What I carried home from the Haifa conference on antisemitism - opinion

Getting there was not simple. I had tried to make this trip to Israel a few times before, and each time, for different reasons, it was pushed off.

The conference had originally been planned for March, then postponed by the war with Iran, landing instead during the three weeks that lead to Tisha B’Av.

Just landing at Ben-Gurion Airport was emotional for me. I was grateful before I had done anything at all.

I was appreciative to find myself among scholars and clinicians from 20 countries, studying antisemitism across disciplines. Presenting my own work to such an engaged audience, in Israel, was a privilege I will not soon forget.

I met people I would never have crossed paths with had October 7 not made this gathering necessary, and we found each other across differences in background. The conversations were thoughtful, deep, and genuinely collaborative.

As a clinician, I recognized something happening in that room that I do not think anyone there was consciously naming. Trauma processed alone tends to fester. It convinces a person that what happened to them is theirs to carry in silence.

Something different happens when trauma is witnessed together, named out loud in a room full of people carrying the same weight. The pain does not disappear, but it becomes bearable in a way it was not a moment before.

For three days, none of us absorbed this material alone. We absorbed it together, and that changed how the body processed it.

Trauma professionals often talk about vicarious trauma, the cost of witnessing another person’s suffering. Less often discussed is vicarious resilience: the transformation that occurs when we witness people responding to catastrophe with courage, meaning, and purpose.

During the conference, I watched hundreds of people do exactly that: launch a new academic association, the Contemporary Antisemitism Studies Association, develop new frameworks, build partnerships across continents, and choose rigor over despair.

Resilience, I was reminded, is not only built within individuals but also within communities that gather to remember, grieve, learn, and keep building together.

What I witnessed in Haifa was not optimism. It was a culture that has spent thousands of years learning how to metabolize grief collectively into meaning and action.

After the conference, I stayed in Jerusalem for a few days, talking with Israelis about what they were carrying: the isolation, the exhaustion, the political splits, and, still, underneath it all, an unmistakable determination to keep living fully.

I also took a hike into the canyon of Ein Prat, walking on the land that the prophet Jeremiah once walked. Jeremiah, who authored Eicha, the Book of Lamentations, is remembered not only as a prophet of destruction but also of consolation and return.

Standing in that landscape, so soon after days spent naming the oldest hatred in its newest forms, felt like walking straight into that same duality.

BHL was writing about Israel’s position among the nations, the sense, he said, of being cast beyond the pale of the democratic world, of watching old allies hedge and old certainties dissolve. This is what drew him to sadness.

But that was a reading of Israel’s relationship to the world outside it. I kept finding myself looking at something else entirely: not how the world was treating us, but how we were treating each other.

Those two readings do not cancel out. They were never answering the same question.

Jewish tradition has never asked us to resolve grief before we are allowed hope. Tisha B’Av itself holds both, on the same day, in the same body. The morning is unrelieved grief. By afternoon, the liturgy already begins turning toward comfort.

The weeks that follow are not called the weeks of moving on. They are called the Seven Weeks of Consolation, and the grief is never asked to leave first.

Memory, in Jewish tradition, is not intended to keep us trapped in grief. It is meant to strengthen identity, continuity, and hope. Four hundred of us gathered in Haifa on that same premise.

What I most want to offer someone who was not in that room is this: resilience is not a feeling you sit and wait for. It is something a room full of people can generate together, by refusing to face it alone and choosing action over passive absorption.

I left Haifa, and I left Israel, having witnessed both the sadness BHL named and something else standing right beside it: a people who keep showing up for each other, keep building, keep choosing each other, even now.

I came home more hopeful than when I left, and more determined than ever to keep doing the work of helping this Jewish world of ours heal. Our tradition has never framed healing as the absence of grief.

Hope and sorrow can coexist, and the capacity to carry both is itself a profound form of resilience.

And that has always been part of our Jewish strength.