One hundred days after Hamas’s attack, looking back at a candid and intense late-night talk with two prominent authors, Joshua Cohen and Ruby Namdar.
Hamas’s attack on October 7 had the effect of stopping time. Many Israelis and concerned Jews I’ve spoken with describe a day that has not yet ended for them—a continuous nightmare from which they can’t wake, a reality compounded by the knowledge that so many of the kidnapped are still in captivity. The fiercist critics of Israel’s actions over the past three months don’t want to hear, let alone acknowledge, these feelings, because the weeks of ongoing death and destruction in Gaza have erased for them the hours of rampant torture and rape and murder that preeceded them. Understandable though this reaction might be, it ignores the sense of rupture that many Jews now feel.
In the weeks just after the attack, this was the dilemma I faced. Attuned to Palestinian suffering, I didn’t want to lose my ability to take in what happened that day—the concepts and sureties it shook loose, the troubling questions it prompted about the Jewish condition. And so I did what I always do in moments when human complexity threatens to get flattened: I turned to the writers. I invited Joshua Cohen and Ruby Namdar, two prominent novelists I greatly admire, to The Atlantic’s New York office after closing hours one evening in late October. Cohen won the Pulitzer Prize for his most recent novel, The Netanyahus, and Namdar won the Sapir Prize, Israel’s most prestigious literary award, for his second book, The Ruined House.
Cohen and Namdar do what great novelists must. They exercise an extreme form of empathy and follow where it leads them. If I wanted to discuss the Jewish condition, these were the people to do it with. They had each devoted many, many pages to obsessively circling questions of identity and belonging, diaspora and home. I knew they would be feeling and thinking a lot, reading what had happened through a literary sensibility, searching for a vocabulary to describe the horror of it all.
We shared a bottle of whiskey, and we talked for more than four hours—I recorded it, but wasn’t sure any of it would be publishable. The conversation was raw and painful, but it also felt cathartic (if also a little headache-inducing the next day). The intensity of that evening produced insights still worth hearing. What follows is a series of moments from our late-night talk, edited and condensed in places.
Gal Beckerman: After October 7, people must have come to you and said, “Write your response.”
Joshua Cohen: The people who write op-eds are the same people who run for office—there’s no money in either of those things. They just attract narcissists and psychopaths. My real impulse was for a human or community connection, for being with my people.
Ruby Namdar: It’s funny, I hardly ever write op-eds. And all I’ve been doing the last few weeks is writing them because, like every person who’s traumatized, I am in a narcissistic stage and am fully focused on my own pain. The thought of working on fiction, for instance, feels beyond absurd to me right now. I do not have the bandwidth. Also, what could I possibly dream up as fiction that could top our reality?
Beckerman: It seems wrong to ask such an academic question, but how did you read what happened on October 7, an event that felt almost engineered to push all the buttons of Jewish trauma?
Namdar: It was—I’m going to use a terrible word here—beautifully orchestrated, not that there’s any beauty in it. But there was a gruesome aesthetic to this, like the one of horror and snuff films. And I actually heard an interesting comparison to what the Mongols did in the Middle Ages. The Mongols used to create art installations of horror. Like, pyramids of skulls, mounds of severed limbs, etc. The Cossacks did similar things to the Jews during the Khmelnytsky Uprising in the 17th century. They created spectacles of horror that seared themselves into the collective memory of the victims.
Beckerman: To terrify?
Namdar: They wanted this to be an image that will be spoken about for generations, and then no one would ever dare to stand up to them. What Hamas did on October 7 was not spontaneous barbarism. It was barbarous, but it was very carefully planned. They all had body cameras, because this was meant to become an installation of sorts. It wasn’t meant to be heroic; it was meant to get under our collective skin. Heroic is when you stand face-to-face with your enemy, you confront your nemesis. There are historic models of such bravery in Arab culture, like Saladin, for example, confronting the Crusaders, army to army, sword to sword, metal to metal. The October 7 atrocities were not based on this model, not at all.
Beckerman: Then what was the ultimate purpose?
Namdar: It was, I believe, to undo the Zionist fantasy of being part of the land, of potency: It was meant to send us back to the helplessness that Diaspora Jews felt in their own home when the Cossacks entered and destroyed their family. The rape element cannot be ignored. We need to talk about the sexual element a little, the sexual violence here, because that is also something that ISIS did recently. Mass rape is a well know genocidal practice; we’ve seen it performed in the ongoing civil war in Syria as well, but chose to look the other way because intervention seemed inconvenient. It is not only about killing an enemy; it’s about defiling and invading the sanctity of the autonomous collective body.
Beckerman: And in the face of all of this, there was a lot of silence. The silence was this kind of cognitive dissonance.
Cohen: In that period of silence, there was a recalibration. And in that recalibration, the left immediately created a contradiction. It had spent a lot of time during the coronavirus pandemic, and the George Floyd protests here, telling everyone that speech was violence, that the way you use words can create violence. And then immediately after October 7, they said, “No, actually violence is speech—what Hamas was doing here was a protest movement. This was a protest of an unjust, illegal occupation.” And so it took those on the left 24 hours to flip the script. And that fits in with the second thing they did, which is they immediately plugged Israelis and Palestinians into their racial binaries of white and Black.
Namdar: That fantasy of Jews as white is so interesting to me. Like, so fascinating. I mean, go walk in the street in Israel and tell us that we’re white—it’s so funny. Put aside even the Yemeni, the Moroccans, the Persian Jews like myself, who never claimed to be white. But even Ashkenazim, the Ashkenazi Jews in Europe, were never considered to be white—they were the untouchables, almost like the Roma. To call someone a Jew was to say the N-word. The whole project of passing as white has actually cost the Jews a dear price. It enabled them to reach certain social heights. But it is now, in my opinion, one of the worst things that happened to the Jewish collective of America, that “whiteness,” because kids who were raised very liberal and then became radical go to schools where whiteness is a slur. Whiteness is a cuss word. Whiteness is demonized. And now they are white, suddenly, the little Yids from the shtetl; now they are white and therefore their existence is not valid. And they cannot support their historic ancestral homeland that their grandparents pined for and used to plant trees in, because it is considered a “white country.” And they are told by their professors that they need to be against white people. The absurdity of it is striking. But it’s also a dangerous fantasy. It is a dangerous fantasy, this whiteness business.
Cohen: I think among a lot of Jews, what you’re calling “this whiteness business” compels them to take the anti-Zionist position.
Beckerman: They need to reject that part of themselves?
Cohen: They need to make themselves acceptable. “Good whites.”
Namdar: This self-loathing, which a lot of American Jews believe to be an authentic Jewish trait, is actually a modern European Jewish trait. It is not a true Jewish trait. As a Persian Jew, I was not raised with it. It’s a very new thing, and it starts with the emancipation in Europe. The ticket to enter polite society was (a) you stop looking like a Jew and (b) you stop speaking like a Jew. And the most important thing was that they had to internalize the anti-Semitic gaze of their generous hosts. So they had to start loathing all things Jewish. They had to laugh at the anti-Semitic jokes. And this self-loathing has become like a sacrifice, like the famous pound of flesh. It’s like you cut a piece of yourself. “A pound of flesh, to be by him cut off / Nearest the merchant’s heart.” You basically cut out your Jewish heart, present it to your ungracious Gentile hosts and say, “I no longer see myself as beautiful, as chosen. I see myself through your eyes, as an unwelcome guest who is tolerated in the salons as long as he is amusing.”
Cohen: I’m reminded of Elias Canetti’s line where he says the Jews will never get over the shame of the Shoah. Because they had to deal with this propaganda everywhere that they ran the world, they owned everything, they were all-powerful. And in a way, when that’s all you hear, you can begin to believe it, but the question is, how do you go from this position of being part of an all-powerful people who control everything to being rounded up and exterminated? That fall is shaming—it’s shaming because you realize you had false self-knowledge; you were laboring under a delusion.
Beckerman: How do you grapple with Palestinian death?
Cohen: Every death makes me cry. And I believe everyone’s pain. That, in a way, is the problem. I recognize the novelistic appetite I have to begin empathizing with someone’s pain, only to end up wanting to channel it, wanting to vocalize it—wanting to turn a hurting human into one of my characters. When I watch the scenes that come out of Gaza, I’m flattened. And I don’t just see death; I see the creation of the great Jew-haters of the future. So that’s where I am: Every death is the loss of an entire world, and yet everyone who remains alive will be a Jew-hater.
Beckerman: I also find this particular aspect of all the death difficult to bear. And then there’s the fact that leading the war is a man who is a fundamentally flawed character. Since you’ve thought about Netanyahu a lot, Josh, I wonder how you would write Bibi’s story right now?
Cohen: You mean if I had to write a sequel? Despite what people who know me would say, I have some capacity for empathy. And when I look at him now, I see a man coming to terms with the fact that he has lost everything and defiled his legacy. He has gone from being the king protector, and the only man who believes he can safeguard not just the state of Israel but the Jewish people, to being someone who’s just trying to fend off the demons—a version of Lear. He’s realizing that his entire strategy, his entire life, has been a failure, but he has to keep up appearances for his wife, while his wicked son’s living it up in Margaritaville.
Beckerman: I see a sequel.
Cohen: Remember, Bibi’s also a person with a pacemaker, with a heart that isn’t pumping enough blood. He’s had a recent brush with his own mortality.
Namdar: A very Shakespearean character, but you know, I also have another book in my mind when I think of Bibi: The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde. As a writer, I am fascinated by people’s looks. Bibi was very, very handsome and extremely seductive in his youth. There was something super sexy, super compelling about his looks, his voice, his body language. He was very convincing, very charming. And look at him now! His face, his hair, his body language—he does not look real; he looks like a cheap knockoff of his former self. I’ve watched this man move from being one of the most handsome, charismatic, seductive, persuasive men I’ve seen—
Cohen: To someone with no presence at all.
Namdar: With no presence, and he looks monstrous. There’s a monstrosity to him, to his looks, his body language and his speech mannerisms. It is both shocking and fascinating to see how the moral and ideological corruption is manifested in the body.
I will say, though, that even if it is very pleasant, popular, and gratifying to blame Bibi for everything—and I do think he should go down in infamy, and I think he should resign today—this is bigger than Bibi. And this is bigger than Israel. This situation concerns the West, which Israel so desperately wants to be or is a part of. We were trying to create Hamas, and radical Islam, in our image. We were projecting ourselves, our own worldview and values, on them. They taught us a lesson, and I wonder if we’ll learn it. If I wanted to be very provocative, which I never am, of course, I would say that it’s a sort of conceptual colonialism, where you think you know them, and you think you own them—their mindset and their actions. But Hamas taught all of us, the entire Western world, a lesson about the limits of how much we understand them. And most of the Western world has done exactly what one does when shell-shocked and having a cognitive dissonance: resort to full denial. Hamas always told us that they are fundamentally a terror organization that is set on destroying Israel and getting the Jews out of Palestine. We refused to believe them. We preferred to keep thinking about them in terms that fit our own pragmatic worldview. We need to start believing them. The projection game must come to an end.
Cohen: It’s difficult to understand how Israel can be, again, this all-powerful Jewish force—as all-powerful as the Jews of Europe were all-powerful—and yet not be in any way able to prevent the violence perpetrated against it. So much of the rhetoric about Hamas is colonialist in the extreme: saying that Israel “fostered” Hamas, that Israel “supported” Hamas and so on, as if Hamas itself has no agency, as if they’re just wounded, misunderstood Arab boys. The truth is that Bibi used Hamas to avoid a two-state solution, which was criminal. But Hamas wasn’t invented in some lab at the Technion.
Beckerman: Tell me what writing since October 7 has been helpful for you, has provided consolation or guidance.
Namdar: I’ve been having a lot of flashbacks. Verse flashbacks. I always loved the Bible. I’m very immersed in it. I am of the Israeli generation that was privileged enough to get the Bible straight into the vein. And without the religious baggage. I get a ton of verse flashbacks, I didn’t even know they exist in me. Verses from the Book of Lamentations, from Jeremiah, from Deuteronomy. “The sights you see will drive you mad” is a verse that keeps popping into my head. I also think about sections in the Talmud that describe the destruction of the first temple, like the puddle of boiling blood on the marble floor of the holy temple. We have plenty of cultural and literary precedents to what happened. And as we said in the beginning of this conversation, knowingly, semi-knowingly or unknowingly, those people read into our deep collective unconscious and tried to utilize our deep memory, our deep collective trauma, against us.
Beckerman: Give us some details.
Namdar: A friend just shared a picture of one of the victims. And again, I’m very much into human beauty; it’s something I respond to. And … I’m going to cry. Sorry. Okay, he is a most angelically beautiful young man that was murdered at the Nova music festival. His name was Keshet, which means “rainbow” in Hebrew.
Cohen: His first name?
Namdar: Yes! And he was an Adonis, and in this picture he’s half naked. He’s beautiful, and he looks so innocent, and he was butchered there, at the desert music festival. And I went to the Lamentations, and there is a line in which they speak about the beautiful boys of Zion. They were “as if gilded with gold.” And then how they became like broken earthen vessels. This, what we are experiencing now, is Lamentations.
Cohen: I had to do this public reading, about a week after. And I felt I couldn’t back out, because a close friend had asked me to do it. So I got up and read the story of Samson, which ends with Samson’s suicide, of course, and the line “He killed more in death than he ever killed in life.” One of the most striking aspects of the Samson story is that Samson seems complicit in his own destruction. Delilah asks him: What is it that makes you so strong? Three times she asks him, and three times he doesn’t answer, until he finally says, you know, I’m a Nazirite; all you have to do is cut my hair. Which she does. And it turns out …
Namdar: Are you saying he was asking for it?
Cohen: I’m saying it’s a parable. And the commentary saying that he was asking for it is surprisingly thin.
Namdar: That might be our generation’s Midrash. So you put three Jews and a bottle of schnapps in a room and look what you get …
Cohen: The Book of Judges, which tells us that it was ever thus. And to be honest, there is some solace in that. Though perhaps it’s more Jewish solace than Israeli, because Israelis have had their basic reality undermined. My wife is Israeli, as secular as they come—or so I thought. On October 7, she “converted” to Judaism. I had to convince her to let me break a glass at our wedding. But now she’s breaking every cup.
Namdar: They definitely touched our deep structure. I’m going to sound like an annoying old rabbi now, but I will say it anyway: I’m devastated. I’m a mess. But because I know the Book of Lamentations and because I know the story of Samson, the fact that there were precedents for this situation is comforting for me. Look at us: three middle-aged Jews with beards sitting here drinking schnapps in New York, many thousands of years after all these crises, and we are looking back, and we’re making historic and textual connections, and we are very invested in this. So I think we are one traumatized collective. But there’s also this weird superpower, some bizarre spiteful resilience that comes with the trauma. It’s ingrained in us. I think of Josh as the embodiment of spiteful resilience, for example. That should be the name of your biography, Spiteful Resilience.
Cohen: The embodiment of spiteful resilience: a cockroach, Kafka’s Ungeziefer. I have to say that I wasn’t shocked on October 7 so much as justified. I had a childhood that was all Shoah, all the time. That was my schooling—that the Jews were endangered in every place, in every time—and now finally here’s proof, here’s proof in my own generation. Hamas has furnished evidence for the accuracy and utility of my childhood education, which is yet another thing I might hold against them.
Beckerman: Do you imagine art that can come out of this moment?
Cohen: Historically, moments like this produce poetry, prayers. Massacres are rare in Jewish fiction. Probably Lamed Shapiro did them best, but in short fiction, not in novels. Even the Shoah itself—there are so few great novels by survivors. Think about it: a world-historical event of mass death, 6 million people dead, and it produced maybe five, maybe six good novels by writers who survived the camps: Adler, Hilsenrath, Kertesz, Wander, Wiesel. Of course, I’m forgetting some. Lists are ugly.
Beckerman: Why is that?
Cohen: Why were there so few survivor-writers? Because there were so few survivors, period, and because to prose that type of suffering almost always verges on kitsch.
Namdar: Do American readers even understand the word kitsch?
Cohen: I love that Israelis think kitsch is a Hebrew word. I mean the public-mourning aspect is kitsch, and a novel is a product of public mourning. That’s not all a novel is, of course, but that’s part of what it is.
Namdar: I think that it can be, but it would be a very bad novel. Death and horror are a terrible kitsch trap, and we saw this trap in action with the few Holocaust novels that were published in Hebrew in the ’50s and had a raw, overly graphic, almost pornographic quality to them. The more subtle, deep response came much later—with novels such as David Grossman’s See Under: Love and Amir Gutfreund’s Our Holocaust. That’s when the real literary response to the collective trauma and mourning began.
Cohen: Novels can be written about these terrorized communities, but the novels that matter would be set in those communities before the terror, before the death. Because books are about life. I know this will come off as trite, but it’s true. Books are founded on and in life. And death comes with the end: the idea, which I found scandalous as a child, that beyond the final page, these characters don’t exist; it’s all over for them; there’s nothing.
Namdar: I think there’s going to be a lot. First of all, I predict a certain silence. Because this is too crazy and too horrific. And too ancient, and too contemporary. There’s going to be a silence, and then I predict two waves. One wave of really bad writing, really bad, terrible kitsch, on steroids—like, bad, embarrassing, reductive, transparent writing. But then—and this is a crazy prediction, but I’m gonna say it—Israeli literature, which has been so-so for quite a while, might suddenly become vital, interesting, searing, biting, many things that it hasn’t been for years. That second wave of artistic response will not touch directly on the trauma of October 7 but will be unconsciously fueled by it, and it may seriously revitalize Jewish and Israeli art and literature. It remains to be seen.
Beckerman: Well, I was thinking about 9/11. And just how there was never a great novel.
Cohen: It’s difficult to write a novel about an event. Because nothing ever starts that morning. Nothing ever ends that night. An event is not a subject.
Namdar: What’s more important is the stuff that has been done to the collective body. From this kind of deep disruption, deep woundedness, somebody’s cut the belly and pulled the baby out, and raped and destroyed and mutilated, all this, it really disrupts the body. And then creative, often dark materials might flow through these gaping wounds.
Cohen: There’s this dangerous lie, which Jews themselves have helped spread, that accuses Jews of being the standard-bearers of some amorphous humanistic tradition. “We” are the ones who, according to the right, are constantly pushing leftist causes; we support freedom of expression and open borders and oppose discrimination universally. And yet to push for that agenda these days is to push for “our” own destruction—or so many Jews believe. As for what I believe: I think if the noble causes you advance wind up branding you as illegitimate, then that’s almost the end of the Enlightenment—when you advocate for an Enlightenment that denies your own right to exist.
Namdar: There is something very, very volatile about the Jewish existence that we actually are doomed to be our own destroyers and the world’s revivers. The Abrahamic journey is a tragic journey. It’s so much better to stay at home. Lech Lecha, the injunction to Abraham to wander, means “You’re fucked.” What crazy person leaves their world and goes to a savage land called Canaan and then to Egypt, and then to Europe, and then back to Palestine? What is your problem? Stay at home, have children, drink wine with your friends. I think that this is why chosenness is a curse, and a blessing, and a vocation. And you know, it’s the first time speaking to you now, to both of you here, where I find that tiny bit of compassion for these absolutely insufferable kids who are protesting Israel. Because these kids are not going to be Jewish in a generation, but they might be carrying the Abrahamic tradition, in a way, because they’re trying so hard to be a blessing to the nations. It’s very strange. It’s abnormal, to the bone.
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