A Very Jewish Day

Margie had forgotten it was Wednesday. She was surprised to see me, but after we settled down and talked about the weather and the hummingbird at the feeder outside her eleventh-story window, she picked up today’s New York Times from the table next to her. There was a photo of a bombed-out building on the front page. Under the picture, the cutline says it is a Palestinian home. Margie said, “I don’t understand this. When it says Palestinian, it means Jews, right? Who is bombing the Jews?”

I explained the terms “Palestinian” and “Israeli.” I explained who is bombing who, and with whose bombs and planes and drones. She read he cutline again. “So when it says Palestinian, it means Arabs? It doesn’t mean Jews? Are you sure?”

It took us a couple of hours to get through the story, because Margie wanted to get it, and I wanted to emphasize that many Jewish people are opposed to the bombing of Palestine. “My father would have been against it,” she said. As I was zipping up my jacket to leave, she took my hand and said, “Thank you for explaining this to me. All my life, Jews have been underdogs. It’s hard to get it into my head that Jews are bombing other people, and with bombs made in America.”

I left Margie and walked to Powell’s Bookstore to use the gift certificate one of Sue’s sisters sent me for Christmas. I bought They Called Me a Lioness: a Palestinian Girl’s Fight for Freedom. The first sentence is, “I sit shivering in the tiny, freezing cell of an Israeli interrogation center, my wrists and ankles sore from the tightly clasped shackles digging into them.”

Then I caught a streetcar to Portland State University, to meet my friend and sometime-Blipper LaurieT. She invited me to join her for dinner and a film about a photographer, more about that in a minute. We were both feeling a bit mournful. She’s traveling by train up into Washington tomorrow for six days with two of her sisters and a memorial service for the mother-in-law of one of them.

The film was Vishniac, (film trailer in that link) a documentary about Roman Vishniac, who documented life in Jewish communities in Eastern Europe in the three years before Kristallnacht. Much of the film is narrated by Vishniac’s daughter. My blip is a shot I made of the film in progress, one of his very moving photographs. I’ve been interested in the work of Vishniac for years. I even went to New York in 2013 with my friend Devorah Greenstein to see a Vishniac exhibit. I was aware, throughout the documentary, that had I seen it before the 7th and 8th of October, 2023, I would have experienced fewer layers of meaning than I did today. Gazing at Vishniac’s portraits of children, and seeing news footage of bombed out buildings in what had been Jewish neighborhoods, I couldn’t help thinking about Palestinian children and completely flattened areas of Gaza.