Dinner With Friends

More than a year ago, in “sleepy” Santa Barbara, long before Hamas ever slaughtered 1,400 innocents at a peace festival or Israel retaliated, a special group of Central Coast locals were incubating a project that could just very well help with this mess. Maybe a lot of messes.

Ironically, we may owe a debt of gratitude to Kanye West. A little more than a year ago, on October 7-9 of 2022, exactly one year to the day before Hamas’ attack, West started spouting antisemitic tropes, like that he was going to go “DEFCON 3 on the Jewish people.” West then doubled and tripled down on his hate speech. The media’s blasé reaction and mostly non-condemnation, “that’s just Kanye,” may have emboldened Elon Musk to proceed down a similar path.

Musk went on an unapologetic tirade all his own, blaming his loss of Twitter ads on the ADL and buddying up to a Parthenon of hate speech’ers. On October 27 of last year, Musk completed his purchase of Twitter and, just like that, the floodgates were opened – antisemitism and hate were beta tested and stepped further out of the closet in America. 

It started to become scary for, among others, Jews. Not so much the amplification and normalization of age-old canards by people like West and Musk whose careers and reward have obviously never been hindered by Jews or anyone else. It wasn’t just the rantings of two people with loud and far-reaching megaphones. The scary thing about the Bat signal being sent out was that racist talk seemed a lot more tolerated than I ever would have expected.

Around that time, a friend of mine and I went to a screening at a Santa Barbara film festival of a documentary called Repairing the World: Stories from the Tree of Life. The film told the story of how, in the aftermath of a heinous hate crime that resulted in the murder of 11 innocent people, the Squirrel Hill community in Pittsburgh (comprised of Muslims, Christians, Jews, and others) came together to stand against hate. After the film, my friend and I turned to each other – me white, him Black – and we wondered together: what happened to the kindred spirit that once seemed to exist between Blacks and Jews?

I casually started talking with some Black friends and some Jewish friends about this; about how our communities had drifted so far apart, certainly since the zenith of Black and Jewish allyship when Blacks and Jews marched together during the civil rights movement. A few of us wondered if it made any sense to sit down over a meal and discuss things. We all agreed there were limits to how poorly a single working dinner could go. And so the dinner invites were sent.

There were 12 of us at our inaugural albeit poorly named “Blacks and Jews” dinner. Community leaders, all strong people and straight talkers. The first such gathering took place seven months ago at my home. (A shout-out to Chef Mollie Ahlstrand for providing delicious food!) We didn’t really have an agenda other than to discuss and have sort of a general airing of grievances. The bar of expectation was low. And?

Our dinner turned out to be incredible. Cathartic. Revelatory even.

By mid-way through the evening, we all felt safe enough to discuss our disappointment with the “other.” We each talked about our PTSD about racism each of us (and our children) had experienced, even right here in Santa Barbara and Montecito. Including our bizarrely self-segregated public schools where Black and Jewish kids are called racial epithets.

Importantly, each group expressed feelings of abandonment by the other. We all did our best to clear up misconceptions. To acknowledge the others’ experiences. To say the conversation was lively and illuminating would be an understatement. The sign the evening had been a success, besides that it went on for four hours and no one was jumping up to leave, is we all decided we should do it again. We didn’t know what we just did, just that it felt good and vaguely epiphanous and maybe like we were somehow moving towards something although none of us knew quite yet what that something was or even could be.

The Second Dinner went deeper, and vaguely felt like couples counseling except the “couple” was Blacks and Jews, just without an expensive therapist. The Third Dinner went deeper still. By now a few others joined, not just Blacks and Jews. We were building trust. Transitioning from colleagues to friends. We saw there was a lot of hurt on both sides. But the group saw our rift as a problem we shared. Rather than pointing fingers at who started it – because it doesn’t matter who started it – we knew it would take both teams to end it.

Then the October 7 Hamas massacre happened. I have to admit I was stunned by how many people and groups immediately sided with terror against Israel. At first, many of us were in a state of stunned silence.

Not the Moment of Silence I Was Looking For

For anyone who wonders what it was like to be the daughter of a Holocaust survivor during those first few days after October 7, 2023 – it sucked. As it did and continues to for so many.

There was the initial shock of the massacre. But frankly there was the just-as-bad shock over so much tacit support given to proud rapists and baby killers. I’m not a supporter of Netanyahu, and I believe both Jews and Palestinians deserve a homeland. But how could anyone not pause for at least a moment to condemn such clear and grotesque acts of terrorism? 

Meanwhile, opposite week continued as formerly vaunted fact-based institutions treated the Hamas “news service” like it was Reuters and dutifully reported that Israel had bombed a hospital in Gaza that in fact turned out to have been misfired upon by Palestinian Islamic Jihad – and in fact not bombed at all. 

Even when the truth of Islamic Jihad’s inadvertent self-attack on Gaza was revealed via an incredible piece of reporting by the Wall Street Journal, lesser publications were still blaming Israel and slow to walk back their false accusations. Even in Santa Barbara, the Santa Barbara Independent on October 17 (in their October 19 Best Of issue) devoted an entire page to an opinion piece signed by a group of UCSB professors “Academics for Justice in Palestine.” Before even mentioning Hamas’ terror, the academics blamed Israel for a misguided missile that hit al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Central Gaza. This damning, unsubstantiated and combustible allegation, without attribution, was utterly devoid of actual evidence or credible sources. But nevertheless, gloriously highlighted by the Independent which has still failed to fully walk back their kneejerk, harmful reporting (as, for example, The New York Times has done).

I can only tell you that the result of all this bad news and in some circles this brand-new holocaust being instantaneously denied, and a mass student movement on college campuses around the country calling for the destruction of Israel, brought up in me very strong feelings of sorrow and isolation. I was in a Mobius strip of waiting… and doom scrolling… both repulsed and addicted to the news cycle. What was I waiting for? 

I was waiting for the situation to change. But it seemed to only keep changing for the worse. And the silence from any empathetic or even sympathetic voice was deafening.

Until the Silence Was Finally Pierced

The first voice to reach out to me from beyond my inner circle, “just checking in,” came in the form of an email from Jordan Killebrew, from our Dinner With Friends group. “With all that is happening in Israel and Gaza, I wanted to check in with my Jewish friends. I am thinking of you. Please reach out if you need anything,” he wrote.

I can’t tell you how much Jordan’s note meant. He didn’t make a reference to who was wrong or who was right, he simply reached out because he knew my husband and I were suffering. He also (intentionally) “replied all” on our Dinner With Friends email chain, the result of which was that every single person, one-by-one, also reached out to make sure that everyone else was okay. 

It’s an overused phrase, but this was our teachable moment. We had only had three Dinner With Friends, but even within those three gatherings we had built strong enough bridges we could use and did use when a crisis arose. 

Maybe our Dinner With Friends doesn’t sound like a massive disruptor event. But it really was. We not only break bread but break the chain of suspicion and distrust by simply dining and talking to people we had never taken the time to really get to know previously. We’ve unpacked a lot at our dinners and learned a lot about each other, our baggage, and our unique burdens and strengths. And we’ve laughed a lot as well. 

Our world has huge problems. Many of which stem from how easy it is to discount and villainize the “other.” Maybe it’s time we all got a little more intentional about getting to know “others.” So that in times of crisis, the trust has already been built. I still believe we have more in common than divides us. And as the great Anthony Bourdain once famously understated: “You learn a lot about someone when you share a meal together.”