Wednesday, November 13, 2024



Disclaimer: the views expressed here are solely those of the author, weekly Judean Rose columnist Varda Meyers Epstein.

Trump trounced Harris and the next morning, she conceded. Now, all that was left was for Dems to do grieve. Except for the small matter of sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner with their Trump-happy relatives in just a little over 3 weeks—less at the time of this writing. Should Harris voters be expected to sit across the table from their cretinous MAGA cousins?

Not at all, explained Yale-affiliated psychiatrist Dr. Amanda Calhoun to MSNBC’s Joy Reid. “If you are going to a situation where you have family members, where you have close friends who you know have voted in ways that are against you . . . against your livelihood . . . it's completely fine to not be around those people and to tell them why.”


Calhoun’s advice, I’d venture to say, runs contrary to what most of us were taught by our mothers; namely that is courteous to set aside political differences at the holiday table for the sake of preserving family harmony. We can agree to disagree, because presidents come and go but family is family until death do you part. We spend time with family at the holidays not because they are entitled to our presence, but because it’s a tradition we value and cherish as a society.

In Israel, of course, there is no such November 28th conundrum to worry about. For one thing, most of those celebrating Thanksgiving in Israel are expat Americans. They left their families behind to make Aliyah, so there’s no one to argue with at table.

Then again, Thanksgiving is something expat Americans mostly celebrate for the sake of the food: turkey, stuffing, yams, gravy, cranberry sauce, and pie. And guess what? Sitting down to eat that meal will be pure pleasure not only because of the food and the lack of argumentative relatives, but because Donald J. Trump won—which means that this year, the only arguing around Israeli Thanksgiving tables will be over who gets the wishbone.

With our stateside cousins of course, it is a different story. We spend time with them only virtually in fits and starts. That makes it a little easier to avoid tense subjects. And if ever there was a tense subject it was this election, with most American Jews wildly at odds with their Israeli counterparts.

Our cousins care about the hostages, but not as much as they care about domestic issues, for example reproductive rights. They care about Iran, but they care about abortion more; they have been told that Donald J. Trump will take away their rights to their own bodies. Kamala Harris told them so.

Joy Reid told them so.

In Israel, we understand our Jewish cousins in America have domestic priorities. But we have trouble understanding how they feel about geopolitics. We don’t like to think that they are ignorant, but do they know they voted for a woman who helped fund October 7 and all that has happened in its wake?

Israelis are hyper-aware of these geopolitics. So much so that in the run up to the election, all of us were tense. I was tense. My neighbors were tense. We all knew that Israel’s enemies were watching and waiting to see who would win the election. My personal fear was that if Harris won, Hamas would take it as a green light to shoot all the remaining living hostages dead.

I did not dare tempt evil by voicing my fears, but now, in retrospect, I can talk about it because it didn’t happen—Harris lost. But it was rough. In the run-up to the election I could literally see those executions playing out in my mind’s eye. Over and over again.  It was hard to hold down food. Hard to breathe.

I don’t know if I was alone in experiencing these visions—but I know my feelings of dread and terror were not exclusive to me. Everyone around me felt the same way and we were all quietly speaking about it to each other. The election was the Sword of Damocles hanging over not just the hostages’ heads, but all our heads. This was something more than politics.

And it is that “something more” that makes it so difficult to be polite as we were taught, and set aside differences for the sake of family.

I know what you’re thinking. What’s the difference, Harris lost. But you see, it’s the vote that counts. It’s the vote that hurt and cut so deeply.

It’s hard to square it in our heads, how “family” could vote for Harris, someone who sends money to Iran and ties Israel’s hands. Someone who bears responsibility for the fact that the Jewish people are no longer safe anywhere in the world.

Many of us have a very hard time with this. We think of what happened on October 7, of the hostages and of the hundreds of soldiers who have been killed since, beautiful young people, older reservists with wives and children, and we can’t bring ourselves to agree to disagree and move on. It’s just too hard. We can’t look the other way and call it “only politics.”

I myself think back to certain lovely childhood memories from back when I was a toddler, and I don’t know what to do. We are family and yet this "family" prioritizes something other than me, my family here, and our people. They prioritized something other than the hundreds of Israeli soldiers who died defending our people—something other than the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who can’t go home to their homes in the north. 

How can I look the other way?

They put us all at risk.



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