The Difficulties of Writing about October 7 | The Walrus

"W hen the October 7 attacks occurred on that Saturday morning in Israel, it was very late Friday on the west coast of Canada, where I live. It was still October 6, 2023. I had been to a Vancouver Canucks pre-season game with my son and a friend. The Canucks won; even for a lifelong Toronto Maple Leafs fan like me, it was a good night. It was Thanksgiving weekend, and my son was about to turn fifteen."

"And then it dropped. On October 7, 2023. And if I thought my inherited trauma had been an issue before, well, that was nothing. This invasion went even deeper, seeping into every aspect of my life. I began to exist in a state of tremendous anxiety and fear, worried about things that would never have given me pause in the Before Times."

"The antisemitism reached a level I never would have expected to witness in my lifetime. On social media, university campuses, at workplaces. As a reporter writing about this, I would become a repository for other people's stories. Almost daily, someone would reach out about an internal memo with antisemitic undertones (or worse), an uncomfortable customer service experience, antisemitism at their child's school. I could go on. I was shocked by what I was hearing-from people in the education system, health care, the arts."

A Canadian son of Holocaust survivors recalls an ordinary evening before the October 7, 2023 attacks and describes how inherited nightmares of being hunted by Nazis resurfaced and transformed into fears of Hamas violence. The attacks triggered intense anxiety and magnified preexisting separation anxiety, pessimism, and catastrophizing rooted in intergenerational trauma. Antisemitism surged across social media, campuses, workplaces, and institutions, producing frequent reports of hostile memos, discriminatory service experiences, and school incidents. As a reporter, the narrator became a repository for others' accounts of antisemitism and felt shocked by the breadth of hostility affecting education, health care, and the arts.

Read at The Walrus