I keep coming back to an uncomfortable thought: when something truly awful happens, many of us look for an explanation before we acknowledge what happened. But just as often, it functions as a way to steady ourselves—to keep from being overwhelmed by grief or horror. October 7: Bearing Witness to the Massacre refuses that escape. It asks us to do something much more basic and much harder—look first, name what happened, and only then decide what to think.

What October 7 exposed wasn’t just political disagreement or a lack of empathy. It revealed something deeper: a failure of moral recognition. For many people, the massacre didn’t register immediately as an atrocity at all. It showed up instead as something that needed sorting, balancing, explaining. That wasn’t because the facts were hidden. It was because Jewish suffering still seems to require conditions before it is fully believed. Violence that should have been unmistakable somehow became arguable.

You could see this almost immediately. Before the bodies were buried, the conversation shifted from naming the massacre to explaining it. This shouldn’t happen. What was extraordinary, from too many, criticism was leveled. Images of civilians hunted at a music festival and families dragged from their homes appeared next to words like “resistance” and “uprising,” as if the violence were still in doubt. The........

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