Emma was still groping her way through a thick fog of grief; still surprised to come home from work and find no one awaiting her but Schooner, baying for a walk; still rolling out of bed each morning after restless nights and stumbling barefoot into the kitchen as if risen by the whistling kettle coming to the boil for Gran’s first pot of tea, and hearing only silence. The mail was mostly circulars or bills she knew she’d have to sort out, to put in her own name or cancel, and she couldn’t bring herself to do it because that would be admitting Gran was really gone, so it piled up on the end table by the door that Gran had always kept clear and dust-free.

There it remained for a month, wedged between utility bills, and the pile of neglected mail climbed higher until one morning in mid-November when Emma burst through the front door, breath ragged and hands raw from Schooner’s first walk of the day, and carelessly tossed her keys onto the little table, knocking the teetering tower of mail to the floor. As Schooner bounded past her on his way to the couch, Emma knelt to clear the mess.

This time the invitation caught her eye. There was no envelope, only thick parchment sealed with red wax. She’d never seen the like outside of a museum, certainly never among her own mail. There was no return address, either, only her own name. She squinted at the imprint in the wax but couldn’t make out the design of the seal—she hadn’t yet put on her glasses. Too impatient, she broke the seal on her way to the bedroom to retrieve her glasses and read its contents.

“Captain Edmund Bigelow,” read the beautiful, stylized handwriting, “requests the pleasure of Miss Emma Kelleher’s presence at a soirée celebrating the birthday of his cherished wife Rosalind at seven o’clock on the sixteenth of November.”

She recognized the address it gave on Salem Street—the old Bigelow house. She and her father had often admired its Victorian details on their summer walks around the historic district. It had been a bed-and-breakfast until a fire nearly burned down the whole block when she was in college. The names were familiar, too: Edmund and Rosalind Bigelow. She had certainly heard them but couldn’t remember any story connected with them or the house, but they had to be former owners. Was this some sort of grand reopening? Or perhaps a fundraiser for the Historical Society? Some period thing? She turned the parchment over. There was nothing about RSVPs or donations or tickets.

That it addressed her by name was odd, but they must have gotten her name from the museum, though she hadn’t heard anyone at work mention the function. She was preparing to toss it in the trash when her eyes fell again on the party’s date.

Today. An odd coincidence. But a coincidence nevertheless. With a shrug she left the invitation atop the mail pile as she went to get Schooner his breakfast.

She had forgotten all about it by the time she arrived at the museum. After a long day of work, she slid and stumbled a hurried half-mile home on frozen sidewalks, eager to walk Schooner, change into sweatpants, and settle in for an intimate evening with Dostoevsky and some pizza as quickly as possible.

She was back with Schooner and on her way to hang up his leash when she spotted the invitation lying open on the dining table.

Emma stared. Hadn’t she put it back with the rest of the mail? She would have sworn she had—but obviously not.

She picked up the parchment, staring at her name handwritten in black ink.

She wasn’t much for parties. Since she had come back to town at the beginning of the summer, ostensibly for the museum job but really to take care of her grandmother in her final months, she hadn’t made any effort at a social life. She hadn’t made any friends, had never seen a single one of her museum colleagues on a social occasion outside work. She hadn’t been on a real date in years.

Emma could hear in her imagination so clearly what Gran would say in that thick brogue that she might as well still have been in the room. “How are you ever going to get a boyfriend, Em, if you’re always with those books?”

Emma looked at the invitation. She looked at her spot on the couch. Then she looked at Schooner. “What do you think? Should I go? No, right? It would be so weird to just go by myself.” The hound laid his big black head on his paws and heaved a tremendous sigh.

It had been a mistake to come, but not entirely. There was an elaborate spread of food on a long table in the dining room and Emma had made straight for it. No plastic plates and paper napkins for this shindig: all bone china and embroidered linens. They were really going all out. A quartet of musicians seated at one end of the parlor filled the rooms with waltzes alternated with lively country dance tunes.

Equal parts hungry and eager to have a prop to hold so she wouldn’t look quite so awkward standing by herself, Emma filled a plate with finger sandwiches and lingered by the wall.

At least she had been right in her hunch on what to wear. She had donned the long, forest green, Victorian-style gown that she wore when filling in as a whaling captain’s wife in the museum’s historical village. It wasn’t quite as elegant as the finery displayed by the other guests talking and dancing and milling around, but at least it fit the period. The room was illuminated only by the flickering flames of oil-burning lamps, though Emma hoped the party planners hadn’t gone so far as to fill them with actual whale oil.

She studied the crowd, searching for a familiar face from the museum or the historical village, but she knew no one.

Swallowing her shyness, Emma drifted over to a party of two couples who looked to be in their mid-forties engaged in cheery conversation. The women returned her smile while the men made little bows to acknowledge her arrival. Emma managed not to laugh. Everyone was taking this period thing rather seriously.

After the necessary round of introductions Emma asked, “So what’s the deal with this party, anyway?”

The four stared at her blankly for an uncomfortably long moment before one of the women ventured, “The…deal, my dear? I’m certain I don’t know what you mean.”

“Is it for the Historical Society? A reopening for the bed-and-breakfast? Like, a fundraiser?” The polite blankness was turning to true puzzlement. “I don’t know how my name got on the list or who’s putting this on, but joke’s on them, I guess. I haven’t got any money.”

One of the men cleared his throat and took his lady’s elbow, pointing out an acquaintance across the room, and soon Emma was alone with her plate of sandwiches.

After a cup of the punch that was blessedly well-fortified she had another go with two more clusters of people, one after another, making similar queries and a similar stab at humor and receiving similar results. One more cup of punch—it was quite good—and then she would head home to her sweatpants and Dostoevsky, mildly regretting she had no one to regale with the tale of this strange evening but Schooner.

The Bigelow place was a brisk ten-minute walk from her apartment, and she had downed all that punch quickly—she would find a restroom before she ducked out. That would give her a chance to look around a bit more, hunt for one of those weird Victorian details she had always loved, and perhaps the evening wouldn’t be a total loss.

She followed a trail of guttering lamplight down the corridor and, when she found no bathroom downstairs, crept up the staircase, feeling oddly like she was sneaking around. She had the strange sense that she should make as little noise as possible, that she didn’t want to be caught. The string music grew fainter, the shadows darker, and the air surprisingly colder as she emerged into the second-floor corridor.

She didn’t like how loudly her footsteps echoed on the hardwood, but really, she was being silly. An invited guest, even one who couldn’t figure out for the life of her what this party was about or why she had been invited, had every right to look for a bathroom.

One door on the right-hand side was open just enough to allow a sliver of light to spill into the corridor. Emma laid her hand on the door to try it at the very moment she heard a voice—male, low, urgent, even angry—from inside the room. Heart leaping in her chest, she drew her hand back, but it was too late: she had already made contact with the door so that it swung inward with an agonizingly loud, slow creak.

Immediately the bass voice halted, replaced by swift footsteps approaching the opening door. Emma took an automatic step backward as a man appeared in the doorway. With the flickering light at his back, he was little more than an enormous shadow.

“I beg your pardon,” Emma spluttered. The scene was getting to her; now she was speaking like a Victorian, too. “I mean, sorry, I was just looking for a bathroom.”

“No, it is I who must beg your pardon for not being downstairs to welcome you.” The man stepped backward into the room with a grand gesture, beckoning her in. It was not a bathroom but a study, with an elaborately carved mahogany desk by a wide bay window, all bathed in the oily light of a single lamp. Emma didn’t want to enter—in fact she wanted very strongly to turn on her heel and leave the house—but as if of their own volition her feet moved forward.

A woman stood to the side by some built-in shelving crammed with objects. She was as beautifully dressed as any woman downstairs, her dark hair elaborately coiffed, and she offered Emma a stiff smile and a dainty hand to shake. It was cold to the touch. “Rosalind Bigelow.”

“Oh, you’re the birthday girl,” Emma joked, but Rosalind’s only response was a slight frown, replaced quickly with that smile, polite but not friendly. “I’m Emma Kelleher.”

For the first time, a hint of warmth lit Rosalind’s eyes. “Oh, Emma! I didn’t recognize you!”

Emma studied the woman’s face, searching her memory and finding nothing. “Do we know each other?”

“I haven’t seen you since you were a child. You don’t remember? But of course your family worked for mine for years.”

Before Emma could pursue the topic, the man stepped forward to take her hand. He had old-fashioned mutton-chop whiskers and pale skin that practically glowed in the gloom. “Miss Kelleher. I am Captain Edmund Bigelow. We’re so pleased you could join us this evening.” His hand, like the woman’s, was cold, and Emma felt the hair on the back of her neck stand on end as he drew her hand to his lips to plant a kiss on her knuckles. She kept the fake smile plastered on and, as soon as she reasonably could, pulled away her hand and shoved it deep into her coat pocket, still feeling that clammy kiss. “I do hope you’re enjoying yourself.”

“It’s, um, a lovely party. Though I still can’t figure it all out, you know?” Edmund and Rosalind stared. “I mean, what’s going on here, really?”

Edmund’s fixed smile didn’t waver. Like Rosalind’s, it didn’t reach his eyes. “We’re celebrating my beloved wife’s birthday.”

Emma gave up; no one was breaking character. But what was that about her family? Was it all made up, a part of the act, the character she was supposed to be playing without realizing it? Or was there some truth there? The warmth and recognition that had filled Rosalind’s eyes, however briefly, had seemed real.

Perhaps Emma would find a write-up about the event in the local paper in the next few days that would clarify things. Or she would ask around at work. The mystery gnawed at her curiosity, but more than anything, she wanted to go home.

She meant to make an excuse and head for the doorway, but suddenly she noticed that Rosalind’s eyes looked swollen, as if she had been crying. A telltale streak marked one of her made-up cheeks. “Hey,” Emma blurted without thinking, “are you okay?”

Rosalind’s eyes widened almost imperceptibly. “I am perfectly well.”

“It’s just…” Emma never knew what to do in these situations. This woman didn’t know her and perhaps would see her questioning as prying, but Emma couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong here. “You’ve been crying. This isn’t part of the act, is it?”

Edmund took a step toward Emma, placing a hand on the small of her back. She restrained a flinch as his touch raised goosebumps all over her skin. “I assure you there is no act,” he murmured smoothly, “and my wife is perfectly alright.”

Both to get Edmund’s hand off her and to make better eye contact with Rosalind, she took another few steps toward the woman. The feeling was stronger, like cold oatmeal stuck in her throat: something was very wrong and it wasn’t part of whatever theater all these people were putting on. “Do you need anything?” She tried to keep her tone light for Edmund’s sake while communicating with her gaze that she was serious.

Rosalind cleared her throat, fluttered her hands, and looked away. “No, no, my dear…are you an art lover? Let me show you my husband’s scrimshaw.”

Emma glanced without interest at the ivory filling the shelves. The museum had a seemingly endless supply of scrimshaw in its collection and was constantly revolving the pieces on display. “Lovely.”

“Do you think so?” Edmund sounded pleased. Emma felt him drawing up behind, shepherding her closer to Rosalind and the display of scrimshaw. “I’m only an amateur, of course, no real artist. But it does keep me out of trouble during the long months at sea.”

Since Rosalind and Edmund were both now studying the collection, Emma did, too. While most of the pieces she was used to seeing at the museum depicted typical maritime motifs, whales and sailing ships and mermaids and the like, these were unlike any scrimshaw she had ever seen. The imagery was dark and frightening: demons, snakes, goats with blood spilling from their slit throats, splashes of red standing out against the black ink. Most of the pieces were whales’ teeth, but there was one huge walrus tusk etched with an elaborate scene: humans writhing in pain and fear as the flames of Hell consumed them, an infernal nightmare. For a long moment Emma stared at it, unable to breathe. The work itself was exquisite, the expressions on the suffering faces rendered with breathtaking emotion and almost loving attention.

“Which is your favorite?”

Edmund’s voice, nearly in her ear, sent a shudder from the top of her scalp down the length of her spine. She noticed for the first time she was shivering. She gestured toward a random piece without remarking which. “That one.”

Edmund picked it up, his elbow brushing hers as he reached. Emma crossed her arms over her chest, trying to stop the uncontrollable trembling. “Take it. It’s yours.”

“Oh, no,” Emma nearly choked in her haste to refuse. “I couldn’t possibly.”

He took a firm hold of her upper arm, angling her to face him. She couldn’t have said what color his eyes were, but they drew her gaze like a cobra in an old cartoon.

Emma wanted to look away but couldn’t. She had the thought, sudden and unbidden and clear as sunlight in her frightened mind, that she was in the presence of malevolence, of evil.

Just as suddenly she pushed it away. He was just a man who was taking his role a little too seriously. A very good actor.

The corners of his mustache twitched upward in a mirthless smile that brooked no argument. “I insist.” He pressed the whale’s tooth into her hand. With a massive effort she wrenched her gaze from his and really looked at the piece of scrimshaw for the first time. It depicted a hissing snake draped around an apple. The design disappeared beneath her fingers as Edmund closed her hand around it. “A little souvenir to remember this special evening.”

Emma numbly dropped the scrimshaw into her coat pocket. She looked at Rosalind, who gave a tiny nod. “Um, thanks,” Emma managed, her voice a croak. “I should get going…”

“So soon?” Edmund’s smile widened but it still brought no warmth to his face. “Before the surprise?”

Emma’s curiosity was all gone and the prospect of a surprise did nothing to pique it. All she wanted was to go home. “Yes. Goodnight. Thank you for inviting me.”

She backed toward the door. Rosalind’s eyes never left hers, and perhaps Emma was a coward, but she couldn’t bring herself to ask one more time if she was alright. Edmund, with another polite bow and the same sinister smile, firmly closed the door as Emma backed into the corridor.

Emma stumbled in her haste to get down the stairs and out the front door. Outside she gulped the damp, frigid air, her pulse thundering so hard it felt like the beginning of a migraine.

A fog had descended on the city. Buttoning her coat around her, she hurried into the cold night, wanting nothing more than to huddle on the couch with her dog and forget she had ever set foot in the Bigelow house.

Emma’s resolve to put the evening’s events out of her mind lasted until her first break the next morning. She had slept badly and only in snatches, disturbed by vague and frightening dreams, and had risen before dawn to give Schooner a long walk by the water. By the time she arrived at work, she was exhausted and jittery.

In the staff room, once she had made herself a large and much-needed coffee, she joined her colleague Kathleen, who had lived here all her life and knew as much local history as anyone. “What do you know about Edmund and Rosalind Bigelow?”

Kathleen’s eyes widened. “The sea captain who killed his wife and then himself?”

Emma gagged on the coffee that now tasted of bile. “What?”

“Yeah.” Kathleen set down her novel with a grimace. “Rich whaling captain. She came from one of the oldest families in town, old Quaker stock. A jealous man, they say, and in a profession that kept him away from home for months and years at a time. Not a good combination. Anyway, on one of his home leaves, apparently it all got to be too much. He threw a birthday party for his wife, invited everyone they knew, all her friends, even her old servants. Then he killed her, then himself. Did it right there during the party for the guests to hear the gunshots and come running in to find their bodies.”

Emma regretted all the coffee she had already consumed that morning. She was nauseated and feared she would vomit right there on the break table. What kind of macabre event was a murder-suicide for historical reenactors, or cosplayers, or whoever they were, to commemorate?

Kathleen went on, “Beautiful old building or not, I wasn’t sorry when the Bigelow house closed down after the fire. I always wondered about the people who came to stay there. Do you know that people would pay extra to stay in the room where he did it? The study.” Kathleen shuddered, looking slightly sick herself, and Emma felt cold. “If you ask me, it’s no loss that they were never able to rebuild. They should tear down the ruins and-”

“But they did,” Emma interrupted. “It’s rebuilt.”

Kathleen regarded her a long moment. “No. You must be thinking of somewhere else. They rebuilt the rest of the block, but the Bigelow place has been stuck in limbo for years with the Historical Society or the city or…I don’t know, but it’s a ruin.” Emma was going to argue further when Kathleen went on, “We have Bigelow’s scrimshaw collection, you know. In storage. I don’t think we’ve ever put it on display. Grim stuff, very dark. Apparently he was into the occult. Not the sort of thing schoolchildren on field trips should be seeing, you know?”

Part of Emma wanted to change the subject, or to end the conversation and cut her break short, but she heard herself ask, “Could you show it to me?”

“You want to see it?”

Emma didn’t, but she nodded, finding she could no longer speak.

Deep in the bowels of the museum’s storage facility, Emma waited at one of the examination tables for Kathleen to emerge from the rows of shelving with a long, flat box. The environment down here was carefully controlled to protect the collections, the air dry and cool, the lighting clinical and artificial.

Emma clenched her fists to keep her hands from shaking as Kathleen removed the box’s lid, revealing at least two dozen objects individually sealed in plastic bags affixed with handwritten labels. “Well, there you are.” When Emma made no reply nor move to pick up any bag, Kathleen added dubiously, “I wouldn’t have pegged you as into this sort of thing.”

“I’m not.” Emma’s voice sounded alien even to herself, monotonous, dry, lifeless.

There they were, just as she had seen them the previous evening: the whales’ teeth etched with toads and demons and goat idols, the enormous walrus tusk with its scene of Hell so vivid that—Emma couldn’t stop the thought—it looked to be rendered not from imagination but experience.

Surely what she had seen in Bigelow’s study had been a replica collection, though the images were so exactly the same that it would have required a singular talent and an extraordinary effort to make the copies. Why go to all the trouble? But then again, why dress up in period costume to reenact the evening of a woman’s murder?

Emma bent over to peer at the scrimshaw, looking for the snake curled around the apple, but it wasn’t there. “Is this everything?”

“That’s all.”

Emma swallowed around that same feeling of cold fear that the night before had settled in her throat until nearly choking her. “Thanks for showing me.”

“That’s it?” Kathleen reached a gloved hand to pick up one of the pieces. “You don’t want to-”

“No.” Emma tripped in her haste to get away from the table, backing into a row of shelving and almost upsetting a row of storage boxes that she grasped to catch and rearrange with clumsy hands. She wanted only to get out of here, to breathe fresh air even if it was the cold, damp air of November on the Atlantic, to feel sunlight on her skin even if it lacked warmth. “I’m all set.”

After Schooner’s evening walk, Emma hauled out her grandparents’ old photo albums and papers. They had lived in the apartment for most of their marriage and her grandfather’s family had never left the port town since their arrival from Ireland in the 1800s, so there was plenty of material. After half an hour without knowing exactly what she was searching for, Emma lingered on a sepia-toned photograph of a family dressed like the costumed actors who portrayed working-class people at the museum. The daughter looked to be in her late teens, and if Emma squinted she could make out her own long nose in the girl’s face. She fished the photograph out of the album, but there was neither name nor date written on the back.

Could it be the great-great-grandmother for whom Emma had been named? She recalled her grandfather’s stories: the men of the family had worked in the textile mills while the women had been domestics. Could that Emma Kelleher or her mother have worked for Rosalind Bigelow? Is that how whoever compiled the guest list to last night’s creepy gathering had gotten her name? She had no one to ask, no one with whom she could even discuss the mystery, and as she shoved the photo albums back into the closet she tried to put it out of her mind even as her stomach churned with unease. Finding the invitation still lying on the dining table where she had left it, Emma crumpled up the parchment and shoved it deep into the trash.

She ordered the pizza she had wanted the night before and settled on the couch with Schooner and her book. But Dostoevsky could not hold her attention as he had always done, and the pizza she normally enjoyed so much that she had to restrain herself to ordering it only once a week could this night not even tempt her. That cold fear so thick that it almost had mass remained lodged in her throat, and after a few attempted bites, she wedged the entire box in the fridge.

Schooner normally slept in the living room, but tonight she dragged his bed into her room and plopped it on the floor by her side of the bed. Evidently pleased at the novelty, he trotted in after her and made himself comfortable. She climbed under the covers, shut off the light, and closed her eyes.

She had never lived alone until her grandmother’s death. It had always been her and her father, then college roommates, then more roommates when she was scraping a living in Washington, DC before moving back to care for Gran. After Gran’s death, it was the crushing grief of missing her that had buffeted Emma each day, not the fact of living alone, which before might have seemed even luxurious. Now she would have given all she owned to have someone there with her. Loyal Schooner was a comfort, and his bulk would have frightened off many a physical attacker, but he could do nothing to ward off psychological fears. She could tell him everything that had happened and everything that terrified her, but he could not look into her eyes and tell her, “You’re not crazy.”

Sleep, as she expected, did not come, and after a restless few hours she leapt out of bed with a sudden resolution and dressed. Schooner looked up wearily. “Let’s go for another walk, boy.” He wagged his tail and lumbered to his feet.

The streets were deserted and silent, the cold air dank on her bare face and hands. She walked fast to keep warm, trying so hard to keep from thinking about anything that she paid no attention to where she was going until an unbidden impulse made her look up, blinking as if waking from a deep sleep, and take notice of the hulking ruin in front of her.

It was a Victorian house, or once had been. Supporting beams still stood, half of the wood-shingled siding facing the street remained, but all was scorched and wrecked beyond any recognizable color. No glass was left in the warped windows. A vast hole caved in the middle of the roof, gaping like a sinister grin. Plywood sheets boarded much of the structure, and spray-painted prominently on one were the words, “DANGER—KEEP OUT!”

Emma did not have to glance at a street sign to know that she was on Salem Street. She did not need to squint at the scorched plaque registering the building as a place of historical significance to know the impossible truth that this was the Bigelow house, where the night before she had eaten finger sandwiches and listened to violins and stared into the eyes of evil.

She did not realize she had started running until she was tugging fruitlessly on a heavy oak door. Barred from the inside, it would not budge. Emma stumbled backward and gazed up at the brick building with no memory of how she had gotten to Saint Michael the Archangel, where she had attended Mass with her grandmother every summer Sunday of her childhood and still managed to drag herself every Sunday since Gran’s death.

She had not consciously chosen to come here, but it was suddenly the only place that made sense, and Emma tugged again at the door, which remained stubbornly locked. The buildup of grief and exhaustion and utter terror burst in her chest like a dam, and Emma fell to her knees, her forehead against the cold wood and her hands clasped.

“Not that,” Emma prayed desperately. All her life she had dutifully intoned the words of the Lord’s Prayer that Gran had taught her as a child, and they echoed in her head now. “I know, I know, ‘Thy will be done.’ Thy will, not mine. But please. Let Thy will be something else. Give me another cross, but not this one. Not madness.”

She remained there, eyes closed and mind racing, until a voice behind her made her jump. “Are you okay, miss?”

Emma staggered to her feet, whipping around as Schooner strained at his leash in excitement. A man stood on the sidewalk at a polite distance, his moonlit face a mask of concern. She realized with a jolt that she knew him, or at least, she had seen him before. Of course she had noticed one of the few young, single men who attended Mass there at Saint Michael’s. Hastily she wiped the tears that had streamed down her cheeks. “I’m fine.”

The man hesitated before taking another step forward. “Are you sure? I…oh, it’s you! I know you. I’ve seen you at Mass.”

Emma bit her lip to keep from saying something embarrassing like, “You have?” It was not totally outlandish that just as she had noticed him, he had noticed her in church. Maybe it didn’t happen as frequently as she might have liked, but she would take it. She cleared her throat. “Yes, I…really, I’m fine. I…Schooner!” Schooner pulled out of her grasp with a sudden lunge toward the man. Emma rushed after him. “Get back here!” But the man was already kneeling to rub Schooner’s chest, laughing as the big dog relaxed into a pant that oddly resembled a grin. “I’m sorry,” Emma murmured, mortified. “He’s very rude.”

“Nah. He’s a very good boy.” His accent was pure working-class New England: a local. He stood to smile at Emma. “I’m Sam Alves.”

“Emma. Kelleher.”

“Emma,” he echoed. He kept his eyes on her while his hands went on patting Schooner, who was sniffing every inch of Sam’s coat within reach. “Look, Emma, can I walk you home?”

She opened her mouth to say no but stopped herself. Schooner was, if nothing else, a good judge of character, and this guy wasn’t a total stranger; he was even a churchgoer. She had been lamenting the months spent back in town without the slightest effort to make a friend, had been desperate for human contact, and here was a human. It didn’t hurt that he was a cute one.

“Yeah, okay. Thanks.” As they fell into step side by side on the brick sidewalk, the church at their backs tolled midnight. “What are you doing walking around at midnight, anyway?”

“Can’t sleep. Not much, anyway. I like to take long walks to clear my head before I even try to sleep.” He waited a long beat before asking, “How about you?” Feeling her chest tighten again with the fear that Sam’s presence had briefly made her forget, Emma gestured lamely at the dog. Sam nodded as if understanding that there was a lot more going on than a late-night dog walk. “Ah, right.”

They walked in a surprisingly comfortable silence to her building. As they stood on the stoop and she debated how to take her leave, Sam said, “Look, Emma, I don’t mean to pry, but do you live alone?” Her eyes widened and even in the dim moonlight she could see the flush in his cheeks. “Sorry, I only meant, do you have someone to talk to in there? I know it’s none of my business, but you were really upset over there at the church, and I’m pretty sure you still are, and maybe it’s not such a good idea for you to be alone. That’s all.”

Emma stared at him, her desire to recover some of the dignity she had lost when he found her sobbing at the church door fighting with her typical preference for telling the truth. She wanted to tell him that she was fine, or that she would be fine, but either would be a lie. “Yeah,” she said at last, simply. “I am alone.”

He nodded. “You want to go somewhere and talk, maybe?”

Emma looked around the empty street. The tourists had fled town with the onset of the cold, and there wasn’t much of a nightlife to speak of, anyway. She did crave human contact, but not in some dingy bar. “At this time of night? Where would we go?”

Sam grinned. “How about a milkshake?”

Emma laughed, surprising herself. “At midnight in November?”

“Anytime, anyplace. When I joined the service, I thought the thing I’d miss most would be my ma’s cooking, and I did, but it’s funny the things you miss when you’re over there that you wouldn’t even think about otherwise. The one thing I wanted, the thing I would’ve traded a month of rations for? A chocolate malt.” He grinned again. He really was handsome, with neatly cut dark hair and kind brown eyes. “How about it? We can go to Walt’s.”

“Walt’s?”

“You don’t know Walt’s?” She shook her head. “Oh, then you’ve got to let me take you. It’s open all night. The only place that is. They make a mean chocolate malt. How about it?”

Emma paused. What else was she going to do? Crawl back under the covers for another sleepless night, wracked by fear and counting the minutes until dawn? “Yeah, sure. Let me put Schooner inside.”

Walt’s Diner, tucked into a side street by the commercial end of the harbor, was exactly the kind of place she had always loved going with her dad: sticky black-and-white tile floors, vinyl booths, an old-school jukebox in the corner, the air thick with the smells of deliciously unhealthy things frying. “This is pretty cool,” she said as they slid into a booth. “I can’t believe I didn’t know about this place.”

Sam grinned again. The fluorescent lighting made his olive skin sallow, but it couldn’t hide how cute he was. Emma didn’t want to imagine how she must have looked. “I’m glad I could introduce you.”

When their milkshakes arrived, Emma took a dutiful sip, expecting it to lodge in her throat just as the pizza had done, but instead she nearly choked on her own surprise. “This is delicious.”

“Told you! A chocolate malt is never the wrong decision.”

When she had downed half the milkshake and made no further attempt at conversation, Sam asked gently, “So you want to talk about it? Whatever it is?”

Emma played with her straw. Truthfully she did want to talk about it, but she also wanted this cute, nice guy to keep looking at her like she was a normal girl and not a total lunatic. “I don’t know you.”

Sam opened his arms. “I grew up over on Canal Street, a couple blocks from here. Fourth of five boys. My folks came over from the Azores. Dad was a fisherman, same as my uncles. I could tell you my whole life story, and I will if you want, but I think the only thing that matters right now is that I’m a pretty good listener. And you seem like you need to talk. So if you want, here I am.”

Emma stirred the remains of her milkshake, still not quite ready. “Your dad was a fisherman. Was?”

“Yeah. He died when I was a kid.”

“My mom, too.”

Sam held her gaze. “He was lost at sea, so that was why I went for the army rather than the navy when I enlisted. I grew up around boats, my buddies were pretty much all going in the navy, but I couldn’t do that to my mom. How about you? You from around here?”

“Sort of. Growing up I spent summers here, with my grandparents. I came back to take care of my grandmother. She died about a month ago.”

Sam’s eyes softened with sadness. “I’m sorry.”

The sheer terror of this night had temporarily shoved aside the grief, but she still missed Gran with a fierce ache. “Thanks. I miss her a lot.” A sudden memory spurred the corners of her lips into the barest hint of a smile. “Actually, she had a thing for Portuguese guys. She used to bring me to the Festival of the Holy Spirit and flirt with all the old Portuguese men.”

“Your grandmother had good taste!”

“Yeah. When she came over from Ireland as a teenager, she and a Portuguese guy fell for each other. But almost right away he had to go off to war. Never came home.” Sam’s grin disappeared. Emma recalled watching D-Day commemorations with Gran and hearing her sigh, almost to herself, “Poor Tommy,” for the sweetheart she had lost decades before Emma was born. “Fortunately for me, I guess, because she met my grandfather a few years later, but she never forgot him.”

“First love.” Sam smiled sadly. “So…you want to talk about what’s going on with you?”

Emma slumped back against the vinyl, shoving her hands in her pockets. Her fingers closed around a cold whale’s tooth. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to look at the scrimshaw again. “You sure you want to hear my problems?”

“I’m sure.”

So she told him everything, from the invitation’s strange arrival that passed unnoticed until the day of the party, to the finger sandwiches and the strong rum punch, the string quartet playing Strauss and English country dances, the chilling minutes in Edmund Bigelow’s study, her conversation with Kathleen, the walk with Schooner to discover the house a scorched ruin: everything that had led to her sobbing on Saint Michael’s steps.

When she finished, he didn’t say anything, and she couldn’t read his expression.

“I know it sounds crazy. Completely crazy. But that’s exactly what scares me. The thought that I could be going crazy.” Her voice broke as the emotion she had been suppressing throughout her retelling bubbled up. “It’s…well, to be honest, it’s my worst fear. For practically my whole life.”

“Your whole life? Really?”

Emma nodded, sniffing back the tears that threatened to fall. “Weird fear for a kid, huh? But I came by it honestly. My mom died when I was little and after that I spent summers with my dad’s parents. I always wondered why we never saw my mom’s family. I’d ask my dad, but it hurt him too much to talk about her, so I moved on to asking my grandmother. She was a tough old Irishwoman, but I knew that I’d wear her down eventually, so I kept asking. Until I snooped on her and my aunts talking one night, and I finally learned about my mom. When she was just a toddler, her own mother strapped her into the car and drove off a bridge into a river.” Sam, who had been watching Emma with silent, sympathetic understanding, gasped. “Yeah. Killed herself and tried to kill her kid. Thank God they got my mom out. But that’s why she had no family, anyway.” Emma grabbed a handful of napkins to wipe her cheeks. “I was pretty young when I found out. Too young to understand, but I never forgot it, and I thought about it more and more as I got older. I thought I’d understand more, but I never did. What could drive a person to do that? To her own child? All I could figure was that it was madness, a very deep, very dark madness. Maybe the kind of thing that runs in families. So why couldn’t it happen to me?”

Sam’s hand twitched forward on the table, as if he were going to reach for hers, but then he cleared his throat and crossed his arms. “I’m really, really sorry that happened to your mom, Emma. It’s an awful story. And I’m sorry you grew up knowing that. I can’t tell you what your future’s going to be. All I can tell you is that I don’t think you’re crazy.”

Emma choked on a grim, surprised laugh. “You don’t?”

“Not one bit.”

“I told you I ate cucumber sandwiches and talked to a murderer who died over a hundred years ago in a building that turns out to have burned down, and you don’t think I’m crazy?”

Sam shook his head. “Nope. So what’s the alternative? If it’s not in your head?”

She couldn’t help looking around the diner for eavesdroppers. There were no other customers and the waitress had disappeared into the back. She practically whispered, “Ghosts?”

“Ghosts.”

“And you don’t think it’s crazy?”

He shrugged. “Here’s what I know. In my experience, at least, usually late at night in a bar or sitting around a campfire, every once in a long while, the conversation gets around to the supernatural. Ghosts, spirits, whatever you want to call it. Things beyond what we can see. And everyone has a story. After a few drinks, or after a day of getting shot at, guys will talk about something they’ve seen or a buddy or relative has seen that can’t be explained away rationally. So yeah, I think the most likely explanation is…a ghostly one.”

Emma put her head in her hands. It was preferable to madness but it was still terrifying. “You think so? I can’t believe we’re sitting here talking about ghosts.” She laughed self-consciously. “I’m not used to this. I was in grad school before I dropped out to come take care of Gran. With a lot of very modern people who would have heard my story and sent me straight to a shrink. People who think there’s nothing more than what we see and touch, good and evil are a construct, and-”

“Wait, wait,” he interrupted. “A construct? What do you mean?”

“That good and evil don’t exist objectively.”

Sam grimaced. “They sound like idiots.” Emma laughed again, and this time it made her feel warm inside, like light was piercing the gloom and fear that had cloaked her. He smiled to see her cheered, but quickly he sobered again, looking slightly over her shoulder as if lost in a memory. “I may not have a fancy education, but I know good and evil are real. I’ve seen them both with my own eyes.”

“I think I have, too.”

The rest of the night passed in conversation under the fluorescent lights, and the gray hint of dawn peeking through the greasy windows surprised them both. The dark, tired smudges beneath Sam’s eyes didn’t detract from his good looks. “Can I walk you home? Again?”

“I’d like that.”

The morning air as they emerged outside was crisp and cold on her face. Emma thrust her hands in her pockets and, in a moment of sudden decision, drew out the whale’s tooth. The scrimshaw was exactly as she remembered it: the snake in the Garden, coiled around the forbidden fruit. She held it out to show Sam.

His eyes widened as he leaned in to get a good look. “That’s what he gave you?”

“Yeah.” She offered to hand it to him but he shook his head vehemently. “What do you think I should do with it? Sneak it into the museum’s collection?”

“If it were me, I’d get on a boat, go out into blue water, and throw it as far as I could into the depths. As soon as possible.”
“I don’t have a boat.”

Sam thought a moment. “We’ve got a bridge.”

They picked their way past the docks and deserted streets to a bridge that Emma had only ever crossed in a car. Halfway out, they stood and gazed at the dark water where the river met the sea. Then they looked at each other and Sam nodded. “Do it.”

The scrimshaw, still cold in her hand, felt heavier than it had, almost magnetized, like if she tried to throw it, it wouldn’t go. It almost tugged at her. Surely that, if nothing else in the past two days, was in her head.

She drew her arm back and heaved the scrimshaw with all her might over the safety fence. They watched it disappear into the black.

Emma felt lighter on the walk home. Though two sleepless nights had left her more exhausted than she had ever been in her life, she felt hopeful. She had read that living through intense experiences, like war or natural disasters, bonded people more quickly than normal life. Was that what this was? She felt close to Sam, certainly closer than anyone else in this town.

Perhaps it was her imagination or wishful thinking, but from the way he kept stealing glances at her and grinning as they walked side by side, hands shoved in their pockets, she dared to hope that he felt the same way.

When she had opened her front door and Schooner bounded out to greet them, she felt shy again. “Well. Thanks, Sam. For everything.” With an effort she met his eye. “It really meant a lot.”

His smile made her chest feel tight in a good way. “My pleasure. Seriously. You’re quite a girl, Emma.”

She flushed. “A girl who hangs out with ghosts.”

“A girl who’s brave enough to face her fears. And I girl that I happen to like.”

Her stomach flipped. For a long moment she couldn’t think of anything to say. At last she blurted, “Hey, you’re not a ghost, are you?”

Sam quirked an eyebrow and took a step closer. “Could a ghost do this?”

She could only feel his kiss for a moment, his lips cool from the November air. Then she felt nothing, far too soon. She opened her eyes. Sam was staring at her, his handsome face a caricature of shock. “Emma?”

He flickered like a guttering candle.

Then he was gone, and Schooner was barking and pawing at the spot where Sam had stood.

Emma did not need to walk by Walt’s to know that she would find no diner there, but she did to make sure. In the spot where she and Sam had nursed milkshakes all night there was now a pawn shop.

Within twenty minutes of arriving at the library she found the information she had come for. They had digitized the town’s local newspapers going back more than a century, and it took little effort to find the article from November of 1945 that she read with a pounding heart.

Gold Star Mother Loses Another as Boys Head Home

Local mother Beatriz Alves was proud to tell anyone who would listen that she had five boys in uniform. Her third son, Tomas, died a hero on the beaches of Normandy…

“Poor Tommy,” sighed Gran’s brogue, practically in her ear, so that Emma jumped back from the screen and looked around. She was alone. When she had regained her breath, she continued reading.

…and Mrs. Alves celebrated with every other mother in America on Victory Day when she knew the rest of her boys would be coming home, safe and sound. Her joy turned to despair with the arrival of a telegram she no longer believed she had to fear. Her fourth son, Samuel, a sergeant who helped liberate the Buchenwald concentration camp with the Third Army, was tragically killed in a traffic accident in France one week before his troop ship’s scheduled departure for home.

Emma stopped reading, no longer even able to cry.

In the library’s collection of old yearbooks, she dug through some volumes from the 1930s until her bleary eyes fell upon the younger but already handsome face of Samuel Alves, who didn’t yet know that he would join the US Army so as not to drown but would get killed anyway after he already helped win a war, and who would somehow go on to kiss Emma Kelleher decades after he died.

She collected Schooner from home and took him for a long walk through the cold sunshine, half-expecting Gran or Sam around every corner, but finding no one she knew, ghost or otherwise.

Back at home again, Schooner trotted off to the couch and Emma gazed around the foyer, at a loss. What should she do now? What would Gran do? That was easy—make a pot of tea. She headed for the kitchen.

There on the dining table lay the handwritten invitation she had crumpled up and thrown out the night before, the parchment once again pristine. And next to it was the scrimshaw that she had hurled into the river and she and Sam had watched disappear beneath the surface.

This time, Saint Michael the Archangel was open when she tried the door. It was Saturday, too early for the vigil Mass, but a good time to light a candle. A good time to pray.

Author’s Note: This story was borne out of a writing prompt that took me out of my comfort zone, both in terms of genre and length. What do you think? Should I write more short stories? Should I abandon my typical genres for the realm of the supernatural? (I can already tell you that’s not going to happen, but I’d still like to know what you think!)

The first evening I sat down to start working on this, alone in my dining room on a literally dark and stormy night, my dog sat down about fifteen feet away and just…stared at me. For an alarmingly long time. Almost like he could feel the ghostly atmosphere I was trying to create. Could he sense some sort of…ghostly presence? I was starting to get genuinely creeped out.

It turned out he just needed to pee. This story is dedicated to Jasper anyway!

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In recent years, I have tended to roll my eyes whenever someone laments the imminent fall of our country or civilization. As a student of history, I understand that by many measures, this is objectively the best time to be alive. And however turbulent and crazy things might feel, that is largely the product of social media amplifying division and news organizations that care nothing about accuracy but only about clicks driving us all insane with their push notification-based news cycle.

But in the past few months, some of these stories have hit particularly close to home in a way that reminds me that they are not just news stories. There were the Israeli embassy staffers who were murdered in cold blood outside a DC Jewish museum—I didn’t know them, but it could have been my friends. Or the shooting into a school Mass on the first day of a Catholic school in Minneapolis—the day before I sent my daughter off to start Catholic school. Or the murder of a young woman, a new immigrant from Ukraine who had arrived in this country to make a new life only a month earlier before she was brutally slain on a train by someone who should have been in jail.

Then there’s the murder of Charlie Kirk, a husband and father with children the same age as my own. I knew who he was, but to be honest I wasn’t too familiar with him or his organization before. I’m big on history, but not so much on contemporary politics. What I do know is that, by accounts of those who knew him, including those who disagreed with his views, he was a kind and decent man.

As I write this, many questions remain unanswered, but it seems pretty clear that he was murdered for expressing his views. And far too many people are comfortable celebrating his death because they didn’t agree with those views.

This is abhorrent. How far we have fallen.

Freedom of expression is for everyone, not just those you agree with. Political violence is disgraceful and has absolutely zero place in our society and must not be tolerated, normalized, or celebrated. Words are not violence. Violence is violence, and perhaps now is a good time to recall that calls to “globalize the intifada” are precisely calls for violence.

It is up to all of us to dial things down before we fracture beyond repair. Reports of the Republic’s demise have been premature, but I have come to believe that we can get there if we continue down the road of grievance and demonization. I am by no means trying to “both sides” this issue, but all of us, whomever we may have voted for or support, need to play a part in putting our society back together. We have to find a way forward together, or we may not have a country at all.

What might that look like?

Spend less time on social media, or get rid of it entirely. Stay away from media organizations that profit by sowing division and anger. Stop viewing “the other side” as your enemy and give people the benefit of the doubt. Spend less time scrolling and more time reading. Go outside. Get involved in something in your local community with other people. Go to church or synagogue. Spend time with your family and friends. Pray.

Israel, 1948: As the new Jewish state faces attempted annihilation, a hardened American combat veteran throws himself into a fight with longer odds than he has ever faced—and encounters a woman who will challenge him to find a different kind of bravery.

Learn more about the book and get your copy here.

If you loved No Other Place on Earth, I think you’ll love this one too (or your dad or grandma—dads and grandmothers love my work). It’s a stand-alone novel, but it is part of the same series, so if you don’t want spoilers, read No Other Place first.

I can’t wait to hear what you think!

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In response to a friend who knew two people who were killed at the music festival, one close friend said, “I mean, I guess that sucks, but what did they expect?” When I expressed anguish at the loss of life, another responded, “do you believe in de-colonization in theory or in practice?”

Ok, so these students live on colonized land in Cambridge. By their logic, would they "expect" to get murdered at a dance party on campus by some extremist genocidal Massachusett group? Obviously not, but these people clearly have never followed a thought to its logical conclusion in their lives.

So let's define our terms. Zionism is belief in the Jewish people's right to self-determination in their indigenous land. Anti-Zionists believe that the one tiny sliver of land on this planet where the Jews exercise sovereignty and can control their own fates and defend themselves is too much and must be dismantled, that that's what "justice" demands. A world were Jews have no refuge, like the one that existed before 1948, is clearly superior.

Pay no attention to the actual apartheid against Palestinians in Lebanon, or the slaughter of Palestinian refugees in camps in Syria, or Hamas's use of its own people in Gaza as human shields and its murder of dissidents. Nope, all that matters is annihilating the world's one Jewish state, and then there will be peace and justice.

If these people knew any actual history, they would understand that Israel’s is actually the greatest success story of decolonization of the 20th century.

I’m not too worried about Israel. In the 77 years since its extraordinary rebirth after the Jewish people survived centuries of exile, forced conversions, pogroms, and genocide, the modern Jewish state has survived much greater challenges than the contempt of some morally vacuous morons at elite American universities.

Back in 1948, when the new United Nations had second thoughts about supporting the establishment of the new Jewish state, the Arab nations prepared for a war in which they were confident they would destroy the state in its infancy and drive the Jews into the sea, and the United States imposed an arms embargo, the Jews were pretty much on their own. They had to fight a war to defend their very existence with whatever arms they could scrounge. Many of their number were brand-new immigrants, fresh from the ashes of Europe where they had survived ghettos and camps and seen their families slaughtered. Most of the world didn’t expect the reborn Israel to survive its infancy.

Well, it survived that war, and every subsequent one that its enemies have waged in an attempt to destroy it. It faces plenty of challenges today, internal and external, but there’s one thing of which I have no doubt: Israel isn’t going anywhere. And thank God.

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You may have seen pictures of this beautiful family in your social media timelines in recent days, or a lot of orange, probably from your Jewish friends. You just might have seen them in the news, depending what outlets you follow. But if you don't already know, I want you to understand why. This is the Bibas family: dad Yarden, mom Shiri, and boys Ariel and Kfir.

On October 7, they were kidnapped from their home in Kibbutz Nir Oz, Israel, and taken to Gaza by H*mas terrorists. More than 200 other people, Israelis and others, were kidnapped that day. Ariel was four. Kfir was just nine months old.

There's an image from that day of Shiri holding her beautiful boys and looking absolutely terrified. As many have already pointed out, it could just as well have been taking during the Holocaust. As a mother, I have been utterly haunted by her pain and fear since that awful day.

For over 500 days, all of Israel, most of the Jewish world, and many more of us who care deeply about Israel and the Jewish people prayed for them desperately and hoped against all odds that they would make it home safely. A beautiful family. A sweet little boy and a precious baby and their loving parents.

Ariel loved Batman and wanted to help people when he grew up. Kfir loved a pink elephant toy. Their fates were literally unimaginable, so we waited and prayed and hoped.

Yarden, who was held separately, was released as part of the ceasefire deal earlier this month. And then last week, it was announced that Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir were dead and their bodies would be released. Before releasing the coffins, their captors held a "ceremony" in which they were mocked.

Back in Israel, forensic investigation quickly and conclusively revealed that the boys were brutally murdered with bare hands and their bodies desecrated to make it look like they were killed in an air strike. The body presented as Shiri's wasn't even hers, due to a "mix-up." She was later returned, too.

I write this because the burden shouldn't have to rest entirely on Jews to explain the realities of genocidal antisemitism. There are truly no words. A baby, a toddler, and their mother.

Please pray for them and for their family, especially Yarden, whose grief is beyond imagination. Please share their pictures. Please remember their names.

And Jew-haters come out of the woodwork to try to convince you that Jesus wasn’t a Jew, but a Palestinian.

The latest iteration of this old bit of propaganda is a burst of outrage from too-online activists who object that the makers of the new Netflix film Mary would dare to cast an Israeli Jewish woman to play the Virgin Mary. wrote a great piece about this, pointing out a lot of important context to the fake “controversy,” which is well worth reading.

The Free Press

On Mary and the Mob

Mary—the Holy Virgin, the Theotokos, the Mother of God—was a Jew. Only a fool or an antisemite could deny this. You can doubt the theological claims made for her role in the drama of salvation, of course, but that she was a daughter of Israel? Don’t be absurd. “Salvation comes from the Jews,” said her son, Jesus of Nazareth, to the Samaritan woman …

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a year ago · 984 likes · 697 comments · Rod Dreher

But I’ll keep it simple. If you buy into the “actors must have the same heritage as the characters they are portraying” thing (which, for the record, I don’t), then only a Jew can portray Mary. Mary was a Jew, born to Jewish parents, living in the land of Israel. At the time the area was under Roman domination. Jesus was born in Bethlehem, in Judea. He spent most of his life and ministry in Galilee. He was born, lived, and died a Jew.

The Romans destroyed Jerusalem and razed the Second Temple (familiar to Christians who know their Bible) in the year 70 when they crushed the years-long Jewish Revolt. Many Jews were killed or driven into exile, but a remnant remained. In 132, the Jews rebelled again, led by Bar Kochba. When the Romans crushed this revolt too, as part of their punishment of the rebellious Jews, they renamed the Jewish homeland “Palestina,” a nod to the Jews’ ancient and hated enemy, the Philistines, an Aegean people who were by then extinct.

Attempts to recast Jesus and Mary as “Palestinian” are in all cases historically inaccurate. At best, they are ignorant. At worst, they are nefarious.

I’ve read or heard plenty of content by well-educated and presumably well-intentioned people who refer to Jesus as living in “Palestine.” I don’t doubt that in many or most cases, this is an innocent mistake. But it’s a mistake with consequences, and it cannot stand uncorrected.

Because there are plenty of bad actors who spread this lie not innocently but as part of a campaign to divorce Jesus from his Jewish roots in order to demonize Israel and its people to a Christian audience. Don’t let them get away with it.

As my friend has written,

“Jesus was born a Jew, lived as a Jew, died as a Jew, and according to authoritative Christian teaching, remains a Jew as he sits at the right hand of God. Under Christian doctrine, Jesus Christ has a human nature, which is Jewish, and a divine nature, which is universal and not connected to any one people group. The scandal of particularity, which offends so many, inheres in Jesus Christ himself.

Christians can either get over it or not.”

Since October 7, the Jewish state has been fighting a war it didn’t start. Around the world, the evil scourge of antisemitism has exploded, online and off. History is very clear about what happens when antisemitism is allowed to thrive unchecked. And it’s not a Jewish problem—it’s very much everyone’s problem.

There is no more important time than right now for Christians to connect or reconnect with the Jewish roots of their faith, and to stand with their Jewish brothers and sisters.

It came on June 6, 1944 in an extraordinary air, land, and naval assault in Normandy. And it was accomplished almost entirely by young men—most were Americans, Brits, and Canadians, but the international coalition included Australians, Dutch, Czechs, French, Greeks, Poles, and others—and some of them shockingly young. Average ages are a bit hard to pin down, but it’s safe to estimate that the majority were in their early twenties, with many not even out of their teens.

Photo: National WWII Museum

Movies and series like Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers can provide a glimpse into the sheer terror and chaos of the harrowing battle, but I’m confident no fictional depiction or artistic portrayal can accurately portray the experience. I won’t try here. But as an author and as someone interested in history in general, when I read about historical events, I can’t help imagining what it must have been like.

A sentence or two in a history book or a journalist’s account may accurately convey the facts of a given feat: “Company A took the enemy’s fortified position in three hours with only two casualties.” Well done, Company A. But what did those soldiers go through for those three hours—a blip in my typical morning, but likely a lifetime on the battlefield? Who were those casualties? Were they lightly wounded, or maimed for life, or did they die on that hill or in a field hospital? Did they have wives or girlfriends anxiously waiting for news or dreading a telegram, parents praying for them, brothers fighting on another battlefield?

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D-Day and the invasion of Normandy may be among the most famous events of World War II, but it’s only one of countless times in that war when young people were asked to do extraordinary, even seemingly impossible, things. Read about the tough combat in Italy, the assaults on Monte Cassino or the grim stalemate at Anzio, or the harsh jungle warfare in the Pacific, or the chaos and fierce fighting and miserable cold of the Battle of the Bulge, and you might begin to see the picture.

And all the while, keep in mind two things:

1. There’s nothing inevitable about the course of history. We know the good guys won World War II. But there was nothing inevitable about it. It required a certain combination of decisions, tactics, and strategy, yes. But it also required a nearly incomprehensible level of sheer human effort.

2. That human effort was performed by regular people like you and me. They were called on to do extraordinary things. They did them, because that’s simply what you did. Of course that generation, like any, included shirkers who avoided the call (whether it was to serve in the armed forces or on the home front in some capacity) for whatever reason, but that’s not who we’re talking about. The point here is that there were ordinary young men who did extraordinary things because they were asked to do them.

They came of age in unique times. They grew up during the Great Depression, many in hardscrabble poverty that would shock most of us today. Some of them loved joining up because the Army was the first time in their lives they’d gotten three square meals a day. (The food in the field would leave a lot to be desired, but that’s another story.)

Photo: FDR Presidential Library & Museum

No one ever taught them that life was meant to be easy. I imagine, if they heard anything on the matter, they were told that life was quite hard and you just had to get on with it. So that’s what they did. And when their country asked them to defeat the greatest evil that the modern world had ever seen, they did it.

I’ve been thinking about these ordinary young men who did extraordinary things a lot as I see the disturbing messages that some in our society are sending our young people today.

As reported in earlier this week, Georgetown University announced before the election that on Wednesday, the institution that purports to mold tomorrow’s leaders would be offering a post-election “Self-Care Suite.” Here’s the agenda:

A cookie is what I gave my toddler as a special treat after she had to be brave and get her flu shot. She’s two.

While embarrassing, this was not a one-off. As Ms. Block reported after the election, this was only one example of a widespread phenomenon at universities across the nation, with professors canceling classes and exams and administrations offering a gamut of infantilizing “wellness” activities. And all this at, incidentally, the same institutions where students scream for “intifada” and cheer on Hamas and Hezbollah.

It’s easy to laugh or roll your eyes at this, but I think it’s a serious issue that deserves serious attention. No one is responsible for the environment in which he or she was raised. And I’m very glad and grateful that most of us in the West don’t face anything like the hard times of the Great Depression and World War II that forged that earlier generation that rose to extraordinary challenges.

But surely we face our own challenges today that need solving. Hopefully they won’t reach the levels of Depression or World War, but you never know. Whatever challenges we face require creativity, fortitude, and courage. I don’t think we’re fostering those virtues by encouraging young adults to respond to the “devastation” of an election result they don’t like by playing with Legos and coloring books.

As a society, we need to stop infantilizing young people. But there are things they can do to reject this infantilization while they wait for society to catch up. I don’t know if there are any young people reading this who want my advice, but this is what I would tell them:

Put down your phone and step away from your computer. Learn to make things with your hands. Plant a garden. Bake bread. Cook real food. Enjoy beautiful art, or even better, try your hand at making it. Do some work, whether for pay or as a volunteer, that leaves you so exhausted at the end of the day that all you can do is fall into bed. Get married and have children. Be part of a faith community. Volunteer in a physical place with other people in real life.

These are the things of the real world. And you'll find that when you have real commitments, they don't allow the space for infantilization, because the garden can't weed itself and the baby can't feed herself and the bills can’t pay themselves, and those are your jobs and it's time to get on with them—they won't wait. But at the same time, you'll find that you won't want or need that infantilizing "space," because you are living a real life, doing the things we were created to do, and that is beautiful and fulfilling.

Is that going to make us extraordinary? I don’t know. But I’ve read a lot of memoirs and interviews of veterans who fought and helped win WWII. I think they’d be the first to tell you that they were ordinary guys, that they weren’t anything special. But they were asking to take on an extraordinary responsibility, and they did it, and they saved civilization. So taking on ordinary responsibilities might be a good place to start.

To all veterans, thank you for your service.

Emory was born in Massachusetts and raised in Hawaii. He graduated from Dartmouth College and, though he had not formally studied anthropology, which was still in its early days, was hired as an assistant ethnologist at Honolulu’s Bishop Museum. After receiving the appointment, Emory said that he immediately had to find a dictionary to look up just what an “ethnologist” was (I did it too so you don’t have to: an ethnologist studies different societies and cultures).

At the time, the “problem of Polynesian origins” was a hot topic of scientific interest, and if you want to understand why, check out a map of the Pacific. Scientists, scholars, sailors, linguists, and armchair explorers were baffled by how the Polynesians had come to settle such far-flung islands as Hawaii, Easter Island, and New Zealand. Just who were these Polynesians, and how did they do it?

Emory got decades of experience in fieldwork, learning as much as he could about Polynesian society, culture, and history through archaeological and ethnological surveys in Hawaii, the Society Islands (which include Tahiti), the Tuamotu Archipelago, and more. During his work he encountered inhabitants of remote islands who still practiced a traditional way of life. In addition to recording chants, songs, and genealogies, Emory collected physical artifacts like fishhooks and tools for canoe-building as well as “considerable information on many ancient practices.”

This was all worthy and interesting in its own right. But it was to have a practical benefit that Emory couldn’t have foreseen.

When the United States entered World War II following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Emory, then 44 and living in Honolulu, was too old to enlist. As Christina Thompson relates in her wonderful book on the history of Polynesians and Polynesia and how we know what we think we know about this fascinating part of the world, Sea People:

“Emory was having dinner with a naval officer when the conversation turned to the question of what would happen to U.S. airmen if they were shot down over the Pacific. The officer argued that even if they managed to find ‘a desert island,’ they would certainly perish from starvation or thirst. Emory pointed out that Polynesians had been managing just fine for hundreds, if not thousands, of years and that there was food and water to be had on even the smallest islands if you knew where to look. Coconuts alone provided food, water, containers, and fuel for a fire; the problem was that most American servicemen had no idea how to husk one. Asked if he could teach them, Emory replied, Of course—all that was needed was a pointed stick. And so began his stint as survival instructor to the U.S. military in the Pacific theater.”

Men destined for the Pacific theater joined Emory for an intensive course in “jungle living.” They began with instruction at the Bishop Museum and then moved on to coastal areas “where conditions most nearly approximate those in the South Seas. They were introduced to the plant and animal life of reef and shore, and shown how these resources can be used towards solving problems of food, shelter, transportation, and maintenance.”

They learned the virtues of different foods they might encounter—breadfruit, taro, yams—and the many possibilities of the all-important coconut. They learned to husk and split them, to eat their meat and drink their fluid, to plait their leaves and make baskets, to light their husks and create a smoldering punk to cut down on match use, to rub their oil on sunburns, and to weave their leaves to build shelters. In addition to all this wonderful coconut knowledge, the men were “also taught what fruits to avoid, what fish are likely to be poisonous, how to use certain plants for cathartics, astringents, germicides, and antidotes for fish poisoning, and how to negotiate reefs without being knocked down by waves, cut by coral, or nipped by a shark.”

Yank Photos, by John A. Bushemi

As Emory explained, throughout the training, “Stress is constantly put on the fact that the techniques they are taught and the knowledge given come originally from natives, and that it is greatly to their advantage as soon as they are on an island in the South Seas to contact natives and add to the foundation for tropical island living given them while in Hawaii.”

Emory found that this hands-on training was not only interesting and enjoyable to the men, but helped alleviate some apprehension that many may have had about serving in a theater so distant from home and unlike anything they had known: “Dread of the unknown and boredom of waiting are replaced by lively anticipation and the pleasure of learning to be self-reliant in a world new to them.”

I love this story for many reasons. Emory was clearly a man who loved history and loved the people of Polynesia, and he devoted his life to learning as much as he could, preserving that knowledge, and passing it on. He seemed to realize that the best way to understand a place was to ask its people and listen with an open mind. When his country went to war, though he was too old to enlist in the armed forces, he used his specialized knowledge to contribute to the war effort in his own way, helping many individual servicemen and likely saving lives. Curiosity and passion can contribute to the greater good—as well as just make life a lot more fun and interesting.

In the Negev desert, the scattered and isolated Jewish communities knew they would have to hold the line. During the months of undeclared war that followed the UN vote for partition in November of 1947, they had been harassed and often cut off from the rest of the land’s Jewish community, the Yishuv. And when the Egyptian Army invaded in May of 1948, they were on the front line.

Kfar Darom was one of those communities and had only 30 young people to defend it. With limited arms, they somehow repulsed a major attack backed by artillery. When they ran out of hand grenades, the religious young defenders filled their tefillin bags with explosives and hurled them at the invaders. The news of their brave stand quickly spread and gave heart to other communities facing long odds.

One of the best known stories in Israel’s War of Independence is that of Yad Mordechai. This kibbutz located on the main road between Gaza and Tel Aviv was founded by Polish-born members of Hashomer Hatzair, a socialist Zionist youth movement. Its name was chosen to honor Mordechai Anielewicz, also a member of Hashomer Hatzair and the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, the largest anti-Nazi Jewish rebellion during World War II. Given Yad Mordechai’s strategic location, its people knew they would be a target once the invasion came. Frequently cut off from the Yishuv by Arab attacks, they spent months shoring up their defenses.

On the eve of battle, the children and a few women of Yad Mordechai were evacuated, leaving slightly over 100 men and boys and two squads of the Palmach (the striking force of the Haganah, the Jews’ defense organization) to defend the kibbutz. They had a few dozen rifles, a couple mortars and machine guns, an anti-tank gun, and not nearly enough ammunition to face an Egyptian attacking force of infantry battalions backed by armor, artillery, and aircraft.

The children of Yad Mordechai are evacuated. Photo source: https://blog.nli.org.il/en/hoi_yad_mordechai/

For five days beginning on May 19, 1948, the Egyptians subjected the kibbutz to brutal artillery and air bombardments and numerous infantry assaults. The shelling destroyed the vital water tower and killed most of the livestock. And with no choice but to stand and fight, the defenders fought off attack after attack even as their casualties mounted, their weapons failed, and their ammunition dwindled.

By the end of the fifth day, the defenders were at the end of their strength. The underground shelters they had constructed were full to bursting with the women and the wounded. They were down to 60 able-bodied defenders spread out over 10 defensive posts, their ammunition was nearly depleted, and they had lost their precious Browning machine gun in a direct shell hit. With intense fighting in nearly every corner of the young country, the Palmach couldn’t spare further men or arms for Yad Mordechai’s defense, and the painful decision to evacuate was made early on the morning of the sixth day.

The people of Yad Mordechai objected to being depicted as heroes, but there’s no doubt that’s what they were. They stood against overwhelming odds to defend their home, tying down major resources of the Egyptian Army for five crucial days that the reborn Jewish state could use to prepare the defense of Tel Aviv. The Egyptian Army, which had anticipated a quick march to that city, never made it to Tel Aviv.

In her moving account The Six Days of Yad-Mordechai, Margaret Larkin brings to life the drama, tragedy, and heroism of the kibbutz’s stand, reminding the reader that war is not about statistics, but people. Anyone looking to learn more about Yad Mordechai can do no better than to grab a copy of Larkin’s wonderful book. Here are just a few of the incredible people whose stories she recounts:

Sasha Ivri had arrived in Mandatory Palestine as an “illegal” immigrant in defiance of the British blockade. He and his brother had survived the war living with Jewish partisans in the forest–their parents were murdered in a concentration camp. He had come to Yad Mordechai to train for his new life in Israel. On the first day of battle, a mortar shell hit the defensive post he was manning and Sacha fell, the first casualty. He was 20.

Adek Weinfeld had been a member of the training kibbutz back in Poland. When the Germans invaded, he escaped to the Soviet zone and ended up fighting in Stalingrad with the Red Army. After the war, though eager to leave for Palestine, he directed a home for orphaned Jewish children in Poland (he called them “my children”). He finally arrived in Yad Mordechai in March of 1948 and two months later stood among its defenders. He, too, fell on the first day of battle.

Dov was only 16 and had lied about his age to join the Palmach. Late at night after the first day of battle, a group of Palmachniks crept out to the wadi to take much-needed arms and ammunition from the fallen Egyptians. When the Egyptians began firing on them, they raced back inside the kibbutz and discovered Dov was missing. They whistled Ha-Tikvah, the Zionist anthem, and he finally appeared. He had been busy plucking a revolver off a dead officer as a souvenir. On the fifth day of the battle, he ran to the fray despite a head wound and was hit before he could reach the post. Only two days after he died, the Palmach received orders to demobilize him (his mother had made the petition, which was granted because of his age).

Batia was in charge of one of the shelters. She spent the first day keeping the other women busy caring for the wounded and directing things–in the packed shelter, the women had to take turns sitting and standing, and no mention was to be made of the evacuated children. As night fell and Batia had no word of her husband Shymek, she went out into the trenches herself. No one could or would tell her of Shymek’s fate. It was only after she returned to the shelter and tried to rest that she overheard one boy tell another that “that comrade who sang so nicely and was always laughing” was killed that morning. That was how she learned that she was a widow, that their baby and their six-year-old son were now fatherless.

Wolf Kriger and his wife Vered returned to Yad Mordechai just before the battle, only a few days after she had a stillbirth. He, too, had survived Stalingrad as a soldier of the Red Army and was repatriated to Poland after the war. He and Vered had journeyed through Germany and France for months before being granted certificates to emigrate to Palestine. Vered stayed in the trench with him for part of the morning on the first day of battle and only went to the shelter at the insistence of the commander. Wolf sent her notes by runner throughout the fight. On the second day, a six-pound shell from an Egyptian cannon landed directly on Wolf in Post 1 after they had already fought off a number of Egyptian advances. In the stress of the battle, Russian-born Vered lost her Hebrew and Polish and felt isolated in the shelter among the close-knit women who had long known each other. When she learned her husband had been killed, she became hysterical and couldn’t be consoled.

Arale Meller had been determined to join the British Army’s Jewish Brigade during the war despite his flat feet. He applied as a driver–despite the small matter of not knowing how to drive. He enlisted another soldier to teach him and was accepted. On the fourth day of the battle of Yad Mordechai, as the Defense Committee debated what to do as their situation grew increasingly desperate, Arale, who had been wounded by shrapnel that day, became overwhelmed by nerves and threatened to break out and fight his way through the Egyptian lines on his own if no one was willing to join him. The very next day, an Egyptian tank breached the perimeter of the kibbutz and the defenders desperately poured fire on it. At last, Arale took up two grenades, charged the tank, and threw them at the machine gun slit as he was riddled with bullets. His courageous sacrifice took the tank out of commission.

Chaska and Zalman were childhood sweethearts in Poland. He got the chance to emigrate first in 1938 and then the war kept them apart. She escaped to Lithuania and, through incredible persistence and luck, managed to secure a rare visa for Palestine. When she finally reached Jerusalem, Zalman had already enlisted in the British Army. Upon learning of her arrival, he claimed a toothache and managed a two-hour leave in Jerusalem, where there was a military dental clinic. He finally made it in to see the dentist with 40 minutes left in his leave. The dentist asked which tooth hurt, Zalman randomly picked one, and the dentist promptly pulled it. Zalman made it to see Chaska with 10 minutes remaining in his leave and a bloody hole in his mouth (and if you’ve got a better love story than that, I’d like to hear it). They both survived the battle of Yad Mordechai.

Leika Shapir had been orphaned as a baby in Poland and raised by a strict grandfather and three aunts who disapproved of her longing to make aliyah. She delayed her dream for years out of obligations to her family members. At last she reached Palestine on the day the Second World War broke out. Throughout the battle of Yad Mordechai, she served as one of the runners who dashed through the trenches carrying messages between the defensive posts and headquarters after the loss of the telephone system in the first bombardment.

When it was decided to evacuate the kibbutz, not all the women and grievously wounded men could fit in the few armored trucks the Palmach managed to get through. A column of over a hundred people set off in the night bearing two wounded men on stretchers. At one point the Egyptians on the surrounding hills noticed their movement and opened fire, and the column scattered in chaos. While everyone else reached the safety of the nearby kibbutz that was their destination, one stretcher and its bearers never made it. Naftali Holtzman, the wounded man, was one of the Palmachniks who had come to defend Yad Mordechai. The stretcher bearers were Jacob Yahalom, who had left his own kibbutz for Yad Mordechai out of love for his wife Shifra, and Leika. Naftali, Jacob, and Leika were caught by an Egyptian patrol and their capture was announced on Cairo radio, although the Egyptians later denied any knowledge of them in response to Red Cross and United Nations inquiries. They were certainly killed.

In all, 26 defenders of Yad Mordechai were killed. The survivors spent difficult months trying to build new lives, but in November of 1948 the Israeli Defense Forces liberated Yad Mordechai and the joyful kibbutzniks immediately returned home to rebuild what the battle had destroyed. Their spirit and bravery are emblematic of that generation of citizen-warriors who stood and fought so that the Jewish state might survive.

Memorial to Mordechai Anielewicz. Photo source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yad_Mordechai#/media/File:Yad-Mordechai-Anilevich-memorial-1.jpg

On October 7, 2023, thousands of terrorists invaded southern Israel from Gaza and unleashed a bloodbath of torture, mutilation, mass rape, and slaughter. They kidnapped over 200 hostages and murdered more than 1,200 men, women, and children, the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. On that terrible day, the security team of Yad Mordechai defended their home, just as their ancestors did 75 years earlier. They managed to repel the invaders, though in the aftermath of the attack, the community was largely depopulated along with much of Israel’s south as the IDF responded to the war Hamas started.

In 1948, the citizens of the infant state of Israel, whether they were native-born sabras, survivors of the Shoah, immigrants fleeing persecution and violence in Arab lands, kibbutzniks, city-dwellers, students, pioneers, or shopkeepers, stood and fought because they had no choice. They had no other home. In the decades since, Israelis have rarely had the opportunity to forget the lessons of 1948, but Israel’s enemies still have failed to learn them. They’d do well to study some history.

This week, as Israel goes from remembering the Shoah, to remembering its fallen soldiers, to celebrating 76 years of independence, it’s clear that whatever the divisions and challenges Israel may face, the spirit and determination of 1948, born of necessity, are still alive.

Note: A slightly different version of this piece appeared last year at .

I started writing fiction in middle school (the less said about that, the better). I wrote my first “novel” at 15, which is now blessedly lost to the sands of time. I wrote a few more novels in my twenties, but this is the one I really wanted to write but avoided for years because I knew I wasn’t ready.

Eventually I knew I couldn’t put it off any longer and I threw myself into intensive research to prepare. And then it was 2020 and lockdown hit, and suddenly I had a lot of time in my apartment with nowhere else to go and nothing else to do. The rest is history.

I’m nervous and excited to share my work with the wider world for the first time. No Other Place on Earth is a saga spanning the turbulent 1930s through World War II and up to the independence of the state of Israel. It’s a story about courage, love, duty, and hope. It’s that same hope that was the basis for the movement that led to the miracle of Israel’s remarkable rebirth in 1948, so beautifully expressed in the Zionist anthem that would become Israel’s national anthem, Ha-Tikvah.

“So long as deep within the heart,

the Jewish soul yearns,

and forward to the East,

an eye looks to Zion.

Our hope is not yet lost,

the hope of 2,000 years,

to be a free people in our land,

the land of Zion and Jerusalem.”

I hope you consider reading it and sharing it with your family and friends. If you do read and enjoy it, please leave a review on Amazon! Even just a few words are fine. For an independent author, it helps enormously in allowing other readers to discover our work.

I can’t wait to hear what you think!

No doubt the social shunning was incredibly painful for survivors, who had already endured so much, and drove them to seek understanding and social satisfaction from each other. But perhaps one of the most difficult things the survivors faced in the post-war years, and even decades, was their new community’s unwillingness to hear about the Holocaust or their experiences as survivors. When Americans were willing to listen, they were often skeptical, dismissive, or even judgmental of the survivors. In his interview with Life after the Holocaust, Thomas Buergenthal reported, “Nobody really wanted to know in those days about the past. Nobody asked. They wanted to know where I came from, what I did. But it went sort of... It was like asking ‘How are you?’ You know, you don’t really expect to get an answer. No, really, there was no great interest in finding out.” 

People were simply not interested; they wanted to get on with their own lives. Even Buergenthal’s aunt and uncle, German Jews who had immigrated to America earlier and took him in after the war, were not interested in hearing about his experiences–they worked hard and took care of him, but they simply did not want to hear. Upon reflecting on why people didn’t ask him about his experiences in the Holocaust, Buergenthal offered an interesting interpretation. The silence was not confined to the immediate post-war years; even in the decades following the Holocaust, Buergenthal’s own children didn’t ask him about the Holocaust and he didn’t speak about it. In later years, when the parents and children did speak about it and Buergenthal looked back on the issue, his wife offered a different explanation that had nothing to do with disinterest: “The kids thought it was so painful that they didn’t want to hear about it. And that’s why they didn’t ask. And I took that to mean that they were not interested, and that they were in fact interested.” 

Three-year-old Thomas before the war. Photo: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The children knew little of their father’s Holocaust experience other than how painful it was; afraid of hurting or upsetting him, they didn’t ask about it. Their father, in turn, thought their silence on the subject meant they were not interested or didn’t care. And so the cycle of silence ran both ways, where both parties—the American-born children and their European-born Holocaust survivor father—didn’t broach the subject of the Holocaust because each thought that was what the other party wanted. This idea can be applied beyond a single family and to the general community: many American Jews may simply have been afraid to bring up the Holocaust with the survivors and dredge up all the pain and suffering they had experienced. The survivors in turn may have believed the Americans were not interested at all, which was clearly not always the case, as Buergenthal and his children demonstrated.

Lisa and Aron Derman, Holocaust survivors and a married couple who moved to New York after the war, also shared their postwar experiences in Life after the Holocaust. With his wife Lisa filling in with commentary, Aron reminisced about their American neighbors: “They were afraid to hurt our feelings. They thought that if they’ll start talking about it, they don’t know how we’re gonna react. (Lisa: Exactly...) So, they felt better they’re not going to touch it. Whatever you want to say, you’ll say. And little by little you... (Lisa: You revealed some of it.) You revealed some of it. But they didn’t press to anything. And we weren’t maybe so anxious to tell ’em all the details.” As with Buergenthal and his own children, once again neither side was eager to bring up the Holocaust, and so neither really did. 

Not all postwar interactions between American Jews and Holocaust survivors were marked by mutual goodwill. Although this particular incident didn’t happen to the Dermans themselves, Lisa had a survivor friend whose Jewish neighbors wouldn’t let their own children play with the survivor’s children. The survivors felt very bad about being rejected by their American neighbors, and Lisa tried to explain that in those early postwar years, “not so much was known and not so many people spoke up, so there was a feeling that the people that were in the concentration camps, there was something... they survived... I don’t know, doing what? Eating other peoples’ flesh? Or, they are terrible...?” 

Lisa and Aron in Florence, Italy in 1945. Photo: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

At that time many people didn’t know a lot of details about the Holocaust, but they did know that it had virtually annihilated the European Jewish world and wiped out millions of Jews. The Holocaust system which the Nazis had labored to build was murderous and powerful; some, therefore, believed that those who had managed to survive must have done something bad, or collaborated in some way with the Nazis, to make it through alive. 

Other survivors faced the same judgmental stereotypes from American Jews who had the audacity or tactlessness to confront them directly with their judgments. In New Lives: Survivors of the Holocaust Living in America, author Dorothy Rabinowitz shares the testimony of Elena, who went to live with her American cousins in the Midwest after the war. She described them as kind people who kept their distance from her, explaining: “You understand, the concentration camp experience is nothing that endears you to people. People who came to my cousins’ house used to ask me such things as whether I had been able to survive because, perchance, I had slept with an SS man. And if I had, did they think I would tell them?” What could have bred the chutzpah to ask such a crude question? Only an utter lack of understanding of the horrifying magnitude of the Holocaust and what its victims and survivors had undergone, and the difficult choices they had been forced to make.

Perhaps even more hurtful to the Holocaust survivors was the condescension and superiority with which American Jews sometimes treated them. One survivor profiled by Dorothy Rabinowitz, Emil Wolf, faced this as he tried to adjust to life in the United States. His aunt, with whom he stayed, was very upset over the destruction of their shared family in Europe, but otherwise she and her husband “wanted to think no more about the dark experiences they had known themselves in Germany, or the far darker imaginings they had of the things that occurred to those who had stayed when they had left.” Like so many other American Jews, they wanted to get on with their lives as comfortably as possible after the war without having to reckon with the horrors of the Shoah that had destroyed their family. 

Worse for Emil, however, were his interactions with the social workers and psychiatric counselors who were supposed to help immigrants. Emil “loathed the probing, personal questions, and the superior air of the questioners…As far as he was concerned, they were not…entitled to hear everything they wanted to know about him, to treat him as though, beyond question, they were his superiors.” These professionals who were tasked with helping Emil work through his problems and adjust to his new life treated him as inferior, and as if they had an intrinsic right to know personal details about his life, as if they were superior to him because he was a victim and they were not. They were condescending and made him feel as if they were doing him a great service, for which he had never asked, and he should feel grateful. 

One man asked Emil if he felt guilty: “I mean guilt about survival; you don’t feel upset from time to time that other people in your family died and that you lived?” The thought that he should feel guilty about having survived the Holocaust had never occurred to Emil; it had to be suggested to him by an American stranger, supposedly a professional, who presumed to suggest how it should feel to have survived the Holocaust. 

Other survivors, too, refused to feel guilt even when outsiders expected them to. Lisa and Aron Derman confirmed in Life after the Holocaust that they had never felt guilty about surviving and couldn’t understand why some others did or why they should be expected to. Lisa explained it poignantly: “I know that my parents, most of all, most of all in their life wanted us to live! If only I could tell my mother that I survived, how happy she would have been to know that I survived. My father, too. That’s all he wanted us is to live, is to live. So why should I feel guilty?” The Dermans, like other survivors, were simply human beings trying to build decent lives after enduring unspeakable horrors at the hands of the Nazis. No one who hadn’t suffered through the Holocaust, and made the difficult life-or-death decisions it forced on people, had the right to judge them.

The issue of American Jews’ reactions to the Holocaust, both during and after the war, is obviously complex. American Jewry is not and never has been a homogenous community, but certain generalizations can be made for the sake of clarity. The American Jewish community was different from any other Jewish community in the world. While they certainly had to contend with harsh antisemitism, which bettered or worsened with the times, they were relatively secure in the United States. This only improved with time, as new generations of Jews were born and raised in the United States and comfortably asserted themselves as confident Americans. Many secularized, while others kept their religious traditions. Their identity as confident Jewish Americans defined their reactions to the Holocaust: from their communal reaction to Kristallnacht, to the way they received and treated survivors after the war. While they were Jews, they were Americans first, and this differentiated them from the European Holocaust survivors. They had been on the winning side of the war, and many had fought and died for the United States in that war. They did not and could not understand what it had been like to live through the absolute horrors of the Holocaust. 

When Holocaust survivors settled in the United States, many American Jews tried to help them by encouraging them to find work, get settled, and assimilate as quickly as possible. But this came at the expense of what the survivors actually needed: a community that was willing to try to understand what they had been through. Individual experiences varied, and certainly they were not all negative. Regina Gelb, who came to the United States as a teenager, emphasized how different her experience was from other survivors’ because of her youth: “I was so lucky to come here and to be a young girl in America, you know? I was just so lucky…I came here, I hadn’t lived yet. So everything that I lived was great!” For plenty of fortunate survivors, America provided the opportunity they so badly needed to live and grow. The experiences of the less fortunate ones, who were not warmly embraced by the Jewish community or given a willing ear to hear what they had gone through and understand what they needed, must serve as a lesson for the future.

It wasn’t only the Jewish-American organizations that failed to provide the refugees with adequate work opportunities; American relatives and sympathizers, too, often fell short of the refugees’ hopes. In the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Oral History Project Life after the Holocaust, survivor Norman Salsitz shared his experience of trying to find a job through family connections after the war. His American cousins owned the largest silk company in the United States; looking for a way to support himself in his new life, Salsitz dressed in his finest outfit and went to his cousin to ask for a job: “So, he looked and looked at me. And he took out a wallet from his pocket. He took out a 100 dollar bill and put it on the table. And he said, ‘Take it and get off my back.’ And when he said this, naturally I didn’t take the hundred dollars. Now, tears filled up my eyes. Now, I couldn’t...I couldn’t answer anything, and I couldn’t cry. So, I didn’t take it.”

Salsitz’s cousin wouldn’t take responsibility for helping him or giving him an opportunity to help himself; he wanted to be rid of a perceived burden, by whatever means possible. It is also possible that he did not want to deal with the constant reminder of the death and destruction of the Holocaust that a survivor would inevitably provide. Whatever his motives, he provides a heartbreaking example of American Jewish communities’ unwillingness or inability to give the refugees what they needed, whether materially or emotionally.

Survivors appreciated employment training and placement, but they needed more than that from their fellow Jews, whether relatives or organizations. The Holocaust was an intensely traumatic, overwhelming experience to survive; survivors needed communal, emotional, and often spiritual support from their families or new communities. Plenty of survivors were taken in by loving relatives or tightly knit communities that were eager to do whatever they could to help the refugees. Unfortunately, however, many refugees did not share this experience. Orthodox Jewish survivors had particular difficulty in adjusting to life in the States. The caseworkers tasked with aiding them all too often did not understand their beliefs or lifestyles, and were not equipped or willing to deal with their special needs. Again, Dr. Neumann and the Denver branch of JFCS provide an example of a community that was unenthusiastic in aiding its refugees.

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Although Denver had Jewish infrastructure including day schools, synagogues, and kosher slaughterhouses, the JFCS was unwilling to take in religious refugees. One refugee, Mr. G., was criticized in the JFCS files for making demands upon the organization because he had been transferred to Denver from a town without a synagogue or rabbi. Beth B. Cohen writes: “Describing Mr. G.’s desire for a community with a synagogue and kosher food as being excessively demanding clearly reveals not just a lack of sympathy for but also a lack of knowledge about the fundamentals of orthodox life.” The organization treated Mr. G.’s demands as picky, unnecessary trivialities; its caseworkers had no sensitivity for his beliefs or awareness that kosher food was not just a taste preference but a requirement of his religion.

Upon arrival and settlement in the United States, religious refugees, especially highly-educated and well-respected community members such as rabbis and cantors, found little of the kind of religious infrastructure and community support to which they had been accustomed in Europe before the war. Many rabbis and yeshiva students who arrived in America expected to be absorbed into and supported by the Jewish communities they found there, as they had been supported by their former communities in Europe. For the most part, this was not the case; they were expected to support themselves, and agencies sent them into the workforce. Fortunately for the new immigrants, “the employment was often within the orthodox world, but it garnered far less status than Torah study and it represented a rupture, rather than continuity, with the past.” 

The Jewish world of the United States was so utterly different from the destroyed one of pre-war Europe that these religious communities forcibly changed forever. They had to adapt to a different kind of Orthodox Jewish world, an American one, and even religious Jews who tried to do so often did not receive the kind of support they needed. Cohen provides the example of a Mr. Lis, who arrived in Hartford, Connecticut in 1949 and attended the local Orthodox synagogue. His experience there was intensely lonely, “made even more so by the fact that none of the other congregants ever invited him for a Sabbath or holiday meal. ‘No one asked, “Where are you for Shabbos? Where are you eating? Never,”’ he emphasized. What accounts for this ungenerous response? ‘We were looked down on,’ Mr. Lis explained, especially ‘those like myself who had nobody.’ As survivors did in other communities he found a social life with other refugees.”

While Mr. Lis did not speculate on the motives of the American Jews who treated him with such indifference, others may do so. Rabbi Harold White, Georgetown University’s longtime Senior Jewish Chaplain, discussed in an interview his own memories of growing up in Hartford and seeing how American Jews treated immigrant Holocaust survivors. Yechiel Lieberman, White’s childhood Hebrew tutor, was a Holocaust survivor as well as a rabbi and a great scholar; when he came to the United States, however, he could not get work as a rabbi. To support himself, he became an insurance salesman, tutoring boys in Hebrew to earn extra money. White recalled Lieberman “was the one who told me how poorly he was received by the Jewish community. He sought, he wanted to teach in a Hebrew school, for example, and he was told, ‘You have an accent, and because you have an accent, you’re not acceptable. And besides, you might tell grim stories. We don’t want our kids to hear them.’” 

Clearly Lieberman faced discrimination as a European Jew rather than an American one, for his local Connecticut community disapproved of his accent in Hebrew. More shockingly, he faced discrimination as a Holocaust survivor specifically because of the horrible traumas he had endured. These Americans did not want to hear about what Lieberman had endured, and they did not want their children to hear about it, either; on the chance that he would share these dark, true stories with his classes, they refused him work as a teacher. Many American Jews simply did not want to hear about the Holocaust at all, and to that end they shunned Holocaust survivors themselves. 

According to Rabbi White’s testimony, the ill treatment and shunning did not stop at the Holocaust survivors–it extended to American Jews who reached out to survivors and tried to aid them in the resettlement and integration process. White reported how his father, an immigrant from Eastern Europe, was very sensitive to the fact that the entire population of his hometown had been annihilated by the Nazis. Out of a sense of obligation to the survivors who came to Hartford, he rented apartments of the buildings he owned to Holocaust survivors.

White recalled the reaction of his uncle, the president of a Conservative synagogue: “My uncle did not have the sensitivity of my father, and my uncle therefore said to my father, ‘Give them a finger and they’ll take your whole hand.’ And instead of my father being congratulated on what he was doing, he was chastised by members of his family.” For people like White’s uncle, Holocaust survivors were purely victims, even needy parasites, who were just waiting to take advantage of the goodwill of the American Jewish community. For the American Jews who felt this way, there was no sense of loyalty or obligation toward their European brethren who had suffered so; they saw themselves as hard-working Americans who were smart enough not to let anyone else take advantage of them, even Holocaust survivors. 

To what lengths could this viewpoint go? Pearl Gibber was the principal of a Jewish religious school in Hartford; as Rabbi White remembers, “She made it her life’s commitment to teach Holocaust survivors English, and she did this in the basement of her house. And I remember the criticism of her; someone referred to her as a nafka, a prostitute, said, ‘Yeah, she looks like a prostitute.’ I remember this vividly, twelve years old…‘a prostitute, what’s she doing with those people? Doesn’t she have better things to do with those people?’” 

A woman who dedicated her time and energy to teaching Holocaust survivors English—a necessary skill for them to integrate into American life, find good jobs, and support themselves, avoiding becoming “parasites” on the community like some American Jews feared—was called a “prostitute.” People could not imagine why she was spending her time in service to these survivors; they had to attribute some strange ulterior motives to her, and the most insulting thing they could do was call her a “prostitute” for her charity. If they had acknowledged that what she was doing was indeed praiseworthy, would they then have had to acknowledge that, as members of the same community, they too had an obligation? It was easier to denigrate the survivors and the American Jews who tried to help them than to reevaluate their own stances toward Holocaust survivors.

This is part 7 of a series. Stay tuned for the next installment.

Several trends impacted the way American Jewish communities received the refugees who came to settle in the United States. In the past, aspiring immigrants could only migrate to America if they were sponsored by a relative, who would be responsible for their welfare and for assuring that they did not become dependent on the state. For the first time in the postwar years, agencies were permitted to act as sponsors. While this allowed many Jews to immigrate who otherwise may not have been able to, it ultimately “also absolved many American Jews from supporting their European relatives,” in Beth B. Cohen’s words. 

In addition, the well-established American Jewish community’s old fears bubbled up to the surface. Their conditional acceptance as Americans had been hard won after generations of acculturation, hard work, and assimilation. They had further proved their allegiance to the country by sending their sons to fight the war in American uniforms. A new wave of immigrants, who largely hailed from Eastern Europe and may have been more religious or identifiably foreign-looking than the established American community, could spark a newly fired antisemitism in the country. Based on these arguably well-founded fears, Cohen questions: “Should it be a surprise that many second-generation American Jewish hosts viewed the thousands of Eastern European newcomers with a discomfort that took precedence over sympathy?” The overall trend was that the American Jewish community viewed European refugee immigrants more as a burden than a welcome addition.

Another frustrating and yet crucial trend is that American Jewish organizations that dealt with and aided refugees, as well as the individuals who led them with varying degrees of finesse and success, tended not to take into account the survivors’ traumatic individual experiences, but rather tried to apply generic blanket goals to all the refugees as a group. A notable example was the organizations’ main yardstick for measuring success with their refugee cases: their overarching goal was to get refugees out into the workforce, independent, and self-supporting as quickly as possible. They did not deal with the refugees’ emotional needs or issues, and often they did not aid refugees in gaining work for which they were qualified, encouraging them to take whatever menial job was available. 

In certain cases, organizations were more concerned with filling their own occupational needs than with aiding the refugees. Dr. Alfred Neumann was the executive director of Jewish Family and Children’s Services (JFCS) in Denver, Colorado. A letter he sent to the United Service for New Americans in 1949 demonstrates his lack of enthusiasm for the part of his job that entailed aiding the refugees who were sent to Denver to settle. In response to whether Denver could or would accept an immigrant who had been employed as a knitter, Dr. Neumann complained, “We have received one unit of this type some months ago, and this gentleman is still unemployed and very much a problem. Second, will you kindly check with the enclosed list of major occupations as to what type of resettlement units are desirable in Denver and the region which Denver supplies with resettlement units.”

For Dr. Neumann, the new immigrants as “units,” a strikingly dehumanizing term to refer to any human being. The dehumanization is especially chilling considering the experience of these refugees. The Nazi machine had started out by dehumanizing them, stripped away their rights, stolen their homes, and murdered their families. Now as new immigrants, they sought the aid of fellow Jews in establishing new lives for themselves in America. But for Dr. Neumann, the resettlement program was not an opportunity to aid poor refugees in need of work and assistance, but rather a chance to fill the job vacancies that suited the Denver community. This view considered the immigrants not as human beings, but only as “units” who would preferably fill specific occupations and adjust nicely and quietly into their new communities. Cohen summarizes the general attitude of organizations tasked with placing refugees in employment: “The emphasis was on the practical. It was placed squarely on the vocational skills of the newcomer rather than on any reward gained from helping a refugee.”

This is part 6 of a series. Stay tuned for the next installment.

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How did American Jews deal with the Holocaust in the years after the war? More poignantly, how did they deal with the survivors they encountered? In We Remember with Reverence and Love, Hasia R. Diner challenges the commonly accepted notion that for years and even decades after the Holocaust, American Jews were silent and refused to discuss it or deal with it publicly. She gives various examples of how American Jews indeed honored the memory of those murdered in the Shoah. One was a Passover Haggadah created in 1952: “The first paragraph of the Seder Ritual of Remembrance intoned that ‘we,’ those assembled who had been directed to stand, ‘remember with reverence and love the six million of our people of the European exile,’ who had been destroyed by ‘a tyrant more wicked than the Pharaoh who enslaved our fathers in Egypt.’”

Another was a public speech by Oscar Handlin, a Harvard professor, who reminded his audience, “Nor can we, in the midst of our joy and well-being, blot out the memory of the tragic decade that has just closed. Honesty demands that as we celebrate we have in our minds also the stark facts of our present situation. Jews have not recovered from the shock of the six million victims of the European catastrophe.” 

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Diner’s argument seems almost a direct response to Haskel Lookstein’s judgment that American Jews did not feel enough anguish—were not paralyzed by it—in the wake of the Holocaust. It’s true: the American Jewish community was not silent about the Holocaust during or after the war. As Diner amply demonstrates in her book, they made memorials and remembrances that were public and private, oral and written. There’s an acute difference, however, between the way that a community deals with an idea in the abstract and the way that it deals with people. The issue here is a human one: how people responded to people; how American Jews treated, welcomed, or rejected those European survivors who were physical, visual reminders of the tragedy and destruction that had consumed the Jewish communities of Europe.

So how did American Jews—as individuals, as communities, and as organizations—receive and respond to the Jewish survivors who immigrated from Europe after the war? 

First it’s important to consider the American postwar environment. After winning the war, Americans simply wanted to get on with their lives as normally as possible, and they didn’t want to deal with its remnants. Also, attitudes toward Jews and other foreigners hadn’t significantly changed. The American population was not exactly ready to welcome the Jewish refugees, often classified as Displaced Persons, with open arms. In her comprehensive study of the Jewish survivor experience in the United States after the war, Case Closed: Holocaust Survivors in Postwar America, Beth B. Cohen confirms that “America, too, had not only legislation to restrict entry into the country but also a native population that wanted to see the displaced persons go elsewhere.” Cohen cites a Gallup poll from January of 1946 which “indicated, despite or perhaps because of anti-Semitism, that 76 percent of non-Jewish voters polled were sympathetic to permitting Jews to settle in Palestine.” So on the one hand, Americans largely supported the establishment of a Jewish state; on the other, it is unclear whether they supported that because of a genuine belief in its necessity or because of an antisemitic desire to keep additional Jews out of the United States. 

Photo: Jewish National Fund photo archive

The Jewish refugees themselves often preferred to go to Israel over America, but they went wherever they were given the opportunity to go. America, however, was not keen to welcome them. For their part, American Jews did not particularly want the refugees to settle in the States, but not for the same reasons as other Americans who were xenophobic, antisemitic, or simply did not want to deal with the survivors. Rather, the “destruction of European Jewry had made Zionists out of most American Jews and convinced them of the need for a national homeland. It was there, not in the United States, that the majority wanted the refugees to settle.” 

The terrible war that had just ended and the near-total annihilation of European Jewry had persuaded American Jews that in any foreign land, Jews could never be totally safe from antisemitism and persecution, and they would never be truly safe as a people until they had a secure homeland in the land of Israel. For the majority of these American Jews, however, they believed this on behalf of their near-destroyed European brethren, not themselves. They believed in the Zionist dream enough to want to see the European refugees settle in the land and help rebuild the Jewish state; it was for the refugees to build, however, while American Jews could rest safely at home. Thus, even from the earliest postwar years, American Jews held mixed feelings toward the European Jewish refugees who settled in the United States rather than the land of Israel.

This is part 5 of a series. Stay tuned for the next installment.

American Jews back home, who had not gone to war where they would have had to confront their European brethren directly, tended not to engage with the harsh reality of the Holocaust. They would do, say, or write what they could to show their support for their suffering brethren; but beyond that, comfortable in the United States, there was not much more action. 

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The persecuted European Jews facing their own mortality intuited this American attitude and even mocked it. Szmul Zygielbojm, a member of the Polish Government-in-Exile who considered making an appeal to American Jewish leaders for assistance to the Warsaw ghetto uprising, was assured by the ghetto fighters, “Jewish leaders abroad won’t be interested. At eleven in the morning you will begin telling them about the anguish of the Jews in Poland, but at 1 P.M. they will ask you to halt the narrative so they can have lunch. That is a difference which cannot be bridged. They will go on lunching at their favorite restaurant. So they cannot understand what is happening in Poland.” From the perspective of the European Jews, who were suffering and dying in mass numbers, their American counterparts lacked the urgency, or perhaps the will, to produce much concrete action toward the benefit or rescue of the European Jews. 

American Jewish journalists exhibited the same feeling toward their fellows. As a terrible crisis engulfed Hungarian Jewry and many more Jews were threatened with immediate deportation or murder, Y. Fishman wrote in the Morning Journal: “In the past, when such news came here, there was a flurry of meetings and protests…But now people are passive; there are dinners and banquets and many expressions of thanks to the [War Refugee Board] and to individuals who save Jews…” As Fishman saw it, American Jews were too comfortable and complacent; while in the past they might have been energized to organize and advocate aiding the European Jews, by 1944 they had lost their steam. Haskel Lookstein offers an interpretation of these attitudes: “Overcome by the pain of their brothers and sisters, frustrated over their lack of power to effect a change in Washington, and frightened by the relentless and efficient process of annihilation, they chose to deny, minimize, or ignore the terrible news that was before their eyes.” 

The Holocaust was then and remains today an incomprehensible and excruciatingly painful issue to confront. Even after decades, it’s impossible to make sense of the Shoah, the attempted destruction of European Jewry. American Jews of the time didn’t know how to contend with it; rather than confront the feelings of loss, guilt, and pain that the Holocaust would necessarily provoke, many chose simply not to deal with it. 

In his final analysis of the American Jewish community’s response (or lack thereof) to the Holocaust, Lookstein concludes that the “Final Solution may have been unstoppable by American Jewry, but it should have been unbearable for them. And it wasn’t. This is important, not alone for our understanding of the past, but for our sense of responsibility in the future.” As he sees it, American Jews couldn’t have done much more, if anything, to stop the Holocaust and to save their European brethren. He doesn’t condemn their lack of effective action, for he doesn’t believe it would have been possible to do more; rather, he laments American Jews’ relatively easy capacity to go on with their lives as normal in the shadow of the Holocaust. They had seen the great evil of the twentieth century and the near destruction of their people in Europe; they still went on with their lives. They were still able to forget that incomprehensible evil enough to find happiness and fulfillment. 

This is not to judge American Jews of the time; rather, it is to try to understand why they reacted the way they did, and how it affected postwar relations between them and the European Holocaust survivors who immigrated to the United States. It came down to American Jews’ relative comfort and security in their identities as Americans: they didn’t fully understand the Holocaust, and they couldn’t understand what it meant to have been a European Jew in the twentieth century. This was an unbridgeable gap: American Jews couldn’t seem to look past their own identities as Americans to fully understand the European survivors who settled in the United States.

This is part 4 of a series. Stay tuned for the next installment.

This time the setting was Kishinev in Tsarist Russia, today’s Chisinau, the capital of Moldova. It was 1903 and the city was home to tens of thousands of Jews. The antisemitic press loved to stir up hatred of the Jews with propaganda and lies, and this time they had a whopper: that the Jews had killed Christian children to use their blood to make matzo for Passover. It was an old lie but it still proved effective.

Photo: Page from The Nuremberg Chronicle: “Blood Libel,” Germany, 1493. Collection of the Museum of Jewish Heritage.

The orgy of violence lasted for days. The frenzied attackers murdered 49 Jews, wounded many hundreds more in creatively savage ways, raped at least 600 women, looted and destroyed homes and businesses, and left thousands of families homeless.

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It was only the latest in the parade of violence that Jewish communities had suffered in a long list of forced conversions, expulsions, and massacres. Jews had always had a precarious existence in Russia (and, frankly, everywhere they have dwelt, to varying degrees, throughout their long centuries of exile). In Russia they had to contend with restrictions on where they could live and what they could do, the kidnapping of their sons for forced service in the army, and periodic flareups of violence that could leave them homeless, beaten, raped, or murdered. These factors spurred waves of immigration of Jews from Russia to Western Europe, Palestine (then a neglected backwater of the dying Ottoman Empire), and the United States at the turn of the century.

But something about Kishinev shook the world.

American Jews, who until then had mostly been content to keep their heads down and get on with the business of building their lives and raising their families, organized protests and demonstrations. They delivered a mass petition protesting the slaughter to the State Department when Russian authorities refused to receive it.

The poet Chaim Nachman Bialik had turned 30 that year and was already known as one of the greatest Hebrew writers of his generation. At the behest of Odessa’s Jewish Historical Commission, he traveled to Kishinev after the pogrom to interview survivors and document what had happened.

Photo: Jewish National Fund photo archive.

His response, “In the City of Slaughter,” is worth reading in full. He wrote it in Hebrew, the Jews’ ancient language that had long been reserved for prayer and literature through centuries of exile and only in recent decades had, through the will of some determined men and women, undergone the extraordinary revitalization that would make it the spoken tongue of the Jews once again in their native land.

The poem cries out to the reader to bear witness, to know what happened in Kishinev. The images are stark and haunting: spattered blood and dried brains. The smell of new blossoms mingling with that of blood. The sunny weather of the incongruous spring that saw such slaughter. The Jew and his dog murdered with the same axe and flung onto the same heap. The baby searching for milk at the breast of its slain mother.

My Hebrew isn’t good enough to read the original, but even in translation, Bialik’s anguish burns through the page. And it’s not just anguish at the brutal fates of the innocent victims and at the evil men who did such things. His verses drip with contempt for those Jews who, in his telling, cowered and prayed and watched from a dark corner as their women were raped. How could they, the “sons of the Maccabees,” bear such shame, to do nothing in face of such a crime and then run to consult their rabbis on a question of Jewish purity law?

writes of this scene in his moving book Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn:

It makes no difference, of course, whether the scene as Bialik describes it ever took place. He was, after all, a poet and not a historian. What matters was his horror, both at what Europe was capable of doing and—because of the passivity that Jewish tradition had fostered in them—at what the Jews could not do.

…For Bialik, therefore, and for many of his contemporaries, the point of Zionism, of the return to the Jewish homeland, was not simply to create a refuge or to fix the “Jewish problem” in Europe. The reason that Jews needed to return to their land was that it was only there that the Jews could fashion a “new Jew.” It was time, he insisted, to re-create the Maccabees of old. It was time for the Jewish nation to be reborn.

Israel was the answer. Only in their own land could they be free to control their own destiny. Only in a nation of their own could they take whatever action necessary to protect Jewish lives—action that the rest of the world had proven it would not take. In the decades since Israel’s rebirth as a nation in 1948, some have claimed, out of ignorance or malice or antisemitism or some combination, that Israel was created because of the Holocaust. But that has it the wrong way around. The Holocaust, decades after Bialik wrote his searing poem, tragically confirmed what Zionists had long declared: that Jews needed to be free to decide their own fate in their own land, to fling open the doors as a refuge for the world’s Jews, to make the hard choices necessary to defend themselves and their children.

The Jewish state would be the only thing that could make the much-bandied-about slogan “Never again” not just empty words, but a promise.

And then the unimaginable. A pogrom of unimaginable scale and brutality. But not in 1903, a world without a Jewish state, and not in Tsarist Russia, but in Israel itself.

Is pogrom the right word to describe what happened on October 7, when Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists poured across Israel’s border in search of Jewish blood? Massacre. Slaughter. No noun feels right. Adjectives, too, fail. Brutal, savage, barbarous. Nothing is enough. It’s been more than two weeks, and hundreds of victims’ bodies still aren’t identified. Hundreds remain hostages in Gaza, children and elderly among them.

New details constantly emerge about what the terrorists did in this bloodbath, the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. The crimes are unspeakable, but we must speak about them anyway. If nothing else, we can bear witness.

They carried plans instructing them to kill as many as possible, to use human shields, and to target schools specified by name. They slaughtered defenseless infants. They tied up children and their parents before burning them alive. They ripped open a pregnant woman and murdered her unborn child. They raped an untold number of women. They tortured, mutilated, and beheaded Jews. In 2023.

There were heroes, too. These Israelis were not the cowering men of Bialik’s poem. Parents hid their children in safe rooms and died fighting off the terrorists so that their little ones might live. Arab Israeli paramedics labored to save lives and lost their own in the process. A retired IDF general rushed south to save his son and his family who were under siege, fighting off terrorists and helping other survivors along the way. A 25-year-old kibbutz security coordinator led her fellow kibbutzniks in killing dozens of terrorists who had infiltrated their home.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Kishinev in the past two weeks (and I’m not the only one—I’ve seen it referenced recently in several essays and articles). Kishinev was a flashpoint for Jews and all who cared about humanity or civilization or basic decency in 1903 and for decades that followed. Its effects cannot be overstated. Kishinev, and Bialik’s anguished poem memorializing what happened there, seared the conscience and demanded recognition, memory, action.

I studied Jewish history, and I knew about Kishinev, but I was stunned a week or two ago to come across a reminder of the number of Jews who were killed in that pogrom: 49. Because day after day following October 7, I had watched with horror as the number of estimated dead from the massacre in southern Israel mounted: from 150, to 200, to 400, to 700, to 900, to 1,200, to over 1,400. And in Israel, where this wasn’t supposed to happen. How could this have happened?

I’m certainly not the one to answer that question. There will be reckonings of intelligence and security failures that allowed this catastrophe to happen. I’m not qualified to assess any of that.

But I can bear witness. To the evil that terrorists committed against innocent men, women, and children because of the hatred for Jews that consumed their hearts and rotted their brains, the world’s oldest hate that still hasn’t died. To the trauma of living Israelis—Holocaust survivors and their IDF veteran grandchildren, immigrants from all over the world, secular kibbutzniks and Haredi scholars volunteering for the IDF—reckoning that it can, in fact, happen in Israel, too. To the moral bankruptcy of the ghouls who celebrated the terrorists’ slaughter of Jews as a victory of “resistance” and “decolonization.” To the media outlets who, as the victims of Hamas’s bloodbath were still being tallied, rushed to print that same terrorist organization’s false accusations about Jews killing innocents on their front pages (yes, that same blood libel where we started).

For those of us outside Israel, who do not have to put our lives and those of our children on the line not out of some ideology but out of a simple battle for existence, bearing witness is the least we can do.

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This is part 3 of an ongoing series. Read part 1 and part 2.

As the war engulfed Europe and the United States entered the fray, American Jews continued to give their government, especially President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the benefit of the doubt. They believed in the President, seeing him as a friend and an ally, and trusted that he knew best and would do the right thing, whatever that may be. Analyzing the Jewish press of the time, Haskel Lookstein finds that the Jewish attitude toward President Roosevelt “was reverential and subservient, obsequious in requests and fawning in gratitude for small favors… a basic confidence on the part of American Jews in his leadership and a fundamental trust that somehow, in some way, Roosevelt would do what had to be done.” During a tense time of fervid wartime patriotism, America’s Jews didn’t feel secure enough to protest Roosevelt’s handling of the war and the European Jewish crisis, whether or not they agreed with it. Any “act of civil disobedience would have been directed ultimately against the President. This was unthinkable to Jews at that time. Whatever the President’s failings, Jews believed that in a world filled with enemies, Roosevelt represented the best that Jews could hope for.” 

Having overwhelmingly supported Roosevelt, American Jews could or would not paint him as their enemy. They instead focused their animus on the State Department. Breckinridge Long, architect of the State Department’s rescue policy and one of the major obstacles to rescue efforts for refugees or humanitarian adjustments to American immigration policies, viewed his own “fight against the refugees as primarily a battle against Jewish Communist agitators who were trying to ruin his political career.” For the American Jewish community, he was a much more palatable opponent than heroic, popular Roosevelt. Henry L. Feingold writes that the American Jewish community “rarely directly questioned the sincerity of Roosevelt. They preferred to attack the State Department, which was being used by Roosevelt as a foil.” Indeed, the State Department’s obstinacy contributed enormously to the American government’s failure to act to save the Jews of Europe. 

Even today Franklin Roosevelt’s role regarding the Holocaust remains hotly debated and controversial. Here the point to note is the wartime Jewish community’s view of Roosevelt: he was their friend and ally, he represented the America in which they believed, and if they trusted in his leadership, all would turn out for the best. Their faith in America as Americans ultimately allowed them to distance themselves mentally from the imperiled European Jews.

There was yet another element to the question of identity, attitude, and allegiance during the Second World War for American Jews. They were concerned for their European brethren; they kept up with the news from Europe, fasted in solidarity, and engaged in activism to support the rescue effort. But for the most part, like other Americans, they were concerned about America’s role in the war. They wanted to see the United States win the war and defeat Nazi Germany, which so brutally oppressed, persecuted, and murdered their brethren. Aside from the obvious emotional aspect of their desire to defeat this enemy of the Jewish people, American Jews were strongly tied to the American forces as individuals. They weren’t supporting a foreign war from afar; rather, Jewish families sent their sons, husbands, brothers, and fathers off to war in their American uniforms. Families wanted to win the war, defeat Nazi Germany, and see their boys come home safely. Given this personal dynamic, it is not altogether surprising that the “Roosevelt administration’s argument that a quick victory was the best way to save the Jews was not directly challenged by American Jewry. Given the patriotic fervor of American Jewry and fear of the accusation that Jews were fighting for an ethnic rather than a national interest, it was difficult for Jewish leaders to oppose the administration’s argument. For most American Jews, winning the war—not the rescue of their brethren—received priority.” 

For American Jewish soldiers especially, the experience of serving in the American military, fighting Nazi Germany, and sometimes even personally liberating concentration camps necessarily separated them from European Jews. As American soldiers, they had proved and validated their own place in American society and found a sense of belonging as Americans, not primarily as Jews. “Military service had empowered Jews as Americans and as Jews, and secured their future,” writes Deborah Dash Moore, author of G.I. Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation. She explains: “When European Jews welcomed them as saviors, Jewish soldiers understood their own good fortune to be wearing the uniform of the armed forces of the United States. Notwithstanding the enduring evidences of racial and religious discrimination, they believed in the commitment of the United States to move toward equality.” Furthermore, “although they sympathized with their European co-religionists, American Jewish veterans recognized when they came home that despite the enduring antisemitism in the United States, the nation’s democratic premises promised Jews a decent future if they were ready to fight for it. The United States was not like Europe, and American Jews were different from European Jews.” 

Through the experience of fighting for their country side by side with young Christians who perhaps had never met a Jew before, American Jewish soldiers developed their sense of self as Americans. They felt what it was like to be part of America and to be on the winning side; they were helping to liberate the camps, rather than having to be liberated themselves. They were the victors, not the victims; they were at home in America in a way that Jews had never been at home in Europe.

This is part 3 of a series. Stay tuned for the next installment.

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On October 7, 2023, Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists infiltrated Israel in an unprecedented attack.

They slaughtered entire families, killing children in front of their parents and parents in front of their children.

They slaughtered babies in their cribs.

They gunned down young people who had gone to the desert to enjoy a music festival in cold blood.

They raped women next to the corpses of their murdered friends.

They burnt people alive.

They kidnapped hostages into Gaza, including mothers with babies.

They filmed themselves as they murdered grandmothers and posted the killings onto the victims’ own Facebook pages to make sure their families could see it.

You may or may not know all this already, depending on what media outlets you watch or read or who you follow on social media. Social media especially has been pretty enlightening in recent days. Many folks who rushed to display Ukrainian flags or post their solidarity for whatever else was the latest cause of the day have been…oddly silent. But there are some things worse than silence.

Chapters of “progressive” organizations rushed to declare their solidarity with Palestinian “resistance,” tweeting jaunty graphics of paragliders in tribute to the Hamas terrorists who took to the skies and landed in Israel to butcher Jews. Crowds in Sydney chanted “gas the Jews.” Dozens of student groups at the storied Harvard University signed onto a statement blaming Israel for the attack on its own people. These are just a few examples.

Bari Weiss summed it up in better than I could:

Now we know who would have looked at Jews shoved onto cattle cars and said, “Well, they did undermine the German economy.” Those are the people today saying: “This is a justified response to the provocation of Israel existing.” Now we know whose politics are rooted not in conservatism or liberalism or anything else other than simply hating Jews. Now we can see exactly how people manage to always come up with a reason for why the Jews deserved it. 

I’ve thought about this kind of thing a lot and for a long time. In our culture, the Holocaust has become a symbol for catastrophe and suffering, and the Nazis for evil. And with the overuse and abuse of Holocaust and Nazi metaphors, a symbol is all they are for many people. We have dozens upon dozens of books and films (some of them excellent, some abysmal) about the Holocaust. We’ve seen politicians comparing vaccine mandates to Nazi laws and young people entering into coronavirus lockdowns comparing themselves to Anne Frank.

Anne Frank herself has become a potent symbol for whoever wants to co-opt her memory for their particular cause. Or as an example of hope and inspiration, of someone who never lost faith in humanity.

But here’s the thing about Anne Frank that those people forget (or ignore, or just don’t care about). The story didn’t end with Anne declaring her undying optimism and living happily ever after. It ended with her getting murdered for being a Jew.

I think most people (except for literal self-declared Nazis who actually proudly declare their antisemitism) watch movies about the Holocaust and cringe at its horrors. They wonder how the Nazis and their allies could have sunk to such depraved depths. They imagine that if they had lived in that time and place, they would have been among the rescuers, never the murderers or the bystanders.

The horrors of the Shoah happened because of hatred of Jews. I’m sure in the 1940s, the people who herded Jews into ghettos or lined them up to shoot them alongside their families in the killing fields of the east or marched them into gas chambers figured those Jews had it coming, anyway.

That hatred is still alive. In 2023, Jews are still being tortured, raped, kidnapped, and slaughtered because they are Jews. Antisemitism never went away. As my friend says, there was a grace period after the Holocaust when antisemitism became unfashionable in public spheres. That time may be over.

Anyone who can look at the savagery of what terrorists did to innocent Israelis on October 7 and has even the impulse to justify or explain why those Jews, too, probably had it coming should at least be honest about their antisemitism.

Because of the nature of my work, I’ve seen and heard things in recent days that I can never unsee and will never forget. This doesn’t feel like the same world that we lived in on October 6. Things are different now. Or maybe it’s just clearer that we’re still in the same world we have always lived in, that nothing has changed.

In any case, the choice is clear. We have looked into the face of evil. Whether we call it by its name or not will show us who we are.

And then some of them did something crazy. They revolted against the greatest imperial power the world had ever known. They wanted to control their own destiny.

In that dusty corner of empire that the Jews called home, that small band of rebels put up a good fight. It took Rome years to put down the revolt, but put it down they did. They sacked and looted Jerusalem, the Jews’ ancient holy city, and destroyed the Temple.

The Jewish rebels, known as zealots, made their last stand at Masada, a mountaintop fortress on a desert plateau overlooking the Dead Sea. After years of fighting, at last mighty Rome decided to crush those stubborn Jews once and for all.

After a siege, the Jewish defenders knew the end was near. They chose to commit suicide rather than submit to Rome, knowing that the alternative was slaughter and slavery. They would serve no one but their own God. They would die free Jews in their own land rather than let their enemies kill them and lead their women and children off in chains to a life of humiliation and brutality.

After centuries of exile—pogroms, blood libels, expulsions, massacres, and the ultimate horror of the Shoah (the Holocaust)—the Jewish people at great cost won their freedom in their own land, and Israel was reborn.

Masada became a potent symbol for the reborn state. Generations of soldiers were inducted into the Israel Defense Forces there. “Masada shall not fall again” became a slogan. No more would the Jews entrust their lives and their children’s lives to the goodwill of others. No more would they have to. They finally had the means to defend themselves in their own land and there would be no going back.

It’s been 75 years since the birth of the modern state of Israel, and many—far too many—are still not over it. That became all too clear in the past few days.

I’ve watched with horror as these nightmarish events have unfolded in Israel. Hamas, the terrorist organization that controls Gaza, and its allies committed a brutal act of war and terrorism. Palestinian terrorists massacred entire families—the death toll is still rising and is as of this writing over 700. They raped women who had gone to attend a dance party in the desert. They kidnapped over a hundred Israeli civilians, including mothers and babies, who are being held in Gaza.

And across the world, their supporters have cheered them on, painting this evil as justified “resistance.”

I know antisemitism is alive and well. I’ve spent my adult life studying and fighting it. But somehow I thought I would never in my lifetime see scenes like we’re seeing right now. For those of us abroad, it’s difficult to comprehend the scale and scope of the tragedy. Israel is a tiny and close-knit country. Among my Israeli friends, most of them know someone who has been killed or is missing. And that of course is on top of the long history of terror attacks and wars that the Jewish state has suffered in its relatively short modern life.

Israel is at war. It didn’t start this war, but I have no doubt it will finish it. It’s up to the rest of us to stand in solidarity with Israel, to call out antisemitism wherever we see it, and not to look away from evil.

The antisemitism American Jews feared wasn’t merely in their heads; it was very real. And it wasn’t only about their own well-being, comfort, and position in America that the Jewish community was concerned. Since the early 1920s, nativist sentiments had prevailed in American opinion, and newly-established immigration quotas kept out mainly Eastern and Southern Europeans, while allowing primarily Northern Europeans from the British Isles and Germany to immigrate. These quotas stood as one of the major obstacles to Jewish immigration. 

Adolf Hitler had argued that no country wanted the Jews, and the United States wouldn’t prove him wrong. American society had no desire to expand or abolish immigration quotas to allow into the country the persecuted Jews of Europe. Even after the horrifying pogroms of Kristallnacht in November of 1938, when Americans were outraged and tended to sympathize with the Jewish victims of Nazi oppression, American opinion was decidedly against taking concrete action to take in the Jewish victims. A full 77% of polled Americans opposed increasing the immigration quota of German citizens in 1938. The doors would remain closed, just as Americans wanted them.

American Jews, nevertheless, reacted strongly to Kristallnacht. Samuel Margoshes, a writer for the Yiddish newspaper The Day, conveyed the feelings of the Jewish community: “The Jewish masses are waiting to go out into the streets, to close their places of business, to stop all work, to declare a fast and to demonstrate to the entire world that we will no longer allow ourselves to be slaughtered by a barbaric regime.” In Bearing Witness: How America and Its Jews Responded to the Holocaust, Henry Feingold opines that Kristallnacht “may have shocked American Jews more than their German compatriots because they were totally unprepared to believe that the rights of citizenship associated with emancipation could be withdrawn.” 

Photo: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Better off and more at home in the United States than they had been in Europe, Jews were shaken to learn that even in a supposedly civilized, emancipated society, their rights could be taken away. There was never any lack of sympathy, fear, or outrage by American Jews on behalf of their suffering European brethren. What they lacked, however, was concrete, effective action, and this was generally due to their own views of their place within America. Naturally considering themselves as part of American society after several generations, they had faith in their own country. This was reflected in the newspaper the Forward in the wake of Kristallnacht: “‘America and other countries are not sending refugee aid,’ the Forward explained, ‘because such aid would play into the hands of the Nazis. The Christian world will find a place of refuge for the Jews. We may have trust in the civilized world.’”1 They had confidence that the “civilized world” to which they were loyal wouldn’t let them down; good would triumph over evil, in the end. 

The public outrage over Kristallnacht, in fact, infused the American Jewish community with a thread of hope and optimism: it told them that the Jews weren’t alone in the struggle against Nazi Germany. The community’s institutions clung to this hopeful idea. The General Jewish Council—which had been formed as an umbrella group for the American Jewish Congress, B’nai B’rith, and other organizations—issued a resolution on Kristallnacht: “Resolved that it is the present sense of the General Jewish Council that there should be no parades, public demonstrations, or protests by Jews.” This was justified by the explanation that the world’s outpouring of anger and outrage after Kristallnacht brought into sharp relief “an issue which goes far beyond the persecution and torture of a particular minority and that today it is civilization itself that is under attack. All Americans—Protestants, Catholics, and Jews alike—have reacted to these hideous accounts from abroad as a national calamity.”2 By issuing such a statement, the Jewish Council tried to erase the specifically Jewish element of the Nazi persecutions and make it a universal issue. 

Certainly, it’s helpful to break down cross-cultural boundaries by recognizing that suffering and persecution are universal human issues about which all people should care, regardless of race or religion. And it was understandable that the Jewish Council desired to ally and thus identify with Christian fellow Americans, emphasizing their common bond as Americans. But the Nazi persecutions were not universal—they were specifically targeting Jewish victims. By refusing to respond to the crisis as Jews, the General Jewish Council denied and diluted the specifically Jewish nature of the crisis in the eyes of the American people. Their desire to define and portray themselves as Americans, and not primarily nor specifically as Jews, would mark the Jewish community’s responses throughout the war.

This is part 2 of a series. Read part 3 here.

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