The Cry Outside My Window

Author’s note:
This piece was written in the diaspora, not in Israel. The “noise outside my window” refers not to rockets or sirens, but to the chants, slogans, and public atmosphere many Jews are encountering far from the front lines. It is part of a series of post–October 7 night entries — reflections on what it feels like to be Jewish now, shaped by a background that differs in important ways from the typical American Jewish experience.

Tonight, the noise outside my window feels louder than the noise inside my mind.

The chants — “Genocide!” “From the river to the sea!” “Death to the Jews!” — fury poured into slogans that flatten history, complexity, and human beings — travel across continents and land somewhere old inside me. Older than Israel. Older than October 7. Older even than my mother’s memories.

The rage I hear is not new.
It has a genealogy.

And tonight, that genealogy presses against the glass.

I. Echoes From a Century Ago

Kishinev was not the beginning of Jew-hatred. Nothing so neat exists in Jewish history. But Kishinev became infamous for revealing how quickly a society could ignite when resentment met conspiracy.

A blood libel rumor.
A newspaper campaign stoking suspicion.
Authorities quietly stepping aside.

And suddenly, a town that had appeared stable erupted into three days of murder and terror: dozens killed, hundreds wounded, Jewish homes destroyed. It was not unprecedented — only newly visible to a world that believed itself civilized.

I think of Kishinev tonight not for its statistics, but for its pattern:
how lies harden into permission,
permission into violence,
and violence into justification.

That pattern is why the shouts outside my window sound so familiar.

II. But My Own Beginning Is Closer: Graz, 1938

My mother, Fritzi, was fifteen when the Nazis marched into Graz.

Before she saw them, she heard them — the rhythm of jackboots echoing down the street, men singing a marching song she never forgot. She repeated it to me first in German, her voice tightening as she spoke:

“Wenn das Judenblut vom Messer spritzt…”
When the Jewish blood spurts from our knives…

She was a child hearing grown men sing about murdering her.

She watched the Graz synagogue burn.
She watched Jewish men rounded up.
She watched neighbors avert their eyes.

Her father — my grandfather Samuel — a decorated World War I veteran, tried to reassure the family he would be spared. He believed his medals protected him. He believed his service mattered.

He was wrong.

He was seized and deported to Dachau.

When he returned, his hair had turned white.
His body was gaunt.
His faith in human decency — the man who once believed in Esperanto, in universal brotherhood — had been broken.

Soon afterward, my mother was sent alone to Palestine. Fifteen years old, a refugee on Kibbutz Afikim, working in the fields, learning Hebrew, not knowing whether her family was alive.

This is not “history” to me.
It is the air I grew up breathing.

III. The South African Layer

People sometimes imagine apartheid-era South Africa as racially stratified but calm for Jews. That is not what I lived.

Antisemitism was woven through the white world — sometimes whispered, sometimes shouted, sometimes acted upon. Even earlier, when Lithuanian Jews arrived, government officials debated whether Jews counted as “white.” That debate alone reveals the atmosphere.

I grew up vigilant. I learned early that danger often came from those who looked most like me.

A few moments still live in my body:

• At thirteen, on a public bus, a boy called me a “fucking Jew.” I gave him two black eyes. Fighting in school uniform was forbidden, and though my school did not expel me, my parents sent me to boarding school in Oudtshoorn — where I encountered a more rural, unfiltered strain of Jew-hatred.

• In a collapsed rugby scrum, someone struck the back of my head and hissed, “Fokken Jood.”

• Years later, during my compulsory service in the South African army, another violent encounter left its mark — physical and otherwise.

And antisemitism was not only Afrikaner. The English carried their own version — quieter, but unmistakable.

I remember 1960 vividly: thousands marched from the Langa township into Cape Town. Schools closed; panic rippled through white neighborhoods. My mother, anxious, said:

“They’re going to blame the Jews.”

That sentence tells you everything about the world I grew up in.

IV. Two Walls in the Museum

On my last trip to Cape Town, I visited the South African Jewish Museum.

On one wall is a gallery of antisemitic graffiti — not crude scrawls, but detailed illustrations, clearly composed by a skilled hand: Jews with hooked noses, Jews clutching the globe, Jews depicted as parasites. To see such artistry weaponized is chilling.

Then you turn — and face another wall.

There hangs a framed statement from Nelson Mandela:

“In my experience, Jews were the first to recognize the injustice of apartheid…
They were more sensitive to racism because they themselves had experienced prejudice.”

Two walls.

One declaring Jews unfit for humanity.
One honoring them for their moral courage.

It felt like standing inside a single truth split down the middle — the Jewish story in two panels.

Because to be Jewish in this moment is to stand at the intersection of three forces:
1. Inherited trauma
2. Lived experience
3. Contemporary hatred dressed as justice

V. The Present Echo

And then there is the present — movements and regimes that speak not only of destroying Israel, but of destroying Jews.

Hamas, in its charter, does not merely call for Israel’s elimination. It names Jews as enemies of God, cites the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as fact, and teaches that killing Jews is a sacred act that “draws one near to God.”

Hezbollah declares that Jews everywhere — not only in Israel — are a global “cancer.” Its former leader, Hassan Nasrallah, once said:
“If they all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.”

The Iranian regime, through state clerics and televised sermons, refers to Jews as “microbes,” “contaminants,” “enemies of humanity,” and “animals with human faces,” echoing a vocabulary Europe once used with catastrophic consequence.

And the Houthis do not speak in code. They march beneath an official chant, taught even to children:
“Death to America, death to Israel, curse the Jews, victory to Islam.”

Not Zionists.
Not Israelis.
Jews.

This is not anti-Zionism.
It is doctrinal Jew-hatred rendered in religious, political, and genocidal terms.

VI. All the Timelines Collapse

Tonight, as the chants reach my window, four worlds fold into one:

• Kishinev, where rumor turned into license
• Kristallnacht, where my mother heard men sing of Jewish blood spurting from knives
• My own youth in South Africa, shaped by slurs, fists, vigilance, and fear
• The present, where armed movements list Jews as explicit objects of annihilation

These are not separate stories.
They are chapters in the same book.

No wonder the cry outside my window feels personal.
No wonder it feels addressed to me.

VII. Returning to the Window

I do not write this to collapse into despair.
I write it to stay honest.

What shakes me tonight is not simply the hatred in the streets — hatred is ancient — but how recognizably it echoes, how easily it awakens memory I never lived but nonetheless carry.

There is a moment when ancestral fear becomes personal.
And another when personal fear becomes historical.

Tonight, I stand at that hinge.

And a question rises — not rhetorical, not philosophical, but deeply lived:

How do I carry all this without letting it carry me?
How do I stay human without becoming hardened?
How do I resist hatred without being shaped by it?

I do not have the answers.

But I know this:

The cry outside the window is not the end of the story.
It is the beginning of the wrestling.

And wrestling — even when the night is long — is still a form of hope.