trevor Project,

Because suicide by trans youth

Has been skyrocketing.

And I look at the headlines every day,

Praying that the courts will protect me

By preventing that man

From running for office,

Will somehow prevent him

From becoming #47 in addition to #45,

But then I remember

That he put these judges on the courts anyhow.

And I wonder:

If the unthinkable happens,

Who will be sacrificed this time around?

Like the hundreds of thousands of people

Dead of COVID because of him,

Most of them Black, most of them poor.

And I wonder

Whether the twenty, thirty thousand Palestinians

Slaughtered since October

Will feel comforted from their graves

If we sacrifice more people in their name.

Will the people upon whose graves I walk every day,

The ghosts of the shackled who built our cities and grew our food,

The living people who stood in front of attack dogs and water cannons,

Will they agree

That it’s a fair exchange?

–

I remember

In November 2016

I spoke with a friend of mine

And asked her why doesn’t everyone else

Think this is as terrifying as I do?

And she said

Well

The only people I know who are paying attention

Are BIPOC or Jewish.

--

But right now I don’t know who I can trust

To call on the phone

To weep with.

–

All I know is

That I have never felt this terrified

Or quite this heartbroken.