Cynthia Ozick: A New York Jewish Life of Letters [View all]

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Although she attends an Orthodox synagogue, Ms. Ozick prefers to describe herself as “just generically Jewish.” If there’s a theme that dominates her oeuvre, it’s Jewishness, particularly Jewish life in America, which has of late infected her with sorrow. Jewishness, she says, is “co-extensive, or coterminous, with American life. You couldn’t pull Jews and America apart. Until now.” She means the period since Oct. 7, 2023.

Seated at her dining table, Ms. Ozick trembles as she speaks of “the mystery of that day in October.” On the very morrow, “it was as if, in this country and everywhere in the world, permission was suddenly given.” She means permission for antisemitism. Her consternation is “profound,” she says: “How could an event like that, a terrible massacre so minutely recorded by the perps, open these permissive floodgates?”

The question torments her. “It’s a greater puzzle than antisemitism itself. The whole world was standing there, suppressing antisemitism, and when Oct. 7 happened, it said, ‘Oh, look. It happened. So we can do it, too.’ ” Her last published commentary, which appeared on these pages, addressed these events. Titled “Antisemitism and the Politics of the Chant,” it asked whether we’ve “come to the end of a Golden Age” in America, especially for its Jewish citizens. She fears we have. The massacre gave a green light for “Jew-hate,” she says. “But for some exceptions, there was no sympathy. It was as if this country changed overnight.

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After Oct. 7, she confronted a question about the country to which her Jewish parents fled from Russia, and where they found great happiness in their lives as Americans. “Is it now the beginning, little by little, of the disintegration of what we’ve come to call the Judeo-Christian in America. Is the legacy of the Founding Fathers coming to an end?” (After that question, she apologizes for using a “cliché.”)

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