Glass box

There is a glass box in the middle of a town square and it is sound proof but entirely transparent, and inside that glass box I am on display 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I am in the glass box and people are standing around me staring at what’s inside. They each have their own reasons. Some are passers-by, wondering why there is a woman in a glass box garnering people’s attention. Some are there for sport, hoping to intimidate me inside the glass box, and to earn social cache for performing some public act of dismay, hacking back saliva and aiming it at one side of the box, denigrating every single aspect of my beautiful Jewish face, throwing paint, and stones, and laughing. Some are there to try and hear what I am saying, but, as I told you, the box is soundproof. I am screaming in the glass box all day, and only those who have the skills to read my lips understand the language I speak and the words I am saying. And even at that, they are often so scared to repeat them.

I was doing a bunch of press this morning and one journalist asked me what it has felt like being me since I started advocating for the Jewish people. Well, it’s like being in that glass box. Every day I am forced to justify my existence to people who aren't even listening and I have seen how the people who claim to be good are mainly self-interested and will ensure that I am never to get out of my box. I am told that was the experience of the biblical prophets, too. I wonder how they did it without being able to listen to David Bowie.

I had a horrible situation this week where someone I really admire, whose writing I support, whose advocacy I agree with for the most part, made yet another post on social media amounting to blood libel, and instead of approaching the matter privately (this has failed on multiple occasions), I decided to get into it publicly in the comments section, and there was some back and forth. I have the facts and I’m an educator. I was later informed that this caused great upset. I was the source of distress, because I made someone feel bad for posting disinformation and antisemitic rhetoric. It doesn’t matter how I felt as a traumatised Jewish person under attack, witnessing this for the zillionth time. I felt like I was in my glass box, watching another person I like walk away from me, pawing at the glass, shouting in the void, powerless to stop it.

From my glass box, I see in the last few days that Jews are being hunted down in the streets of Athens, Sweden, Amsterdam and New York City, while we have attempted to commemorate the Holocaust. From my glass box, I have illustrated that since October 7, lefists have wanted to finish what Hitler started. From my glass box, I have tried to make it clear that instead of being upset that I’ve called you an antisemite maybe stop being an antisemite. Maybe listen. Be an ally. I have a deep empirical and academic understanding of antisemitism. I have asked from my glass box: Do you really understand antisemitism? Are you honest with yourself? We have set a standard for all minorities in society, but not for Jews. Our voices are erased, talked over, not consulted, ignored, spat on, and we are not seen as credible narrators. We are viewed with scepticism, and the enjoy watching us try, while turning down the volume, deleting our responses, pretending we never spoke to them at all.

We are seen as perpetrators of violence, hurt and inconvenience. The truth may be an inconvenience but it must be learned. Antisemitism is not just hooked noses and money libels and ridiculous ideas about power. It is also how you discuss the war in Gaza. And weaponizing dead children to incriminate Jewish people is the oldest trick in the book. So people can cry and moan all they want that they "just care about the children", but they don't. They care about being able to blame the Jewish people for the children. If they cared about the children they would care about the problem: Hamas. The only way to secure a future for a Gazan child is to recognize that so long as Hamas remain in control they will never be free. It is not Israel who is stealing Gaza's future. It is Hamas, and it has been Hamas. But this lie about Jews and other people’s children is as old as the world. It’s as old as William of Norwich. Don’t know him? Look him up.

Someone asked me yesterday what I’ve been doing to feel relief. But how do you take care of yourself? It’s been 7 months and 2 days since October 7. I have not been able to watch TV since. I saw one movie in the theatre (“Love Lies Bleeding” - brilliant, five stars, a complete work, Clint Mansell on the score, see it, enjoy it, it’s hot). I watch live jazz once a week. I write here. Mainly what I do is physical exorcism. I put my body under stress to emancipate the emotional weight of the reality we are living in, and the pressure I am under to keep fighting through it. To really go through it, even though we have no idea if there’s an end, or when. I box four times a week. I am pushing myself physically until I feel a relief of sorts. Long distance running, even though my shins are permanently furious. Good, I think. Be furious, legs. Sometimes it’s better to feel it in my shins than in my soul.

The other day I ran for 15 kilometres, and I didn’t even mean to. That’s nine miles. I was listening to Songs For The Deaf by Queens Of The Stone Age on repeat. There is not a moment of oxygen on that record. Between ‘Hanging Tree’ and ‘Go With The Flow’, the tape doesn’t even stop. It’s out of one angry drumbeat into the next, Dave Grohl menacing as though he’s playing with baseball bats instead of sticks. The latter contains the only song lyric I would ever tattoo on my skin (“I wanted something good to die for, to make it beautiful to live”). That’s what I’ve been doing, actually. That’s exactly what I’ve been doing. I’ve been listening to suffocating music. Music that takes up so much space in my head and coarses through my veins like petrol fuelling a Dodge Charger Daytona. Music that makes me feel panicked, chased, pursued on a lone desert highway. Music that spikes my pulse so that I can no longer think beyond the ferociousness of a drumkit or the distorted whining of a Gibson Les Paul. I grew up with a lot of that music and that is where I have returned to. Since October 7, I have drowned in the heaviness of sound. That is what the inside of my glass box sounds like. That is how I clear out the contents of my head. Very very loudly.

I have escaped to places where everything clatters. “We’re In This Together” by Nine Inch Nails, which is on their third album The Fragile. At exactly 4:13 on that track, a full nervous breakdown occurs, dialled in to the extremes by producer Alan Moulder. It’s challenging. It’s something to get through. It wasn’t a walk in the park to make or to mix. Trent Reznor is screaming: “Youuuuu and meeee, we’re in this together noooowwwww… We will make it through somehowwwwww.” And I know because I’ve listened to it 5,000 times that he does make it through the other side of the track, but each time I hear it, it sounds like he might get swallowed by a black hole in space.

This is the type of shit I’ve been listening to. Claustrophobic, yet bright; heavy yet sublime. Songs that don’t promise an obvious solution. Songs that go to extreme places. Songs that feel like a pathway between life and some kind of sudden death. Smashing Pumpkins “Geek USA” on Siamese Dream. People call it grunge, like it’s slime on a sidewalk or an oversized pair of khaki pants. This is not just grunge. This is The Beatles inverted. And Jimmy Chamberlin is my favorite drummer - of all fucking time. If destroyed, still true. What else? The urgent disturbance of PJ Harvey on Is This Desire? The uncontained feral animal that was Kurt Cobain on In Utero. The nauseating saccharine distress of My Bloody Valentine on Loveless. The seductive danger of Massive Attack on Mezzanine. The experience of feeling like a chip travelling along the motherboard of a computer that is any record by Aphex Twin. These albums that I have returned to are threatening, alarming, provoking. They accompany me while I bang my head around in my glass box these last seven months.

I would love to go on a vacation. I would love to walk around an art gallery. I would love to stand under a painting of the cruxifion in an indulgent room and think about someone else’s hell. I would love to look out at a blue sea, and laugh. Crack open a beer, even. I would love any version of any of that, but it’s not been offered to me. It will be some day. Some day it will be available. Some day I will get out of my glass box. But I’ll never forget the still chaos of crying for help in broad daylight, as people walk by feeling ever so pleased with themselves.

You have to be a total fucking asshole to blame the Jews. That's just it: you're an asshole. You're a total asshole for thinking for a second that Jews are the people to terrorize, or abandon from your life. The Jews? Really? What a complete fucking ancient asshole you must be.