The Question Every Jewish Professional Got Asked After October 7 |
You know the moment I’m talking about.
Maybe it was in a meeting. Maybe it was in a hallway, or on a Zoom call, or over lunch. Maybe it came from a boss, a colleague, a client. Maybe it was phrased gently. Maybe it wasn’t phrased at all—just a look, a pause, a sudden awareness that the room had rearranged itself around you.
But at some point after October 7, someone at your job turned to you—the Jewish one—and expected you to say something. To explain. To account for. To condemn.
Not because you had done anything. Not because you had said anything. Because you were Jewish, and something had happened in a country six thousand miles away, and apparently that made it yours to answer for.
If you’re a Jewish professional in America, there is a very good chance you know exactly what that moment felt like. And there is an equally good chance you have never fully talked about it.
This year, the federal government put a dollar figure on what that question cost at one institution. Columbia University agreed to pay $21 million[1]—the largest EEOC settlement for antisemitism in the agency’s sixty-year history—to resolve claims that Jewish employees were subjected to a hostile work environment after October 7. The claims process is open now, with a deadline of June 2, 2026. That is one university. The same thing happened at thousands of workplaces across the country where no one filed a claim—because most people had no idea they could.
Sometimes it was explicit. So, what do you think about what’s happening over there? Said with a weight that made it clear this was not a casual question. Said in a way that no one was asking your non-Jewish colleagues. Said in a way that assumed your answer would reveal something essential about you—your values, your loyalties, whether you were one of the good ones.
Sometimes it was softer. A colleague forwarding you an article with no comment, just a thought you’d want to see this. A manager checking in with a tone that felt less like concern and more like surveillance. An invitation to sign a statement that somehow only landed in your inbox.
And sometimes it wasn’t a question at all. It was an absence—the meeting you were no longer included in, the project that quietly moved to someone else, the conversation that stopped when you walked into the room. No one asked you anything. They just decided they already knew the answer.
Here is the part that is hard to explain to people who did not experience it: the question itself was not always the worst part. The worst........