Why Are We Still Here?

Staying and leaving aren’t tests of our character. It’s okay to not know.

Marc was cooking with one AirPod in, half listening to a podcast. I was at the kitchen table with my laptop open. He looked up and said, honestly, why are we even staying here?

He didn’t say where he meant instead. He didn’t need to. It’s Tel Aviv or Miami, and it has been for a while.

I used to be the one who asked. For the first couple of years in London, I would raise it, and he would talk me down. Now he raises it, and I go quiet.

This weekend the Times of Israel ran another piece about Jews leaving New York. A single mother who moved to Jersey City three days after the primaries. A woman who left Greenwich Village after her sixth grader got a group text from classmates asking if any Jews wanted to go to the chambers. Aliyah applications from New York are up 31 percent since the mayoral election.

I have read this article many times. In 2015, it was The Atlantic asking whether it was time for the Jews to leave Europe, based on a poll in which 58 percent of British Jews said Jews may have no long-term future here. Before that, it was France, over and over, since 2000. The story is true every time somebody writes it, and every time someone decides to leave.

For many Jewish communities that no longer exist, like my grandmother’s in Baghdad, leaving took years. My grandmother, Hela, left a full decade after the two-day pogrom that destroyed any semblance of security Iraqi Jews once felt in 1941. Even when you know it’s time, it takes time. There are hold outs. There are people who stay. There are people who return after the grass doesn’t end up any greener in Miami or Tel Aviv. And to their credit, the reporters write the stories with a question mark at the end. I’m not claiming to know where this leads for New York, or Paris, or London. I’m just telling you how it feels.