The masks of 2026

This week, I landed in New York for a work trip that happened to coincide with NYC Pride Week. This wasn’t my first time experiencing Pride in the city, but my most vivid memory takes me back to 2020. I moved here just as COVID-19 hit the globe, arriving for a year-long fellowship in LGBTQ+ medicine.

If 2020 required us to constantly wear physical masks to protect ourselves from our environment, the aftermath of October 7 has forced a completely different kind of mask onto any Israeli walking the streets of New York. Especially those of us carrying overlapping, complex identities – LGBTQ+, Jewish, Israeli, and liberal Zionist. These current masks might be physically more comfortable, but beneath the surface, they are far more suffocating, sorrowful, and alarming.

As a specialist in infectious diseases, my entire profession revolves around studying and understanding viruses. But no vaccine from Moderna or Pfizer can stop the epidemic of 2026. This is a social contagion that has festered beneath the surface for years, waiting for the right moment to erupt. Post-October 7th, it was handed the ultimate legitimacy to finally burst into the light.

Since that dark October, I have visited New York several times. Each time, the seemingly innocent question, “Where are you from?” forces a deep breath. Even when opting for the softer alternative – “Tel Aviv” – a mental war ensues for a few agonizing seconds, trying to calculate how the other person will react. It doesn’t even matter how much of this anxiety is just in your head or how much of it is entirely real; the mere existence of this hesitation suddenly makes you feel apologetic about the place where you grew up. A place you spent your whole life believing could truly be the best place on earth to live – as an Israeli, as a Jew, and as a gay man, in whichever order you choose.

I meet friends who have lived in the city for years. In casual, fleeting encounters, they now prefer to say they are from somewhere else. Others, who have lived in the US long enough to possess an accent that masks their origin, suddenly choose to claim they were born and raised in America just to avoid the tension. These sights make you realize we have hit a dead end.

It feels like a double-bind. On one hand, your country is changing before your eyes. Its government has lost all sense of direction, compass, and conscience. While thousands of people are on the front lines, fighting an endless war whose strategic purpose was lost long ago, you find yourself abroad, forced to defend the Israel we deserve to have – not the one that currently exists. Stepping outside its borders to a place like New York reminds you of what you actually want to fight for: everything that Israel ought to be, and yet is becoming less of by the day.

On the other hand, this period exposes the raging epidemic of hatred and ignorance fueled by the social media era. It demonstrates with terrifying clarity how easily people can hate, how swiftly they flee from complexity, how effortlessly they are incited, and how often a shared hatred of the “other” becomes the ultimate social glue. This is true for us, it is true for them, and it is fundamentally true of human nature – which has seemingly forgotten that less than a century ago, even without algorithms and social media, this exact brand of dystopian hatred led to the attempted annihilation of an entire people.

Yet, amid this profound melancholy, there is perhaps one historical comfort: throughout history, they have tried to break us, and they have never truly succeeded. They won’t succeed this time either.

But to win on the outside, we desperately need a profound shift from within. A change that will allow us to bring all of our identities back to the forefront, and to say “I am from Israel” with our heads held high. This coming October, we face the most critical crossroads in our nation’s history – a junction that will determine exactly where we go from here.

Go vote. Fly back to vote. Do not forfeit the right and the duty to bring Pride back home, and to remind everyone – most of all, ourselves – that we deserve so much better. Both from within, and from without.