The Waves Are Still There

Welcome back to What Came After. This episode with guest Eden Einav comes out just days before the third anniversary of October 7th, and I think Eden is exactly the right person to spotlight as this anniversary approaches. 

Eden Einav is an IDF veteran who served with Yasar Darom, the unit tasked with recovering fallen soldiers and hostages. I want to reiterate: Eden's job was to recover fallen soldiers and hostages. Take a moment to sit with that. 

This is a difficult interview, especially toward the end, and Eden is remarkably vulnerable throughout. In a piece he wrote about his experience, Eden talks about bringing the fallen home — and then about the immense task of bringing himself home, after everything he's been through. 

I think about that daily. I wonder how to bring myself home, and what home even is now: where I live outside Chicago? The homeland of the Jewish people? The new communities I've leaned into after so many I valued rejected me for being a Zionist—and, I suspect, for being a Jew?

Before the episode begins, I want to say a quick word about this work. Sometimes I wonder, with all the suffering in the world, whether what we're doing is important. Then I think about the countless times I've been told — by survivors of October 7th, by descendants of Holocaust survivors — that when they thought they could hang on no longer, a voice inside them said: "You have to survive so you can tell the story."

That's what we're doing. That's the archive this show is making, and I hope you'll consider supporting it at wcamedia.org/support/ Thank you for being part of this.