The Tolerance Epidemic

“Where are the women?”

When I was about ten, my Girl Scout troop, Troop 3484, stood on the corner of 77th Street and Central Park West chanting that question at passersby. Central Park had 23 statues of men and not one of a real woman. We donated $1,920 of our cookie money to the campaign to change that, a figure we chose because 1920 was the year American women won the vote. In 2020, a monument to Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton was unveiled on the park’s Literary Walk. I was enthralled by this: I, a 10 year old girl, just made a change that would impact New York City forever.

In the New York I grew up in, liberalism wasn’t merely a political position; it was the air we breathed. We were for everyone. We marched for women in pink hats and learned about Stonewall in school. We celebrated Pride every June, swapped Columbus Day for Indigenous People’s Day, signed petitions for refugees, and learned to check our privilege in mandatory affinity spaces before we learned to drive. Diversity wasn’t something we tolerated; it was something we celebrated, loudly and often. At my high school, voting Republican wasn’t controversial so much as unthinkable. We were the open-minded ones. It often felt like the point of our education.

October 7, 2023 tested this assumption for me. Since Hamas’s attack on Israel, I have watched much of the progressive world I was raised in––on campus, in the media, in politics––abandon its own principles the moment the victims were Jewish. This hypocrisy rests on something my generation seems to have forgotten: how recently, and at what cost, our own freedoms were won.

American women have voted for barely a century. Black Americans were beaten, jailed and killed for civil rights within my grandparents’ lifetimes. The Stonewall uprising was in 1969; same-sex marriage became legal nationwide in 2015, when I was in elementary school. My best friend’s parents fled Iran in 1982: from war, from antisemitism, and from being stripped of their freedoms. Her mother was made to chant “Death to America, death to Israel” every morning at school. These aren’t history lessons. They are dinner table stories, told by people still alive to tell them.

The philosopher Karl Popper understood how fragile such freedoms are. Born in Vienna to a family of Jewish descent, he escaped Austria before the Nazis arrived, and in 1945 he published The Open Society and Its Enemies. In it, he described the paradox of tolerance: a society that tolerates everything, including the intolerant, will eventually be destroyed by them. Popper did not argue for silencing ideas he disliked. As long as intolerant views could be met with argument, he thought suppressing them would be unwise. The problem occurs when the intolerant refuse to argue at all: when they teach their followers that reason itself is a trick, and begin to answer words with violence. At that point, he argued, a tolerant society must claim the right not to tolerate them.

The liberalism I align with is not a tolerance for everything, it is a set of specific convictions: that women are equal to men, that people may love whom they love, that disagreements are settled with words rather than violence. A liberalism that can no longer tell a protester from a gunman, or a woman’s account of her rape from the propaganda of the men who raped her, has not become more tolerant. It has stopped believing in anything.

In January of 2024, three months after October 7, my father and I visited Kibbutz Be’eri in Israel, a few kilometers from the Gaza border. Be’eri was a community of people who believed in coexistence. For them, living just meters from Gaza was an active choice; a vision of peace, a belief so strong they based generations of families there. Vivian Silver, a co-founder of the peace movement Women Wage Peace, was one of its residents. She spent years arranging rides for sick Gazans to Israeli hospitals. On October 7, she was one of hundreds of residents brutally murdered in their own homes, while dozens more were taken hostage into Gaza.

The mud pulled at my shoes as I walked through the kibbutz, each home plastered in bullets, decimated with bombs, or burnt down. I inspected each house, taking note of kitchen appliances left behind, and spotting children’s books in the rubble. One book, left open, showed a picture of an elephant and a giraffe: גִּ’ירָפָה, it read. “Giraffe”. There was a smell I had no word for at first. Then I did: it was death, and it had soaked into the ground. In the distance, I could hear the war. Bombs, every few minutes. The soldiers we met each described that morning from their own perspectives, pointing to the walls they hid behind so we could attempt to visualize how they survived. They all emphasized one point: the attackers came prepared, with memorized mental maps of the kibbutzim, knowing exactly which homes had children and exactly where the safe rooms were.

We took a bus to the site of the Nova music festival. On the way, our phones began to blare: Red Alert, the warning that a rocket is incoming. This close to Gaza, it gives you seconds to prepare. Through the window, I saw a dark object streaking across the sky. We scrambled off the bus and into a small concrete shelter on the side of the road, packed in like sardines, and I watched the Iron Dome intercept the rocket overhead. We filed out in silence and climbed back onto the bus. Then our guide spoke: “That shelter you were just in was packed with people fleeing the festival. It was bombed by terrorists, everyone inside was murdered.”

For the first time, I could truly feel the fear.

At the site of the Nova music festival, near Kibbutz Re’im, more than 360 people were murdered. We stood in an open field of desert ringed by thin trees. As I silently walked the grounds, I recalled survivor testimonies I had watched and read, and I could picture it all: women were raped against the trees around us. Some were stabbed while it happened; some were shot as they ran. Thousands of young men and women ran for their lives with nowhere to hide. In the survivors’ testimony, and in the attackers’ own footage, you can hear what the gunmen were shouting as they hunted them: “Allahu Akbar”. The photographs at the memorial showed girls my age, girls who looked like my friends, who had come to the desert to dance until sunrise. They were hunted.

I went back to America deeply changed. I did not witness the killing. I saw what it left behind and heard it from those who lived through it, and that was enough. This attack was the work of men who hated life itself: men who hunted young people at a dance party, raped women, and burned families in their homes. That hatred belonged to Hamas, not to the people they slaughtered, and not to the Palestinians they claim to fight for.

Then I watched the response––or rather, the silence of the people who I once marched with. UN Women, the United Nations agency dedicated to gender equality, stalled for nearly two months before explicitly condemning the sexual violence (The Guardian). A hashtag, #MeToo_Unless_UR_A_Jew, spread to name the double standard. In March 2024, a UN report found “reasonable grounds” to believe that rape and sexual violence occurred on October 7. For a movement built on the words “believe women,” this prolonged hesitation was telling.

It became increasingly clear to me, as every accusation against Israel was believed instantly and the women raped at Nova were met with silence, that there was no other explanation for it but mere hypocrisy. People who taught me that silence is complicity went silent. A movement that taught me to believe survivors demanded more of these survivors than of any others.

The double standard extends far beyond Jews. In 2022, a 22-year-old woman named Mahsa Amini died in the custody of Iran’s morality police after being arrested for wearing her headscarf too loosely. This January, the same regime slaughtered tens of thousands of its own citizens in just two days for protesting, according to human rights groups. In Afghanistan, the Taliban force women to cover themselves from head to toe, bar girls from school past sixth grade, and have made it illegal for a woman’s voice to be heard aloud in public. In China, an estimated one million or more Uyghur Muslims have been held in detention camps. Where was the outrage? For them, there were no encampments, no walkouts, no chants on the Diag. Instead, in the same crowds that once wore pink hats in support of “pussy power”, protesters chanted their support for the “resistance” that raped women at Nova. At what point should our tolerance cease?

Read today, Popper’s paradox sounds less like a theory and more like a warning, one he wrote from experience. Tolerance was never meant to stretch so far that it excuses the men who raped and murdered young women at a music festival, while withholding sympathy from the women themselves. We are spending our tolerance on the wrong people.

This summer I returned to Israel. One evening in Florentin, a neighborhood in south Tel Aviv, I heard the Muslim call to prayer drift over from Jaffa. Nobody on the street looked up. It was simply part of the city’s sound, like a church bell in New York. I thought about the videos on my phone back home, which had taught me to expect something entirely different.

Back in my daily life between New York and Ann Arbor, I am surrounded by people my age who enjoy more freedom than almost anyone in human history: to protest, to speak, to love whom they choose, to walk home at night. Many of them use it to chant about a place they have never seen. In a commemoration walk of October 7th just last week, our peaceful memorial was met with screams of “Free Palestine” from afar, and police officers surrounding us in protection. When Berkeley political scientist Ron Hassner surveyed 250 college students in 2023, most supported “From the river to the sea,” but fewer than half of those supporters could name the river or the sea (Hassner, Berkeley). That is not a failure of intelligence. It is a failure of curiosity, and of education.

My generation is a perpetual thumb-flick away from a new opinion. A sixty second clip, cut and scored to make us angry, arrives already knowing what we should think. We share it before asking who filmed it, what was edited out, or what happened in the minute before the camera started rolling. Our feeds reward certainty, and certainty is the opposite of curiosity. Standing in Be’eri, I learned what no article or video had taught me. The smell. The sounds. I came home expecting answers, and instead I came home with questions: who were these families, what did they believe, what would I have done, what am I still not seeing? That is the gift of experience. Not certainty, curiosity.

This is the habit we are losing. Not the ability to form opinions, but the patience to earn them: to read past the headline, to talk to the person who disagrees, to look up the map before chanting about it.

So I pose a question to my peers: are we forgetting what our grandparents fought for, and why they fled? Or are we so privileged that we have never stood close to death, never lived through a war or a loss so graphic it stays etched in our vision? Freedom that is inherited rather than won begins to feel innate: always there, never earned, never noticed. Perhaps this is the Achilles’ heel of this generation: safety so complete that we can treat other people’s suffering as a slogan, or a cause for the semester. My best friend’s mother never had that luxury in Iran. Neither did the women at Nova.

The statue my troop helped fund still stands on the Literary Walk. Bronze does not move with the crowd, and values are supposed to work the same way. I am a feminist. I believe gay people deserve to live freely, everywhere. I believe in human rights, which is exactly why I reject a version of them with an exception for Jews, or for women living under regimes it has become unfashionable to criticize.

I am not asking anyone to stop marching. I am asking them to remember those that marched, and fled, and rebuilt; to learn the map before they chant about it; and to hold Tel Aviv, Tehran and their own campuses to the same standard.

Let us not become the generation that inherited every freedom and forgot what it cost.