Presently, with more than ordinary effort, I am recovering from an attack of temporary memory loss – in delayed reaction to a combat that personally I wasn’t in. Among the young and educated elite, it is now okay – more than okay, good for sex appeal – to isolate and despise Jewish fellow students and professors. From Berkeley to Columbia, it’s now okay to celebrate Hamas’s atrocities of October 7, 2023. I’ve been in lots of combats but they never resulted in a symptom such as memory loss – the kind one associates with shell shock.

The first combat I was in was fought when I was six years of age. There was a family that lived in the house on the hill. My mother called them “Jewish hillbillies.” Theirs was the most remote of the rental properties in Camp Hilltop, where we (my family) spent our summers. Hilltop was run by an earthy, raspy-voiced theosophist. Her late husband had been one too but had starved to death accidentally while on a long fast.

Anyway, one afternoon all the kids were seated together on the steps of one of the bungalows when the younger of the sons from the remote cabin on the hill appeared with a hammer and began hammering on the sandaled toes of the kids. The big kids as well as the little kids, going row by row. Nobody stopped him! Though he was littler than anybody, he was also badder – and that’ll get you a certain degree of respect.

When he got to me with his hammer, I stood up, saying, “This time, Jan, you’ve gone far enough!” Or, “you’ve gone too far!” I don’t remember my exact words. But I do know that we were soon going at it with our fists, standing on the ground.

It hurt. Fighting hurt, and I did not like it at all, but with kids circled around us saying, “Keep going Abby, don’t run away!” what could I do?

So I kept at it as my audience required till Jan ran away first, crying. I was accompanied, escorted really, to our bungalow across the gravel road by big kids shouting, “Abby beat up Jan!”

I guess it was a proud moment. I’m not sure. But it probably set the tone for many combats that followed in adult life – a list of which could conceivably impress my readers. I don’t know. Thoughtful readers are hard to impress. So I won’t try.

But instead will fast forward to the present era, when universities like Columbia, where I have some of my degrees, are still cheering for a Hamas expedition of October 7, 2023, which saw babies torn from their mothers’ wombs and put in ovens, and whole families tied up together and burned alive. 

Athens and Jerusalem: the two essential foundations of our civilization. From Athens, we have the Academy, the House that Plato built, where truth is sought without fear or favor; from Jerusalem, we have Biblical history, the history-to-be-remembered of which God is the Witness, the Jewish record of experience on the timeline, illuminated without fear or favor.

For me this is a moment

of foundations dissolving,

when memory itself 

dissolves in tears.

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