tonite, as bombs and airstrikes go off in gaza, i am thinking about home. who gets the privilege to decide where they live? historically, jewish people have been kicked out, worse than that. now, we don’t have the right to kick someone else out, too, worse than that. but you know that. writing this here, i know i am preaching to the choir. i am so sad this week thinking about the palestinian struggle, something i had to learn about as an adult. no one in my jewish communities growing up ever told me about palestinians, at least not in a compassionate complex way. no one in the US ever discussed the israeli/palestinian conflict, not really. i remembered tonight, while washing my dishes, after reply-guying to some israeli ppl i know from my jewish summer camp, how here in america some jewish people voted for trump only bc he supports israel. of course, biden supports israel, too. it’s all so twisted. anyway, i said i wanted to talk about home. that’s what this is all about, right? people just want to live in their homes, where they have been living for generations. sometimes i consider how if it weren’t for pogroms and anti-semitism, my home would be elsewhere. i would be european. i’m not bitter about this. i’m an assimilated american, it is what is is. but something about my history is dead to me. huge parts of my cultural heritage are invisible. i’ll never regain them. in a way, this is everyone’s american experience - memory loss. the memory loss of native americans and african americans is different than mine. their genocide is different from ours. i wrote on facebook in an angry comment thread, how do you explain it? how do you explain why you don’t want palestine to be free? there is no good explanation. it’s always something about what jewish people have gone through, the friggin oppression olympics. i know: lifting up the oppression of someone else does not threaten the validity my own life’s hardships. i would never compare my oppression to someone else’s, someone whose home is also their jail.