Gaza and the Gun Between Us
A rift between two friends reflects the fractured ways the Jewish Left in America has processed October 7, and what came after.
It’s been an interesting couple of years to be a Jew in America, or so my friends tell me. I’ve been living in Southeast Asia for most of that time, and I moved back to Detroit about a month ago. Among old friends, Jewish ones especially, I’ve seen political coalitions fraying and, in some cases, lifelong best friends no longer speaking to each other. After nearly two years of horrific violence in Israel and Palestine, maybe this isn’t surprising. But since Hamas’ “Al-Aqsa Flood” attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, everyone seems to have hardened their pre-existing opinions, while I’ve only grown less certain about anything.
When I got back to Detroit, I thought talking to Mitch might help me understand some of this. I had always looked up to Mitch. He was, after all, a year older and a far more proficient skateboarder. In middle school, he played trombone in a ska band, when being in a ska band was the coolest thing one could do, and in high school he was briefly one half of a rap duo, when that was the coolest thing one could do. We’re both broadly on the left, but his leftism includes a liberal Zionism, while mine never has. He’s long advocated for a complete Israeli withdrawal to its 1967 borders, and his Judaism has never meant unquestioning support for Israeli policy, but he’s also come to view an explicitly Jewish state as essential. Over the past two years, that conviction has just grown stronger. Our friendship, once anchored by something like a shared set of instincts, had come to mirror a broader rift now cutting through Jewish communities across the country.
The last time I lived in Detroit, in 2015, I was in grad school and in need of work, and Mitch had taken over his father’s pest control company. He hired me. Then he moved on, working at a property management company and becoming a freelance contractor and handyman as well. When I met up with him recently, he was working through a long list of fixits for a house in the center of Detroit, before the new tenants moved in. I said I wanted to give him a hand, but I have about as much mechanical aptitude as you’d expect from someone who makes their living on Substack, so I mostly just held the base of his ladder as he lifted a pane of plexiglass into an empty window frame on the second story. The heat index was inching close to 100 degrees. He wore old hiking boots, black jeans and a black t-shirt, all of it heavy with sweat and smears of white paint.
I knew we’d been viewing the world differently these past two years, but I hadn’t realized how deep the disconnect was until we went inside.
“Alright, so tell me,” I said, holding my phone toward him as a recorder. “What’s it been like to be a Jew in America these past two years?” He was rummaging through a toolbox in the kitchen, looking for three deck nails. A wobbly half wall upstairs needed to be set right.
“Yeah, shit’s crazy man,” he said.
“How so?”
“Well, I carry a gun now.”
“What?”
I thought he was joking, but he stood up and straightened his back, pulling from his back pocket a small black pistol, sheathed in a leather sleeve with a belt clip.
“No. That’s not real. Is it?”
“Fuck yeah it is,” he said, freeing it from the sleeve.
“When did you get that?”
“Like, right after October 7.”
Mitch had applied for a concealed pistol license, and by November of 2023 he had got the license and the gun, he said. He set the gun on the counter and went upstairs to tend to the pony wall, leaving me to gawk at the pistol. It was a SIG Sauer p365, barely as big as his hand.
“You can pick it up if you want,” he called back down the stairs.