Gentiles will look at that date and see only numbers. Most Jews, the Jews for whom the identity is important, will look at those numbers and no matter how they order them, they'll know exactly what this means.
So much of that day is seared into my memory. The bat mitzvahs on the same morning of G------- Z----- and Y--- F--- at Chizuk Amuno congregation, the weekend visit of the L-----s at my parents house from upstate New York, the call from my uncle telling me that Rabin was killed, and the way I embarrassed myself at the Pikesville Hilton in front of a pretty girl at G-------- Z-----'s bat mitzvah party by doing a Jerry Lewis impression.
When Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated, we knew the world would change forever. It turns out we underestimated how much.
Maybe the idea of peace was a chimera, but were it a mirage it was as much because of the people on either side who refused in bad faith to believe in it, or even to want it. There are people out there, hundreds of millions of them, who want the slaughter to continue in perpetuum, and not just the Arab side. They so hate each other that to them the only way to resolve this conflict is the eventual extinction of the other; and they don't just pursue it resignedly, they pursue it with a joy that's barely restrained. Hoping for slaughter becomes their reason for living. It's Likudniks as well as Hamasniks, apocalyptic Christianists as well as apocalyptic Islamists. If the right of this debate is not as murderous as the left, they are far more powerful, and they have far less distance to travel between murderous thoughts and murderous actions.
It's a generation later. Netanyahu was elected Prime Minister when he was five years older than I am now. He's lived the majority of his life since then as Prime Minister, and is now older than Rabin ever was.
What's happened in the meantime is the shattering of every dream a Jewish liberal ever had. All that's left is a left who not only rejects us, but rejects that either the US or Israel as any force for good, and in many cases, rejects that it ever could be.
My generation may well be the last generation of American Jews to believe you can be entirely liberal and entirely Jewish. So long as the left gets in bed with the lowest kind of Hamas sympathizing totalitarian forces and entertains the idea that the entire State of Israel is indistinguishable from a colonialist project, that's over. There is little future for Jews on the left, there may not even be a place for Jews in a center that no longer exists in our era that dismisses people on the other side of discourse as less than human - and not just their ideas but the people themselves. All that can be relied on to protect Jews is the loving arms of a reactionary far right that's perpetually on the verge of eliminating republican democracy around the world. We are the one minority they'd save, and when their power is eventually threatened, we will be the minority casually disposed of as a concession.
It certainly never felt that way, but in many ways, my childhood was idyllic. Almost all the bullies I knew, kid and adult, were other Jews. The problems of every Jew from the beginning to the end of recorded time did not exist for me. The problem was that I felt like a Jew among Jews, as many Jews inevitably do. In visiting my own pain on others, I don't doubt I made other Jewish kids feel the same way - maybe even other adults.
My very comical town of origin, Pikesville MD, is undergoing something of a renaissance. When it came time to pursue their own lives, most kids my age moved away. But now that kids ten years younger are starting families, these younger contemporaries are, to my astonishment, moving back and electing a life in Baltimore.
Why is that? What changed in the years between my peers and my youngest brother's peers that made life in Pikesville attractive again? I can only surmise, but the ultimate difference is a tiny critical mass of pressure: feeling just a tiny bit more of those gentile screws on their temples. I don't have statistical backing for any of this, it's only my own anecdotal speculations, and statistical measurements may prove wrong everything I say below.
Baltimore was always a dream deferred, but the Pikesville I grew up in never was. Within our white picket eruv kids who wanted to fulfill their dreams got the education, the connections, and the prestige to go to the best colleges, get the best jobs in the best cities, and live their best lives. That won't be true for kids just a little bit younger than us. For better or worse, DEI crowds many Jews out of the best colleges, and being a doctor or lawyer is nowhere near so lucrative a profession as it was in 1995. To my astonishment, Jews are about to become middle class again. Maybe that's a good thing, but the middle class is hollowing out everywhere. So long as the trajectory is downward, will their grandchildren even be middle class?
But the issue in the early 21st century that makes Jews feel completely unwelcome among non-Jews? You guessed it, there can only be one issue that describes the discrepancy. It's the simple fact of Israel. Not whether Israel is peaceful or bellicose, liberal or conservative, a nation of sanctuary seekers or a nation of colonialists: Israel itself. Over its history, Israel's been as all the world's most functional states have, but what has never changed is the animus against Israel, even in its most principled moments. Yes, the hatred of Israel is particularly vehement now, a little bit of it deserved, but the bacteria of anti-Jewish hatred is always there, waiting for a particularly humid climate when it can eat its way through a whole culture. Anti-Israel criticism is often not antisemitic, but YOUR anti-Israel criticism may be in ways you make a conspicuous effort to not understand.
Just ask yourselves: how often do you make a point of condemning Russia, China, or Saudi Arabia vs. how often you condemn Israel? Is it commensurate with how great a threat each of these countries are to world peace? And even if you do it equally, is it in proportion to the crimes these countries commit? And even if you think the US is too tied up with Israel economically, aren't they economically bound with China and Saudi Arabia? Stand outside yourself and then count: how many justifications do you have to make for the disproportionality of your attention to Israel's crimes before it sounds normal to you again?
You may find this trivial, maybe it is, but so long as the world believes in microaggressions and safe spaces, this may make the difference between making Jews feel welcome and making them mistrust you. Why should Jews be the only minority expected to accept feeling unsafe?
Hopefully more later. There is so much of this...
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