He knew.
I told you Dad...
I told you. I knew he knew. I always knew he knew. In your gut, you always knew he knew too. Every Israeli knew. Every Jew knew. Even if they didn't know, they knew. The nervous system of every Jew knew he knew in their kishkes from the moment it happened and we all stuffed it down like a seventh course apple cake on Rosh Hashana.
A few months ago, I retracted my suggestion that he knew about it and deliberately did nothing. Not because I didn't believe it, but because in the face of no evidence, what can we go with? If we trust every gut feeling that passes through us we'd all have either spent our money in Vegas or would never leave our rooms. It seemed like a conspiracy theory again, and even if it wasn't, it would be taken up by the banner of conspiracy theorists within two seconds (as it likely will now...). Here's what I wrote on April 18th:
So for a time, a period of at least a few months, I managed to convince myself that Bibi Netanyahu let October 7th happen deliberately, a belief I warned at the outset of all this would circulate among antisemites like wildfire. This is a belief akin to the idea that Roosevelt deliberately allowed Pearl Harbor. This is an unacceptable, out of bounds belief, for me or anyone else. This is a belief that the minds of millions could justify anything at all to rid ourselves of him, including a mass murder of Jews. As truly horrific as Netanyahu is, his incompetence is so much more likely an explanation. An irony about propaganda is that even the purveyors of it come to believe their own claims. Propaganda only works when it requires a thin film of truth, and when you're fed that thin film enough times, it becomes a meal, and you've swallowed supposed truths that are 99% a drug meant to drive you mad.
I may not have done enough work to understand this issue I've been trying to understand my whole lifetime, but I'm trying. For anyone that this issue makes passionate, you need to do the work too. A lot of our future depends on us all making the effort.
There is no validation inherent in getting it right: if it is right--and there's still a... 30% chance it isn't? 25? 20?--it's the nature of falsehoods that one conspiracy theory proven right will result in another fifty that are demonstrably false. History is outlandish enough, but the more outlandish history grows, more outlandish falsities people believe about history. No matter how strange the real truth is, it is the nature of people to believe that the truth is still much stranger. We may be right about a few things, but we're wrong about many more, and if Netanyahu was warned about October 7th and did not notify his cabinet, then it will be so easy to convince 50% of the world that the entire cabinet knew, and 25% that the military leadership knew, and 5% that all of military intelligence knew, and 1% that the perpetrators were just Israeli soldiers in Kaffiyas.
Months ago, I was furious when I read something on a British friend's wall. Britain frankly has a bit of a reputation now as one of the countries where anti-Zionism will likely spill over into antisemitism. On this friend's wall, this guy didn't say that Netanyahu knew, he didn't say that the Israeli government knew, he said that ISRAEL knew.
Oh I know, I know, it was just a shorthand. But this casual shorthand implicates every citizen of the country and every foreigner who supports this country: whether intended or not, the implication is that the 90% of the world's Jews who are Zionists are blithely willing to sacrifice 1000 of our own people in order to complete our military objectives.
Whether or not anybody I casually encounter socially believes it, I guarantee there are many millions who do, and that belief is given sanction by this lack of care about how Jews are implicated in crimes we did not perpetrate. Even if you think Jews are uniquely responsible for certain crimes--and clearly many people I know do, only Jews are supposed to accept that there will be linguistic vagaries in the admonishments of us that sound like microaggressions. What's true for us is true for everybody else: either microaggressions don't matter for any group at all, which is certainly possible, or you all need to be 1000x more careful in the way you talk about Jews, and Jews are entirely right to bristle at the double standard.
I have so much more to say about this, but this is about you Dad, not the goyim.
Goyim suck, there's nothing we can do about it. Even the righteous goyim suck. Some of them are amazing, truly. I'd trust M... M.... and A..... T...... with my life, but the thing is, we really don't know who to trust in those moments until the very moment we need to know: and by then, our best guesses come to gossamer. Other people have to survive too, and you can't expect even your most trusted friends to willingly risk their lives if it means taking families of ten with them. The same would go for Jews if we have to be the ones to rescue others. Everybody thinks they'd acquit themselves well in the Holocaust until it happens, and then everybody realizes that survival in war is the world's most complicated mess. Some people who went with Hitler were evil, but most were just people: lied to about how to reclaim their dignity in the face of humiliation, trying to survive as anybody would, and more importantly, trying to get their loved ones to survive. People can lay down their own lives, but is a hero a hero when the hero's contribution sacrifices their family?
You were a hero Dad. You sacrificed again and again and again and again, sacrifice was your religion: not Judaism. But the fact that other people did not completely acknowledge the extent of the constant sacrifices, particularly your children, particularly one child, provoked a fury in you that towered even over the good moments. There often didn't seem to be a single comment from you that did not have 20 implications: 17 of them not entirely complimentary. You would often say, not just to me but often to me, 'Everything I say you take as an insult.' to which I'd volley back 'Because everything you say you mean as an insult.'
I don't know how you found Mom, I don't know how you found such a saint, I don't know how she did it for almost 51 years, I don't know how you produced adults as considerate as Jordan and Ethan, and my life is now a long process of sifting the many, MANY good lessons you imparted to me from the bad. The gifts you gave me were not just the knowledge, the humor, the business, and yes, the sacrifice... Occasionally you would complain about our ingratitude and I would put my hands up and lean my head over as though on a cross, and I'd sing out 'CRUCIFIXUS ETIAM PRO NOBIS!...' One time you complained about how ungrateful we were and ..... picked up a pillow, put it against your face and said "It'll all be over soon. Don't worry." Another time you'd done something to really frustrate ...... and he complained to me "When he goes we're gonna need thirty years just to say 'Alright, what the hell was that?!'" You somehow expected that a million jokes at our expense would not be repaid: I hope you retained some small measure of pride in how hilarious all three of your children are: we learned how to make fun of people at Jack Tucker's dinner table.
What the hell was that indeed? You weren't an ordinary father because ordinary fathers let go of their children. I'm sure some would just call you an old world, immigrant father, who snarled disapproval as a way of maintaining authority, but that model died out precisely because it left such discontents. You didn't have to act that way. You chose it, and then acted astonished when people resented it.
One of the reasons your disapproval so stung was because, at bottom, you were not a bad listener: you simply chose not to listen when it was to your advantage. What was best about you was your attentiveness: no one could accuse Jack Tucker of being anything but the most devoted parent, but it wasn't just time and thousands of favors, it was attentiveness. It was that you wanted nothing more than six hour conversations with your children: even if the conversation could sometimes be one-sided and turn acrimonious because of something you deliberately said. But you wanted nothing more than your childrens' company, and oh how you got it...
You brought all three of us into business. My involvement in the business has long since become a figleaf. I have time to read and write, not that I do much reading these days except in audiobook form, but thanks to you I am in some small senses a 19th century gentleman of leisure who chose his own personal cultivation over success. I owe you such a debt of gratitude for that, but oh how you hated that like anything: you wanted me in the world and to get me there I won't say the names you called me or the depths you sank to to try to hurt and humiliate. But after that childhood, I was far too bruised and scared of the world at 25 to properly go into it. I will say, in that regard, you were not exactly a help. And when it came time to figure out how to be nice to people: you were not exactly a help either, even as you constantly lectured on how surly was the social grace of a son who, like you, was clearly on the autism spectrum.
It's only since you've been gone, in my mid-40s, that I've learned that you don't always have to say the clever line or make the impression that lights up the room. I've done what I can to be nicer, I've done what I can to be more forgiving, and more importantly to you, I've done what I can to be more responsible and conscientious. I still have a path to tread with all that, but I am going to walk it.
I sometimes think many people pass when they can't find a way of reconciling themselves to the present. Obviously that doesn't hold true all the time, but I sometimes think it always holds true in our family. You were such a bizarre mixture of saint and tyrant that there is no way to judge you in 2026. You sacrificed everything for a family that only wanted you to pursue your fulfillment. Your life was a distraught preparation for a defeat that completely avoided you. People like you make the world go round, and would that 2026 had anyone allowed to contain as many multitudes as you did: simultaneously the world's most gregarious and remote person, the world's friendliest and most authoritarian, the world's funniest person and the most lethally serious. People like you achieved enough to create better worlds: and not for yourself, but for loved ones, for communities, for thousands and thousands who would never know your name. And yet people like you made the world of 2026 necessary. We now live in the detritus of this better world's cost, and if the world is to get better by any definition: freer, more secure, more equal, more moral, better educated, better cultured, better represented--then we have to unpack whirlwinds like Jack Tucker who got us this far: whether his name is Lyndon Johnson, or Henry Ford, or writ small Jack Tucker, the story is the same: men of limitless intelligence, limitless energy and limitless work ethic who pushed and pushed and pushed to get the best possible results out of subordinates, and were mystified when their subordinates rebelled because they thought subordinates should always remember that he understood the world better than they.
And that is the crux of where you left the world. For a man who made such a religion of moderation in all things but his family, who was so skeptical of all claims of certainty, you somehow WERE certainty. Not just the bagel in the morning, the sitcoms constantly in the background, the constant reminders about everything we had to do that day; you WERE the idea that the world could be completely American and completely Jewish, that Zionism could be completely nationalist and completely liberal, that culture defines everything about human beings, that history goes by dialectical thesis and antithesis, that all excesses of historical actors in controlling human affairs would result in rebellion (which is extraordinary considering the difference between your belief about that and how you lived your life...).
It almost seemed as though moment you left the world was the moment the whole world decided that was all a load of shit.
Both notions are deeply mistaken, and simultaneously not wrong. For all your electrifying brilliance in a hundred areas, I don't think you ever understood at your base level that two contradictory things can be true at the same time.
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