Hi friends!
If you’re new around here, I’m Liz, and this is Burn It All Down, the internet’s foremost source for whatever I feel like saying. In 2023, I named these unhinged times the Age of Unhingement™ and then answered a mysterious calling to write about how completely fucking insane everything is. Back then, the cultural insanity was immense, and yet so relatively twee it could have played a ukulele.
This week’s episode is brought to you by Tylenol.
In my two and a half years of writing this newsletter, there was only one time I seriously considered never sending it again, and it was long before most of us met.
In 2023, at the end of September, I was losing my mind, for a variety of reasons that we can’t get into right now because we’ll be here for hours, but know that my mental health was bad enough that I tried to quit a freelance job by sending my boss a sublimely unhinged voice note via Slack. My boss, in a desperate attempt to make me stay because I was leading a team on an unruly project and was somehow still delivering the deliverables from the throes of insanity, and also because he’s a pretty decent guy (we still work together on other things), and I think he could tell that I was in the midst of losing my mind, told me I needed to think about it for a week before he would let me resign, which I didn’t like, but didn’t have the energy to fight.
A few days later, October 7 happened. The next week, I was allowed to resign. And then, a few days after that, during a very sleepless night, I decided to better educate myself on the history of anti-Semitism in Europe, which is obviously not a viable treatment for a Jew in the throes of insomnia, but is, in fact, a great way to trigger one’s epigenetic IBS.
When I look back at that October, all I see is darkness.
My Jewish community runs deep, and I was getting a lot of calls from friends who wanted to talk things out. One called to tell me that a friend of hers, a classic Instagram story revolutionary who is not involved in any offline activism, berated her in a DM for not speaking out against Israel within 48 hours of October 7, when so many of us were just trying to process what had happened, not make public statements. Another called me to ask, with genuine curiosity, why I thought it was wrong that Israel had cut off the water in Gaza, and so I explained that cutting off a basic human need (and right) to a population that is under occupation just doesn’t sit right with international law or with me.
I thought my head might explode from reconciling so many different points of view. I eventually had to stop answering the calls. And then there was social media, the atmosphere of which was more politically strident and sorrowful than ever before, a wild development considering we had all just lived through the pandemic.
There was no way that I, a Jew who wants to burn everything down, could keep writing this newsletter, with its one unifying theme, HOW INSANE EVERYTHING IS, and one clear mission, to keep it authentic to me, without addressing October 7. I felt like a bit of a fool for not realizing that, if I was going to talk about how insane everything is, I’d eventually have to address the Middle East.
I was scared to speak out about what was happening, not because I wasn’t clear on my own beliefs. I was very clear and they haven’t changed, but they exist in the middle of two algorithm-aided extremes. In that moment, when everyone on social media was tearing each other to shreds, I didn’t want anyone coming for me, because I had already lost my mind that fall and wanted a shot at getting it back before year’s end.
I seriously considered abandoning this newsletter, but the thought of giving up my new, little happy place on this cursed fucking internet made me, a very sad bitch at the time, even sadder. So, when I felt ready, I sat down and wrote a few honest words and sent them into the ether.
No one ended up coming for me, but a few friends reached out to tell me that my words made them cry. Me too, because I wrote them all with tears in my eyes. Revisiting them this morning made me cry again. I ended that email with a promise that I would get back to roasting unhinged nonsense as soon as the horrors abated, but they never did, they just kept getting worse.
Last week, I celebrated Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, with my family in Toronto. We’re on 5786 in Jew years now, and I’m giving you permission to appropriate our culture if you’re over this year and can’t wait until January for a new one. It’s never been weirder to be a Jew in my lifetime, so if you’re interested in affiliating yourself with us, and you’re not one of the Christian Zionists hoping we’ll all go back to Israel so the rapture can happen, then sure, why not? Time isn’t real, so come along to 5786 and join us in it.
After Rosh Hashanah, us Jews entered the Days of Awe, also known as the Days of Repentance. I prefer awe over repentance since a reclamation of wonder suits me better than stewing in remorse, but either way, the ten days leading up to Yom Kippur are traditionally spent reflecting on the past year and repairing any harm we may have caused. We are trying not to end up in God’s bad book, because he’s keeping tabs and taking names, kind of like an omnipresent Regina George or Santa if he was macabre.
The goal is to get in God’s good book, called the Book of Life. If you are perfect, your name automatically goes in and you are granted another year of being your beautiful self on this wretched Earth. The Book of Death is the bad book. In it, the names of the wicked are immediately written. The rest of us have those ten days to sort our shit out before cloud daddy puts pen to paper and inscribes our fate. I have, since my early life as a childhood absurdist, loved this book allegory because it’s so petty and relatable to me, a writer, whose notebooks have historically been well-used, judgmental, and insane.
I know that atoning in a Substack screed is not traditionally how Jews mark Yom Kippur and try to get in the good book, but I am far from a traditionalist. I’ve never been one for fasting on this day, as is religious custom. In fact, more than once, my bubie and I — she’ll be 95 in January, I just saw her last week — snuck out of synagogue together, walked across the street to her house, and secretly ate giant pieces of challah toast washed down with half a pot of coffee each.
But I think that the yearly tradition of reflection and amends is both helpful and necessary, especially when we have this much to repair collectively.
So, I must now atone, and what I need to atone for is that I have been hoarding my thoughts on Israel. Though I’ve been very vocal in person, I haven’t written about it in depth in quite some time here in my newsletter. This has been a fucked-up year, and there was always something to say that was easier and funnier.
A lot of Jews see Israel as an escape plan that prevents another Holocaust from happening, and supporting the country, no questions asked, as a binary: You’re either with us or against us. But I’ve never seen the world in black and white. I know our history (don’t forget that both of my paternal grandparents survived the Holocaust, my grandmother by sewing in a factory at Auschwitz while nearly starving to death). I still mourn the massacre that did actually happen on October 7, despite what people are saying on X. I know that People Love Dead Jews, because that’s the title of a book both my dad and my dear friend Andrew Greenwald have read and recommended to me, but I’ve been sleeping OK lately, so it’s not currently on my reading list.
I also know that everything I just told you is not an excuse to allow history to repeat itself. We say never forget, but ignoring mass death, suffering, and starvation is selective memory if we think it’s OK because it’s not happening to us.
Israel is not above criticism because it’s a mythical safety net for the Jewish diaspora. It is a country, much like America, that has multiple revisionist versions of history, but unlike America, it is a tiny piece of land where different groups of people, including Jews, have lived and fought each other since antiquity. That tiny piece of land has a story so ancient and bloody that every time I’ve been to the Old City in Jerusalem I have felt the centuries of pain in every quarter.
In my nearly four decades of being a Jew, I have experienced anti-Semitism before, but never so boldly as since October 7. A sleeping bear woke up that day and was thrilled for the opportunity to leave its cave. Read the comments on any viral post, pro-Israel or pro-Palestine, and there’s a pretty good chance you’ll see something along the lines of “Hitler was right.” Those comments often get many thousands of likes.
This isn’t a problem relegated to the online world. At the end of October in 2023, I went to a workshop at a prominent art gallery in Downtown Los Angeles where the artist running the afternoon’s activities asked us to introduce ourselves and share one thing we love and one thing we hate. A woman wearing clown makeup (it was Halloween weekend) boldly told the entire group that she hates Zionist Jews. The first word was delivered as a throwaway, not a disclaimer, if that would even make it any better.
I sat there in disbelief.
Declaring you hated Jews to a room full of ostensibly progressive people at an art gallery in California no longer elicited any response. I didn’t say anything myself. I was in shock and had thought the afternoon would be an escape.
Almost all my of Jewish friends and family members have a story of experiencing blatant anti-Semitism in the past two years. Over the weekend, one of my dearest friends, who lives here in Los Angeles, told me that a woman physically distanced herself from him at a wedding reception in Europe and brought up dead babies when she found out that he was Israeli. In that moment, he was also in shock and didn’t know what to say.
But I do. I have the words now. I have been thinking constantly about how I feel and occasionally writing about it for two years, and while my beliefs have not changed, they have crystalized. I no longer share them in fear.
This is not the time for any of us to let fear silence us. Free speech only dies if we acquiesce to the threats and allow the hateful comments that come with this dehumanizing version of politics we’ve accepted as the norm to prevent those of us who speak from the heart to say what we think and feel.
I believe in the sanctity of human life. I don’t believe in the supremacy of one group of people over another. I cry my eyes out when I see hostages leaving Gaza looking like Holocaust victims and when I see a dead Palestinian child being held by their weeping father. I can call what’s happening in Gaza a genocide and still pray for the remaining hostages to return home safely.
I can have these beliefs without needing to atone for my personal failure to solve thousands of years of conflict in the Middle East. If the rumors are true, that solution will come, instantaneously like the rapture, when every celebrity finally speaks out on their social media.
I’m also not atoning for what the Israeli government has or hasn’t done (the hostage families are still out protesting). People are not their governments and I’m not even Israeli, so that’s on Netanyahu and his fundamentalist Orthodox cronies to reconcile with their very different version of God who seems to have misplaced his burn book.
From where I stand, neither Israelis or Palestinians are homogenous, evil groups of people. Palestine deserves to be free and we all have a right to live in safety. I see how we got here from every possible angle and still refuse to fall into the cynicism and fear that fuels endless violence and takes us further from peace.
Feel free to tell on yourself in my comments if you disagree, I need some fresh material for next week:
Now, before I let you go, I have a few more quick atonements.
I’m sorry that I was on my Canadian hiatus during the Charlie Kirk memorial. Watching clips of a Nazi rally seemingly produced by The Righteous Gemstones made me consider staying put in Toronto and sending for my things, but ultimately I want to spend the winter in California.
I’m also sorry for not discussing Kimmel. That situation was top-tier Unhingement, but I needed my hiatus badly and the time has now passed. A great reminder, though, that in America’s capitalist hellscape, where everything is ultimately about money, boycotts work.
Finally, I’m sorry that I can’t seem to send this newsletter with any discernible cadence. More structure might be nice for all of us, but whimsy and surprise do have value, I think. Especially when it comes to emails, because who wants to deal with those? That said, I have a lot of ideas for what I’d like to do with this baby of mine now that she has grown. More to come on that.
My newsletter is still, after all this time, my happy place on this cursed fucking internet. I am eternally grateful to the past version of me who misplaced her mind yet somehow found the courage to keep writing, and I am eternally grateful to all of you who were there in the early days, supporting me as I very publicly faced a lot of fear.
To a better, sweeter year for all and an immediate ceasefire. ❤️
Less Lessons More Blessin’s™
Liz
Heavy stuff... these are troubling times... stay sane... much love...
Beautiful