I was in Lugano, Switzerland, on September 11, 2001. I don’t need to tell you what happened that day, but I will tell you that being in Europe at an American boarding school with an international student population spanning some near 50 nationalities impacted how I experienced that day. And not only the day, but the weeks, months, years, and decades that followed.

I’d left for Switzerland the fall of my senior year of high school. I’d left my mostly white, mostly affluent public high school in the north suburbs of Chicago, where I was one of roughly 800 students per grade to become one of 80 per year. While affluence certainly took on an even more opulent dimension at a boarding school in Switzerland at the turn of the millennium, it was a marked shift from my suburban American high school to now have roommates, dormmates, and classmates from Serbia, Brazil, Venezuela, Japan, China, Italy, Mozambique, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Russia, Albania, England, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Germany, Finland, Norway, Canada, Australia, Spain, Andorra, Taiwan, Ukraine, Egypt, and and and.

The plan was that I’d spend my senior year there, graduate, and then return as a postgraduate, taking a gap year before ultimately going back to college in the United States. In the end, I spent only the fall semester back as a postgrad (after graduating from high school there), and then spent the spring semester in Oxford, England, before starting college in Philadelphia in fall 2002.

But for that fall of 2001, I was at boarding school. In Lugano, Switzerland. And I spent the afternoon and evening of September 11 (Lugano is six hours ahead of New York City), surrounded by people from all over the world. We sat in the basement of what we called the “Snack Bar,” where a single CRT television protruded from a wall, watching the news. I imagine it was BBC news, which is what I spent the rest of semester watching at my English teacher’s house when I’d walk up the hill to work on my college applications and homework from her living room, and catch a sense of my at home American news from a global perspective and lens.

But that afternoon and evening, we sat in the basement, and watched.

I sat with my friends who were seniors, holding the hand of another American friend concerned about a family member (who would ultimately be safe and alive). With us was a friend I’ll call M. We haven’t spoken in years. I’ve chalked it up to distance and life and time. I’d like to imagine that if we saw each other today, tomorrow, even another year or decade from now, we’d be able to pick up back where we left off during those formative high school years. But for the purposes of this story, we’ll call him M, and note that he was from a country in the Middle East, one that was—in the immediate aftermath of September 11—implicated in the day’s events.

I was a really good student growing up. My grades had started suffering at the end of ninth grade, and intensely plummeted from my standard operating procedures by eleventh grade. It was part of why I left for Switzerland. I was presented with the opportunity and means to take a gap year, rectify my flailing academic accord, and still attempt my—at times debilitating—desire and need to go to an Ivy League school. And given also the nature of the environment in which I was flailing in the north suburbs of Chicago, coupled with my academic flail, I left senior year.

And gosh did I rectify myself academically that senior year in Switzerland. I made Dean’s List and Headmaster’s List. I won a math award. A math award! (I’m a full-time artist). And gosh did I go full throttle in my extracurriculars too. I co-founded a literary magazine. I helped start a student government. I started speaking in workshops for dorms across campus about eating disorder awareness. I starred in school plays. And and and. The point is, I was excelling. At least on the outside. For all intents and purposes. And that’s the light in which the faculty saw me, too.

Which is why M—himself a scholar and star—and I, in the immediate wake and aftermath of September 11, during my postgraduate fall semester, were able to get away with this: we started studying together in my dorm during study hall, specifically for our AP European History class.

This was expressly forbidden.

There were “girls” dorms. And there were “boys” dorms. And we were not, under any circumstances whatsoever allowed in each other’s dorms. Without grave consequences and such.

Except for M.

We’d talked the faculty on duty into letting him come into the common space of my dorm suite that I shared with several other female students (we were two to a bedroom)—where a long desk lived—during study hall (which happened on weeknights in the evening after dinner and was mandatory, for everyone to stay in their dorm rooms to study every single weeknight), so that we could help each other with our respective essays and other homework assignments for AP Euro.

We’d sit there at the long desk with our clunky early 2000s laptops, cans of Red Bull (also extremely early 2000s), and type. When we felt we had worthy drafts of our essays for our various class assignments, we’d trade laptops, and read and edit and provide feedback for each other’s work. As I type this now on my less clunky laptop at a coffee shop in Brooklyn, I think mostly about M’s smile. It was one of his most defining characteristics. His smile. The way his cheeks flared, and his eyes brightened and lit. We smiled a lot. Laughed. Wrote. Read. Laughed.

For the majority of these 24 years since, I’ve tended to think of my study hall moments with M as two smart and abiding students, who teachers loved, getting away with breaking the rules. But now, I’m able to look back and reframe it as resistance. A white Jewish American and a brown Muslim from an Arab country spending hours upon hours together in the wake of a pending war, as their countries made enemies of each other, and my country made a vilifying enemy of anyone who looked like him (whilst consuming Austrian-created drinks and European history, no less).

White supremacy thrives by keeping us fractured. White supremacy in the United States fuels itself on a consistent blend of anti-Black racism, racism, anti-Jewish oppression and antisemitism, and Islamophobia. Assimilation, which is inherently anti-Black, is part of that. And the racism all people of color experience—especially in the United States—only further propagates itself to uphold a racist hierarchy that erases, exploits, and scapegoats, depending on our proximity to white Christian supremacy. This: the tenets of whiteness and white supremacy.Which is why the antidote to oppression is solidarity, rather than an isolation that fractures us.

My life has been abundantly fueled of late—here in early 2025—with cross-cultural dialogue and conversation that seeks to do exactly that: build solidarity; thwart any/all supremacies’ plan.

I see us working more fervently than ever to do the very thing white supremacy didn’t think we’d actually do: talk to each other; build community; resist being fractured and pulled apart.

I arrived back home in the United States from Europe in April 2002, in a very different place than most of my peers. I had taken on a critical lens of the United States. I had seen and heard and witnessed the impact my country’s (like so many others before and alongside it) practice of imperialism had on actual people and their actual lives (and deaths) both at home and abroad. I had come to feel anything but patriotic, when so many people at home had loudly lifted a flag.

I’m not discounting the impact of September 11. The devastating deaths of thousands. The long-term health impact for those impacted by the rubble and air. The grief and heartbreak for those who lost loved ones. The trauma and terror of first responders, of those who were there, or nearby, or witnessed it from a rooftop in New Jersey, or a television screen somewhere else—that trauma and terror too. And in rural Pennsylvania. And the Pentagon. Long-lasting and real.

And.

All of those things could have been held without more death. Without retaliation at the hands of American imperialism. Without the longest war in American history. Without laws and biases and ideologies that led to an uptick of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim discrimination and hate.

I know a mythology of safety was shattered that day. For so many people in the United States and beyond. As we sat in the basement holding hands, I too felt something shatter and keep shattering in the days and weeks and months ahead. And also, classmates from the Middle East checked in on my family and me. I received calls from alum whose countries had once been bombed and brutalized by the American military and our penchant for imperialism and war.

The story that the world wants to uphold is the one that allows for violence to be upheld.

Resistance is study hall and holding hands while watching television. Resistance is resisting the systems of supremacy that force our fracturing, even within our own communities.

The ways I’ve recently watched Jews publicly vilify other Jews, with the same tactics Nazis in Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe used to vilify Jews in the 1930s and 40s is staggering to me.

That’s not resistance. That’s letting violence uphold violence. And then nobody wins.

And what is winning anyway?

Bodies are not a game. To unalive someone for sport—in what universe can we possibly stomach finding that just? That is how we mythologize how we think we are supposed to survive.

But survival isn’t contingent on hierarchy. Survival is impossible when we fracture ourselves.

Survival—actual survival—actual survival where everyone has a chance to live a full, holistic, just, accessible, and equitable life, works best when we help make and keep each other whole.

We sat there trading laptops. Pounding Red Bulls. Studying something so much more than the assignments on our syllabus that our teacher required us to consume and complete for class.

There is rigor in studying with one another. When we instead study each other, that’s when we become voyeuristic. That’s when we separate and fracture. That is when we buy into the delusion that it’s appropriate behavior to exert hierarchy or power over one another, rather than root and anchor and ground ourselves in a power from within and then share that power with each other. When we study what we share, we amplify the things we are capable of co-creating by putting the pieces of our long-time, systemically orchestrated and upheld fracturing back together again.

I miss M. But I see him and study with him daily in the interpersonal relationships and bonds I continue to nurture and nourish throughout my life. I still study with him in the ways that I actively resist white supremacy’s attempted chokehold on my life. The way white supremacy and supremacy of every and any kind asks and entices me to assimilate as a white American Jew.

But I resist.

We resist.

I resist being fractured from the people I love.

I resist being fractured within myself enough to think it’s appropriate to fracture someone else.

I don’t need to tell you what happened that day. And I don’t need to tell you what’s happened every day on this planet both before and since. But I do need to tell you that I think we can resist.

Not each other.

But the ideologies that have hindered our ability to study—learn, live—together in peace.

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