There is a meme, its source a satirical Clickhole article: “Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made a Great Point.” It’s been lodged in my brain ever since seeing the news that U.S. president Donald Trump was on the cusp of bringing the remaining living Oct. 7 hostages home from Gaza to Israel. Once I read that he had (there were Jewish holidays, but being secular, I stayed glued to the news), that there were living hostages whose unimaginable nightmare could begin to end, I was I suppose too stunned to say anything.

No, Trump does not personally get full credit for the ceasefire and hostage return, but even outlets unlikely to fawn are in partial gotta-hand-it-to-him mode. And no, this ceasefire is not a permanent peace in the region. The war has not entirely stopped. But even a permanent resolution of the conflict, even some impeccably drawn borders that miraculously make everybody happy, none of this would bring the Bibas boys and their mother back to life, nor the thousands of others, Palestinians and Israelis and more, who’ve been killed on Oct. 7 and beyond. There’s no ‘well that’s over with, onward and upward’ possible. Hamas and certain Israeli higher-ups are going to need to do a bit of truth-and-reconciliation. The injured and displaced will still need help. Israel will need to regroup, internally and image-wise. Jews the world over will need to live with knowing the feelings about us that simmer below the surface until they don’t.

But there’s a reason the “heartbreaking” meme is where I’m stuck. As I have spelled out in columns and podcasts, I am no fan of how the Trump administration has approached things generally (vaccines!) and things Jewishly in particular. I don’t think slashing education funding, whether Jewish Studies or some random biology department, is plausibly good-for-the-Jews. Nor do I see the benefit, to Jews or indeed to anyone, of abducting pro-Palestinian university students, of making martyrs out of student protesters. And on a zoomed-out level, there’s not much good for Jews in the rise of a new right-wing nativist populism, of an America that favours white........

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