Two Jewish Writers, a Bottle of Whiskey, and a Post–October 7 Reality

Hamas’s attack on October 7 had the effect of stopping time. Many Israelis and concerned Jews I’ve spoken with describe a day that has not yet ended for them—a continuous nightmare from which they can’t wake, a reality compounded by the knowledge that so many of the kidnapped are still in captivity. The fiercest critics of Israel’s actions over the past three months don’t want to hear, let alone acknowledge, these feelings, because the weeks of ongoing death and destruction in Gaza have erased for them the hours of rampant torture and rape and murder that preceded them. Understandable though this reaction might be, it ignores the sense of rupture that many Jews now feel.

In the weeks just after the attack, this was the dilemma I faced. Attuned to Palestinian suffering, I didn’t want to lose my ability to take in what happened that day—the concepts and sureties it shook loose, the troubling questions it prompted about the Jewish condition. And so I did what I always do in moments when human complexity threatens to get flattened: I turned to the writers. I invited Joshua Cohen and Ruby Namdar, two prominent novelists I greatly admire, to The Atlantic’s New York office after closing hours one evening in late October. Cohen won the Pulitzer Prize for his most recent novel, The Netanyahus, and Namdar won the Sapir Prize, Israel’s most prestigious literary award, for his second book, The Ruined House.

Cohen and Namdar do what great novelists must. They exercise an extreme form of empathy and follow where it leads them. If I wanted to discuss the Jewish condition, these were the people to do it with. They had each devoted many, many pages to obsessively circling questions of identity and belonging, diaspora and home. I knew they would be feeling and thinking a lot, reading what had happened through a literary sensibility, searching for a vocabulary to describe the horror of it all.

We shared a bottle of whiskey, and we talked for more than four hours—I recorded it, but wasn’t sure any of it would be publishable. The conversation was raw and painful, but it also felt cathartic (if also a little headache-inducing the next day). The intensity of that evening produced insights still worth hearing. What follows is a series of moments from our late-night talk, edited and condensed in places.

After October 7, people must have come to you and said,