Efrem Sigel

Efrem Sigel’s latest book is the true-crime memoir, Juror Number 2: The Story of a Murder, the Agony of a Neighborhood (The Writers' Press, 2020).  The review in Publishers Weekly, December 2020, said about "Juror": "Novelist Sigel (The Kermanshah Transfer) turns his sharp eye for detail to a beautifully written hybrid of true crime and memoir. True crime buffs and fans of memoirs will be enthralled by Sigel's irresistible mix of clear reporting, empathy, and thoughtful examination of the link between poverty and violence."

 

His first novel, The Kermanshah Transfer (Macmillan), a novel of Middle Eastern intrigue, came out in 1973. His second novel, The Disappearance was published by The Permanent Press. in 2009.  "Juror Number 2: The Story of a Murder, the Agony of a Neighborhood" appeared in 2020.  A third work of fiction, a short story collection entitled "Let There Be Light" is due in 2024.  Since the late 1990s more than 30 of his stories and memoirs have appeared in dozens of magazines, including The Journal, the Antioch Review, the Jerusalem Post, Midstream, Nimrod, Sixfold, Gemini, and PerSe and have won a number of prizes.  His recent OpEds in City Journal, the New York Daily News and Times of Israel can be seen below under the Efrem Sigel Blog.

Efrem has been a journalist, editor and founder, with his wife Frederica, of two business publishing companies. Under the auspices of the Harvard Business School Club of NY, Efrem leads teams of volunteers, all alumni of Harvard Business School, who consult to nonprofits in the field of education.  He's on the board of Futures and Options, a nonprofit that arranges intensive orientation, paid internships and career exploration for students from underserved neighborhoods in New York City.

He grew up in Staten Island, NY, graduated from Curtis High School, has an A.B. from Harvard College and an MBA from Harvard Business School. After college he spent two years as a Peace Corps teacher in Ivory Coast, West Africa. Swimming, tennis, walking and hiking in the Berkshires in western Massachusetts, and reading, writing and Scrabble are his favorite pastimes.  He lives in New York City.  He and his wife have two sons and four grandchildren.

For more about Efrem, see his Linkedin profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/efrem-sigel-4b1b419/

The Efrem Sigel blog   This is an author's draft, no copying or sharing, please

WHAT MAKES YOU THINK THAT I KNOW NOW?      
by Efrem Sigel  ©Efrem Sigel 2026 all rights reserved No reproduction without permission

The wig she wore was reddish brown, a burnt sienna color, and for a long time Mark Gold didn't think about what her real hair must look like. Her complexion was fair. There was a creaminess to her skin and a softness to her voice that made you think of a model except that a model lives to make an impression and she seemed unaware of her effect on others.

Mark could work at a furious clip and daydream at the same time. Even when he was cranking out client reports, tunes were dancing in his head, and from the moment he saw her, this woman was Ellington's Sophisticated Lady, Strayhorn's Lush Life. At times the musical ideas took hold of his fingers, which would trill over the computer keyboard as if its 104 keys were black and white ivories instead of F10, Esc, Alt, and PgDn. Market research was how he earned his living, but music filled his lungs the way the wind gave lift to the spinnaker on a racing cruiser.

Mark's boss at Competitive Intelligence, Ron Fujimoto, had run through three bookkeepers before he found Shira. Beefy Marlene had quit after her husband abandoned her for a thinner woman. Then came Rita, a tough-talking stick of an Italian-American girl from Yonkers. In six weeks Rita was gone, joining her boyfriend as he set out across the country on his new Harley-Davidson. In desperation they hired a 45-year-old ex-priest with an associate degree in accounting. He lasted two days and two hours.

Now there was Shira, 25, with her low voice and her skin the smooth of clear pine. After graduation she'd worked as a bookkeeper for one of the New York supermarket chains. Then she'd gotten married and for six months she hadn't worked. Had something transpired, some medical or emotional event? How's your health? Mark asked when he interviewed her. A pause. "Excellent," she'd said. Why had she hesitated?

She'd gone to a religious high school in Queens. The bowler hat she wore to the interview was temporary, Shira said. When she started working, she'd wear a wig. He didn't have to worry, it wouldn't attract any attention.

Mark was vaguely annoyed at all the explanation. His 17-year-old son, Jeffrey, now living with Mark's ex-wife, had had his bar mitzvah at Bet Shalom in Good Harbor—the place where his father, Howard, had been president forever. Mark had had his own bar mitzvah there, had grown up among Orthodox neighbors and knew the rule: only a husband was allowed to see a wife's hair. "What about Fridays," he asked Shira? "What about the holidays?"

"I have to leave two and a half hours before Shabbos begins," she said. "I won't take any lunch. I'll work whatever extra hours are needed." As for holidays—Sukkot, Passover, Shavuot—it would all come out of her two weeks' vacation.

The economy was booming, anyone with a pulse who wanted work had a job. Rita with the biker boyfriend had stayed six weeks; the ex-priest, two days. "When can you start?" Ron said to Shira. Her choice of lifestyle (lifestyle! as if she were gay or vegetarian or entered quilting contests), her religious convictions, needn't be his concern.

Ron, a wintry man, kept his distance from everyone in the office so the fact that Shira was from another planet spiritually did not bother him. Separate planets were Ron's notion of the ideal office environment, each worker spinning furiously in his own orbit, no gravitational pull from another body disturbing his mission.

Mark, research chief and number two, was as tough on the staff as Ron but Mark wanted to be friends with them whereas Ron didn't give a hoot. Jeez, Ron, Mark would plead, just talk to them, a word of encouragement, a personal question; it makes it easier if they like you.

"I don't care if they like me," Ron said, "all I care is if they do the job."

Not Mark: after a weekend he was always running up to Alice, the kooky bleach blonde who did a lot of the report writing, or to Thurston, their solemn Chinese-American computer whiz, to ask if they'd heard the president's speech, seen the way the Giants had blown it in the fourth quarter, or even whether they had any flooding in their basement from the heavy rains. His eager laugh seemed to turn off single females who might otherwise have been attracted by his gentle, awe-inspiring competence.

*****

Fujimoto had founded the company eight years ago in an older commercial building in New Providence, convenient to the train, just off the cloverleaf from I-95. He was Mister Outside, a gracious host at lunch, peerless at wooing new clients, spare, handsome, a hint of gray at the temples.

Mark excelled inside, where he dispatched things at blur speed: a letter in 30 seconds, a questionnaire in 20 minutes. At 39, he was a trifle overweight and prematurely balding, with a concave pattern of black hair that he kept clipped short, like a putting green. His voice was an edgy tenor; in the days when his combo had been playing three nights a week Mark had handled the vocal, leaning into the boom mike that hung out over the keyboard, his lyric coming at you like a left jab.

Competitive Intelligence, Inc., CII, did telephone surveys for clients in packaged goods, pharmaceuticals; now they were moving into audio equipment, Internet services, specialty retailing. Mark had a knack: He'd look at a table of dull responses and pick out the quirk in the data, the abnormality in the normal. No client report went out without passing through Mark's head; he'd close his door and transform 20 ho-hum pages into a sparkling picture of what made consumers' hearts beat faster.

Shira turned out to have a sense of humor. She succeeded in collecting $7,800 from a drug company in Kansas City whose payables people were forever misplacing invoices. Shira reached the controller, telling him, "I bet if that was the most important woman in your life, your wife or daughter or mother, it wouldn't take you four days to return a simple phone call, would it?" She could be forceful while keeping a smile in her voice. There was a rhythm to how she did things, a lightness to the way she spoke and moved, that made Mark hear Oscar Peterson or Ahmad Jamal.

Mark was aware first of Shira's comings and goings, then of the holidays she was celebrating. He snuck looks at the auburn wig, trying to figure out what was under it. Her complexion and blue eyes made him think she must be blond. He pictured silvery hair moving like a lace curtain in the evening breeze. In his empty Larchmont house, the hours between 7:30 p.m. and 7:30 a.m. were a desert stretching before him. He picked at reheated lasagna; his heart raced when he thought of her. Submerged in night, he bent over the keyboard, limbering up with Gershwin, Porter, Basie before settling down to write tunes. Thursday evenings he played in a bistro in Hastings on Hudson; every month he sent his new compositions to his agent. Over the years 14 had been published and recorded, a couple making it, briefly, onto the Billboard charts. The quarterly royalties trickled in; usually the check covered no more than a quality paperback, sometimes a Chinese meal out, once (paydirt!) a new VCR.

Mark had come within half a standard deviation of a career as a pianist, before veering off into psychographics and stratified samples. His musician buddies still called late at night to give him the news. Frank, a clarinet player in East Orange, phoned when he got home from the pit of "Miss Saigon," where he'd been playing for years; it was a gig that wind players dream of, until they land it and are imprisoned in its mind-deadening sameness. Frank's wife had moved out two months ago. At midnight he pestered Mark about recipes, home improvements, the stock market; anything to hear himself talk, to hear the answering murmur of a friend's voice. Mark would smile wryly, knowing the subtext: you got through your divorce, now help me survive mine. In the four years since he and Andrea had split up there'd been a couple of lady friends, but every time he thought of marriage he'd see Andrea's long brown hair, hanging in a willowy cascade and hear Sinatra's aching "I've Got You Under My Skin" and realize it was no go.

Five months after Shira started, Mark took the second day of Rosh Ha­shana off, something he'd done only occasionally in his adult years—even though he knew it pleased his father. On a sun-dappled September morning he sat in synagogue as they read the Torah portion, the binding of Isaac. Mark mused about how out of kilter, how strangely lopsided, could be the love between parent and child, how¾like Abraham¾the parent could hearken to an inner voice that put the child in harm's way.

His son, Jeffrey, had so much ability as a horn player that it brought tears to Mark's eyes. Mark tried to encourage him to pursue music, but the boy, headed for Dartmouth, would have none of it.

"Music is for fun, for fooling around, but it's not a living," he told his father. "I'm going to do computers, the Internet. I'm good at that and the world will pay me for it."

When Mark thought of how he drove up to Hastings every Thursday and played his guts out for $75, a plate of sliced steak and whipped potatoes, and a glass of Pinot Noir, it seemed to him that Jeffrey was the parent, and he was the kid. He remembered his father's dreams for him: the law, Howard said, blind to Mark's giant talent, the law is a wonderful profession. (At least Howard had been honest enough to admit, with a rueful chuckle, how he'd ignored career advice from his own father.)

At Yom Kippur the rabbi had asked him to be one of three to chant Kol Nidre, with its plaintive plea to be absolved of promises unkept, of vows unfulfilled. The night before, he tried the tune on the piano, drawn to the mystery of its somber chords. At midnight he crawled into bed and when he woke up, Kol Nidre came easily to his lips, as if part of his innermost memory.

Before the first rainy night of Sukkot he noticed that Shira was pale, burdened with packages as she prepared to entertain 18 relatives in their new sukka. When Mark asked how it had gone her face glowed as she named the family members who'd come: Haim's parents, her parents, her 73-year old bubby, Haim's brother's kids. "We sang songs, we made noise, we got wet from the rain. It was beautiful." Haim and Shira Levin lived in a down-market corner of Riverdale, in the upstairs of a two-family house whose balcony overlooked the tiny lawn where the sukka stood.

Mark didn't tell her that four days earlier he'd perched on a ladder at Bet Shalom,
gripping hammer and nails as he worked with others to frame the synagogue's sukka. He had powerful hands, his fingers strong as a woodchopper's from thousands of hours at the piano. It brought back memories: his father used to show up for this chore every year, sometimes bringing six- or eight- or ten-year-old Mark along as a helper, until one year Mark said, "No, I'm not going any more." Now Howard was no longer in a position to be hammering anything—maybe this would be the year that finally they were going to get someone else to be synagogue president—and here was Mark by himself. Still, the pounding and stretching as five of them worked together, kidding each other, was therapy, like Rachmaninoff's Third or Rhapsody in Blue.

*****

Her husband called from time to time, he had a quick, nervous voice, the voice of someone looking over his shoulder. A teacher, Shira had said, but Mark couldn't imagine this voice disciplining a roomful of boys. One Friday in August, Haim had shown up at the office. He was taller than Mark had imagined, he wore an open collared-shirt and the cords in his neck, sinewy and taut, moved like the strings of a guitar.

"Haim, this is Mark Gold; Mark, this is my husband Haim."

Haim shook his hand, his fingers heavy, sweaty. He wore a fedora that looked as if it had rolled under the wheels of a pickup truck. His pants were black, his belt shiny. The tassels of his tzitzit could be seen waving outside his shirttails. Mark pictured Haim among the many black-coated men sauntering to and from synagogue three times a day. He had spent the week in the Catskills where his pupils studied all day in a stuffy, low-ceilinged building, heat clinging to the oak desks, a lone table fan pushing the air back and forth. When they took a break the pupils, ages nine through 12, would loll under leafy oaks or throw a baseball back and forth.

Mark tried to imagine this world as Haim led Shira away. The outer door swung shut and the last glimpse Mark had was of a slantwise sunbeam highlighting the auburn wig, and of the bob of her graceful body. He could see the motion of her shoulders, back and haunches, the way the loose-fitting black dress rode up ever so slightly over the curve of her ass.

*****

When she spoke to Mark she kept her eyes below his face, to a point on his chest; it wasn't avoidance so much as habit: fixing a line and staying to her side of it. She came to him with questions, curious to know how they priced the market research, why they billed one customer in installments but demanded upfront payments from another. Now and then he would stare at her own face, at those striking blue eyes and the soft fuzz on her cheek, until she had no choice but to look back. At first, she would come to him once or twice a week; now almost every day she slipped through his open door to ask a question. She moved with grace, the slight dip of the shoulders, a push of the thighs as she strode toward him, as if she were bobbing through waist-high water in a still pool. Always she wore these loose-fitting outfits, long-sleeved blouses, skirts with billowing folds that covered her ankles. Under the wig he could glimpse her neck, long and curved, like the stalk of a daffodil.

In a way it was unremarkable, her bringing him questions. There were two dozen people at CII and all day long they streamed into his office to wave papers at him, to ask him to read letters, proposals, focus group narratives. Was it his imagination or did she linger a few seconds more than was absolutely necessary? She told him snatches of her life, which was ruled by the cycle of the week and the month and the season. It seemed so driven, all this dashing about, the early hours at work to get ready for Shabbos or a holiday. Her husband's job brought in very little money, Mark could see that from the inexpensive car they shared, from Shira's frugality: the leftovers for lunch, the brown paper bags she re-used.

Sukkot and Chanukkah came and went; she'd been there eight months. Mark and Shira shared stories, laughs. She had a sense of the fragility of life; she cherished the droop of a pink orchid, the majesty of the sun dipping below the treetops. At her core he sensed a melancholy that troubled and aroused him. Now and then she brought him a piece of rugelach that she'd baked. Knowing she wouldn't eat from his kitchen, he'd present her with a choice apple or pear from the Korean grocer's. Mark hated it when she went home at five o'clock; it was as if Con Ed had shut down the power. He'd always had this strong melodic drive in his music; now he was writing a suite of love songs with a haunting echo of what might have been.

*****

One icy January morning her computer crashed as Shira was getting everything ready for the accountants. Nothing they did would bring the hard drive back to life, so in mid-afternoon she restored from her backup disks to another computer and set to work re-entering a couple of weeks' worth of data. At six she was still there, at seven she was still there. Mark was finishing a client report and at 7:45 p.m. he came out and found her, triumphant; the general journal was printing out.

"We did it," she told him.

"No," he said, "you did it. Great job, Shira. You called home to let your husband know?"

"Yes, for sure."

He said goodnight and went down to the washroom and then back into his office to collect his briefcase and there she was at the door in her black woolen overcoat, stamping her feet, they were twinkling with bits of ice and snow from the glaze on the sidewalk.

"It's gone," she said.

"No," he said, thinking she was talking about the data.

"My car. It's gone from the parking lot. Someone broke in and drove it away. There's broken glass at the edge of the parking space, they broke the window with a tool and then must have jump-started it."

He could hear the wind roaring against the windows like a marauder. Her cheeks were pink, stinging from the cold. She'd walked round and round the lot, vainly seeking her two-door Toyota Celica. She told Mark this ruefully, as if ashamed to confess the misfortune. It was 8:15 p.m. now, the lights inside were casting dull shadows on the office furniture. It was strange to be here at this hour with Shira. The computers, the desks were like objects in a forest, with their familiar aspect during the day and a fantastical one at night. Now, with the phones stilled, the dark closed in around them like a thick curtain of leaves, this young woman with the auburn wig seemed a druid who dwells among the shadows of the thick tree trunks.

Mark knew it was their only car. "Of course, I'll drive you home."

 "But it's late for you, you must be hungry; you should go home."

"There's nothing at home but a piano and that'll wait." She knew about the music. For weeks he'd carried around his CD, the one that Blue Note Records had released seven years ago to critical acclaim and popular indifference, keeping it in his black briefcase, desperate to present it to her but embarrassed to do so. Finally he'd tied it up in a manila inter-office envelope and slipped it onto her desk after she'd gone for the day, leaving a note that read, "From another life, as if in a dream."  The next day he'd come in to find a sealed note propped up against his monitor; in her sweet, rounded hand she'd written: "Dreaming, waking, living: such a mystery. It's beautiful, thank you." Now he went on to explain that his 17-year-old son lived with his ex-wife, in Chappaqua.

"We've been divorced for four years."

"Do you see him?"

"On weekends. I'll go up on Friday night and get him and bring him back with me."

"So you leave early on Friday, too," she said with a smile. "It must be nice to spend Shabbos with your son." "Look," he said, "It's too late to catch a bus, if they're even running. And too cold. I'm going to take you home."

They reported the theft to the police and climbed into his Acura for the ride to Riverdale. It was the coldest night of the year and he slipped on his leather gloves to come around to open the passenger door.

The front of the car felt very small to him, like a seat in the theater between two overfed ladies from Indianapolis. He began to talk about work, about a new client they'd landed. She murmured responses, her face in the shadows, the auburn wig outlined like the black edge of a milky cloud moving across the night sky. He was on the verge of telling Shira about the suite of love songs, three of them, each more poignant than the previous; then he stopped, swallowing the rest of his sentence as he gasped for breath.

When he reached the Cross County parkway, the sound of the car wheels against the roadway was thundering in his ears. He felt that Shira's lips were moving before he heard the words come out. What kind of a boy was his son, she was asking. A wonderful kid, Mark said. So bright. So empathetic.

"Your wife. Was it . . . was it difficult when you divorced? Was it acrimonious?"

"Acrimonious?" He remembered how smitten he'd been with her, then how things changed. Andrea wanted evenings out, dinner parties; he was yo-yoing between the office and the piano and the gigs for his combo. "Give it up," she'd said, "give the evenings up, you have a wife and child." He'd tried, but if he went a week or two without writing and making music he'd sit bolt upright at three in the morning, afraid that death would come for him before he'd emptied his head of all the melodies that were living there.

In a few words he told Shira how Andrea's coldness grew into a wall of ice between them. The divorce was a relief, but he was a long way from being over her.

Shira sat there in the dark, mulling his story. The heater had come on, she'd taken off her gloves and he could see the faint outline of her fingers moving, like ghostly fish swimming in the shallows. He imagined that she was turning over his words in her strong, delicate hands.

"How did you meet your husband?" Mark asked.

"We're from the same neighborhood. We were at camp together."

Mark waited. She went on, "Our fathers were childhood friends: two Orthodox men who walked to synagogue and davinned together. From the time we were six or seven they used to joke about marrying us to each other. Not that they ever insisted, but it was always there, a hope, perhaps an expectation."

She paused. "It's not that there's no love," she said, "but in the end, it's having the same values, it's coming from families that love and support you and want you to carry on the tradition, those are the things that are important in a marriage."

"And having children," Mark said, as he turned off the Saw Mill at the 254th street exit in Riverdale. "Which way?" he asked. "Right?"

He was stunned to see tears dotting her cheeks like tiny pearls.

"Yes," she said, struggling to speak. "Right, then left at the light."

The car was a sealed carriage carrying them to destiny.

"I'm sorry," he said, "I didn't mean to upset you."

"We've been trying to have children. Like Sarah in the Bible I've been praying to God to open my womb."

He thought back to Rosh Hashana: on the first day they read about the birth of Isaac, the redemption of God's promise of fertility to a hundred-year-old woman.

"Look," Mark said, "there are doctors, there are fertility clinics."

"I know all about it."

They were in front of the two-family house, with its dark trim and muddy stucco. Mark could see steam rising from the chimney.

Shira told him how for the last 14 months she and Haim had been going to a fertility clinic, around the corner from Einstein. Twice, her own eggs had been implanted; twice she had miscarried. The doctors were skeptical about trying a third time. Haim wouldn't listen. He wanted a son, someone to come with him to shul.

Something about the way she told this story awakened in him such a rush of sympathy that he had to fight the impulse to cup her shoulder with his right hand. His fingers tensed with the effort to avoid squeezing that rounded knob of bone and flesh, whose outline he could dimly see through the fabric of her blouse. His pupils had widened to admit whatever swirls of light filtered through the windshield from the streetlamp half a block away. Here in the front seat everything was grainy. Her face seemed to be made up of pixels, not flesh; still, he was surprised at how familiar the outline of her face was, how appealing the graceful curve of her upper lip and her fine white teeth, upright as toy soldiers.

For long seconds neither of them spoke. "Thank you so much for the ride," she said, but still she made no move to get out of the car.

"Your hair. I mean, your real hair. What color is it?"

Why was she not surprised at the question? Why had he imagined her smiling in pleasure, instead of, as was the case, turning so red that her cheeks seemed to glow in the front seat like the lit end of a cigarette?

"Light brown, I guess. Or dirty blond—that's what it was when I was younger, especially in summer, when I'd be out in the sun all day long."

"When you were at camp together, did you talk, the way kids will, about getting married someday? When you didn't know what grown-up life was all about?"

The pause before she answered seemed to go on and on.

"What makes you think that I know now?" she said at last, the words dropping softly, distinctly, like the first piano notes of the Archduke.

He looked sideways at Shira, expecting to see her brave smile. Instead, her face was contorted with the effort to master an emotion he could only guess at: was it joy or dread that caused her to bite her lip? His chest thumped. To touch was forbidden; not to touch seemed unthinkable. Just the nearness of her brought him to the wire edge.

She reached up with her hands, he thought to fasten the top button of her coat, but she lifted them higher until she was pulling at something. The wig came free. She turned toward him, bowing her head slightly so he could see the profusion of lustrous hair, soft and sweet as new grass, trimmed closely about her scalp. In the darkness it could be any color he cared to imagine, maple or wheat or honey. Then she was tugging the wig back into place. The car door opened and closed, and Mark was alone with the music of his heart.

 

 

President for Life, A Short Story  Note: this is an author's draft.  Do not copy or circulate.  Comments to: efrem.sigel@gmail.com

 

PRESIDENT FOR LIFE

Howard paused to catch his breath. With the three-clawed walker it was a slow pull up the front steps, past the two white columns—time to paint them, he wondered?—that stood to either side of the mahogany door.  The building had the feel of a grand, intimate, well-worn home; only a simple sign and the oversized mezuzah affixed diagonally to the door frame, identified it as a synagogue.

The frigid late December weather made the stump of his leg ache, as if the actual limb were frozen somewhere in space and he was condemned forever to feel the void of its loss. Two years ago while crossing 45th Street near Grand Central, a keg from a beer truck had bounced loose and smashed into him, breaking the tibia and most of the bones in the foot.  The damage was so severe that they'd wound up amputating just below the knee and fitting him with a prosthetic.  This marvel of engineering looked like a foot and even took a special shoe that looked like a shoe.  But no invention could replace the mobility he had lost.

The accident took place shortly after Ann's death, and, still in mourning, Howard paid little heed to the pain.  Six months later he cut back his hours at the law firm that had his name on the door, bored with the business after 30 years, bored with mergers and acquisitions and the big-ego media tycoons that he spent his days advising.  He felt more at home in this building with its odd nooks and rumbling pipes, a place where adults prayed or argued and kids sang songs and spilled grape juice on the dark wood floors. 

          Outside, snow had begun falling, coating the grass with what looked like a maple sugar residue.  Inside, a hiss of warmth pulsed from the radiator.  He and Ezra Sender were to interview a candidate for Hebrew school principal but neither Ezra nor the candidate had arrived. The time of year, the way the wind hurled itself against the windows, put him in mind of another winter's day and another Hebrew school teacher, long ago when he'd stood tall on two good legs.

      *****
          It was just as things were quieting down after the tumult occasioned by their South American rabbi, a Venezuelan named Carlos Kahan.  CK, as he liked to be called, was brilliant and mercurial, with black eyebrows and a brooding, malevolent air.  It hadn't taken long to catch on to him.  First CK requested emergency leave for a family funeral; they later found out he'd gone to LA for a short-term consulting gig.  Then he began dipping into the rabbi's discretionary fund for personal expenses: Pilates sessions, a roundtrip plane ticket to and from Caracas.

Called before the board at a contentious meeting, CK was unrepentant. "You can't fire me," he insisted. "I have a contract."  Howard, then the treasurer, met privately with CK.  He kept pressing the facts—misappropriation of charitable funds, lying to the board—and finally got the rabbi to quit. The next thing he knew, the nominating committee was in his house, sipping decaf, nibbling on Ann's mocha brownies and convincing him to be president. 

At the time, the synagogue in Good Harbor, a small Westchester community, had been struggling.  Their Hebrew school had consisted of a single teacher: Miriam, 31 years old, the daughter of former congregants who'd moved to Florida.  Howard had heard she was in the midst of a wrenching divorce from a violent man.

The Sunday of that long-ago Chanukah party began rainy and mild, with mist hanging outside the synagogue windows like some enormous billowing cobweb.  By five o'clock winter had roared in and a wintry mix of drizzle and sleet was falling.

In the early evening gloom when it was time to light the candles, Miriam dimmed the lights, the kids thronging around her; they would have followed her anywhere.  In the glow of the candles, Howard had marveled at Miriam's dark eyes and lustrous black curls.  She wore a long skirt and in the shadows her feet were hidden.  A long silk blouse covered her bosom and was buttoned high up on her neck.  Only a patch of white throat, her pale glowing cheeks and her nose, the color of mother of pearl, were visible.  As they sang, Miriam's rich contralto filled the sanctuary.

Ann was not there that night; their own kids, they were then 16 and 18, were too grown-up for Chanukah parties.  By 8:30 everyone had departed except for Howard and the caretaker, Willie Anderson, wheeling his green trash barrel and picking up paper plates covered with bits of greasy potato pancakes.  Howard went upstairs to turn off lights in the office and there was Miriam on her cellphone, confiding—to her mother? a friend?—some painful development in the breakup of her marriage.

"I didn't mean to interrupt," Howard had said, halting in the doorway.

She flushed.  Her long curls were black against the pink rising from her throat.  "I shouldn't have brought my private business here."

"You did—you do—a wonderful job with the kids.  All of us were in awe, actually."

Howard stepped back so she could pass.  She was breathing rapidly and he inhaled her perfume, a fruity scent, raspberry or strawberry.

Ten minutes later, he found her in the parking lot, staring hopelessly at the cluttered trunk of her Chevrolet Geo.  A rear tire was flat and she was looking for a jack. The frigid wind plucked at Howard's jacket like the fingers of an anxious mother.  The raindrops had frozen in wavy ribbons on the blacktop. 

Gently nudging Miriam aside, he began clearing out the trunk—a seltzer bottle, filmy with age, maps and books, multicolored rags, a tennis racket—to unearth the spare.  The jack, folded down on itself, was icy to the touch.

 When Howard took off his blazer, tie and shirt his arms developed an instant case of goose bumps.  He pried off the wheel cover and cracked each of the lug nuts. In his undershirt, with numbing fingers, he changed the tire while Miriam waited at a distance, drawing her black woolen cape around her shoulders.

"How can I thank you?"

He looked at his sooty fingers, embarrassed.

"It's nothing."
 "Nothing?  Changing a tire for me on a night like this was a lovely thing to do."

"You'll be okay now," he said, smiling. "Any gas station can fix the flat for you."

Shivering in the Bet Shalom parking lot in his shirtsleeves, all Howard wanted to do was stay and talk to this woman.  Instead he began walking quickly to his car.

"Wait!"

Miriam had started the engine.  She leaned her head out the window. He saw a mass of dark curls, her pale cheeks hidden in shadow.

"I wanted to wish you a happy Chanukah."

*****

In the years since that night, the number of families at Bet Shalom had tripled, members had given generously to expand and modernize the sanctuary, kitchen and bathrooms, and turn part of the lawn into a playground.  Yes, they'd cycled through three or four rabbis but two of them had stayed eight and ten years respectively; only in one case had they failed to renew an initial thee-year contract. 

Now Howard was checking his watch.  Early, he thought, these days I'm always early.  In the gray light slanting in through the front doorway and the windows, he glanced up at the wall of raised memorial plaques, including the one that said Ann Berger Gold.  What would Ann have thought of his new-found promptness?  For years she'd nagged him to get ready earlier. "That's the trouble with you, Ann," he'd say.  "You miss the fun of the moment by always planning ahead."

"The fun of the moment?  You mean, when I'm already in my party dress and I'm having to fish your shirt out of the 'to be ironed' pile in the closet?"

At those moments Ann's nose was even more pointed, her black eyes flashing warning lights.   How her vitality had surrounded, energized and, yes, occasionally stifled him. 

Sharon Isaacs, one of four teachers—and also the acting principal—had called a week ago to say she was quitting to take a full-time job in a day school in Putnam County.   She supported her family by herself; her husband was a meek, clueless fellow who couldn't keep a job.  The synagogue offered her a raise but it wasn't enough.  "I'm sorry to have to leave," she said. "It's just the money."

Ezra arrived, followed by the applicant.  Of the three they'd interviewed, she was the most promising, a young woman with dull brown hair and little hairs peeking out from under her sleeves, like pencil marks that no eraser could remove.  Her social skills were mediocre; she barely looked at them as she spoke. She'd been a teacher for five years, assistant principal for two; she came with excellent references. After she left, he turned to Ezra.

"Is she really the best we can find?"

Couldn't they find someone better, he was thinking, not to mention better-looking? Before he could stop the words from coming out, he asked Ezra, "What about Miriam Twersky?  Any chance she'd be available again?"

          Ezra shook his head in disbelief. Miriam had remarried years ago. "Last I heard, she was teaching in the Judaic studies department at NYU.  Her twins must be 11 or 12 now."

*****

After that long-ago Chanukah party, he couldn't get the picture of Miriam out of his mind. Twenty-three years into their marriage, he and Ann had been suffering through a period of prolonged dissonance.  Every offhand comment, every annoyed inflection, every request to the other to do some meaningless chore was as irritating as poison ivy.  Ten days after the party Howard had left work in mid-afternoon and come to the synagogue.  He looked over the bills, had a word with the rabbi and found himself in the hallway just as the last pupils were hurrying into the back seats of cars and vans.  Miriam came up to him to thank him for his help the other night.

She was wearing a black woolen skirt with a dark red sweater.  All he could think of was her white throat, hidden by the turtleneck.

"Just part of the job," Howard said, smiling.  "Balance the budget, change a flat."  They went down the backstairs together.  He was dark-haired then, trim, handy with a pruning shears or a car jack. To Miriam, with everything in her life in flux, he must have looked like a man used to making things happen.

He gazed at her frankly.  There was a glorious warmth to being in her presence that both excited and calmed him.  Very occasionally he would get this feeling, on a chilly autumn morning during the Sukkot minyan, when dust particles danced on a beam of sunlight and the voices—his and those of a lonely dozen congregants—rose and fell in prayer.  Then it might come, this sensation of being bathed in something miraculous.

"How's your other teaching going? And the studies?  That's a lot to juggle," he said. Besides her two afternoons a week at Bet Shalom, Miriam also was a substitute teacher at a high school in the Bronx and was working on her Ph.D. at NYU.

"Sometimes I'll get in my car in the morning and I'll forget, literally, where I'm headed that day," she said. Her smile was enough to banish winter.  When she offered hm a ride. he imagined sitting side by side with her in the front seat, her long hair brushing against the sleeve of his jacket, and wondered whether the scent of her perfume would make him dizzy.

"Thanks, my car is out front."  Almost in a whisper he added, "Another time?"

Over the next weeks he left his midtown office early a couple of times, arriving as Hebrew school was letting out.  The two of them would wait until everyone else had left the building before they came near one another.  Then they'd walk out together and sit in the front seat of her car.

Miriam told him about her life, about the restraining order she'd gotten to keep her husband Frank at bay, about the dissertation for her doctorate.  She turned toward him and stared intently at his face, as if seeking not just advice but sustenance.

A couple of weeks went by.  One day Miriam said, "I'm working on something more important than the dissertation proposal."

Her tone was lighter, almost flirting. "My Dad is flying in and coming to dinner tomorrow," she explained.  "You can't imagine how fussy he is.  I'd almost rather be cooking for anyone but him."

"Anyone?"

"Anyone.  What's your favorite meal?"

"Oh, I guess brisket with boiled potatoes."

"That's easy."  She laughed, delighted. "Come for dinner some night, I'll make you a brisket."

Didn't she know that what she was proposing so innocently was impossible?  And yet her timing was good.  Ann was after him about everything.  Why hadn't he done more to intervene with their son Mark, listless and solitary in his junior year of high school? What about the leaky storm windows or the crumbling plaster in a bedroom closet? Most of all, why couldn't he just be there for her, her concerns, needs, fears? 

"Either you're at work," she hissed, "or you're on the phone about the synagogue. You're like some guest at a hotel, meals included, instead of a partner." Always the effective debater, he'd fought back, marshalling all the arguments for why she was wrong.  But he knew she was right. 

In February, Ann went down to Florida to visit her parents. Howard called Miriam, dry-mouthed, to announce, "I'm a bachelor for the next four nights."

"Come tomorrow night for dinner?"

By 7:30 the next morning he was calling Miriam to cancel.  Her number rang five times before the voice mail kicked in.  He tried her at 1:30 and again got a message.  A couple of hours later he called once more, but after two rings he hung up, knowing now that he didn't want her to answer.

She lived in White Plains, a half hour away; at 5:30 he got in his car and drove in a trance through the yellow-gray dusk.  When he pressed the buzzer in the lobby of the white-brick building, her quick voice answered.

"Hi, is that you?"

"Yes, it's me."

"Come on up.  Fourth floor, turn left when you get off the elevator." 

         *****
          The routine was simple: two years as president, and you were done.  They thanked you, gave you a gift. Old-timers reminded you that the happiest words in the English language were "ex-synagogue president."
          Yes, he'd served his term but then, four and a half years ago, they'd come to him again, Ellen Winter pleading, "Howard, please, please won't you do it?"

"Why me?  Once is enough.  There are plenty of others who could do it." 

"Howard, we're broke and you understand money.  We have a problem with the rabbi, and you're so good at dealing with rabbis."  They both laughed, remembering CK and his antics.

"Okay," Howard said, "but just one year."  Almost immediately Ann needed the mastectomy; then she needed a second.  The cancer spread.  She underwent a withering siege of chemotherapy, all the artillery of the oncologists trained on her weakened body. She was racked by nausea; a horrible cough twisted her body like a piece of hemp.  Nine months after the second operation Ann was gone.  Howard remembered sitting in the sukkah on a chilly October evening, wishing they would just bury him in the ground then and there so he would never have to go back into his empty house.

During those final months, their daughter Rachel took a leave from her job in Chicago to be with her mother.    There was in Ann's face in those last days a kind of timeless wisdom that expressed itself not in words or actions—talking, eating, walking, standing were all increasingly difficult—but in the subtlest of gestures: the quiver of her thin lips, the raising of an eyebrow.  Near the end Ann was unusually lucid, speaking slowly but precisely and looking at Howard out of bottomless gray-green, all-knowing eyes.
After the funeral, Ezra Sender arranged for a minyan at his house morning and evening for the shiva prayers.   Night after night his fellow congregants showed up, bearing baskets of fruit, roasts, aluminum baking pans bending with the weight of noodle pudding. 

Every year since, the nominating committee had asked him to stay in the job. 

*****

"Miriam Twersky.  Any chance she'd be available?" he'd blurted out to Ezra, as in his mind he relived that visit to her apartment.

Howard had closed the door behind him, very slowly.  He didn't know what to do with his hands.  He was absurdly conscious of having come with nothing, no flowers, no wine, no chocolates.  He was 48 then, and it had been 24 years since he'd visited a young woman alone in her apartment. 

Once inside he was greeted by the aroma of brisket and onions.  He looked into a small dining nook, where a festive table was set with a white tablecloth, two silver candlesticks, two slim wine glasses.  A salad bowl held greens, red and yellow peppers, celery. 

Miriam stood in front of him in a white blouse with a ruffled collar, her long hair framing her face.

Her smile was both brave and terrified.  Neither of them had yet uttered a word.

"Are you going to stay?" she asked.

"I can't believe you said that.  My thought was to come up, thank you for inviting me and get out of here as fast as I could."

"Well?"

"I don't want to leave.  Is it okay?" 
  She nodded, beckoning him to join her in the living room. He took a seat on the small sofa, done in a brown and white Berber fabric. The floor to ceiling bookshelves were filled with books, some in Hebrew, some in French.

Miriam brought him a glass of Chablis. 

"Dinner's ready any time.  I didn't know your schedule, I thought you might be rushed."  And then she added, "The kitchen is kosher, by the way."

Compared to the sin he was about to commit, the potential transgression of eating non-kosher food seemed laughably trivial.

"I'm not rushed.  Come and talk to me."

Miriam sat next to him.  She looked very young, like a child bride.  She brought her face near, her long curls tickling his cheeks.  He heard her intake of breath.  He'd imagined it was her special gift, the clarity of her soul, that had captured him, that explained his behavior. But kissing her sweet lips was surrender to something different, something imperious, insistent, carnal.  He was suffocating from the warmth of her. He clasped her to him and felt her strong shoulders and the bones in her back.  Beneath her blouse her heart was pounding, pounding, her kisses overwhelming him with their need. 

The brisket was room temperature, its gravy congealed, when they fell upon it hours later.

For five weeks they met furtively, once or twice a week, in out-of-the-way restaurants or at her apartment.  Her love for him thrilled him, lifted him to a different plane of existence. For both of them the stress was nearly unbearable.  One afternoon she broke down, weeping as if the tears would never stop. 

"We can't anymore," she sobbed.  "I can't do this to you, to your family."

Of course she was right, but the more she wept the more he protested, using every measure of lawyerly persuasion, every ounce of lover's passion. He swore that he loved her as he'd never loved anyone. He would leave Ann, leave their home of 20 years, leave Bet Shalom.  He spoke these words as if willing himself into the abyss of his own disgrace.

"No darling. No. No. No."

She wouldn't be swayed, so determined was she to save him from his own folly.  He forced himself to stop coming to Bet Shalom on days that she taught.  The pain was unremitting. He tore up every scrap of paper with her number, as if it weren't imprinted forever in his mind; he went through his hard drive, deleting every email.  Even so, when they ran into one another at some synagogue event he couldn't stop staring at her dark eyes, sadder but more luminous than ever.  How could everyone else in the room not see? Who on the board would come to tell him he had to resign?

*****

Ezra was gone; the afternoon was waning and still Howard sat in the library. His hair was silver.  His grip was as strong as ever, but what with the walker and the arthritis in his good knee he was moving more slowly, a lot more slowly.  Miriam? Surely her curls would forever be dark and full, not a speck of gray, her body as firm and willowy as the day he'd changed her tire.

   Willie was vacuuming the sanctuary and Howard called him over.

"Take a look at this," he said.  Willie and he were both new grandfathers, and he showed a picture of his ten-month old grandson, the toddler grinning as he stood unsteadily but triumphantly while holding onto the back of a chair.

Outside, the white precipitation had gathered in a slushy puddle along the walk, like a child's ice cream treat that has slipped out of the cone.  In the car he was still smiling over the photo of his grandson, imagining the delight on Ann's face if she could have seen it. Yet another scene came to mind: Ann propped against her pillows, talking to him in her feeble, still clear voice about times they'd shared, surprising him even in those last days with her uncanny ability to recall and retell.  He'd always half-suspected what lay behind her eyes, the secrets she'd known—must have known—but kept silent about.

One more year, Howard? they always asked when they came to him in April; surely it was time to tell them, No more, time to find someone else.

But as he pulled into the garage, he had trouble saying those words to himself. 

Another year, what was the big deal?  It wasn't as if he would be president for life.

 

 

Efrem's article in City Journal, April 14, 2024
Face the Bloody Double Standard: Young Americans' lopsided opinions on war endanger Israel and the United States  by Efrem Sigel and Hannah E. Meyers

Overnight, the United States and other allies helped deflect hundreds of Iranian cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, and drones that rained down on Israel. As regional tensions continue to mount, the long-term support of the U.S. will be more critical than ever for the Middle East's lone democracy. Waves of anti-Israel protests—coming from American campuses, in particular—pose an increasing threat to this support. Recent rhetoric from the State Department and the White House suggest that insistent demonstrators have shaken America from its firm support of Israel in its existential, defensive war in Gaza. This has encouraged Iran and groups like Hamas, whose primary goal is to destroy Israel and exterminate its Jewish population. 

 

College students are understandably horrified over war in Gaza and thousands of civilian deaths. Every innocent death is a tragedy. But they sidestep reality: the number of deaths in this defensive war is a fraction of victims killed, tortured, and imprisoned—with indefensible aims—by the Muslim leader of Syria, as well as leaders in Russia and China. Yet, American students are not chanting "Death to Syria!" They are not barring Russian professors or musicians from appearing on campuses. They are not calling for the bombing of Beijing. There's no outpouring of outrage against the perpetrators of these ongoing massacres, which are far worse both in carnage and in objective.

As Iranian menace grows, it is critical that American university students confront the moral double standards that have led them to champion forces committed to death and oppression. And to recognize that there is no other name for this lopsided crusade than rank anti-Semitism.

Indeed, the skew in these conflicts and their aims is stark. In the second Chechen war, from 1999 to 2009, perhaps as many as 100,000 civilians were killed. Under relentless Russian bombing, the capital, Grozny, "became a ravaged moonscape," writes New York Times correspondent Carlotta Gall. There were no safe corridors for civilians, no warnings of attacks, no procession of aid trucks from the UN. Almost all the victims were Muslim. Nor was the existence of the Russian Federation ever at stake in this conflict; the Chechens merely sought independence.

In the Syrian civil war that began in 2011 and continues today, more than 300,000 civilians and perhaps as many as 500,000—mostly Muslims—have died from ceaseless bombing, artillery fire, and chemical weapons attacks ordered by Syrian Bashar al-Assad and assisted or carried out by the Russian air force. The death toll includes "at least 14,000 people" who have perished by torture or summary execution in Syrian prisons. "By now almost every war crime and crime against humanity" has been committed in Syria, confirmed Paulo Pinheiro, chair of a UN commission of inquiry, adding that today nearly 17 million people in Syria are in need of food, water, and medical care. Here, too, Again, Assad is not battling to preserve his state's existence, only his own murderous rule.

In China's Xinjiang province, more than 500,000 Uighur Muslims were arrested and imprisoned between 2017 and 2021 as part of China's Strike Hard campaign against Muslim religious practice and cultural identity—a campaign that continues today.  One million Uighurs have also been subjected to "political re-education" that includes "arbitrary detention, torture, cultural persecution [and] forced labor." The treatment of the Uighurs by Chinese authorities amounts to "a crime against humanity," says the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Xinjiang's 11.5 million Muslims are less than one-tenth of 1 percent of China's population of 1.4 billion, so the Uighur struggle for Muslim religious practice and identity could not possibly threaten the security or existence of China.

In contrast to these deadly confrontations, Israel is the only state waging a defensive war for its survival.

Hamas's codified goal is annihilating Israel, killing or exiling its 7 million Jews. That's also the stated policy of Iran, a Muslim country of 89 million people ruled by the country's foremost religious authority, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Khamenei is yet another Muslim leader responsible for the detention and torture of Muslim women protesters, and whose regime supplies money, weapons, and training enabling Hamas and Hezbollah to murder innocent citizens of Israel, the U.S., and other countries. Indeed, Iran's act of naked aggression now confirms it to be a third source of direct attack, along with Hamas and Hezbollah, in the war of survival forced on Israel by the attacks of
October 7.

The UN's roster of 197 member states includes such violence-prone countries as Afghanistan, Haiti, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo—and such unrepentant violators of human rights as Myanmar, Syria, North Korea, Russia, China, and Iran. Yet Israel, a democracy whose Jewish, Arab, and Christian citizens enjoy freedom of speech, religion, and the right to vote, is the only country whose existence is still being challenged, 76 years after independence. Zionism was originally a movement seeking self-determination for Jews and their return to their historic homeland, similar to the independence movements in India, Poland, Ireland, Algeria, Brazil, and dozens of other nations. Today, Zionism is, at its core, an affirmation of Israel's right to exist and of its role as a homeland for Jews.  

Unless American youth take a good look at the world around them, at all of the carnage, and consider the moral imperatives behind why and how a country wages war, they will continue to push geopolitical power toward forces driven to oppress and kill. They will put the United States itself into a weaker position in our ability to maintain our own freedom and act as a beacon and defender of freedom in the world. And they will expose to destruction countless more Muslim lives and sacred sites. Indeed, the only Israeli hurt by Iran's barrage last night was a young Bedouin girl, who is fighting for her life in an Israeli hospital. At the same time, Israeli defenses dramatically intercepted Iranian missiles in the air above Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa Mosque—where Muhammad is held to have journeyed to heaven.

If they maintain such geopolitical myopia, America's youth will become just the latest in history's ponderous ledger of those too morally weak, too willfully ignorant, and too easily led by demagogues to do anything but campaign for dead Jews.

Author's note: Efrem Sigel is the author of two novels as well as op-eds that have appeared in the New York Daily News and The Times of Israel. Hannah E. Meyers is a fellow and director of public safety at the Manhattan Institute.

 

_____________________ 

Efrem's  article, in the NY Daily News, January 25, 2024, p. 20

 

Three Lies About Israel & the Truth 

by Efrem Sigel

 

The worldview of the pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel, anti-Jew protestors massing daily in New York and around the globe, rests on three lies about Israel.   No matter how fervently protestors believe these lies, wave them on signs and chant them in unison, such beliefs fail the simplest of tests: the test of truth.

Lie number 1: The Jewish citizens of Israel are "settler colonialists" with no historical ties to the land of Israel and no right to reside there.

The truth: The Jewish presence in Israel precedes the arrival of Islam by 1,600 years. Dozens of kings of Israel, beginning with Saul, David and Solomon reigned in these areas from 1050 BCE on.  Even after the Roman defeat of the Bar Kochba revolt in 135 CE, which led to the dispersion of Jews throughout the Mediterranean, Jews continued to live in Jerusalem and environs.   The Arab armies spreading Islam by force didn't arrive until the seventh century CE.

Lie number 2: Israel has been oppressing and maltreating Palestinians (and denying them a state) for 75 years.

 

This lie turns reality on its head.  The truth: On November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly approved the creation of two new states, one Jewish and one Arab, to replace the British Mandate.  Rather than accept their own state, the Arabs set out to destroy the Jewish state. Azzam Pasha, secretary-general of the Arab League warned of "a war of extermination and a momentous massacre."  Immediately following November 29, Arab militias began attacking Jewish towns; on May 15, 1948, a day after Ben-Gurion proclaimed the state of Israel, forces from Egypt, Syria and Iraq invaded.  Some 600,000 Arab residents fled the hostilities, a departure the Palestinians call the nakba, or catastrophe.  The real catastrophe was refusing to accept a state alongside Israel.

Since Israel's victory in 1948, terrorists from Arab countries, Gaza and the West Bank have regularly infiltrated Israel to murder Jews. Between 1949 and now, including the intifadas of the 1990s and early 2000s and the October 7 atrocities, 4,890 civilians have died in terror attacks.  Could there be worse "maltreatment" than Palestinians killing Jews by shooting, stabbing, car rammings, bombings, and most recently, rape, dismemberment and mutilation?

Arab armies also fought two major wars, in June 1967 and October 1973, aimed at annihilating Israel. Instead, they suffered disastrous defeats, losing the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights.

While Egypt and Jordan eventually signed peace treaties with Israel, Palestinian leaders squandered opportunities. In 2000, Yasser Arafat spurned Israeli Prime Minister Barak's offer of a Palestinian state encompassing most of the West Bank and Gaza. In 2008 Mahmoud Abbas declined an even more generous offer.

By rejecting their own state in favor of trying to destroy the Jewish one, Palestinian leaders tolerated, nay, encouraged, violence rather than coexistence, at a horrendous—and pointless—cost in lives.

Lie number 3: Israel is an apartheid state.

 

This is the easiest lie to refute. The truth: the 2.1 million Arab citizens of Israel have rights denied to Arabs in neighboring countries: the right of free speech, the right to education and healthcare, the right to vote   Arab students constitute 20% or more of enrollment at leading Israeli universities.  Arab doctors are 17% of all Israeli doctors. Two of the 15 judges on the Israeli supreme court are Arab citizens. And Israel's Muslims worship freely in 1,600 mosques across the country.

The UN Human Rights Council is notorious for lambasting Israel for alleged human rights violations while ignoring much more egregious violations by Cuba, China and others. Yet even Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, has acknowledged the truth: Israeli Arabs have "freedom of speech, freedom of religion and participation in political life." Mansour Abbas, head of the Israeli Arab political party Ra'am, rejects labeling Israel an apartheid state. "Our fate is to live together," he says, and to choose "peace, security and tolerance" over "fights, conflict, hatred."

It's understandable, if infuriating, that Palestinians indoctrinated in hatred for Jews accept lies as truth.  But what excuse is there for Rep. Rashida Tlaib slandering Israel as an apartheid state? For professor Joseph Massad at Columbia praising Hamas' barbarism as "awesome"?  As for those blocking roadways while chanting "From the river to the sea"—how many know even the basic geography and history of Israel? In a survey of 250 U.S. students., 86% of whom approved the chant, only 47% could correctly name the Jordan river and the Mediterranean.  Some thought the river was the Nile, that the sea was the Atlantic.  Fewer than 25% could identify Yasser Arafat. When asked about the 1993 Oslo Accords, a quarter said no such agreement ever existed.  As Ron Hassner, the UC-Berkeley professor who commissioned the survey, writes in the Wall Street Journal, those orchestrating calls for Israel's destruction count on "the political ignorance of their audiences" to spread their message of hate.

The truth cannot bring back the Israelis slaughtered by Hamas or the thousands of Gazans killed in Israel's response.  But when the fighting ends, honoring the truth and rejecting lies would be a vital first step on a very long road to peace.
_______________________________
Author's note: Efrem Sigel is the author of "Juror Number 2: The Story of a Murder, the Agony of a Neighborhood" and
the forthcoming short story collection, "Let There Be Light."