hey folks, this week’s newsletter pertains to the war happening in Gaza right now, as well as genocide more broadly.
while i don’t discuss anything graphic and i don’t show any images of warfare (modern or historic), if this is too much for you today, feel free to come back and read when you’re ready.
love you, friend.
I once had a pedagogy instructor insist that students cannot “unlearn” things. We can “re-teach” something a student has been previously taught to do poorly—say, constructing a sound thesis statement—but “unlearning” simply cannot happen. The student will always retain a portion of that mediocre skill, no matter what you say.
I took issue with this at the time, and I still kind of do. Because yes, I cannot go back in a time machine and make a student not learn how to do something the wrong way. But I can help them re-learn how to do it correctly, right? If we can’t actively un-learn something, does that mean we are always doomed to repeat mistakes? That our brains are not truly malleable, that we cannot change no matter what?
I’ve been thinking a lot about “unlearning” over the past six months since the October 7th attacks, specifically for us American Jews who grew up learning about, thinking about, and speaking about Israel. A lot of us, myself included, have been deconstructing what the idea of Israel is in relation to our identity, versus what is has been and what it has become.
And please note before we take even a fraction of a step forward here: what is happening to Palestinians right now is genocide. This newsletter is not about whether or not that’s what happening, because it is fact. This is systematic slaughter, destruction, and violence against the Palestinian people. What I want this newsletter to be is about is the necessary and vital pain and fear that comes with deconstructing narratives we have clung to, even when they no longer serve us.
This week, seven members of the chef José Andres’ humanitarian organization World Central Kitchen were murdered by members of the IDF while providing food and aid to Palestinians facing famine and destruction. Israeli president Netanyahu claims it was an tragic accident where innocent people were targetted, neglecting to mention the more than 30,000 innocent Palestinian civilians that have also died at the hands of the IDF.
I’ve been so disgusted by the news, the photos, and the videos coming out of Gaza the last several months, and this week’s news is just one more incomprehensible instance of unspeakable violence.
My silence the past six months in this newsletter, as complicit as I know it makes me, has been due to my own desire to un-learn and re-learn before I press publish on my writing about the subject. One look in my Substack drafts and you’ll see the digital version of crumpled up paper drafts littering the floor. It’s not so much that I have wanted to get it right, because I know won’t. I will offend someone. It’s that I want to make sure I’m in a place where I’m confident enough in my un-learning and re-learning that I can say what I wish to say.
I have been determined to keep writing about this, though, in part because of an experience I had in Armenia several years ago. Long story short, I taught creative writing in English for a year both remotely in person to a group of Armenian teenagers. It was an incredibly informative and rewarding gig, and I spent part of a summer in the beautiful capital city of Yerevan, Armenia.
A big part of my own preparation to teach these students involved learning about Armenian history, specifically the Armenian genocide of 1915 - 1916. If you haven’t heard of it, the Armenian genocide was the systematic displacement, torture, rape, and murder of Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman empire. It is believed that as many as 1.5 million were starved, raped, murdered, and tortured to death. A massive exodus of Armenians has created pockets of diaspora around the world, particularly here in the United States, Lebanon, and Syria.
But this genocide, oftentimes called the “first genocide of the 20th century,” has never been fully acknowledged by the perpetrators (modern day Turkey). While some foreign powers recognize that it happened, not all do. (I am not an expert on this topic, so if you’d like to learn more, I recommend seeking out reputable sources like this one or this one). The lengths the Ottoman government went to, however, to try and justify their actions without calling it genocide is galling, and in many ways, it echoes what Netanyahu has claimed about Palestinians and Hamas. The Ottomans claimed that Armenians were collaborating with their enemy, and that any murders that did occur were in the name of safety, despite the ample evidence to the contrary.
And when you are in Armenia, you feel the weight of this unacknowledged history. You can sense the absences nearly a century later. Students told me their family’s own stories of survival and displacement, heartbreak and violence, all of which have stuck with me, in no small part because my family’s story could have been similar had they not left Europe in the early 20th-century before the Holocaust.
I remember telling my dad when I got home how, in a very dark way, I felt lucky that the world recognized the Holocaust when it happened to the Jews. Even with fringe radical groups that continue to deny that the Holocaust ever happened, the world as a whole acknowledged what happened and called it what it was. There was no cultural or historical gaslighting in that sense—the trauma and pain of it could be brought the surface and reckoned with publicly, even if there was no one perfect way to do that.
I share this because to call what is happening now what it truly is—a genocide—is to make sure the Palestinian people aren’t also a tragedy hidden, in this case, right in front of our very eyes. And I never want a genocide to happen, period, but I most certainly cannot live with knowing a genocide is being carried out in the name of Jews like myself.
It has taken me a very long time to figure out how I want to say all this, because I’ve needed to un-learn and re-learn what I knew about Israel, Palestine, and American Jewish culture’s relationship to the two. To be raised a Jew in America for the past 75 years is to be told, over and over again, that Judaism and Zionism are one and the same, inseparable. In some circles, to question Israel is the question Judaism as a whole and betray your fellow Jews. No matter how well-educated I am or how much I would like to think I’m a critical thinker, it is a difficult and emotional task. And to give that former instructor of mine credit: it turns it is really, really hard to un-learn things that were drilled into you as a child.
Frankly, this kind of deconstruction will take more than six months for me to work through. But this week’s news is a reminder that in order to be humanitarian, we cannot grow callous to the human toll of war. And it’s not just the casualties, the torture, the assaults, the destruction, and the displacement. It’s also the violence that comes with denial and minimization of violence.
Just writing this draft is anxiety-producing, but compared to the terror and violence Palestinians are facing (and yes, for those who need me to say it, the Israeli hostages too), it is nothing. It is anxiety-producing because I fear disappointing and angering people in my life.
But it is not anxiety-producing because I am in danger. Far from it.
Sure, some folks I follow and otherwise agree with have posted antisemitic stuff on Instagram, or stuff I’d consider adjacent to antisemitism. I won’t pretend moving through the world with a Jewish last name is easy all the time either at this point.
But I also know where I stand, and I have seen what happens when you don’t call genocide what it is. And I care too much about future generations to let that happen. When this is one day taught in the history books, I at least want to be one of the people who believed those crying genocide, even if I alone could not be the one to stop it. It’s not enough, but it is something. And it is in keeping with what I was taught in Hebrew School: that we will never forget what happened to our people and never allow this to happen to any other people.
Does this make me self-loathing? My unlearning and reckoning is ongoing. It continues, even when it is uncomfortable.
I only pose this question because, as I’ve established already, un-learning and re-learning is rough. The process of doing so, however, has already made me more open-minded, more questioning, more generous. Which means it is working.
I have a long way to go still. And maybe you, too, are in the midst of it. If you are, you are not alone. It is a fraught space, but not a lonely one. And I’m right there with you.