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When a breast cancer diagnosis knocked me down, a network of Jewish women lifted me up
(JTA) — On the way home from the hospital where I was given my diagnosis of grade 2 invasive lobular breast cancer, I directed my husband, through my tears, to stop at the kosher store.
“I don’t want to see anyone right now,” I said, knowing the inevitability of running into someone we knew in the small Jewish community where we live, “so can you go in?” He pulled into the parking lot. “We need challah,” I reminded him. It was Thursday, after all. The next evening was Shabbat. Time doesn’t stand still for cancer.
My hospital appointment took place two days after the front page of the New York Times declared: “When Should Women Get Regular Mammograms: At 40, U.S. Panel Now Says.” I was 48. Breast cancer has long been the second most common cancer for women, after skin cancer. It is also the most lethal after lung cancer. Statistically, though, most women affected are postmenopausal, so unless there was a specific reason to test early, women were screened regularly from the age of 50. Now, the advice has changed. Breast cancer is rising in younger women. For women in their 40s, the rate of increase between 2015 and 2019 doubled from the previous decade to 2 per cent per year.
Why is this happening? Air pollution? Microplastics? Chemicals in our food? We don’t know.
In the days following my appointment, there was a proliferation of articles about the topic. Importantly, doctors explained that the cancer women are diagnosed with in their 40s tends to be a more aggressive type of cancer. Cancers in premenopausal women grow faster; many breast cancers, like mine, are hormone sensitive. (Got estrogen? Bad luck for you.)
When I posted the news about my diagnosis — on Facebook, because I’m an oversharing type — I was stunned by the number of friends my age, more discreet about their lives, who sent me messages to tell me they had recently gone through the same thing. Everyone had advice. “If you can do a lumpectomy, you’re very lucky. It’s not a major operation, and you’ll preserve your breast.” “Cut it all off! Immediately! Just get rid of all it and you’ll never worry again! Do you want to spend the rest of your life in mammogram scanxiety?” “Ask plastic surgeons for pictures, and pick the cutest new boobs out there. You won’t regret it.” “The radiation burns—that’s something no one ever tells you. Get yourself some Lubriderm and lidocaine, mix into a slurry, slap it on a panty liner, and tuck it in your sports bra.”
I’m not sure why I thought I was immune. Or maybe I didn’t — maybe I just never gave it much thought. Even when I found the lump on my breast, I was dismissive. I went to the doctor, and she asked if anyone in my family had had breast cancer. “Oh, who knows? They were all murdered,” I said blithely. Her eyes bugged. “In the Holocaust,” I added. “Your…mother? Grandmother? Sisters?” “Oh! No, no history of breast cancer in my immediate family.”
Add to that, my mother and sister both tested negative for the BRCA gene mutations, and that’s my Ashkenazi side. The thing is, though, most women who test positive for breast cancer have no family history of it.
But also, I’d done everything right! If you look through the preventative measures, I took all of them. I had three kids by 35, and I breastfed them. I have a healthy, mostly plant-based diet; I walk and cycle everywhere. I’m not a drinker or smoker. I eat so many blueberries!
Several of the articles that have been published in recent days are emphasizing the particular danger for Black women, with good reason: They have twice the mortality rate of white women. But as I did my research, I realized that Jewish women should also be on high alert. We’ve long known that one in forty Ashkenazi women has the BRCA gene mutation, significantly raising the risk of breast cancer (50% of women with the gene mutation will get breast cancer) as well ovarian cancer, which is much harder to detect and far more deadly. So many of my friends who reached out to me to tell me of their breast cancer experiences are Jewish; interestingly, not one has the BRCA mutation. Are these high numbers indicative or anecdotal? Are Jewish women generally more susceptible to breast cancer? This seems to be an important area of future research.
For me, that research will come too late — as did the guidance. For now, I have to accept that this cancer diagnosis is part of my life, that just as I will pick up challah every Thursday, I will wake every morning and take my hormone-blocking Tamoxifen. I will lose sleep every night about which surgery to have until I have the surgery, and then I will lose sleep every night about whether it was fully successful. And there’s plenty more in store for me that isn’t pretty; so it goes.
But here’s a good thing that’s already come out of this diagnosis: When the responses to my Facebook post flooded in, they were not only along the lines of “Refuah shleimah” and “I’ve just been through this too,” but also, “Thank you for sharing! I’m going to book my mammogram right now!”
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The real anti-Zionists are at the highest levels of the Israeli government
The fact that about half of young American Jews favor replacing Israel with a binational Israeli-Palestinian state is indeed a result of anti-Zionism — but not necessarily their own.
Instead, it’s a consequence of the Israeli government’s drive to radically increase Israeli control over the West Bank and Gaza. By ensuring that some 5.5 million Arabs increasingly live under Israel authority, Israel’s leaders have created the demographic reality of a binational state.
We can’t blame young American Jews for just acknowledging reality. Instead, it’s time to acknowledge that a movement to undermine Zionism has taken hold within the Israeli government.
If Zionism is the movement for a secure homeland for the Jews, then any forces that reject or undermine that homeland’s legitimacy or security are anti-Zionist. That includes the people whose positions and policies actively undermine the existence of a Jewish homeland.
The democratic Jewish state enshrined in the country’s Declaration of Independence has given way to something that looks a lot more like a herrenvolk democracy, in which democratic rights apply only to the dominant ethnic group. History has many examples of such arrangements, and — spoiler alert — they don’t end well for the majority. French Algeria until 1962, Rhodesia until 1980, South Africa until 1994 — all eventually faced one of three fates: negotiated transition to full democracy, violent collapse or ongoing instability and international isolation. To date, none have stabilized permanently.
Just recently Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasted that Israel will soon control 70% of Gaza, well beyond the 53% allotted to the country in the Gaza ceasefire framework to which Israel is still supposed to adhere.
When an audience member at his talk shouted out that Israel should take 100% of Gaza, Netanyahu responded, “First 70%. We’ll start with that.”
Then there’s the West Bank, where settlers tried to expel 2,000 Palestinians from a village south of Nablus earlier this month, and where settlers and an IDF soldier wounded nine Palestinians on a June 5 rampage through Hawara.
Since Oct. 7, 2023, Israel has established at least 59 new illegal outposts in the West Bank — compared to an annual average of seven in the preceding three decades. It has appropriated a record amount of land, and displaced more than 8,700 Palestinians through demolitions and settler violence.
There’s also East Jerusalem, where some Israeli Jews are actively trying to remove 20,000 Palestinians from the Silwan neighborhood.
Each act of seizure, harassment and expulsion is anti-Zionist. These Palestinians will not fade into Egypt or Amman or Los Angeles. Mass expulsion isn’t happening, and neither is mass immigration. A Jewish state is giving way to a state that is effectively equal parts Arab and Jewish — except the Jews have all the rights. As the anti-Zionists in the Israeli government seize control of more Palestinian land, they undo all of Zionism’s hard-fought gains. A nondemocratic Jewish state will be neither safe nor secure.
If this sounds like diasporic Jewish garment-rending over morality and Jewish values, it’s not. The people who live in a fantasy world are not those who point out the necessity of finding a way toward coexistence, but those who think Israel can survive and flourish if it trashes its founding principles and its democracy.
Logic and history are not on Israel’s side. No minority- or bare-majority-rule system over a large disenfranchised population has proved durable. I know from my many conversations with my fellow Jews who support a “Greater Israel” incorporating Gaza and the West Bank — or just want to ignore or get rid of Palestinians — that they think time, power or God will bend the iron laws of demography in Israel’s favor. History would beg to differ.
But what about the Palestinians, you might ask: don’t they bear responsibility? For decades of rejectionism and terror? For elevating kleptocratic and ineffective leaders? For glorifying violence and cheering on Hamas in its slaughter, kidnapping and rape of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, 2023? For wanting, as many of them do, an end to Jewish sovereignty in the land?
Yes. Palestinian rejectionism and embrace of violence has been a disaster for Jews, as well as for generations of Palestinians. But those facts don’t change the demographic reality.
Of Americans Jews under 35, 51% support a binational state, according to a recent Jewish Voters Research Center poll. What they see is that there are 15 million people between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. About half of them are not Jews, much less Zionists, and one government is not just intent on holding and controlling all that territory, but well on its way to doing so. If a binational state already exists in practice, the best hope for the region, these young people are saying, is to accept that fact, and direct all our efforts toward making that state just.
They may be completely mistaken about the chances of that happening peacefully or even in their lifetimes, but they’re not the ones who got us to this point. The ongoing settlement of territories with a vast non-Jewish majority was the most anti-Zionist thing Israel could have done, and continues to do, and yet here we are.
The Jewish communal obsession with policing who is and isn’t a Zionist misses the larger point. The State of Israel exists. What’s in question is its character — whether it will be democratic and secure, or calcify into something modern history has repeatedly shown the world rejects.
Land comes with people, and demographics is destiny. A government intent on holding and controlling all the territory between the river and the sea is undermining Zionism from within.
The post The real anti-Zionists are at the highest levels of the Israeli government appeared first on The Forward.
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‘Odessa’ wants to use your empathy against you
The short film Odessa begins with what its director Harald Swinkels calls an “empathy trap.”
The film opens with a German couple and their young son hiking across the Dolomites; the woman seems anxious, the man much more energetic. They approach a church, where they are greeted suspiciously by the twins who take care of it, until they say the passcode: “Odessa.” They later try the codeword again with an innkeeper — but this time they are sent running as she calls on the village to attack them. It’s a heart-pounding scene as the family the viewer has been so closely tied to runs for their lives from a loud, angry mob.
Interspersed through the scenes of the family’s flight are blurry white and black clips of a hazy figure approaching a camera. Even with the obscured shot, the viewer can make out train tracks and recognize the setting as a concentration camp, a flashback to the world they’re leaving. It feels like your typical Holocaust film, showing the risks Jewish refugees faced at every turn and the way the trauma of the camps haunted them.
At the end of the film’s 20-minute run, however, the shadowy figure finally comes into focus. It’s the husband, but not in the striped clothes of a camp prisoner: He’s wearing an SS uniform and ordering twins to be placed in a separate line. He’s Josef Mengele.
“People take first impressions as character,” Swinkels told me in an interview. “That’s not character. You should look behind that.”
Contemporary politics inspired Swinkels, the founder of the Dutch production company Exosphere, to make the film.
“One of my most conservative friends started arguing that ‘these people’ should be kept in their own region, as he called it, and certainly not taken in by us,” Swinkels said, of debates over Syrian immigrants in the Netherlands. “And then we had this discussion about if you would feel the same about these refugees, if they look like him and me.”
Wanting to make a film about Northwestern Europeans fleeing led Swinkels to think about World War II. After an election in Denmark resulted in a right-wing shift in politics, he also became interested in exposing how charisma can hide someone’s darker nature.
Swinkels had long been interested in Josef Mengele, but when he discovered the Nazi’s duplicitous relationship with the kids in Auschwitz — survivors have testified that Mengele would bring them candy in order to gain their trust — that solidified him as the main character. The film features a quote from a Jewish prisoner forced to work for Mengele, Miklós Nyiszli, stating that the doctor “was capable of being so kind to the children” as he prepared to torture them and send them to their deaths.
“Arendt once called it the banality of evil,” Swinkels said. “But with Mengele, it’s even more dangerous because it’s the charm of evil.”
The bread crumbs leading to the family’s true identity are there for history buffs. Over the course of the film, we slowly learn their names — Josef, Irene, and Reif. “Odessa” was the American name for Nazi’s underground escape networks, although there is no historical consensus that this term was used by the Nazis or was an actual organization.
But the clues are easy enough to miss — by the time the audience learns these details, we have already formed assumptions that the protagonists of the story are likely Jews or members of another group persecuted by the Nazis.
The fact that Mengele had darker features and his wife had fairer ones adds another misleading layer. At one point, the wife abandons the journey and insists that it’ll be safer for the son to stay with her while the husband flees. It seems as though this is because she is Aryan and the husband isn’t. But, as it turns out, it’s because he is a wanted war criminal.
The short film also nods to a few other historical figures. One of the brothers at the church is named Alois, in reference to Alois Hudal, an Austrian Catholic Bishop who was a Nazi sympathizer and aided in the escape of several Nazi leaders, including Adolf Eichmann. He did not have a twin brother in real life, but this detail alludes to Mengele’s fascination with twins.
The inn-keeper who sets the village after the family, Frau Scholl, is named after Sophie Scholl, a member of the White Rose Nazi-resistance group, hinted at by white roses outside of her house in the film. They even shot the film in the Dolomites, the same mountain range Mengele crossed during his escape.
Swinkels noted that details like this can be easy to miss. “But I think you can still feel it, that we put so much detail in the film to make all these kinds of historical references,” he said.
He hopes that the film makes viewers think more carefully about charismatic figures.
“History has taught us that monsters don’t come dressed as monsters,” Swinkels said. “They come as protectors, visionaries, or loving fathers. And by the time we find that truth, it’s most often too late.”
“If a viewer walks out of Odessa and looks a little bit harder at the next person who charms them, and even better at the next person they’re about to vote for, then the film will have fulfilled its purpose.”
The short film Odessa is showing at the Tribeca Film Festival on June 13.
The post ‘Odessa’ wants to use your empathy against you appeared first on The Forward.
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Graham Platner, anti-Israel progressive, locks up Democratic Senate nomination in Maine
(JTA) — Graham Platner, the anti-Israel progressive who took Maine’s political establishment by storm this spring, has officially prevailed in his state’s Democratic Senate primary.
Multiple news outlets called the race within 90 minutes of the polls closing, with only a fraction of the votes counted.
The victory was seen as a foregone conclusion after Platner’s primary opponent, Gov. Janet Mills, suspended her candidacy in late April, saying her campaign could not afford to continue.
Still, the final tally suggested that not all Mainers had embraced the political neophyte whose campaign was dogged by controversies, including the revelation that Platner had a Nazi Totenkopf tattoo on his chest for nearly two decades until he drew criticism for it on the campaign trail. He denied knowing it was a Nazi symbol.
Mills, who remained on the ballot, drew about one in five votes in the first 10% of ballots counted, according to the tally published by The New York Times.
The result sets Platner up to face off in November against incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins, who has received substantial support from pro-Israel donors. The latest polls suggest a tight race.
“I’m humbled and proud to officially be your Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate to take on Susan Collins and the billionaire class she represents. Together, we will win this seat back for working Mainers,” Platner tweeted on Tuesday night. “Thank you, Maine.”
While Democratic leaders officially threw their support behind Platner after Mills halted her campaign, many of them remained circumspect about him. Their balancing act grew more delicate in the final days of the primary race, as Platner drew allegations of antisemitism over his characterization of donations channeled to Collins by the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC and as he faced new allegations of misconduct toward women. (He said he had been a “far from perfect boyfriend” during some periods of his life but denied engaging in misconduct.)
Now, top Democrats will have to decide how hard to gun for Platner, who has become a standard-bearer in the party’s anti-Israel shift at a time when the chamber is narrowly divided.
They are already facing pressure to disavow him. “Chuck Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in America, and every Senate Democrat propping up Platner’s campaign, should be ashamed,” the Republican Jewish Coalition said in a statement after the polls closed. “Their continued support of Graham Platner, who wore the symbol of Hitler’s SS on his chest for 18 years is an outrage. Schumer must withdraw his support immediately.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Graham Platner, anti-Israel progressive, locks up Democratic Senate nomination in Maine appeared first on The Forward.
