Some Thoughts on Awakening to a Nightmare

Everyone has at some point awakened from a horrible nightmare, only to experience a rush of relief that it was only a bad dream. Since October 7, anyone living in Israel has experienced a nightmare from which there is no awakening. Even the most mundane daily tasks become almost surreal: How can I be brushing my teeth this morning, as on any other day, when yesterday I learned about forty babies and young children killed, many of them decapitated?

I’VE BEEN thinking a lot lately about something my father a”h used to say after making aliyah: “I would rather be killed by an Iranian nuclear bomb, chas v’shalom, than remain alive in a world that allowed six million Jews to be killed twice in one century.”

I felt pretty much the same way after reading about 31 Harvard student groups, which could not even wait 24 hours to blame Israel “entirely” for the atrocities committed against those murdered by Hamas, without indeed even mentioning said atrocities. If that represents even a fraction of the “class” of America’s future movers and shakers, then I could not bear to live in such a country. And it surely does: Earlier this year, the Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper, endorsed the BDS movement against Israel.

We are not talking about a handful of campus radicals. Those same Harvard students expect to move easily into Wall Street firms, government jobs, and high-paying law firms. As soon as hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman sought a list of signatories so that he could be sure not to hire any of them, and he started lining up other CEOs to make the same commitment, many rushed to disassociate themselves or to resign from the groups — but not before.