At The Free Press, Adam Louis-Klein writes:
After three months in a remote Amazonian village with no internet or phone signal, I returned to a small Colombian town on October 9, 2023—still in the rainforest, but now with internet—and checked social media for the first time. The jungle was still in my ears—squawking macaws, torrential rain, the low hum of a generator—when my screen filled with images from another world entirely: young people sprinting through dust and gunfire at the Nova music festival in Israel.
I had crossed between worlds, only to find that the world I returned to was no longer the same.
The deeper shock came in the hours that followed, as I scrolled through the reactions of friends and colleagues. Denial, justification, and open hostility toward anyone who expressed care for Israelis. I typed a simple phrase—Am Yisrael Chai, “the people of Israel live”—and learned that, in my circles of left-wing academia, that too was considered an act of aggression.
Almost immediately, I saw that a colleague had commented with a photo of people burning an Israeli flag. A former friend declared that my words revealed me as nothing but a “filthy Zionist.” Longtime intellectual collaborators informed me it was unacceptable to work with me given my support for the Jewish people. For them, even calling Jews a “people” was offensive and “right-wing.”
In the days following October 7, I was already experiencing what Marion Kaplan, in her study of Jewish life under Nazi Germany, terms “social death”—complete ostracization and the cutting of one’s previous social bonds. I was beginning to understand that to be a Jewish intellectual—to be a person who speaks in a Jewish voice, and who sees his fate as bound up in the collective fate of the Jewish people—was simply not something the academy could accept.
Read the rest of the essay, here.
