25th Anniversary of 9/11
If these personal posts feel spaced out, this one has been twenty-five years in the making, compelled by Friday's convergence of Shabbat, Rosh Hashanah, and the 25th anniversary of September 11th. I considered folding it into a hopeful message for the new year, but that felt dishonest. This stands alone.
A quarter century has passed since I lost the man I was engaged to, Alexander Braginsky, in the North Tower. He didn't die. That word is too passive. He was murdered by jihadists.
His death played out in public, on every screen in the country, which is exactly why I retreated into something private and quiet. I have questioned that instinct for twenty-five years. Baruch dayan ha'emet, blessed is the judge of truth, is what Jews say on hearing of a death. I said very little else. Time has since given me a full life: twenty years with a husband I adore, three children I would not trade for anything. The pain didn't disappear. It moved into a corner, and I kept the lights low there. My father never used the word manifesting, but his instinct was always to move forward rather than dwell, because grief is a current you don't out-swim, you only get pulled under trying. Jewish law agrees with him more than I expected. The outer limit of mourning is a year. Maimonides went further: one who grieves excessively at the way of the world is a fool.
I'm not certain I grieved enough. Jewish burial rituals like shmirah and shiva exist to sanctify the dead and, just as deliberately, to humanize the living. It forces reconciliation on a timeline, however long that timeline runs. I never got that structure, because there was no body. You would think a people who buried millions of ashes from crematoria would have a precedent for this, but we do not. I asked three rabbis that October how to bury a man with no remains, and none had an answer. Ten years later, in June 2011, a bone fragment from his ear was recovered. His mother took that as license to dedicate a park in his name in Haifa. I found his memorial stone there by accident, facing the Mediterranean toward his hometown of Odessa, watching over the exact swing set where my own children played. I have never fully recovered from that afternoon.
Last Friday, watching Mamdani hand the ceremonial pen to his chief counsel, Ramzi Kassem, a lawyer who represented Guantánamo detainees on al Qaeda-linked terrorism charges, including 9/11 itself, was the first time in years I regretted staying at the edges of 9/11 family advocacy rather than the center of it. That handoff was not an accident. Symbolism never is.
The people watching that image increasingly have no memory of the day it references. They know it the way I know Pearl Harbor: secondhand, from a textbook. Into that gap walks a movement calling itself democratic socialism. The difference between socialism and communism has always been a question of method rather than destination, the ballot box instead of force, and that distinction is exactly what makes the rebrand work on people who were taught to fear one but never introduced to the other. Most of its supporters do not know the architecture they are signing onto. That is the danger! A generation with no lived memory of what communism actually does will keep mistaking its relaunch for something new.
I'll hold myself to the same standard. I have never walked into the 9/11 Museum, despite a career built on museums. Three attempts, three retreats to the memorial pool outside instead, where I have etched names of friends and coworkers off the wall onto wax paper and left before facing the exhibit that holds his wallet; I believe it’s actually the first item exhibited in the museum. I still don't know if silence was the right way to carry him, especially now that his mother is also gone and there is no one else left who remembers him the way I do. I don't regret protecting my new family from that weight, but I do wonder what it cost.
Museums are never neutral. To borrow from historian James Young, they reveal the values of their makers as much as the events they claim to document, and memorials suppress as much as they declare. What Mamdani's administration is doing to the meaning of 9/11 is not new in kind, only in speed. We are watching historical revision happen in real time, in front of cameras, with a pen. I pray Americans have the fortitude to weather this narrative onslaught, further fueled by hateful algorithms and the miseducation of at least one generation of our youth, courtesy of cunning foreign government funding.
For all those who died on September 11th twenty-five years ago, including my best friend Alexander Braginsky, may their memories forever be a blessing.
Am Yisrael Chai