How Secure Do We Have to Feel Before the Unimaginable Becomes Possible?

How many more friends must I lose before the inevitable becomes reality?

I used to ask this during the AIDS crisis, when people were disappearing from our lives to a disease that sinister, that insidious.

Now I’m losing friends again — and so are most Jewish people I know — not to any illness, but to an ideology that doesn’t support my freedom to be a Zionist. Their views on my views are born of Qatar’s bankroll: huge sums thrown at American universities, Fashion Trust Arabia, and the film industry. People go where the money is. I get it, but I don’t respect it. Mostly, it makes me sad — because I’ve lost my closest, longest friendships over something they could never understand. The depth of my heritage sits right at my surface; they are generations removed from any persecution of their own.

Not all of them are antisemites. Some of them are even Jews, just radicalized beyond recognition.

And my life will never be the same.

Nobody threw me out of the “safe spaces” of the propagandized — no big scenes, no emotional pronouncements. I just stopped being welcome, and honestly? Relieved. It saves everyone the trouble of pretending. I used to be a fat kid; anything resembling the elephant in the room brings back........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)