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.
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