Sept. 2025
Wendy Schneider

For nearly two years, Jews everywhere have been living through a shared experience of grief, confusion, fear, and uncertainty—something that, for the first time in my lifetime, feels like a truly global Jewish phenomenon.  I’ve tried to make sense of it, as many of us have, by reading countless articles and commentaries, and by listening to an endless stream of podcasts. Then, last spring, I came across a short story in the April 8 edition of The New Yorker—David Bezmozgis’s "From, To" —and it quite literally took my breath away. In a way no political analysis could ever accomplish,  it distilled the essence of this moment for the Jewish people, laying bare the generational rifts and emotional wounds that run through so many of our families.

The events of Oct. 7, 2023, form the backdrop to the narrative, which opens with a late-night phone call informing the protagonist—a divorced real-estate lawyer of Soviet Jewish heritage—of his mother’s sudden death while playing Rummikub on the roof of her apartment building. With his younger daughter asleep in the next room, he calls his eldest, who is sharing a tent with her Palestinian girlfriend at an unnamed university encampment.

As the family moves through the rituals of Jewish mourning, the protagonist is forced to confront the chasm between the history of struggle that shaped him and his daughter’s sharply different worldview—a rift that has deeply unsettled countless Jewish families in our time.

In an early-August Zoom interview with the Hamilton Jewish News, Bezmozgis said he wrote the story “for people who felt as I did” in an effort “to leave a record of this moment.” A Latvian Jew born in 1973, he believes the family dynamics in his story mirror the experience of what many Jews of his and older generations have experienced in the aftermath of Oct. 7. 

“I think in a lot of families there’s a sense of disunity,” he said. For older generations, the attack brought profound grief—not only for the staggering loss of life but also for the collapse of a long-held illusion that they were “outside the stream of Jewish history.” That pain has often been compounded by deep ideological rifts with their children, leaving some feeling isolated within their own homes. By centring the story on a death and funeral, Bezmozgis forces his characters to confront who they are as a Jewish family. “It’s not politics writ large,” he said. “It’s a much more intimate experience of being a Jew today.” 

As a student of Soviet Jewish history, Bezmozgis sees echoes of today’s divides in the “massive, incredibly painful break” of the Bolshevik Revolution, when young Jews abandoned their parents’ Judaism for revolutionary ideals, and later in his parents’ generation’s disillusionment with the Soviet project, “which was supposed to have saved the Jews, but instead imperiled them.”

The father’s anguish over his daughter’s embrace of anti-Zionism is palpable. Yet unlike his protagonist—who wonders whether he might have done more to counter his daughter’s limited grasp of Jewish history—Bezmozgis resists drawing a straight line between parenting style and political outlook. He has seen too many examples of Jewishly educated young people who turned to anti-Zionism precisely because their schooling left them alienated from their Jewish identity.

“I think it has much more to do with knowing your own history and having a feeling for your people.” At the same time, he said, if anti-Israel sentiment is as omnipresent as “the air you breathe,” it becomes difficult for progressive young Jews to make “at least equal space” in their hearts for Jewish suffering.

This is not to suggest that Bezmozgis’s protagonist feels nothing for Palestinian suffering. In one passage, he gives in to the impulse to scroll through posts from fellow members of his Facebook soccer group—people he had assumed would express solidarity with the Palestinian cause. There he finds “gruesome videos of weeping fathers, covered in the dust of an air strike, cradling the broken bodies of their children.” His reaction is one many of us might recognize:

“To put himself in the place of the Gazan fathers for even a few seconds was unbearable,” Bezmozgis writes. “The sensation in his heart and his mind breached the bounds of his body and swamped the potential of life.”

It’s tempting to read the protagonist’s reflections as a window into Bezmozgis’s own politics, but the author resists that assumption.

“The only way that I want to express whatever political feelings I have is through art,” he said. “I’m just interested in the experience of people ... that’s what artists aspire to do, which is to reveal the emotion, the pain of the thing.”

Still, Bezmozgis concedes that ending the story with the Kaddish’s prayer for peace carries the message he most wants readers to hear: “I think so much of what’s been painful about this is how little people speak of peace,” he said. “It’s just a human choice not to have hatred in your heart and expect the same from the other side.”