How to Talk About Israel with Non-Jews
After a breakthrough dinner, I realized I didn't have to avoid the subject
This essay is part of a new collection of work inspired by the anthology On Being Jewish Now: Reflections of Authors and Advocates. Want to contribute? Instructions here. Subscribe here.
I never want to talk about Israel. Or, to be more precise, I never want to talk about Israel with my non-Jewish friends.
Years before the October 7 attack and the Gaza war, a non-Jewish friend said to me, with heat in her voice, that she didn’t think it was antisemitic to support the Palestinian cause and oppose Zionism. Never one for conflict, I mumbled, “It’s complicated,” and changed the subject.
I didn’t think my friend was antisemitic. Still, criticism from someone outside the tribe felt like a stranger reprimanding my child. That was okay for me to do, but not anyone else.
My non-Jewish friend is like me: a child of the 1960s who left behind youthful activism and settled into life as a center-left Democrat. We agree on abortion rights and gun control; we abhor mass incarceration and worry about climate change.
If I weren’t Jewish, my stance on Israel might be as clear-cut as my opinion on the future of fossil fuels. The sins of the Occupation weigh on my soul—and always have. The death and destruction in Gaza have added pounds to that burden. I squirm when right-wing politicians trumpet support for Israel. How could I possibly stand on their side?
But I am Jewish. The cantor’s melodies and chants, the blare of the shofar and the sound of the rough Hebrew “ch” seeped into my bones in childhood. I sang “Hatikvah” at summer camp and brought a dime to Hebrew School every week so I could paste another leaf on the tree I was buying in Israel. I was raised with a syllogism, spoken with pride: We are Jewish; Israel is ours.
This deeply-felt logic had a desperate undercurrent: We needed Israel. Otherwise, we could be chased from our homes—and worse. History—distant from my life, but present in my grandmother’s talk of pogroms and in the tattooed numbers on our cantor’s arm—told us so.
I absorbed this lesson in Jewish history, but for years, it had little hold on my daily life. I visited Israel several times and belonged to a synagogue, but I led a secular life and was not involved in Jewish causes. Yet after the 2016 election, the Charlottesville rally, and the Tree of Life shooting, I found myself thinking about Kristallnacht, Spain’s expulsion of Jews, and my six-year-old grandmother hiding from marauding locals in a village in Eastern Europe. These images have been omnipresent in my mind since October 7, 2023, as I’ve listened to angry denunciations of the Jewish state and shouts of “from the river to the sea.”
Recently, my husband and I had dinner with our non-Jewish friends, Margaret and Ed. We chatted about travel and our kids before Margaret leaned across the table and asked: “Can we talk about Israel?”
As if of its own accord, my head swiveled toward my husband, Steve.
“I’m so antsy about how our non-Jewish friends feel about Israel, but I’m afraid to talk about it,” I had told him, earlier that day. Now, we had no choice.
“It’s complicated,” I answered Margaret. But this time, I plunged on. I told them about “Hatikvah” and my tree in Israel. They had heard about the horrible displacement known as the Nakba, but they didn’t know how it happened. Steve told them about the 1947 UN Partition Plan, which proposed dividing the land between Israeli and Palestinian states. Israel accepted the plan, and their territory was attacked by a coalition of Arab countries. We talked about the Jewish diaspora and tried to explain how the Zionist movement came about, while I made an internal note to brush up on the history. We told them about our families and their histories.
“My parents thought Israel was a miracle,” I said. They were the children of immigrants fleeing poverty and persecution. They had grown up with Jewish quotas and “restricted” hotels and clubs, and they never forgot that six million Jews were murdered in Europe while they came of age in the U.S. Israel was where we could go if things got bad again—and you could never be sure that they wouldn’t.
At the end of the evening, Margaret thanked us for the conversation. I hugged her. “I’m glad you brought it up,” I said.
I can’t deny my history and heritage, nor can I ignore the rights and suffering of others. I won’t stand for “Israel, right or wrong.” I have to live with “Israel, right and wrong.” The least I can do is talk about it.
Fredda Rosen is a non-fiction writer whose early work appeared in the Washington Post, Cosmopolitan, and the Philadelphia Inquirer, among other publications. She took a thirty-year detour from the writing life to lead a nonprofit organization that helped people with developmental disabilities find jobs and live in their own homes. Fredda is thrilled to be writing again. Her most recent work was published in Dorothy Parker's Ashes.
This essay is part of a new collection of work inspired by the anthology On Being Jewish Now: Reflections of Authors and Advocates. Want to contribute? Instructions here. Subscribe here.
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Thank you so much. It's such a hard time, isn't it? Supporting each other is the only way through.
Have you read Einat Wilf? Her views have given me a lot of clarity about what is really at play.