The Day After

Yesterday, we remembered. Yesterday, we mourned.

We remembered those who were dancing in the desert, those who were celebrating Simchat Torah, and those who were simply sleeping in their beds. Families waking up to a holiday morning. Parents protecting their children. The young and the old, men and women, children and grandparents. Jews, Muslims, Christians, Israelis and foreign nationals.

Terror did not stop to ask who they were, what they believed, where they came from, or whom they prayed to.

Yesterday was October 7. Today is October 8. And we need to talk about the day after.

Because history remembers dates: September 1, 1939. November 9, 1938. September 11, 2001. October 7, 2023.

We remember the day the planes hit. The day borders were crossed. The night the glass shattered. The morning the music stopped.

But history is also written the day after. When the smoke is still rising. When the dead have not yet been buried. When families are still waiting for names. When nobody yet knows what the event will become.

The day after is when shock begins to turn into narrative. When people decide what happened, what it means, who deserves sympathy, who deserves blame, and sometimes, before the blood has even dried, whose suffering requires an explanation.

October 7 was the day something broke. October 8 was the day I began to understand that the breaking would not stop there.

In Jewish mourning, when we lose someone close to us, we tear a garment over the heart, a ritual known as keriah (קריעה). The tear is visible. We do not hide it. For a time, we live inside that broken garment.

Three years later, I sometimes feel that this is what we have been doing since October 7. We work in it. We raise our children in it. We celebrate birthdays in it. We travel, laugh, argue, fall in love, complain about ridiculous things, make dinner, answer emails.

We live. But the tear is still there.

I am the granddaughter of four Holocaust survivors. I grew up in Paris with the Shoah woven into my family history: the stories, the silences, the people who were missing. And yet, somehow, it still belonged to another time. Their time.

October 7 collapsed that distance. Suddenly, history did not feel safely behind us.

And October 8 taught me something else: the aftermath of an event can change us almost as profoundly as the event itself.

Before Israel had buried its dead, before families even knew whether their loved ones had been murdered, kidnapped, or were still hiding somewhere, before we had begun to comprehend what had happened, the explanations began. The qualifications. The “yes, but.”

And Jews thousands of miles away from Israel were already being asked to answer for a war that had not even begun.

There is room to grieve Palestinian suffering. There is room to criticize Israeli governments and Israeli policies. There is room for anger, disagreement, and moral outrage.

But what I was not prepared for was how quickly the murder of Jews could become an argument about Jews. How quickly grief could require a defense. How quickly compassion could come with conditions.

And then the language changed.

Holocaust. Genocide. Camps. Nazis. Extermination.

Words I had known all my life. Words I hear constantly in my work recording the testimonies of Holocaust survivors.

Suddenly, they were everywhere. Except now, they were being turned toward us.

Israel was compared to Nazi Germany. Gaza was described through the vocabulary of the Holocaust. “Genocide” became not only a grave legal and moral accusation, but a word shouted on campuses, carried on signs, and repeated endlessly online.

There are serious questions about the conduct of war. There is unbearable Palestinian suffering. There are accusations that must be examined seriously, according to facts and law.

But I am talking about something else.

I am talking about what happens when history becomes vocabulary before it becomes understanding.

I have sat across from people who were deported in cattle cars. People who were numbered. People who survived ghettos and concentration camps. People whose parents disappeared into gas chambers.

And I watched words describing their lived experience travel across continents and generations, flatten into slogans and, at times, be hurled back at Jews.

Perhaps this is one reason I have never felt more Jewish. Not more religious. More Jewish.

Because after October 7, it sometimes felt as though Jews were being asked not only to defend Israel’s very right to exist, but to defend our own history. To explain what these words meant. To argue for distinctions I once assumed everyone understood. To insist that history matters precisely because words matter.

That does not mean October 7 was another Holocaust. It was not.

History does not have to repeat itself to echo.

And three years later, perhaps that is what troubles me most. Not that the past has returned unchanged. It hasn’t. But some instincts are disturbingly familiar.

The instinct to explain Jewish suffering before mourning it. To make Jews everywhere answer for the actions of a government thousands of miles away. To turn history into analogy before allowing the present to be understood on its own terms. To decide whose suffering deserves uncomplicated compassion.

And this is where we are now, three years later.

We have marched. We have mourned. We have argued. We have watched friendships fracture and institutions struggle to find words. We have seen extraordinary solidarity and breathtaking cruelty. We have watched Israelis and Palestinians bury far too many people.

And somewhere along the way, many of us became different. I did.

For years, I have recorded Holocaust survivors because I know we are racing against time. But today, when I sit across from one of them, I am thinking less about preserving the past for its own sake and more about the young person who will one day inherit it.

What will they understand? What will they recognize? What will they do when hatred no longer looks like the black-and-white photographs in their history books?

That is why I have become increasingly uncomfortable with the phrase “Never Again.” Not because I reject it. Because we have too often treated it as a conclusion when it was supposed to be an instruction.

Memory alone does not protect us. Museums do not protect us. Testimonies sitting unwatched in archives do not protect us.

And education that teaches young people only what hatred looked like in Europe in the 1930s, without teaching them to recognize prejudice, dehumanization, and collective blame in their own time, is not enough.

So where are we today?

Still grieving, yes. Still angry, often. Still profoundly divided. But still here.

And I do not want October 7 to teach us only to be afraid. I do not want Jewish identity to become a permanent state of defense. I do not want Palestinian suffering to become something Jews are afraid to acknowledge, or Jewish suffering something others feel compelled to qualify.

I want us to remember without becoming prisoners of memory. To disagree without dehumanizing. To defend our history without weaponizing someone else’s. To recognize suffering without first asking whose side it belongs to.

Maybe that is what the torn garment means to me now.

Jewish mourning does not ask us to wear it forever. Eventually, we take it off.

But the tear happened. The fabric will never be exactly what it was before.

Neither will we.

October 7 tore something open.

October 8 taught us that the world would not give us time to mend it before pulling at the tear.

Three years later, I am no longer asking whether we can become who we were before.

We cannot.

I am asking what we will carry forward: the fear, the anger, the grief, or the responsibility that comes with remembering.

Because perhaps history is not shaped only by what happens to us on the days we never forget.

Perhaps it is shaped by who we choose to become the day after.