We had just put the kids to bed and sat down for a late-night meal of macaroni and cheese and margaritas in our pajamas. It was the spring of 2023, and the mood in our vacation rental in Upstate New York was giggly and intimate. But then, with the air warm and the record player softly crackling in the background, one of our friends asked how my writing was going.
The question always put me on edge. True to the stereotype, I had always been an open and direct Israeli. Yet, with my closest writer friends already having published one or two novels, I had grown accustomed to downplaying my own struggles. Caught between insecurity and impostor syndrome, I had learned to paint an optimistic “any-day-now” picture to anyone who asked, keeping my fear that my memoir might never be published carefully under wraps.
But that night I was tired of pretending. I had just gone through another fruitless round of pitching to agents only to be told that the writing was strong but that they were “going to have to pass” because they “wouldn’t know how to sell it.” Sitting there with close friends, I no longer had it in me to pretend everything was fine. So instead, I told them everything.
“I know this is a common problem for writers,” I apologized, as though I was telling them a story they had heard a hundred times before, “but I’d like to think I’ve tried everything I can. But sometimes I think it’s all my fault for not pushing hard enough. That if I had real ambition, I’d figure out a path to make this book happen. Other times, I wonder if I should just accept that I’m a big, fat loser and that no one is interested in what I have to say.”
I braced myself for the pity party I assumed was coming. I had heard it all before. Though I knew I wouldn’t believe them, I waited for their reassurance that my worth extended beyond my writing and didn’t depend on public recognition. Having finally given voice to what I had been carrying for so long, I now sat before them—sad, needy, and exposed.
Instead, my friend covered his mouth, shook his head, and, his voice brimming with love and wonder, said the four words that would keep coming back to me. “God, you’re so open.”
Pay attention, a voice whispered in my head. Your vulnerability is not a weakness. It’s a superpower. Keep saying the embarrassing things out loud.
Just six months later, I watched, eyes bleary with grief and horror, as people who knew and loved me rushed to social media to minimize, defend, and justify the massacre, rape, and abduction of Jews and Israelis. Having grown up in Israel knowing that every bus ride or café outing could end in a suicide bombing, it was unfathomable to me how they could support such brutal acts of terror. As a liberal Zionist who had often protested the Israeli government, consistently advocated for peaceful coexistence, and still believed in a two-state solution, I had assumed that empathy for people on both sides of this conflict—particularly among my writer friends—would be the prevailing view. I was wrong.
When I commented on a celebrated novelist and fellow Columbia alum’s social media post dismissing the suffering of Israelis, she responded with a torrent of accusations that escalated with each exchange. I pleaded with her to see the humanity and pain of everyone caught in the conflict. Instead, in a declaration of allegiance to the Palestinian cause, she accused me of my alleged bloodthirst, ridiculing me for daring to challenge someone of South African descent who claimed to understand my country better than I did. Even when I resisted taking the bait of her most provocative remarks—Hey, Yardenne, how many Palestinians did you shoot when you were in the IDF?—she escalated further and sent me a private message. I don’t want to publicly humiliate you, she wrote, but you’re leaving me little choice.
For the first time since the October 7 Massacre, I burst out laughing. You can’t humiliate me, I wrote back, because I have nothing to hide. In training myself to look at my country from every angle, even when it was painful, inconvenient, or scary, I had learned that every country has chapters in its history it would rather not read aloud. As long as I was willing to say the embarrassing things out loud, no one could use them against me.
As the first weeks of the Israel-Hamas war passed in a haze, it became abundantly clear that the social circles where I’d pitched my tent—the politically progressive literary and academic worlds of New York City—were not what I had believed them to be. Twisting facts and suspending the very empathy they so proudly professed, they excused and dismissed Jewish pain while ignoring, justifying, and celebrating Hamas’ crimes. Close friends cut ties, arguing that my advocacy for the release of the hostages was nothing more than a cynical attempt to distract from the rising death toll in Gaza. Colleagues and acquaintances flooded social media with “hot takes” on Hamas and Israel, ranging from the hateful to the delusional. Even so, I kept engaging.
Pay attention, a voice whispered in my head. Your vulnerability is not a weakness. It’s a superpower.
Some, in private conversations, replied with care and compassion, but remained adamant about maintaining a public façade of brave, subversive resistance to what they perceived as the powers-that-be. Others tried to school me on the country I grew up in, countering my lived experience with shallow propaganda. Others still demanded that I “unlearn” Zionism—the belief in the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland—before they would even agree to speak to me. Committed to a devil-may-care, “burn it all down” philosophy that never stopped to consider the Israelis trapped in Hamas’s tunnels or the Palestinians suffocating under its oppressive, violent rule, one writer—whose manuscript I had previously volunteered to edit—responded by lashing out and blocking me.
As the American literary landscape became increasingly inhospitable to Jews who refused to denounce—or at least distance themselves from—Israel, I was faced with a choice. I could follow the advice of some well-meaning friends and relatives, keep my mouth shut, cut my losses, and hope for that professional acceptance I had been longing for. I could scrub Israel from my writing, erasing where I was born and raised, where I had lived for most of my life, and where most of my family still lived. Or, I could remain open. I could remain vulnerable. I could refuse to edit myself out of my own story.
When a renowned literary magazine that had published my work in the past began taking on a decisively anti-Israel, pro-violent-resistance bent, I contacted the editor to share my concerns, citing several of their more egregious pieces, including an essay comparing the Hamas paragliders who massacred Israelis at the Nova Festival to birds breaking free from their cages. In response, she invited me to submit an essay presenting my own perspective.
Never before had I felt such urgency about a writing project. I worked for hours, outlining, expanding, and fact-checking every point I made. I described the cancellation of authors who so much as mentioned Israel’s existence in their books, the journals that banned “Zionists” from even submitting their work for consideration, the publishers committing to the anti-Israel Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, and the literary magazines publishing anti-Israel bigotry, denying the events of October 7, and belittling the rise of anti-Semitism. I included hyperlinks to corroborating sources. I explained the trap of offering Jews conditional acceptance only as long as they toed the party line. I described how my own long-standing writing group had ghosted me. Above all, I chose vulnerability.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the editor rejected my submission. Proving the exact point I was making, she dismissed my argument—and the many references backing it up—because she did not agree with my premise. A few weeks later, my essay was published by the Jewish Book Council. My former friends read it. My former professors read it. It was out there for colleagues, potential employers, agents, publishers, or anyone else who felt compelled to vet me. Who I was, where I stood, and what I believed were now out in the open. There was no going back.
The months and years since have been an eerie combination of despair and relief. I had burned bridges simply by being myself. But now I was free. I no longer had a community to lose. I no longer had opportunities to miss out on. Writing, once a cross to bear, became a source of joy again. I feel it whenever someone thanks me for giving words to what they’d been struggling to express. I feel it whenever a reader tells me they disagree with my views but appreciate my integrity. I feel it whenever I say the embarrassing thing out loud. In the midst of horror, grief, and isolation, I found my voice. Here it is.
Here I am.
Hineni.
