The first thing that my mother asked me, when she saw me, I was like, oh my God, I'm

The first thing that my mother asked me, when she saw me after Hamas's massacre in Israel, was to promise that I wouldn't write or talk about it publicly, that I wouldn't make myself a target for some violent anti-Semite.

At that conversation with her, just a day or two after talking to my friends about whether or not they were going to keep their children home that week, because their kids go to daycare at a synagogue, and they're worried the daycare would be bombed or that an arm shooter would open fire.

That should give you a sense of what it's felt like to be Jewish in recent weeks.

Israel's 9-11, that's been the refrain, and I fear that analogy carries more truth than the people making it wanted to, because what was what was 9-11?

It's an attack that drowned an entire country, our country, my country, America,

in terror and in rage, it drove us mad with fear, and in response, we shredded our own liberties.

We invaded Afghanistan, we invaded Iraq, our response to 9-11 led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

It made us weaker, it made us poorer, it made us heated around the world.

We didn't pull our forces out of Afghanistan until 2021, 20 years later, and when we left, we did so in humiliation and catastrophe and defeat abandoning the country to the Taliban.

Our politics still haven't recovered from the ravages of that era.

It was in large part the invasion of Iraq that discredited the Republican Party's leadership class, leading directly to the rise of Donald Trump.

9-11 created a permission structure in American politics to do incredibly stupid brutal things, and we are still paying the costs.

Perhaps we always will be.

In the days after Hamas's attack, I was in Tokyo of all places, as far from the people I would gather with, to grieve and to process and to hurt.

So I was confined to following along online, which I don't recommend.

And what was so striking was to see how fast we were turning on each other.

How we became obsessed, not with what should actually be done, or even what was actually being done, but with what was and could be said and by whom.

I read and heard more about the idiocy of student groups and random academics than about what the right response here actually was.

And it's tempting to call that a distraction or a waste of time or a derangement driven by social media, but it's not.

This too was an echo of what happened in America after 9-11 and that era of flag pins and freedom fries.

Council culture is endlessly debated today, but the boundaries of speech and the penalties were stepping over them were stronger than.

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