{"id":286692,"date":"2026-07-04T15:27:16","date_gmt":"2026-07-04T15:27:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/286692\/"},"modified":"2026-07-04T15:27:16","modified_gmt":"2026-07-04T15:27:16","slug":"the-blogs-from-moscow-to-manhattan-abe-gurko","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/286692\/","title":{"rendered":"The Blogs: From Moscow to Manhattan | Abe Gurko"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\tHow Secure Do We Have to Feel Before the Unimaginable Becomes Possible?<\/p>\n

How many more friends must I lose before the inevitable becomes reality?\n<\/p>\n

I used to ask this during the AIDS crisis, when people were disappearing from our lives to a disease that sinister, that insidious.\n<\/p>\n

Now I\u2019m losing friends again \u2014 and so are most Jewish people I know \u2014 not to any illness, but to an ideology that doesn\u2019t support my freedom to be a Zionist. Their views on my views are born of Qatar\u2019s bankroll: huge sums thrown at American universities, Fashion Trust Arabia, and the film industry. People go where the money is. I get it, but I don\u2019t respect it. Mostly, it makes me sad \u2014 because I\u2019ve lost my closest, longest friendships over something they could never understand. The depth of my heritage sits right at my surface; they are generations removed from any persecution of their own.\n<\/p>\n

Not all of them are antisemites. Some of them are even Jews, just radicalized beyond recognition.\n<\/p>\n

And my life will never be the same.\n<\/p>\n

Nobody threw me out of the \u201csafe spaces\u201d of the propagandized \u2014 no big scenes, no emotional pronouncements. I just stopped being welcome, and honestly? Relieved. It saves everyone the trouble of pretending. I used to be a fat kid; anything resembling the elephant in the room brings back sad memories.\n<\/p>\n

Who needs a crystal ball when seeing is believing? You\u2019d have to be blind not to see which way things are going. Jewish people tucking their stars of David inside their shirts. Arguments about Israel that don\u2019t stay arguments for long. Friends unfollowing friends. Newspapers parsing language with surgical precision while the temperature rises outside the page \u2014 a reminder of how feckless legacy media is, and how it keeps proving itself no friend of the Jews.\n<\/p>\n

So, here\u2019s the question I can\u2019t shake: How secure does a Jewish community have to feel before the unimaginable becomes possible?\n<\/p>\n

Every Jewish community eventually believes it has reached permanence. Spain believed it \u2014 a thousand years on the peninsula, then four months to convert or leave. Germany believed it \u2014 iron crosses still on the wall when the knock came.\n<\/p>\n

And the Soviet Union \u2014 the one that haunts me most \u2014 didn\u2019t even run on old-fashioned Jew-hatred. It ran on hope. Communism promised the end of discrimination, a world where nobody would be judged by what they were born. Jews signed up, because everything they\u2019d ever been born into came with a target on it. Then the new labels showed up: Zionist. Cosmopolitan. Rootless. Disloyal. The crackdown on \u201crootless cosmopolitans\u201d never officially said the word Jew. It didn\u2019t have to. Everyone knew. One August night in 1952, thirteen Jewish poets and writers were shot. The lesson isn\u2019t that communism was uniquely evil. It\u2019s that when a country needs somebody to blame, it doesn\u2019t shop for a new address \u2014 it goes to the old one.\n<\/p>\n

Which brings me to New York Times columnist Masha Gessen, who argues that antisemitism and anti-Zionism shouldn\u2019t be lumped together \u2014 those careful distinctions matter, especially when politics runs hot. It\u2019s a serious argument. It\u2019s also spectacularly unhelpful for those of us who aren\u2019t woke, far-left Democratic Socialists.\n<\/p>\n

But then Gessen applied the theory to Boulder. A man firebombed a march for Israeli hostages \u2014 fifteen people burned, an 82-year-old woman dead \u2014 and Gessen suggested that violence that looks antisemitic might be \u201csomething else.\u201d Something political. He was screaming about Zionists while he threw the Molotovs. This is where careful distinctions stop being a theory and start being a danger to every Jew in the diaspora.\n<\/p>\n

But Moscow already ran this experiment. \u201cAnti-Zionist\u201d was the official vocabulary there too \u2014 precise, political, never\u00a0technically\u00a0about Jews \u2014 right up until Jewish poets were shot and Jewish doctors were arrested. Beware the language parsers. They are not to be trusted.\n<\/p>\n

So, I\u2019m not being a hysteric when I ask: is Manhattan\u2019s future going to resemble Moscow\u2019s past?\n<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the problem with the parsing. When Jews are targeted at anything connected to Israel, the outcome does not arrive with footnotes. We spend enormous energy debating what something\u00a0is. The real question is what it\u00a0does. And for the Jews on the receiving end, the distinction between antisemitism and anti-Zionism is a luxury enjoyed by people who are not the target \u2014 rather, people dissecting words from behind their desks and iPhones.\n<\/p>\n

But history doesn\u2019t only warn through repetition. It warns through the slow shift from \u201cthis is unimaginable\u201d to \u201cwhat are we even talking about.\u201d Disbelief should be a warning sign to get your papers in order. And lately, the conversations in my many WhatsApp groups are getting four-alarm fiery.\n<\/p>\n

My predictions have an annoying habit of coming true. This is the one time in my life I am begging to be wrong.\n<\/p>\n

Every Jewish generation believes it has finally become the exception. Sometimes it\u2019s right. Sometimes it\u2019s not. The difference is rarely visible in advance. And at this point, the opera ain\u2019t over \u2014 but we should all be taking singing lessons.\n<\/p>\n

Happy July 4th \u2013 May the Fourth Be With You!\n<\/p>\n

If you haven\u2019t\u00a0read or listened to my book<\/a>, please do.\u00a0Click here.<\/a>\n<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tAbe Gurko is a writer, producer, and son of Holocaust survivors. His mission\u2014embodied in his book and platform, Won\u2019t Be Silent\u2014Don\u2019t Stop \u2019til It Matters\u2014is to champion Jewish resilience and justice. He lives in Beverly Hills with his Israeli husband, Shlomi Barmi, and their Chihuahua, Alfie.\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How Secure Do We Have to Feel Before the Unimaginable Becomes Possible? How many more friends must I…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":286693,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[20274,3862,75,84,83,9,24,63],"class_list":["post-286692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-manhattan","tag-anti-zionism","tag-antisemitism","tag-manhattan","tag-manhattan-headlines","tag-manhattan-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=286692"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286692\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/286693"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=286692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=286692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=286692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}