On pity
This is about compassion in certain situations
We’re back!
Housekeeping notes: Next week, paid subscribers will get this month’s ET Speak Home. Also! I forgot to announce this month’s “book club” book. I’ll be writing a short essay about Primo Levi’s The Wrench later this month. (“Um, Emily? How many of these are going to be about books by Primo Levi?” Thank you for asking. Six.)
With that! Onto news, views, and Jews.
NEWS
This week’s mini-essay (below) is not on war with Iran, but I did write a very short thread on the war and antisemitism that you can read here. Relatedly, a brief spouting of opinion from me on antisemitism during the panel I moderated this week was captured here. I did work that can’t be captured in these bullet points this week, I swear.
In the New Yorker, Isaach Chotiner has an interview with Matt Duss on Trump’s decision to pursue Iranian regime change, while Susan Glasser noted that Trump’s explanation for why we are now at war with Iran keep shifting.
And over at Vox, Josh Keating also wrote about Trump and “regime change.”
And in other news, Adam Serwer in the Atlantic: “Trump, and other powerful figures, made the public an offer: Let us get away with what we want to do, and you will too.”
MY VIEWS ON…
…strength and pity!
This is kind of personal and maybe, given everything, even self-indulgent and I hope you’ll forgive me for that. Also, it’s prompted by what’s going on in my life but my hope is that you don’t need to have experienced this exact thing for it to make sense.
Recently, someone told me that she had a lot of empathy for me. She was being kind. But my reaction was one of annoyance. I didn’t want her to feel sorry for me. I don’t want to be the kind of person for whom people feel sorry.
It’s like when people comment on how strong I’m being. Does that sound like I’m bragging? I’m not. I don’t want to be a person who is thought of as strong given her circumstances. I don’t want to have the given circumstances.
But actually it’s a trap for anyone speaking to me, because, since I do have the circumstances, I also get annoyed when people act like everything is fine and normal. It’s not fine. I try to remind myself that, before this happened to my family, I, too, treated small things like they were big things. I cried after a little postpartum group session when my son was 10 weeks old because he cried so much during the group. Isn’t that silly? Who would cry over that? I try to remind myself of that when people tell me their equivalent of crying over that. Everyone has some version of hard. If they don’t, they don’t know it yet, I tell myself. I am sure even my current version is easy to someone who knows better.
All of this anger isn’t actually meant for the people I am speaking with, of course. But there’s nobody, really, to send it to. Someone told me to reread the Book of Job and I said that, if it were me, the ending of that story would go very differently. If it were me, I said, I’d have several follow up questions. I would express my righteous indignation. But no higher power is appearing before me to be questioned. There’s no one to argue with, no one to force into conceding that I’m right.
Of course I’m right. It’s not fair. But it’s what it is. And so I try to have empathy for myself and to forgive myself for having the empathy. It’s not her fault, I tell myself about myself. She doesn’t want to feel sorry for you, either.
AND SOME STUFF ABOUT JEWS
In Haaretz, this opinion piece argues that “Netanyahu Hopes to Ride the Iran War All the Way to the Ballot Box. Never Mind the Casualties”
From JTA: “A documentary about the murder of five Jews in a Polish town is being threatened with a ban in Poland — not because they were killed in the Holocaust, but because they weren’t.”
From the New York Times: “A Toronto synagogue was damaged by gunfire on Monday night, the beginning of the Jewish holiday Purim, the police said.”
For Jewish Currents, David Klion wrote about parsing the Jewishness of Epstein’s network and why it matters without being antisemitic.
From the Committee to Protect Journalists: “More journalists and media workers were killed in 2025 than in any other year since the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) began collecting data more than three decades ago. This is the second consecutive year-on-year record for press deaths. Israel was responsible for two-thirds of all press killings in both 2025 and 2024.”
-ET
“Empathy“ by sinclair.sharon28 is licensed under CC BY 2.0.