When I Stopped Being a Progressive

"Why isn’t anti-Semitism seen as a form of racism as virulent as all the other kinds?"

By Debbie Weiss

Israelis hold photographs of abducted and missing family members during a protest outside of the Knesset, Nov. 6, 2023.

On October tenth, I didn’t want to leave the house. Not even for the seven-minute drive to the yoga studio for my regular Tuesday morning class. I felt an unspecified evil, a tear in the fabric of reality.

It reminded me of starting the fifth grade the summer after my mom died and hating having to walk to school on my own. If my seemingly healthy mom could suddenly die from an unexpected illness, who knew what other terrible things could happen. In fact, best if my dad didn’t leave the house by himself either. 

Back then, I couldn’t say what I was afraid of, but it didn’t feel safe out there. I’d learned that anyone could die at any time, even my mom, and the world just felt wrong.

I felt that way this past October; jittery about venturing past the front door. Leery of some unspecified menace. But this time I could identify my fear: it was anti-Semitism. 

I haven’t yet seen any overt signs in my small Northern California town, but it's here. Or maybe the next town over – and certainly 26 miles away in the nearest city. It’s in rallies treating the October seventh attacks as justified. And it’s in the statements issued by allegedly progressive organizations blaming Israel for the attacks, denigrating the loss of life with words like “context,” or saying Israel has no civilians. 

Would a terrorist attack against any other nation be so rationalized? 

I’ve been reading articles that suggest that Israel feels far away and removed to many people or that being pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel is the province of recent generations and the politically progressive. But to me, it just feels like they don’t like us. 

It seems as if only apologetic Jews are worthy of compassion. As if we have to qualify our anguish for those lost. And that feels like a demand for self-loathing, which can happen to those who’ve been persecuted or bullied. 

I was bullied in junior high. Having lost my mom two years earlier, I had a kind of nerdy vulnerability that probably acted as a pheromone call to bullies. But even at twelve, I could distinguish between the bullies, a group of mean girls who pretended they were in juvenile hall instead of a middle class junior high school and, far worse, the school administrators who did nothing when I repeatedly asked for help. 

They were the grown-ups who should have known better. And I decided our school system sucked.

Similarly these days, law school organizations, social justice movements, and other groups which claim to be forward-thinking are making irresponsible, even incendiary statements about the attacks. But these are the people who should be providing a nuanced view and stanching the damage from the more extreme fronts. 

Why isn’t anti-Semitism seen as a form of racism as virulent as all the other kinds?

I’m starting to think I’m not so progressive after all. 

My grandfather survived the Depression to own a heating and air conditioning business in New York. He told me that he sometimes had to hide the fact that he was the owner of the business when dealing with non-Jewish customers. He also told me about being denied entrance to hotels when he traveled. Even when he’d retired to a placid California suburb, he kept a spiked club under the driver’s seat of his car, “just in case.”

His son, my father, was the first person in our family to earn a college degree with a scholarship to Rensselaer Polytechnic. He recalls telling my grandfather after he graduated that he wanted to work at IBM, and my grandfather looking pained as he told him that they didn’t hire “our kind.” 

Debbie’s grandfather, Reginald Milton Weiss.

I want to stand up for the grandfather who lived with anti-Semitism to make a life for us. So much of the response to the attacks feels like hatred against my own family.

When my mother died in 1973, the psychology of the time was that if a kid who’d suffered a loss appeared to be doing well, best not to dwell on it so the kid would move on – as if that were even possible. So I started the fifth grade and felt dumb for not understanding the new math while not understanding how my mom could vanish without anyone talking about it. But this is what resilience looked like back then.

So I constructed myself to be less vulnerable, a lawyer at 24, conventionally put together, nothing that might be objectionable. Nothing like the girl who had lost her mother and been bullied at school. 

It wasn’t until I lost my husband at age 50 that I decided that the enforced resilience I’d been practicing wasn’t so great. I wanted to mourn my loss however and for as long as I wanted. 

And now I want to mourn this new world development, which appears to conflate progressiveness with anti-Semitism. Maybe the Jewish people are seen as so resilient that we don’t need compassion. Is the problem that Jews, at 2.4 percent of the U.S. population, are overly represented by our accomplishments? 

Last Sunday during yoga, a woman I knew to be Jewish was lying on her mat before class, knees pulled up as if to protect herself, eyes tightly closed, with a look of distress on her face.

“Hey, I just wanted to check in about how you’re doing with all that’s happening,” I said, hoping I wasn’t intruding.

“Not good,” she said, opening her eyes and managing a weak smile. She said she’d never felt so alone being Jewish in our small Northern California community. Nobody was talking about what was happening in the world.

I confessed my own anxiety and it led to several Jewish women gathering to talk about how we’re feeling these days. It’s good to know that I’m not alone in feeling alienated – and even better knowing that I have a new group of friends who support each other.

But I’m not a progressive anymore. And sometimes I don’t feel like leaving the house. 

Debbie Weiss is a Former Lawyer, Essayist, and the Author of A Midlife Widow's Search for Love.

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