Kathryn 

"THERE is a dream which keeps coming back to me at almost regular intervals; it is dark and I am being murdered in some kind of thicket or brushwood; there is a busy road at no more than ten yards distance; I scream for help but nobody hears me, the crowd walks past laughing and chatting."

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-- Arthur Koestler, “The Nightmare That Is a Reality,” The New York Times, Jan.  9, 1944.

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After nearly two decades as a print reporter covering cops and crime and then fashion/style writer, my husband Jeff and I decamped to leafy Durham, NC. We were happily raising our two young daughters there when, in 2018, the Durham City Council  unanimously passed a sicko boycott of Israel that even today remains on the municipal books.

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For the first time, I felt Jew-hatred in my bones. I was reduced to nighttime crying bouts on the cold bathroom floor after the kids went to sleep. 

 

Finally, I stopped crying and start screaming--in the way Koestler describes it--against the grotesque, deadly illiberalism of anti-Zionism, and in the most inconvenient of places. 

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I told Jeff that, well, that would be the end of any invitations to cocktail parties. 

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"Great!" he said. "I hate those anyway."

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"So, perhaps, it is the other way round: perhaps it is we, the screamers, who react in a sound and healthy way to the reality which surrounds us, whereas you are the neurotics who totter about in a screened fantasy world because you lack the faculty to face the facts." 

 

-- Koestler

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