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Israeli expats reconnect with national identity after October 7th

Posted on by Vanessa
Israeli expats reconnect with national identity after October 7th

(JTA) — While studying at Columbia University's journalism school last year, Eleanor Reich walked past protests calling for the destruction of her country. When she passed classmates in the hallway, she said, some would avoid her eyes.

It was only when she returned to Tel Aviv that she felt like she could breathe a sigh of relief. She said when she arrived for her first trip in December, she immediately started crying.

“At least here, even if I disagree with someone, there should at least be a common narrative of this country,” Reich, 27, said of her time in Israel. “When you argue with someone in New York, you don’t know if they even think my country should exist.”

She added: “I think what October 7th really did for me and a lot of people I spoke to was that it made us realize that no matter where we are in the world, are primarily Israelis.”

Officially, about 200,000 Israelis live in the United States. But Israeli advocacy groups, taking a broader view than the U.S. census, put the number as high as one million. Some of the expats are here for temporary stays, others to build a permanent life away from their place of birth. But those who spoke to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency said that, despite being just an ocean away, they feel much more Israeli since October 7.

Pro-Palestinian supporters attempt to gain entry into Grand Central Terminal while protesting against the City University of New York (CUNY) college allowing filming of an FBI: Most Wanted episode depicting a Gaza solidarity camp in New York York City, USA, fictionalized on July 22nd. 2024. (Source: Reuters/Adam Gray)

“I've lived here for 23 years and I've realized that I'm a lot more Israeli than I thought,” said Vered Guttman, a chef and food writer who lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland, and works for families of Israeli hostages there Year. Since October 7, she said, she watched Israeli television news “every hour of the day that I was awake,” something she had never done before.

“I can't think about anything other than the hostages and Israel, the feeling that my country is falling apart,” said Guttman, 56. “The United States is my country too, but Israel is still my country, and it feels “It feels like it’s really falling apart.” I don’t know if it will survive.”

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Constantly following Israeli news is a common coping mechanism. Rabbi Amitai Fraiman, a Jerusalem native who moved to the United States 11 years ago, referred to the news and explained that the past year could be summed up as “a constant state of emotional jet lag.”

“The simple fact of the news cycle that we get our news directly from Israel creates a lag in our consciousness,” said Fraiman, 37, who lives in Palo Alto, California, and runs a Zionist think tank. “There is a certain time of day when there is no news from there. So what should we do?”

For Boaz Atzili, a political scientist and professor at American University in Washington, DC, the daily hostage acts began the moment he woke up on October 7th. Several members of Atzili's family live in communities on the Gaza border.

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“When you see hundreds of WhatsApp messages, when you wake up and see, I have the alarm system from Israel, which also shows hundreds of thousands of alarms at the same time, then you know something is wrong,” Atzili said.

Atzili, 57, spent that day — and every day since — in constant communication with his family members in Israel. His 79-year-old aunt hid for 10 hours as Hamas militants searched her home but did not find her, Atzili said. He soon learned that two relatives – his cousin Aviv and Aviv's wife Liat, who lived on Kibbutz Nir Oz – were missing. Liat, an American citizen, was released in November as part of Israel's week-long ceasefire with Hamas.

A day after Liat's release, the Atzilis learned that Aviv, who had been a member of Nir Oz's emergency response team, had been killed on October 7. Hamas still has his body.

For Boaz Atzili, the deeply personal nature of the war helped put things in perspective. While he acknowledged the rise of anti-Semitism in the United States, particularly on college campuses like his, he said those problems do not compare to the plight in Israel.

“I always find it a little difficult to understand the fear of anti-Semitism and all that,” Atzili said. “I get it and it’s real. But I also constantly have the feeling that this isn't the main story here. This is a side story that is nowhere near as threatening and horrific as what is going on in the Middle East.”

Elan Carr, the CEO of the Israeli American Council, which provides programs for Israelis living in the United States and political advocacy in the country, said rising anti-Semitism has affected Israelis here. By the end of last school year, he said, IAC had directly responded to more than 600 reported cases of anti-Semitism in both K-12 public schools and college campuses — more than the group had ever addressed before.

“When I say handled, I don’t mean a statement was made,” Carr said. “I mean, I treat them, handle cases, meet families, train teachers and students, accompany parents and families to school board meetings.”

The IAC has also conducted training for 2,000 public school teachers across the country on the “IHRA definition (of anti-Semitism), anti-Zionism, Jewish ethnicity and recognizing anti-Semitism,” Carr said. The group also hosted a national conference in Washington, D.C., earlier this month led by former President Donald Trump, during whose administration Carr served.

Israelis have also been the driving force behind protests on behalf of the hostages in cities across the United States, where they have found community with one another. In addition to participating in demonstrations, Atzili wrote letters and met with politicians and Jewish community leaders to push for a hostage-taking treaty and a ceasefire. Guttman was at some of the same protests.

“I think that a lot of us Israelis here felt the need to do something from day one, when we were just going crazy,” Guttman said.

Some Israelis said they had paid a social price for their national identity. A 38-year-old engineer from Brooklyn said she lost several friends in the fallout from the Israel-Hamas war. She defined the past year as “a combination of sadness, anger and a sense of betrayal,” particularly from the “liberal left in Brooklyn” with which she identifies.

“I feel that in the circles I work in or have worked in, acceptance, listening to everyone, respecting everyone, understanding complexity and intersectionality, and sustaining different narratives together has always been a core value were,” she said. “And after Oct. 7, everything seemed to collapse. Now there is a feeling that these circles have discovered true evil and that true evil is Israel and what Israel is doing and that all the values ​​that I think they had previously held have been kind of abandoned.”

The Brooklyn tech worker, who moved to the United States 12 years ago, declined to reveal her name, explaining that she felt “a deep divide in what I felt was my identity, who I was comfortable with and feel authentically and in what parts of it.” I can certainly share it myself.”

Like Reich, she said she feels most comfortable visiting Israel.

“Because of who I am, my circles in Israel are also the liberal left,” she said. “That's when I felt like I could finally have the complex conversation: 'We completely disagree with the government, we believe the war has to end, what's happening in Gaza is terrible.' However, October 7th happened, that was also terrible, Israel has the right to exist. “Israel has the right to defend itself,” which I think is a narrative that doesn’t exist in the United States.”

For some, this sense of belonging to Israel has raised the question: When do we move back?

Fraiman, the rabbi of Palo Alto, visited Israel in July for his brother's wedding. He said the “urge” to return to Israel had only increased since the war began.

“Like most Israelis, the joke is that we are in the 11th year of our three-year plan,” Fraiman said. “When we arrived we never had any intention of moving or relocating in this way. It’s just that life happens, and that’s why the conversation about returning between me and my wife is always alive and vibrant.”

The Brooklyn engineer said returning to Israel was always part of her plan, but larger forces got in the way, from COVID to economic downturns to unrest over judicial reform in Israel to war.

“Suddenly I asked myself: What am I doing here?” she said. “But I also have two young children whose future I have to think about, and at the moment the reality in Israel is very bleak. So it sounds irresponsible to get on a plane.”

While the last 11 months have brought significant pain and heartache for many Israeli-Americans, there has also been a glimmer of hope. Guttman, for example, said she and her husband have felt an outpouring of support from neighbors they didn't previously know.

“Suddenly we had neighbors who had never been in our house – we didn't even know they knew we were Israeli – knocking on our door just to say how sorry they were for everything that was happening and thought of us,” Guttman said. “We personally have had nothing but the most supportive and thoughtful response from people and neighbors.”

Miriam Buium, an Ashdod native who moved to San Diego in 1999, said she and her husband felt a similar embrace. In fact, Buium, 49, said it is her interactions with others — especially non-Israelis — that give her hope for her homeland.

“We have friends here who are Muslims and we work with them, we go to their restaurants, and with the majority of them, the 90% of them, we have no problems,” Buium said. “So I believe that if we can live together here, we can live together in Israel in the future.”



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