86th Street and Broadway

I’m thinking fondly of West 86th Street and Broadway. It’s as good a place as any to call the heart of Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the neighborhood where I spent several happy years before finding my current home.

It’s just six blocks uptown from Zabars and from the original site of the iconic H & H Bagels, just four blocks south of Murray’s Sturgeon Shop, and this is fitting for one of the most Jewish corners in America. The surrounding community is home to many artists and intellectuals, families of refugees from the Holocaust among them.

Walk up Broadway from the intersection for 35 minutes, or take the subway north for four stops, and you’re at Columbia University. Go the same distance downtown and you’ve reached Columbus Circle. Let’s consider both places and what’s been happening there since the beginning of this month.

Any day now, we’re likely to see headlines suggesting some type of replay of last year’s controversial pro-Palestinian encampments on college campuses, with Columbia often identified as the prime example. I hope that the college’s new administration comes closer to getting things right this time: Upholding our sacred American tradition of protecting free speech while ensuring all students are protected from violence, harassment, and intimidation.

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In addition to fresh chants of “Ceasefire Now!,” we’re likely to see again some slogans twist into disturbing anti-Israel rhetoric, and again we’ll be asking when that rhetoric may cross the line into antisemitism. I will say, with many others, that at the end of the day, the distinction boils down to what makes us uncomfortable versus what makes us unsafe.

Now moving to Columbus Circle, where thousands gathered on Labor Day weekend for a vigil honoring Hersh Goldberg-Polin and his five fellow hostages after they were murdered in cold blood by Hamas just days earlier. This heartbreaking moment brought together families of hostages with local Jewish religious and political leaders, who led chants of “Seal the deal now,” referring to the frequently promised but not realized ceasefire agreement.

The parents of 19-year-old Edan Alexander, who was raised in Tenafly, joined the IDF, and was kidnapped to Gaza, told the gathering that in addition to Hamas, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu bears responsibility for the continued captivity of their son by “shifting the goalposts” on the ceasefire draft and undermining his own negotiation team. The Columbus Circle gathering was one of many where I and thousands of other Jewish Americans said kaddish for the murder victims and spoke of their solidarity with the masses of Israelis who have taken to the street to demand the hostages’ return and an end to the fighting.

The Histadrut, Israel’s labor federation, staged a nationwide general strike in support of the hostage families’ ceasefire demand after the six young people’s bodies were discovered. Despite the strike’s short duration, the outrage of many hundreds of thousands of Israelis is still hot that the Netanyahu government was dithering and delaying while the chance to bring these six young people back alive slipped away.

On September 4, the Hostage and Missing Family Forum called on Netanyahu to stop wearing the yellow ribbon pin of solidarity for their cause, accusing him of “faking his support,” as the Times of Israel reported. This was the same day that Yedioth Ahronoth published a documented report detailing how the prime minister “effectively spiked” a draft hostage agreement in late July by introducing new demands for a continued occupation of the Egypt-Gaza border area, the kinds of things that Defense Minister Gallant and leaders of the Mossad and Shin Bet are saying are not required for Israel’s security.

It’s hardly a secret that Netanyahu has been overly concerned with placating the most extreme members of his far-right coalition, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir — proponents of perpetual occupation and Jewish “re-settlement” of Gaza, as they threaten to bring down his government if the ceasefire and hostage release takes place.

We need to contrast this with the moral stand exemplified by Rachel Goldberg-Polin and Jon Polin, Hersh’s parents, who spoke in the spirit of tikkun olam, the sacred duty of repairing the world, when they addressed the Democratic National Convention a few weeks before the current tragedy. “There is a surplus of agony on all sides of the tragic conflict in the Middle East,” they said. “In a competition of pain, there are no winners.”

The hostage families with their bravery and outspokenness now represent the moral center of world Judaism and our best hope for peace.

The people protesting at Columbia don’t often speak the same language as those who went to Columbus Circle. For some campus radicals, the Stars of David on the side of planes delivering death-producing munitions over Gaza have become objects of their loathing and, disturbingly, some have also taken this as license to adopt distorted attitudes toward the entire Jewish people. There are undeniably too many antisemites within their ranks. I only hope they hear the outcry for peace coming from the folks wearing Stars of David at Columbus Circle down the way who are also calling for an end to the suffering.

I’m thinking of the corner, 86th and Broadway, that vibrant center of American Jewish life. The folks who rallied at Columbus Circle could certainly go the mile and a half uptown to get there. Perhaps the folks raising Palestinian banners up at Columbia, in the name of ceasefire, could come downtown too.

Mark Lurinsky of Montclair is recently retired from a career in public accounting. He is an activist in local politics and a member of the steering committee of J Street’s New Jersey chapter.