“Avi’s Menorah: A Personal Essay”

By Mike Weiss

This is my attempt to process the latest twenty-first century horror, once again featuring the casual, even gleeful slaughter of children, along with other ghastly spectacles unfolding before our eyes in Israel and Gaza. Vapid, misinformed social media hot takes spew forth from both the right and the left. Venomous screeds from people aligned with or sympathetic to various tribes fetishize “resistance” or call for a genocidal “holy war” against the “other.” I am tempted to smash or torch every electronic device within my immediate vicinity.

I am a second generation American child of the Jewish Diaspora of the early twentieth century. All four of my grandparents landed here as children, barely escaping the murderous pogroms of Russia, Poland, and Romania, harbingers of an even greater catastrophe soon to unfold from 1933–1945. My paternal grandfather arrived as an undocumented immigrant, owing to cleverly designed quotas crafted by the United States Congress to keep people like him out. He worked as a common laborer in Detroit in the years prior to the Second World War.

Around that time, a widely read magazine article composed by a respected U.S. author described people like my grandfather (Polish Jews) as “parasites” posing a lethal threat to the Anglo-Saxon-Nordic purity which made America great. Virtually all family members my grandfather left behind ultimately met their end as piles of ash in Nazi ovens. Their executioners were inspired in no small part by the racialist theories featured in scholarly works composed by learned men safely ensconced in the ivory towers of British and American universities.

My grandparents never talked about the Old Country. It took me decades to understand why.

Like so many of my generation, I have reaped the benefits of all that America had to offer, thanks to those who have gone before me. My grandfather found work in defense plants and eventually opened his own businesses after the war. His younger brother, a U.S. Army paratrooper, died in the effort to wipe the Third Reich and all of its poisonous platitudes from the face of the earth. “Never again,” as the famous phrase goes.

From there, the story unfolds in one continuous upward arc of progress and privilege. First generation children of immigrants, educated in excellent, low-cost American public schools and universities, passed on their good fortune to kids like me. Born with both a relentless work ethic and a failing heart, my grandfather dropped dead at age sixty three. But the ripple effects of his courage, fortitude, and good fortune continue to this day.

I received a Jewish religious education until age thirteen. I bailed after my Bar Mitzvah, and my parents relented. They no longer pressed the issue, having fulfilled an obligation they felt to honor their immigrant parents’ heritage and sacrifices. I never quite let go of my Jewish identity, however, despite the strange new world I found myself wandering through. I made a rather weird college choice, ending up at a small Presbyterian school in the mountains of Tennessee. I spent most of my four years there as the only Jewish student on campus. I received an excellent liberal arts education which serves me still, while developing some close friendships along the way.

In other ways, my alma mater was not a great fit. Conspicuous as a non-Christian outsider, I became a “special project” for some of my enthusiastic evangelical classmates. One of my closest friends at the time occasionally needled me with “Holocaust jokes,” evoking howls of laughter from those seated around us in the dining hall. “You know I’m just kidding, right man?” Today he is an unapologetic MAGA zealot, and it all kind of makes sense now. Most of my fellow students were decent people who eyed me curiously from a distance. I do not blame them for the alienation I felt, because I made my own choices.

From time to time, the temptation to transfer tugged at me, but I hung in there. Despite being cast as a bit of a stranger on this campus, I emerged as a marginal leader, earning an appointment as a dormitory Resident Assistant (RA) in my junior year.

At the start of that year, our dorm supervisor briefed the RAs on the new freshman boys moving into our quads for the upcoming semester. He told me I was getting an “exchange student from Israel” named Avi. “Cool,” I thought. “Someone I can relate to.” But the dorm supervisor’s understanding of Middle East geopolitics was simplistic. I soon learned that Avi was a Palestinian Arab from the occupied West Bank. A couple of years younger than me, Avi’s home would have been located in the Arab nation of Jordan upon his birth. By the time he turned five, Avi and his family lived under the rule of the victorious Jewish State of Israel as a result of the 1967 Six Day War. Somehow Avi and I both ended up at this little Appalachian college together.

I took my responsibilities seriously and made an effort to get to know everyone in my charge, helping these dorky misfits refine their terrible study habits, teaching them how to separate their laundry items, and tending to some of them while they puked up the consequences of their first binge drinking episodes. I even prevented two ill-placed roommates from killing each other.

A smart young man, Avi figured out who I was at about the same time I realized he was no Israeli Jew. We approached each other cautiously at first. This was right around the time of the Israeli military invasion of Lebanon during that nation’s civil war, with the stated purpose of wiping out PLO enclaves from which terror attacks were launched on Northern Israel. The ensuing bloody chaos and atrocities splashed over television screens throughout the year and beyond.

I give Avi full credit for deciding that I posed no threat, and for leveling with me about who he was and where he came from. What began as a kind of elephant-in-the-room situation where we would talk around the obvious, eventually evolved into long dorm room conversations stretching late into the night. We discussed the war and its causes to the extent that we could understand them. We also talked about our families, and I became enthralled with the story of his.

Prior to this moment in my life, in Hebrew School, during Shabbat services and High Holy Days, at Sunday School, and around the family dinner table, the Arab-Israeli conflict was framed as a simple morality play between good and evil. Every Jewish kid can recall the moment he or she first became aware of antisemitism and the Holocaust. We watched in horror as the terrorist massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics unfolded on our television screens. The narrative of Israel’s founding and its triumphant perseverance against all odds could only be understood through a prism of righteousness, heroism, and Jewish exceptionalism. Arabs were inevitably caricatured as violent, beastly creatures bereft of humanity, culture, and civilization.

This narrative began to unravel as I got to know Avi, who lent me books by Palestinian authors and told me stories about how he and his family lived under occupation. This may have been my first realization that my history education up to that point was limited, simplistic, flawed, and in some cases, deliberately falsified. Thoughtful, historically-literate Americans are familiar with this epiphany, of course. Perhaps Avi had a parallel experience in getting to know me, reevaluating his understanding of history and his feelings about Jews.

I cannot know for sure, because after that year Avi and I never saw each other again. He never returned to school. His homeland remained convulsed in violence throughout most of the 1980s. Next came a few sporadic lulls in the 1990s, followed by the metastasizing, intractable bloodshed of the twenty-first century, culminating in today’s scenes of machine gunned children, parents and grandparents, beheaded corpses, and cramped, squalid slums leveled by some of the most sophisticated weapons systems known to man. For all I know, Avi never lived long enough to complete his education, get married, raise a family, and build a life.

I do know that he lived long enough to send me a package from East Jerusalem while I was at home during the summer between my junior and senior years. I opened the box, and on top of the wrapped gift I found a letter he composed thanking me for helping him through his first year of college and for the interesting talks we had. He mentioned no plans for the upcoming school year. I unwrapped the gift–a Menorah he purchased in the crowded open air markets of East Jerusalem, where somehow Muslims, Christians, Jews, and secular tourists wandered the streets together in search of bargains. All under the watchful eyes of automatic weapons-toting soldiers, of course.

I lost the letter, but not the Menorah. In fact, I see it now on a bookshelf across from where I sit writing this piece. In one sense it stands as a lonely, poignant testament to enduring humanity and an unlikely friendship forged between two kids who were supposed to hate each other but chose not to. In another, it seems to mock our species’ abject failure to learn how to live together as neighbors without seeking to exploit, oppress, dispossess, and slaughter each other.

A few years after I met Avi, I began a rewarding career as a history teacher which now spans forty years. Today, however, I have nothing to offer beyond the heartbreak and remembrance which impelled me to write this. I still believe an understanding of history must be a prerequisite for any hope of human progress. Yet today I wonder if more often than not history, like religion, becomes weaponized to serve misguided or evil purposes. Now it seems as if a long life devoted to an effort to understand history leaves me empty and understanding nothing.

I cannot remember if Avi’s Menorah has ever been lit at Hanukkah–it has sat dormant for many decades now. I will resolve to light it this year, perhaps in one last attempt to rekindle lost hope.

Oct 11, 2023