Most Jewish-American girls I know met their husbands on JDate.com or at Jewish summer camp. Not me. I picked my husband up at pub in Times Square on St Patrick’s Day. My friend Ellen was engaged to a bloke from Longford and she begged me to come. “You’ll meet an Irish guy!” she said.
I resisted. I didn’t know anything about the Irish. I thought it was all green beer and plastic leprechaun hats ... Oh, and Bono. I knew him.
Cut to (as we say in Hollywood): Fifteen Years Later.
I am happily married to a man from Co Meath. Bobby and our son are dual citizens. I dream of also having Irish citizenship one day. (Taoiseach, if you’re reading…) I devour Irish literature, can happily subsist on a diet of sausage rolls and Bulmers and love to swim in the Irish Sea. We even named our son after Cormac mac Airt. (Thank you to the Irish mother-in-law for all those trips to Tara.) I count it as one of the greatest, unexpected blessings in my life that I am Irish, in spirit, if not passport (eh-chem, Taoiseach).
Bobby, who likes to say he married the first Jewish girl he ever met, has similarly embraced my culture. He loves Woody Allen movies and chopped liver – as G-d and the Torah command. He even learned the very annotated version of our High Holiday prayers: “They tried to kill us. They failed. Let’s eat.”
We discovered, to our delight, that our cultures have so much in common. We are both bookish, soulful people. Both cultures rooted in oppression, sarcasm and smoked salmon. We both hide our trauma in dark humour. My people really aren’t supposed to be eating sausage rolls but my point is our similarities vastly outweigh our differences.
I know that Irish solidarity with the Palestinian cause runs deep and I truly believe that most Irish people’s hearts are in the right place
Until October 7th, 2023, when Hamas committed the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, we only ever considered it “bashert” – fate, in Yiddish – that we had the great privilege of raising our son Irish and Jewish. He speaks some Irish (big póg mo thóin fan) and Hebrew. (We say the Oseh Shalom, the prayer-for-peace, each Sunday.)
Before Israel ever retaliated in Gaza, Bobby and I watched, aghast, from abroad, as some of the kindest people we know empathised not with the 1,200 people slaughtered by Hamas – but with the terrorists. I didn’t see an outpouring of calls to bring home the 240 hostages, including babies and 30 children, among them Emily Hand, a nine-year-old Irish-Israeli. (And no, Leo Varadkar, she was not “lost”.)
We went from browsing real estate listings in Dalkey as a form of self-care to browsing the social media feeds of Irish people we follow in abject horror.
[ Ireland’s reputation enhanced by stance on Gaza, says Mary RobinsonOpens in new window ]
To be clear, this went way beyond criticism of the Israeli government and its actions. Posts downplaying the Holocaust; alleging that Jews are baby killers (an ancient “blood libel” used to justify the murder of Jews); mocking prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s stereotypical looks; denying that women were sexually assaulted by Hamas on October 7th, United Nations report and GoPro footage of bloodied, half-naked bodies be damned. Would our Jewish-Irish family feel safe living in Ireland?
I know that Irish solidarity with the Palestinian cause runs deep, and I truly believe that most Irish people’s hearts are in the right place. When your heart aches for the loss of life in Gaza, my heart aches, too. We say in Judaism that every life is a universe, and that is as true for the child in Gaza as the child on the kibbutz.
But I know that anti-Semitism also runs deep. Ireland has been called “the most anti-Semitic place in Europe” – not exactly a title to own alongside all those Eurovision wins.
We’ve seen the scattering of Hamas and Hizbullah flags in Dublin, crowds calling to “globalise the intifada” and free Palestine “From the river to the sea” – both cri de coeurs to murder Jews. We’ve read of Jewish students in Ireland being harassed. Fine Gael councillor Punam Rane recently said that “the entire US economy today is ruled by the Jews”. Damn, I wish someone had told me. I would’ve hit Brown Thomas.
I take Irish people at their word when they tell me they are not anti-Semitic, only anti-Israel. They often say they have nothing against Jews and then make the case that Israel doesn’t have a right to exist. At a rally in Dublin last year, Richard Boyd Barrett called Israel “a filthy colonial regime” that must be brought down. To most Jews, this is a little like saying that you have nothing against the Irish, you just think they have no ancestral right to live on the island of Ireland and should either be wiped-out by jihadists or go back to countries that murdered them in the past. So, it’s not ideal.
I admire the Irish urge to root for the underdog, but I’d humbly ask you to please consider that Jews are a tiny ethnic minority – just 0.2 per cent of the global population. Historically, we’ve been ethnically cleansed out of every country we’ve tried to live in. My ancestors were enslaved in Egypt, driven out of ancient Israel and then murdered in the pogroms of eastern Europe. Jews are the victims of a staggering number of hate crimes in the US and the EU. In the past year, there have been multiple bomb threats at our son’s religious school, and a man wielding a knife and anti-Semitic slurs in our Los Angeles neighbourhood. This isn’t a distant, trendy cause to us.
Ireland has been called ‘the most anti-Semitic place in Europe’ – not exactly a title to own alongside all those Eurovision wins
There are only 2,193 Jews in Ireland, according to the 2022 census, and that number is declining. There are only two synagogues in Dublin. Like the old Jewish joke goes: There are always two synagogues. One we attend and one we wouldn’t step foot in!
I’d implore my beloved Ireland to ask itself why the nation isn’t more animated about other humanitarian crises? More than 300,000 Muslims killed in Syria, 400,000 in Yemen, thousands killed and millions displaced in Sudan. Why is it only when the Jewish state is involved that the Irish take to the streets?
[ Repeated Israeli strikes cause widespread destruction in Nabatieh, LebanonOpens in new window ]
Look, I can’t solve the Middle East conflict or combat decades of anti-Israel sentiment. I have a small child currently cursing at me in Irish and a new season of Bad Sisters to watch. All I can say is that, everyday, our family prays that the suffering in the Middle East ends. That this fever lifts. That we can watch our children feed the ducks in St Stephen’s Green and see our similarities, rather than our differences. That we can go back to the way it was before… and just blame the British.
Amy Chozick is a Los Angeles-based writer, showrunner and executive producer. A former New York Times journalist, she is the author of Chasing Hillary, which she adapted into the HBO Max series The Girls on the Bus
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