October 7, 2026 — New York
This column appeared in the New York Daily News.
By Marisa Bearak, Assistant Director of AJC New York
In the summer of 2001, I started studying for my bat mitzvah. My Little League team had won another championship. My world was defined by ordinary childhood milestones.
Weeks later, I was sitting in eighth-grade math class on Sept. 11 when we learned about the attacks. Hundreds of us were shuffled into the cafeteria. Many students and teachers were sobbing; others sat shaken, trying to understand what was happening.
I never forgot the fear in that room.
Oct. 7, 2023, brought back feelings I first encountered at 12: another day of mass terrorism dividing life into a before and an after. On this third anniversary, I think of the 1,200 lives stolen that day and how Israelis — and Jews around the world — have learned to live in its aftermath.
The attacks belong to different histories, but the rupture is hauntingly familiar. People went to work. Families slept in their homes. Young people danced through the night. And suddenly, the lives they knew were torn open.
That rupture pulled me back to a middle school cafeteria. With an adult clarity I could not have had at 12, I understood how much uncertainty lived inside that fear. Israeli children waited for parents murdered or dragged into Gaza. Families hoped loved ones taken hostage would come home. Some did. Too many did not.
Three years later, survivors live alongside memories no one should have to carry and absences that will always be felt. Even amid existential and immediate threats, Israelis are marrying, having children, making music, celebrating holidays, arguing ferociously about politics and building a future.
Jewish life in America has changed, too.
American Jewish Committee’s State of Antisemitism in America 2025 Report found that 55% of American Jews changed their behavior out of fear of antisemitism, including by avoiding visible signs of Jewish identity or certain places and events.
That instinct to retreat is one I understand. I grew up in a New York where extraordinary diversity came with the bargain of looking out for one another. After Oct. 7, many Jewish New Yorkers have felt outside that compact. Allies are there, but solidarity can feel too quiet and the burden ours alone.
But hiding cannot be the answer. We need to remain connected to our identity, purpose and one another.
Through August, the NYPD reported 229 anti-Jewish hate crimes — 54% of all confirmed hate crimes — even though Jews comprise only about 10% of New Yorkers.
And yet Jewish life here remains visible, vibrant and defiantly alive. That insistence on continuing — on carrying ourselves forward through violence and upheaval — is what I recognize in both New York after Sept. 11 and the Jewish world after Oct. 7.
I saw that parallel most powerfully at the Nova Music Festival Exhibition, inspired by the 9/11 Memorial & Museum. Visitors walked among abandoned tents and belongings recovered after terrorists killed hundreds and abducted dozens to Gaza. A shoe had been worn by someone dancing only hours earlier. A burned car had been meant to carry people home.
New Yorkers know what it means when ordinary objects suddenly become sacred evidence that someone was here.
Recently, standing beneath the Survivor Tree — a Callery pear pulled burned and broken from Ground Zero, then returned after rehabilitation — I thought of Job: Ki yesh la’etz tikvah — For there is hope for a tree.” Even after it is cut down, it can grow again.
Today, Israeli families carry unimaginable loss, communities shattered on Oct. 7 undertake the stubborn work of returning to life and Jews around the world refuse to make ourselves smaller in the face of hatred.
Trees are growing again. We are dancing again.
Marisa Bearak is Assistant Director of AJC New York.
