KAROL MARKOWICZ: Your Jewish friends have a side group chat.

If you’re on a group chat, which includes more than two Jews, know your Jewish friends have a side chat. At last count I’m on more than 10 group chats like this, most with the word “Jew,” “Jewish” or “Israel” in the name, that have splintered off from main chats. Some of the side chats have a side-side chat, of course, two Jews, three opinions and all that.

It’s (probably) not because we’re a secret cabal ruling the world and we need you out of the way to discuss it. It’s that after October 7th Jews have found we needed to talk about it, a lot. The horrific attacks, the war, the violent protests aimed at upending our safety in the west, all of it, and we didn’t want to drag our non-Jewish friends down.

* * * * * * * *

Which takes us back to the group chats. We didn’t want to overwhelm our friends with our, well-founded or not, neuroses. So we took the conversation elsewhere and we discussed our worries about whether our kids could be safe on campus, or the weird “likes” of internet acquaintances, or the security we feel we have only in Florida, on our own time.

But the result of that is that your Jewish friends are on high alert for our safety and you may not even know why. “Wait, what happened with Candace Owens?” went one of my mixed chats recently. It’s very easy not to know all the minutiae. And it is all minutiae right up until it’s not. It’s all crazy worries, things that could never happen here, until your kids are skipping down the street in Toledo, Spain, where Jews used to live but don’t anymore.

QED: Fifteen Minutes of Flame: Aaron Bushnell’s agony didn’t start with Israel’s war in Gaza. It began with an abusive cult that traumatized its children, and saw the destruction of Israel as a gateway to heaven.