In April 2002, at the height of the wave of Palestinian terror known as the Second Intifada, I was a high school senior in suburban Maryland. When the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations called a rally in support of Israel’s right to defend itself, my Jewish day school bused us to the National Mall in Washington, DC, to join the tens of thousands who had flocked to the capital from across the country.
In a bit of family lore, my late grandmother – who was well into her seventies at the time and not one for huge crowds – came down on a coach bus from New York to attend the demonstration. When we asked her afterward what she thought of the experience, she responded, “I’m glad I did it, and now I know I’m never going to do it again.”
Though my grandmother was referring to the hassle of participating in a 100,000-person rally (if memory serves, she carried a folding lawn chair around with her throughout), she was conveying a sentiment that many American Jews felt until this past month. Israel has been forced to contend with terrorism throughout the 21 years that have elapsed since that day, and although hatred of Jews has been steadily rising, not until the October 7 massacre did many Jews feel the same sense of anxiety and urgency that they had back then. As one longtime Jewish organizational leader who has been engaged in combating antisemitism for more than half a century told me this week, “I can’t believe I’m participating in another rally like this in my lifetime.”
But on Tuesday, there he was, and there I was, back on the National Mall, joining nearly 300,000 others in what is believed to have been the largest gathering of Jews and the largest demonstration in support of Israel in the history of the United States.
For so many of us – American Jews, Israelis, and our allies of other backgrounds – the March for Israel was exactly what we needed. One friend I ran into there told me it was the first time since October 7 that she didn’t feel as though she and everyone around her were sitting shiva.
I came to the march straight from a shiva in Jerusalem
Her comment struck home because I had come to the march from a shiva.
On Sunday evening, back in Jerusalem, I went to pay a condolence visit to the parents of Rose Lubin, a 20-year-old Border Police officer who was stabbed to death by a Palestinian assailant at a light rail station in the city last Monday. Rose had immigrated to Israel from Atlanta on her own and joined the Border Police as a lone soldier. Like many of the other visitors that day, I didn’t know her personally, though several of my younger friends and colleagues did.
Her parents talked about her love of sports, her dedication to her friends, her integrity, and her Jewish identity. Her mother read out a workout routine that she had developed for her friends to improve their fitness. Her father recounted that Rose would walk miles to attend cheerleading events on Shabbat so as not to violate the sanctity of the day. As they spoke, a light rain started to fall, the raindrops mirroring the tears streaming down people’s faces.
Then I headed home, tossed a few things in a carry-on bag, and headed to the airport.
Half a day later, after dropping off my stuff at my DC hotel, I took an Uber to visit my alma mater, the University of Maryland. The director of the campus Hillel had invited me to come speak to Jewish and pro-Israel students about the events of the six weeks. As I strolled around the leafy campus on which I spent four relatively quiet years two decades ago, I was struck by the feeling that nothing much had changed.
College antisemitism has gotten much worse in recent years
But I was wrong. “The situation here is worse than it was when you were here,” one student told me. “It’s worse than it was four years ago. It’s worse than it was two weeks ago.” Though tensions between pro-Israel and anti-Israel students had been steadily rising for weeks, they erupted last Thursday when the words “Holocaust 2.0” were chalked on the pavement during a protest organized by the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. Other on-campus demonstrations have included calls for an “intifada,” which Jewish students view as a call for violence against them; they told me the university administration has refused to take action, though it did condemn the rhetoric at the Thursday protest, which it termed “hateful and antisemitic.” Jewish students who have tried to engage with their anti-Israel peers have been told they “don’t dialogue with Zionists.” As I left the Hillel building, I noticed a police car in the parking lot, which I had never seen before.
But, an inspiring sight at the National Mall
The next day, I set out from my hotel early to stop by several receptions ahead of the march. As I rode through the streets of Washington, I saw people streaming toward the Mall from all directions dressed in blue and white, wrapped in Israeli flags, and carrying signs expressing their support for Israel and their opposition to antisemitism. Students from Jewish day schools sang and danced as they made their way to the event and parents could be seen walking hand-in-hand with their children.
As we gathered on the Mall, the atmosphere was like that of a family reunion. I ran into high school and college friends, colleagues from every job I’ve had since college, former and current neighbors, and more Jewish professionals and lay leaders than I could count. We embraced, looked one another in the eye, and asked, “How are you doing?” More often than not, I was asked, “How are you holding up? What’s it like over there?” and each time I tried to describe what it’s like to be in a wartime routine, in which life continues in the shadow of an unfathomable massacre and a military campaign that has claimed far too many young Israeli lives.
And then the music swelled and the program began. Beautiful and inspiring as it was – and it was; it was moving and uplifting and powerful – what happened on stage was almost beside the point. The main purpose of the march was the sense of community engendered by looking around you and realizing that everyone you see is there for the same reason as you: to grieve, to shout, to express love and pain and defiance – and to do so together. We came from across the country and around the world, in planes, trains, and automobiles – and hundreds of coach buses – to stand with one another in a sea of blue and white. It was a form of mass catharsis, of large-scale group therapy, at a time when so many of us just needed to know that we weren’t alone.
In a way, the arc of my week mirrored our collective experience since that terrible day six weeks ago. From witnessing the effects of the dual wars raging in Israel and wherever Jews live across the world – the pain of parents who lost their daughter to an act of terror and the sense that Jew-hatred has emerged even in places in which it had seldom, if ever, been seen before – to joining hundreds of thousands in an unprecedented demonstration of solidarity and defiance, the past few days have been a microcosm of the intertwined emotions that millions of Israelis, Jews, and our allies have experienced since October 7.
And that, ultimately, is why we’ll win.
Because even in the wake of the greatest mass murder of our people since the Holocaust, and even as countless people celebrate and minimize and justify our loss and our pain when forced to decide how we will respond, we invariably choose life.
What I experienced on Tuesday in Washington was a prayer, a call, a celebration of life. Time and again, the cry rang out, echoing off the white marble edifices all around us: Am yisrael chai – the Jewish people’s lives. Am yisrael chai. Am yisrael chai. Am yisrael chai.
The world needed to hear it, but perhaps we did too – a reminder that even in the darkest of days, even when we feel abandoned, we are carried forward by our conviction, our commitment to life, and our confidence in a brighter future.
Am yisrael chai.