When Silence Speaks: Friendship, Faith, and The Longest Hatred

“Jews are evil until proven otherwise; anti-Jewish racism is totally cool.” —Dara Horn*

It’s become impossible to ignore that Jew-hatred on both the right and the left draws from the same ancient playbook. The book cover changes, but the story doesn’t.

On the left, many people talk about Israel as though it isn’t there, deciding its fate without ever speaking to Israeli Jews. In those circles, American Jews are treated as stand-ins for Israel itself. Dual loyalty isn’t implied anymore, it’s assumed.

Of course, anyone can be deeply critical of Israel’s policies, Israelis are. I am very critical in these pages. But to speak Israel into non-existence is something else entirely. Israel’s existence isn’t about “rights.” It’s about survival. The very people who now say Israel should not exist descend from those who expelled and murdered Jews. Close to a million Middle Eastern and North African Jews fled to Israel upon expulsion from Arab lands. There was no where else to run. Shoah survivors were kept in European DP camps for years after the Holocaust, no one wanted them. Israel took them. Israel absorbed tens of thousands of Jews making an exodus from antisemitism in Ethiopia, a million Jews running from Russian Jew-hatred in the 90’s just as today it is absorbing thousands of French Jews leaving terrorizing antisemitism, and perhaps soon thousands of Dutch Jews escaping rising Netherland Jew-hatred.

You can hear the echoes from Europe’s yesterday and the Middle East in hoping to rescind Jewish self-determination. How is that not a kind of epistemic genocide, an imagined world where Jews simply have no place? We don’t have to imagine it. We (and they) know what that looks like. (Note: I also support Palestinian self-determination.)

The Quiet Between Conversations

Lately, I’ve been thinking about two friends I’ve known for years, people whose minds I admire and whose hearts I trust to beat alongside mine, even through disagreement. Our talks used to last for hours, looping through politics, faith, and all the contradictions that come with both.

Not long ago, I told one of them, Riley, that their comments about Israel and American Jews troubled me. Riley has long argued that Israel’s very existence is a crime. It wasn’t the politics that hurt; it was the silence about antisemitism, as if hatred toward Jews were somehow self-inflicted or deserved. I said this not in anger, but with care.

The second friend, Brooks, is different – warmer, curious, but lately more admiring of figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson, drawn to their anti-Zionism. I said, “If you respect them for that, you must also confront their antisemitism.” Brooks brushed it off: “It’s just politics.” That phrase said far more than intended.

After that, two months ago, the calls stopped. Since then all living hostages have been returned to Israel, the IDF has stopped bombing & most shooting, and has backed up quite a bit in what is a tenuous cease fire. Not a word of protest from them or anyone on the left on behalf of the Palestinians Hamas has recently executed post cease fire, and those it will soon execute. Not a peep of protest against Hamas murdering its own citizens. It can’t be less clear: the majority of American leftists hate Israeli Jews more than they care for Palestinian lives. As for my friends, eight weeks of silence isn’t long in the ordinary world, but in close friendship, absence is loud.

What Silence Reveals

What stays with me isn’t just their silence, but what it reveals. In these past years, through MAGA rallies, conspiracy threads, and campus chants, one non-Jewish friend has asked how I’m holding up with the hatred from the left and being used by the right to serve an authoritarian agenda. He understood. Jews have vertigo, today. That small act of empathy shows me how possible it is to care, and how rare it’s become in the circles of non-Jewish friends.

Looking back, I see now that much of my friendship with Riley and Brooks revolved around Judaism as a topic, a subject, not as something living in me. They wanted to talk about “the Jewish question,” not about Jewish life. When I asked Riley to write something condemning right-wing antisemitism, or Brooks to speak out against Marjorie Taylor Greene, not publicly, just for me, both refused. Their lines were drawn in silence.

I learned long ago, in another career, that silence itself is communication. In business, in negotiation, you’re trained to listen to what isn’t said. Silence tells you where you stand. It hides from confrontation, sometimes hiding from both truth and lies, too.

My affection for them doesn’t erase my disappointment. Love doesn’t guarantee understanding. It certainly doesn’t promise trust. Sometimes friendships reach a quiet place, not an ending, exactly, but a pause where the words run out and the truth quietly remains.

And I wonder about Hannah Arendt, if that quiet hints at something larger. As Hitler’s voice grew louder, her non-Jewish friends grew quiet. They simply stopped being her friends. They didn’t argue. They just fell silent.

I’ve been listening to that silence again.

*Dara Horn, Jewish novelist and author of People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present said this on the Times of Israel Podcast, What Matters Now To Author Dara Horn: Why Jews Are The Eternal Scapegoat, hosted by Amanda Birschel-Dan.