Attracting Trolls for Writing While Jewish

An antisemite slings Yiddish; Plus, the cure for the anti-Jewish literary blacklist.

I hate to give an antisemitic troll oxygen like this, but here’s a snapshot of what it’s like to commit the crime of Writing While Jewish:

One friend did comment on how this bigot managed to include some Yiddish words, to which I replied with the perfect Yiddish curse for this situation: "Gay kocken offen yom." "Go shit in the ocean."

I get emails like this a few times a month, and even more on social media. The thing about this one, though, is that she (there was a female name attached to it) was not responding to anything I wrote. It was what I chose to run in Judith Magazine, where I’m nonfiction editor. In case you’re not familiar with Judith, it’s a publication launched by my colleague and friend

Elissa Wald

as a safe space for Jewish voices in light of the current blacklist.

I ran a wonderful piece written by author and poet Matthew Lippman, who managed to explain the unexplainable—the pull Israel has on Diaspora Jews. It’s not just what he said, but the way he said it. If you have a few minutes, I highly recommend taking a look.

We Walk Sightless Among the Miracles

That was too much for this antisemite to handle, apparently, and emailed me two days in a row.

When I get letters like this, I go through many stages of anger, amusement, annoyance, and finally just a tinge of laughter at the thought that this would deter me in the slightest from writing about antisemitism.

And, speaking of laughter, I’m going to use that as a segue to the next topic, which was an online literary event I participated in thanks to author

Julie Zuckerman

. It was a live online event called Literary Modiin.

At one point, Julie asked how it feels to have our books out there in the post-October 7 world. I said that I wrote my book before October 7, 2023, and it included some humor. In fact, most of my writing used to contain a little bit of humor, or my attempts at it. But since October 7, nothing has been funny to me. So, it’s good to go back and reread my book, now that I’m promoting it, just to remember what it was like to have a sense of humor.

“Today, I’m not sure I could have written this same novel,” I said. “It’s optimistic. It imagines a world where two people with deep differences—culturally, spiritually, emotionally—still find something lasting between them. The story is a snapshot, not only of Jake and Cait, but of where my mind was at that time.”

I felt a little out of place in this forum, amid authors who wrote about the Holocaust and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and there I was with my summer-romance beach read! But I think I also showed that there’s more to Found and Lost: The Jake and Cait Story in its examination of faith, music, and the passage of time. It asks the question, “What if your beshert is not exactly what you thought they’d be?”

By the way, if you’ve read the book and enjoyed it, please leave a review on Goodreads or Amazon!

I read an excerpt of my book, talked about the difference between “plotters and pantsers,” and repeated wisdom I heard at a writer’s conference in Los Angeles a couple of months ago when it comes to the blacklisting of Jewish writers. I said:

“Show that even though the so-called wisdom out there is that no one wants to hear from Jewish or Israeli voices, Jews actually do buy books, and we do write books. Strange, but true. So, when you hear an agent saying there’s no market for them right now, prove them wrong. Of course there’s a market for Jewish books because we read them, we write them, and we buy them.”

You can watch the whole thing here:

Finally, like everybody in the Jewish world (and, hopefully, sane people in the non-Jewish one), I mourn the murder of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim in Washington, DC. Many of us have seen this kind of escalation coming for years. In 2021, I wrote: “Antisemitism is at its most deadly when it comes cloaked in righteousness.” May their memories be a blessing.