Letters to the editor
Readers respond
The view from the other end
Your story about Julie Paris and the Jewish riders pressing Peloton captured a dilemma that is distinctly American: what to do when standing up visibly for Israel starts to cost something (“Pittsburgher joins push for Peloton to address Jewish users’ concerns over anti-Zionism,” Sept. 4). From Efrat, where I write about Israeli society, the same story looks very different. Israel sits at the other end of the rhetoric your riders are answering, and daily life here has developed a relationship to that storm which might surprise your readers: Mostly, we do not notice it.
The honest inventory first. Israelis notice the things with hands. The singer who cancels, the academic conference that quietly disinvites, the airline that drops its route: Those sting, and they make the news here for days. What almost never registers is the discursive layer, the protests, the op-eds, the online campaigns, the spreadsheets of brands activists abroad urge shoppers to shun. Walk an Israeli supermarket and nobody stands in the aisle consulting a list. The storm that organizes so much anguish in Pittsburgh synagogues and community Facebook groups is, on the ground here, close to invisible.
That is not bravado; it is arithmetic. A country of 10 million that exports what Israel exports feels rhetorical pressure the way a whale feels rain. The record exports of recent years kept climbing straight through the loudest seasons of the campaigns, and the economy the movement promised to strangle has been busy setting records instead.
There is a deeper reason the shrug is rational. Anti-Israel rhetoric aims at the country’s legitimacy, and legitimacy for Israelis is not decided in the detergent aisle or the op-ed page. The sense of being judged by rules no other conflict attracts has hardened into a civic reflex: communities under pressure close ranks, a pattern relief workers have watched in every hard season this country has absorbed. Coverage abroad that drops ordinary reporting standards the moment the story turns to Israel feeds the loop, telling the public it is being scored by unfair referees.
None of this means the riders’ fight does not matter, and this is the part I would say directly to them. Their weather and ours are different storms from the same front. When Jewish consumers in America organize, they are not defending Israel’s economy, which is managing, but their own place in American life, the right to be visibly Jewish, in a gym or anywhere, without penalty. That fight happens on their side of the ocean, and no shrug from Efrat excuses anyone from it.
So ride on, press the company, spend accordingly. Just know that from here the view is quieter than the campaigns promise. The whales keep swimming, the rain keeps falling, and the country at the other end of the rhetoric gets up on Saturday morning, notices the sirens and not the speeches, and rides its own bikes, indoors when necessary, through whatever the season brings.
Mark Ginsberg
Efrat, Israel
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