London Calling

Nova and the Sound of Silence

Liverpool Street. I used to cut these corners in the rush of my breathless wonder years grinding out a copy of the NME every week. A print copy. When such things used to exist. Before a print magazine was obsolete. I was dwelling in the jaw of London’s East end, between the towering shards of glass that define its skyline from above. Down below it was the most chaotic time in my life. I was an editor, and a discoverer of new bands, new songwriters, new producers, looking for the art that disrupted the sharp edges of commerce. The voices, the lyrics, the beats, the haircuts. I lived just above Spitalfields Market, and Liverpool Street was my home tube station. It was the last station I disappeared under in November 2014, before I hopped on a plane with a suitcase and a one-way ticket to Los Angeles.

I talk about Liverpool Street when people ask me why I left London; how I knew Jew hate was becoming a problem. I talk about how the writing was literally on the walls; swastikas graffiti’d on the cobblestone alley marked Norton Folgate. I talk about how the Tesco opposite the tube station had banned kosher products from its shelves, mistaking that they were “Israeli”. I talk about the claustrophobia of a threat that seemed undetectable to every man and woman in a suit who rushed past me on the swarming streets beneath the godlike buildings every day. I talk about the feeling of sinking. The feeling of needing to alight. I never went back to Liverpool Street. In all the years of visiting or temporarily living in London since, I never went back to the East End.

Alas yesterday, I did. I took the Metropolitan Line all the way to Liverpool Street, and I got out from underground into the sweltering heart of the city again; the place where Shakespeare’s career began, where Jack The Ripper terrorized, where Jewish immigrants lived in the late 1800s (there are still Hebrew and Yiddish markings if you look closely enough on Brick Lane). I was walking towards Curtain Road, a street I used to fall into before or between venues, trying to find the next big rascals with a hit single. I was on my way to the current home of the Nova exhibition. I was speaking on a panel. I don’t usually use terms like “full circle”, but this was one of those moments. Back in the place I left to use my voice; to fight back against the disease of Jew hate that I felt creeping onto these very pavements almost 12 years ago. Back to talk about a massacre that happened at a music festival; one that every single one of my former NME colleagues has never once addressed.

I invited some of them down to hear me today, or just to walk about the museum at their own pace alone. I received zero responses.

However, I did have friends in the room. I had friends in the room. I can’t overstate how much that meant.

Yesterday, at the Nova exhibition, I shared a stage with three other indomitable women; my friend Nicole Lampert, a brilliant Jewish journalist who I met first and entrusted when I was doing work around domestic violence, before we all came together to tackle an equally terrifying animal of media bias post-October 7; a survivor Danielle Gelbaum, 25, who fled Nova with her sister on foot across the fields of Re’im and wound up escaping in a white pick-up truck with 16 other survivors; and Lisa Marlowe, bereaved mother of Jake Marlowe, the only British citizen to be murdered at Nova, who was there doing unarmed security for the music festival.

The first time I saw the Nova exhibition was in Tel Aviv, in the massive Expo hall, days after I had been to the real thing for the first time. It was December 2023. The Expo hall was confronting, because it was one giant open space, and it was as though Nova had been airlifted from its original site and replicated exactly in that space. Having just been to Re’im with a Nova survivor, where the blood was still on the 232 highway, and the air still smelled of smoke and death, the exhibition behaved as a stark simulation frozen in time; a crime scene paused. I thought: this must travel. Everywhere.

It had a home in Los Angeles, where I live, for months. It went to Toronto. It went to Miami. It went to New York. It went to Berlin. Now it is in London for two more weeks. Go.

Our panel yesterday was titled: The Sound of Silence. We listened to testimony from Danielle, who decided to go into reserve duty weeks after her survival. She was in a unit specializing in explosives. Her sister’s recovery looked very different from Danielle’s leap into battle to defend her nation. As Lisa shared her gut-wrenching story of learning about her son’s murder, the room was stunned into muted tears, and hearts shattered further upon hearing of her family’s lack of non-Jewish institutional support, or even neighborly support.

I spoke to the power of presence; of bearing witness, of recognizing the significance of this exhibit’s mere existence and of every single person in attendance at a jam-packed event so full there were not enough chairs for all who came to listen, to watch. I reminded everyone that yes, there has been betrayal, silence, denial. Yet, we are here. It took over 35 years for people at large to talk about the atrocities of the Holocaust. What we have achieved in the telling of the Nova story already feels momentous to me. I spoke about my own experiences onsite after October 7; how standing in a bomb shelter where 30 people were eviscerated by multiple grenades reminded me instantaneously of Auschwitz, of the burning of Jews, of the hunting of Jews. I appealed to people’s humanity, reminding the audience that this is not a political exhibition, but a place where we document a massacre, and that we must use our human eyes and human ears without prejudice.

I reminded everyone in the audience that while we come here to see the evidence of what happened to 300 murdered souls, we cannot forget the 3000-strong tribe of Nova. The thousands who live in a world that denies their story, or that blames them for their own victimhood. How we each have a responsibility as fellow travelers to help keep this community safe and strong, by hearing their testimony, by validating it, and by challenging anyone privately or publicly who engages in erasure, in denial. I spoke to the extraordinary power of Jewish resilience, and its historic contribution to the advancement of medicine and psychology in recognition of PTSD and complex trauma. The ways in which Holocaust survival has formed the backbone of study to help people who suffer from trauma the world over. How the Nova survivors don’t weaponize their anger; how instead they harness their pride. How their self-knowing, their love for who they are, their unapologetic Israeli chutzpah has only strengthened with every new breath. I suggested to willing ears that we all need to help them carry the truth forward. The truth of what happened there, and what is happening here with every averted eye, or cold shoulder.

As I left Liverpool Street last night, I thought about my emancipation 12 years ago. I thought about how people told me: “it won’t happen again”. But what wouldn’t happen again? What? That Jewish businesses wouldn’t be boycotted? That Jewish buildings wouldn’t be vandalized? That Jewish individuals wouldn’t be accused of lying or controlling? That we wouldn’t be subjected to character assassinations that slowly dehumanized us in the eyes of our neighbors? That Jews wouldn’t be targeted and hunted en masse? That there wouldn’t be another attempt at Jewish genocide? What exactly did they think would not happen again?

People walk through the doors of the Nova exhibit and they emerge changed. Sometimes all it takes is a minor flutter of discomfort. Something about the story I believed doesn’t add up. That’s the seed that can grow an intellectual curiosity to overcome the populism, the mainstream narrative, the fantasy. Nova is the inconvenient truth that cannot be ignored. It demands recognition.

You cannot watch a young Jewish woman, or a grieving Jewish mother, stand up in front of a room full of strangers and call it conspiracy. I was asked to be uplifting yesterday. I think it was uplifting. I couldn’t sleep after from joy. It may sound odd. Nova is hard. Yet, sharing a stage with women who remember and embrace the power of their words moves me tremendously. In the face of extreme trauma, we are undefeated.

So what about the silence? There is so much of it. There were so many faces I would have loved to see in that room yesterday. For their sake, not just mine. We are on different timelines, and those timelines will merge together again. I believe that this is an inevitability. It’s early days. Remember that. It is still very early days.

So in the interim, I am so proud and so humbled to do what I do, and I thank you for doing it next to me.

You can watch yesterday’s panel discussion in full below:

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