שני רגעים

I was in the car with my mom, on my way to swim practice. I still lived in America at the time, and didn't know anything about what happened on October 7th yet. My mom was supposed to be going too New York to celebrate her birthday with her friends, but as we drove, my mom got another text from her friends saying they couldn't make it. I asked my mom why they couldn't come and she said that something had happened in Israel, only vaguely describing what had really happened. I ended up learning what had happened almost a week later, in a mix of my schoolmates telling me what happened and from my mom telling me what happened at the music festival.

I was in my STEM class, and I was talking to one of the Jewish guys in my class and he asked me if I had seen the video from the high school. I had no clue what he was talking about but when he showed it to me, I realized I'd actually heard some of the kids in my class mention it. In the video, there was a Jewish kid sitting at a lunch table and two other guys dressed in Islamic clothing and hair covers were making fun of him and were trying to scare him because of what happened on October 7th. I remember sitting in shock after seeing it, because out of all the communities, mine had always been very Jewish and I'd never really had to worry about antisemitism or anything like that.