We have seen the enemy, and
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THERE is a dream which keeps coming back to me at almost regular intervals; it is dark and I am being murdered in some kind of thicket or brushwood; there is a busy road at no more than ten yards distance; I scream for help but nobody hears me, the crowd walks past laughing and chatting.
-- Arthur Koestler, “The Nightmare That Is a Reality,” The New York Times, Jan. 9, 1944
SO, perhaps, it is the other way round: perhaps it is we, the screamers, who react in a sound and healthy way to the reality which surrounds us, whereas you are the neurotics who totter about in a screened fantasy world because you lack the faculty to face the facts.
-- Koestler
For nearly two decades I worked as a staff print reporter covering crime, general assignment, and fashion. In 2018 my husband Jeff and I were happily raising our two young daughters in leafy, Democratic-voting Durham, NC, when the city council unanimously passed a shocking, toxic boycott of Israel.
The resolution was the first of its kind nationwide, and it enshrined antisemitism in Durham's municipal books for posterity. But more: it served as a prototype for embracing the grotesque illiberalism of anti-Zionism.
In "progressive" strongholds, #doitlikedurham became a thing.
It was then that I understood Jew-hatred in my bones. For a few months I sat on the cold bathroom floor late at night, tear-ridden. Something had arrived--old, dark, un-dead.
Finally I stopped crying and started fighting, and in the most inconvenient of places. City hall. The kids' prep school. Our synagogue.
I told Jeff that, well, we could forget any future invitations to birthday soirees, New Year's fetes, even Passover Breakfasts.
He had one question.
"Is that a promise?"