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The Right Uses ‘Religious Freedom’ to Attack Trans People—What About Mine?
When politicians attempt to ban gender-affirming care, bar trans kids from playing sports, and legally erase trans people, they are not protecting religious freedom; they are imposing Christian nationalism.
Jul 02, 2026
This week, the Supreme Court dealt transgender Americans another devastating blow, upholding state bans on transgender athletes’ participation in girls' and women's sports. The decision represents the latest in a long series of attacks on trans lives, as we remain in the crosshairs of a manufactured culture war. The architects of these attacks usually wrap their bigotry in a familiar defense: “religious freedom.” They claim their faith compels them to legislate a strict, inflexible gender binary, and that any deviation from it is a threat to their religious liberty.
But as a trans Jew, and a leader of a major national Jewish organization, I have a question for them: What about my religious freedom? What about the freedom to live our Judaism?
My grandmother was born at home on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, spoke Yiddish as her first language, and was raised by immigrants who worked 12 hour physical jobs six days a week. She would not have known the phrase “gender identity” if her life depended on it. And yet, when I transitioned two decades ago, she did not hesitate. She took a deep breath, took a long look at me, decided it was still me she was seeing, and accepted me completely from that moment on.
When politicians attempt to ban gender-affirming care, bar trans kids from playing sports, and legally erase trans people, they are not protecting religious freedom. They are imposing Christian nationalism. Real religious freedom—the principle this country was founded on—only counts if it applies to all of us. Christian nationalists advocating against the rights of LGBTQ+ people are actively suppressing Judaism and other religions that don't neatly align with their theology.
We cannot let that vocal and well-funded Christian nationalist minority implement laws that endanger transgender people like me.
For years, the far-right has successfully monopolized the concept of religious liberty in this country, weaponizing it as a license to discriminate. But our past does not have to be our future. The theology they are attempting to encode into law is not a universal truth. In fact, it runs in direct opposition to my own religious tradition.
Judaism is a deeply embodied religion. It does not view the physical body as a prison, a shameful secret, or a rigid test of obedience; it delights in it. More than a thousand years before the advent of contemporary thinking about gender identity, the rabbis of the Talmud recognized seven different embodied genders. When faced with the reality of human diversity, they didn’t panic or attempt to legislate it out of existence. They acknowledged it, discussed it, and made space for it in Jewish law.
Today, the major streams of American Judaism, including the Reform, Reconstructionist, and Conservative movements, as well as plenty of Orthodox communities, explicitly affirm that being transgender is real, and healthy, and holy. And again, that affirmation is grounded in ancient theology and Jewish religious law.
At Bend the Arc, we organize progressive Jews because we understand attacks on trans people are a part of the authoritarian playbook. The very same political forces attempting to erase trans lives are the ones mainstreaming antisemitism, suppressing votes, abducting immigrants, and attacking reproductive freedom. They demand conformity because human diversity is a fundamental threat to their consolidation of power.
When I transitioned, my Jewish grandmother understood on a theological level that I was still me, and still made in the image of God. She also taught me that we do not abandon our people to appease bullies.
We cannot let a vocal and well-funded Christian nationalist minority dictate the narrative on religious freedom in America. We cannot let that vocal and well-funded Christian nationalist minority implement laws that endanger transgender people like me. LGBTQ+ people and everyone who loves us must wield our joy and pride every day as a weapon against Christian nationalism and authoritarianism, and we must stand unapologetically in our own traditions as we insist on living that joy in public.
My faith commands it. My humanity demands it. And our democracy depends on it.
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Jews as Prey and Conquerers
With Jewish identity focused on its ethnic nation-state rather than a worldwide people gifted Torah and obligations, its majoritarianism and contempt for others shows our vulnerability—as all other groups—to vice.
Jun 27, 2026
Separating the meaning of Jewish identity and learning, distinct from the Israeli state and its underlying doctrine, is worthwhile work.
It's also urgent work, overdue. This is a maniacal, genocidal post from Israel's Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir:
For every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep. All of Lebanon must burn!
Repulsion from Israel's actions naturally affects how Jews are seen in the world, how we walk among others in the world—and ironically, for Zionists, validates their conception of the gentile world as forever hostile to Jews.
The existence of the State of Israel, the merger of Judaism with Jewish nationalism, has unavoidably changed what being a Jew is.
Identifying with a state perpetually in conflict, we retreat to the protection of our litany of noble sufferings, protecting from facts, from seeing ourselves as cruel or hurtful. Or—even—silly, annoying, not so significant.
Zionist theoretician Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote in 1923 of the way that the Jewish state would have to be constructed, that “it is utterly impossible to obtain the voluntary consent of the Palestine Arabs for converting ‘Palestine’ from an Arab country into a country with a Jewish majority.”
Colonization would have to continue “only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population—behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.”
When Jabotinsky wrote this, Jews were immigrating to Palestine under British protection to fulfill the League of Nations Mandate promise of a yet-to-be defined “Jewish homeland” there.
Population "transfer" to create a Jewish majority state was envisioned by Zionist leadership, from founder Theodor Herzl onwards.
The United Nations Palestine partition plan of 1947 and resulting civil conflict provided the opportunity for Jewish militias and then the Israeli army to target and empty communities—to become sites for Jewish settlements with Hebrew names.
Israeli statehood on May 14, 1948 was accomplished by dispossession of most of the Arabs of Palestine—the expulsion of 750,000 Arabs from what would become Israel. This is called the Nakba (catastrophe) in Arabic.
Those Palestinians remain exiled despite a pledge from Israel to the United Nations in 1949 to accept returning refugees, as part of their admission as a member state.
The “restoration” of our sovereignty inflicted a catastrophe on Palestinians which will be part of Jewish history forever.
The creation of the State of Israel is presented as necessary Jewish self-assertion.
In September 1948, Israeli diplomat Abba Eban wrote that in a “just world” consultation and agreement would have been preferred. “But the world is more realistic than just. The doctrine of ‘accomplished fact’ has been entirely vindicated against that of ‘prior consent.’”
That doctrine forces for Jews a necessity of either identifying with Israel, or maintaining the identity of “Jewish-not Zionist,” an awkward thing to maintain while well-provisioned Jewish organizations present Zionism as Judaism.
That doctrine also destroyed Jewish communities across the Middle East and North Africa, and as far as India. Exercising naked power to force Arabs from their homes to privilege Jews in Palestine poisoned the place of Jews who lived for many centuries as citizens in neighboring societies.
Thinking of the vulnerability and degradation of Jews in the past, I struggle to reconcile those moments with this moment of Jews as a menace—and Jewish nationalism as a personal imprisonment.
The Zionist movement which descended on Palestine to “ingather the exiles” is now a state dedicated to a philosophy of Jewish redemption by violence, “an admixture of ultranationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority,” as described by Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and others in a 1948 letter to The New York Times, of the faction that is now in control of Israel’s psyche.
Israel operates with a logic in which opponents to the Jewish state intend a Holocaust—mindless, causeless enemies as in the Passover or Purim or Hanukkah stories.
While most Jews in the diaspora live in accommodation and cooperation with gentile co-nationals, Israel has sacralized and militarized the “they always turn on us” belief.
We live in two models of Jewishness—the Jew living in civil cooperation with gentiles, and the militant Jewish supremacist in Palestine.
The contradiction of those two models of Jewishness makes us a problem to ourselves and others, with no clarity.
Complicating this is our belief in the grandeur of our own culture and learning.
As a child, I was buoyed by stories of Jewish learning and achievement—unlikely persistence through the ages—uniqueness.
I felt I was one of a fine, special group.
I also absorbed the other, paired, narrative of Jewish history. In the ritual reading of the Haggadah text each Pesach, I was reminded that we were enslaved in Egypt, and that in every generation They rise up to destroy us. And we survive, achieve, and show our high quality.
The theme of Jewish life is that we were chosen for a great mission, and have been persecuted since.
In these narratives, living a Jewish life is fulfilling the endowment of Torah and generations of scholarship, earnest and humane— targeted by malice, by jealousy from peoples less… fortunate? Not Jewish.
It may be that feelings Jews have about gentiles are as problematic as prejudices gentiles have against Jews. We suffer from not only how gentiles may see us, but limitations on how we see non-Jews.
Mitch Abidor, in the magazine Jewish Currents, describes a passage in Philip Roth’s novel Portnoy’s Complaint about a non-Jewish girl who tosses a flaming baton and catches it, and and its significance to the “nice Jewish boys in the stands." Portnoy observes that:
there was still a certain comic detachment exhibited on our side of the field, grounded in the belief that this was precisely the kind of talent that only a goy would think to develop in the first place.
Legendary Forverts newspaper editor Abraham Cahan wrote in his novel, The Rise of David Levinsky, of Talmudic education (an experience Cahan had shared with his character during his youth in Lithuania). The process of extended reasoning and disputation in religious study seemed the acme of human ratiocination:
"Can you fathom the sea? Neither can you fathom the depths of the Talmud," as we would put it. We were sure that the highest mathematics taught in the Gentile universities were child's play as compared to the Talmud.
This feeling of higher thought as a specifically Jewish achievement is useful to surface in discussion of how we see our not-Jewish fellows.
Torah study may be mostly a treasure of the observant now, but the habits and outlook of study and productive disputation persist. Might the assumption of superlative Jewish quality also?
To accept the World-Against-the-Jew construct, one must accept the idea that there is a unique quality to Jews.
Our religion revolves around identity, descent from tribes in a substantive relationship with the true God. When we pray, we are praying to a god that particularly cares that we are Jews doing the praying.
The central prayer of Judaism is the Shema:
Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.
The Yiddish phrase "pintele yid," Jewish spark or kernel, expresses the belief that there is an irreducible, distinct core of Jewishness that is in a born Jew, observant or secular or ignorant.
The story told about converts is that their nefesh (soul, spirit) was there at Sinai to hear Moses tell God’s covenant with his people..
This resolves Judaism as an embrace of Torah—fudges the membership story, in truth.
Is “Jew” a coherent national category, as we include Indians, Ethiopians, Yemenis, Poles, and Romanians?
When devotion to Torah is the center of this identity, it does not require ruling from imagined supremacy.
The poison brewed when mixed with a colonial enterprise designed at a time Britain could design a plan “natives” had to accept.
The Israeli government recognizes Israeli citizenship for Jews, Arabs, and others, but then records the “nationality” of the citizen separately, so that I, an American citizen, in their system share the same “nationality”—“Jewish”—as an Israeli Jew.
Ultimately the identity is based on magic, superstition, folkways, and spiritual truth. Am I required to believe in the existence of "The Jewish Nation" as the term is meant in the Zionist state?
The Zionist proposition for the world’s relationship with Jews is, “Love us, love our land.” This is articulated in their claim, “Anti-Zionism is antisemitism.”
In 1906, Jewish educator Solomon Schechter said that he feared assimilation of Jews, loss of identity, “even more than pogroms.” He wrote that in the Jewish “exile,” the Zionist project could form “the great bulwark against assimilation… an opposing force.”
As we Jews "fight for our existence," is it because diminishment of our self-held special place in the world feels like death?
American Jewish organizations promote connection with the State of Israel to nurture Jewish identity of the young.
Identifying with a state perpetually in conflict, we retreat to the protection of our litany of noble sufferings, protecting from facts, from seeing ourselves as cruel or hurtful. Or—even—silly, annoying, not so significant.
A popular 1970s Israeli song had the refrain, "The Whole World is Against Us.” It concluded,
The whole world is against us...
This song was taught to us
By our old fathers,
And we too shall sing it,
And after us—the sons.
And great-grandchildren of great-grandchildren will sing
Here in the Land of Israel,
And anyone who is against us
Can go to hell!
The whole world is against us…
It’s not clear how we wish to be regarded.
At the Enlightenment and revolutionary emancipation of Jews, converting from toleration to equal citizenship, there was a loss of community autonomy, statutory difference—the loss of definition as members of a nation within the nation.
Even stigmatized, community autonomy had its advantages. Jewish communities had their own recognized governance, internal taxation, regulation of their own personal affairs, and laws, courts.
That concept of modern citizenship as individual equality conflicts with Jews residing as their own self-governing polity with representatives to the larger society, as was often the practice. This is sacrificed with equal citizenship, where all live under the same law.
Max Nordau, speaking to the First Zionist Congress in 1897, made interesting comments that when Jews lived isolated in ghettos, they had society of their own. He says that while Emancipation had its intoxication, it left Jews in Western Europe in “misery” because they could not thrive as Jews among Jews.
We are people; people do evil.
Acceptance becomes a stressor; the more we become like our fellow nationals, the more desperate to maintain a difference.
By the logic of Nordau, the most salutary circumstance for Jewish happiness is isolation from the larger society—or living as the majority the Jewish state achieved in 1948.
UK Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, in a 2016 address on antisemitism, presents the existence of Israel as a Jewish human right. “Antisemitism means denying the right of Jews to exist collectively as Jews with the same rights as everyone else.” (Emphasis added.)
Now, we've acquired the belief we're only meant to be happy if we rule our own “Jewish” land? Or only be safe if we do? The rationale toggles between the two, that Israel represents Jewish safety or Jewish fulfillment.
Jewish history treasures—curates—narratives of persecution. The meaning of that must be considered. If we have grievance, contempt, or pity for those outside our circle, are we healthy?
For me, there has been not just a feeling of kinship but a higher expectation of Jews, expecting less of gentiles as a rule. Prejudice absorbed growing up is painful to examine.
The origin story of our people—chosen by God to a special mission of glorifying Him and his laws—may instill confidence, a sense of identity, but I think is “worth another think” as a problem when, as Peter Beinart points out, it is empowered as a state.
He writes, “In most of the Jewish world today, rejecting Jewish statehood is a greater heresy than rejecting Judaism itself.”
Beinart's comment suggests that many Jews now have Zionism as their faith—and faiths are based on taking certain premises as fact. It may be a creator of a particular sort, or in this case a belief in the Jewish people as a reconstituted modern nation-state. In any case, faiths can't be debated.
Beinart, religiously observant and well-grounded in Jewish study, called his book Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, and gave it the subtitle, A Reckoning. The necessary reckoning he forecasts for Jews I think will be ugly and with false starts and detours, and will necessitate re-evaluations of how we prejudge gentiles.
We number perhaps 16 million worldwide, and we Jews are at the pivot point of the USA’s wars on Iran, Iraq, and all sorts of involvement in bolstering Israel’s impunity in its neighborhood. Things at pivot points can get caught and mangled.
Dr. Michael A. Meyer wrote of American Jews: “For them the state is the flagship of the people to which they belong. Their Jewish identity is as much ethnic as religious, and their religious expression of that identity as much as affirmation of their peoplehood and the importance they attribute to preserving it…”
Polling shows this identification with Israel is less true than when written in 1994.
The American Council for Judaism, an anti-Zionist organization founded in 1943, is reviving the struggle within the Jewish community for Jewish life "free from the Zionist idea of Judaism as a nationality or the elevation of one nation above others…grounded in justice, solidarity, and humility."
We maybe are preserving ourselves without attention to what we become. An organized project to dispossess Arabs from their homes leaves us as what sort of people, declaring populations "human animals," and promising a “Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 48”?
Israel is now again attempting a land grab of south Lebanon, methodically blowing up evacuated villages so that Lebanese have no homes to return to.
Israel has no declared borders, only armistice lines after various wars since 1948. It has claimed and settled part of Syria, and in a de facto manner acquired all of mandate Palestine, settled it with Jews, but without recognizing citizenship of non-Jews living there. Gaza, populated in majority by refugees from the 1948 Nakba, it tried to settle, and strangled it at the best of times.
Israel has, since 1948, and especially since the 1967 occupation, arbitrarily detained 1 million Palestinians, and subjected them to routine beatings, humiliation, and abuse, reaching new depths since October 7, 2023.
This abuse is enabled by indifference to the humanity of a classification of people—in this case non-Jews.
Having known abuse from both pogromists and cruel soldiers, we—we?—unleash them on Arab civilians.
Israel is a significant producer in the international arms trade, especially in mechanisms of surveillance and control of civilian populations.
One thing is taboo: anything other than seeing innocence in the actions of Jews in the world.
Cruelty, persecution, crimes against humanity are in a blind spot when it's “our own people” as perpetrators. Exceptions to a virtuous rule.
There is anger at Israel's blockade, bombing, and occupation of Gaza, and West Bank state terrorism, and the reaction of Israel defenders is often that the charged offenses match historic antisemitic canards—thus are invalid.
The problem with enumerating the package of common antisemitic slurs is that they always seem to create a kind of immunity: If something has been falsely charged of Jews, one needn't avoid the crime charged?
Is it a matter of seeing ourselves as others see us? Is it a matter of the struggle for some objectivity? Is every ethnic or tribal identity a devaluing of those outside it?
For me to see the Jewish story with objectivity is as impractical as performing a non-trivial surgical operation on myself.
Do I touch on something unmentionable, “feed antisemitism,” by separating our human value from our outsize mythologizing?
I defend myself: It cannot be betrayal to think of Hillel's teaching, the universal "What is hateful to you, do not do to another," with an eye to truths we thought established in the Nuremberg trials, not to mention learned from the object lesson of the Nuremberg rallies.
Zionist Israel is Chelm. The legendary town of Chelm (not the real Polish city) in Yiddish stories is inhabited by remarkably foolish people who begin from foolish premises and build on them to ridiculous solutions.
The first stupid premise—that “Israel” can be taken from “Palestine”—is compounded by more and more technological excellence in killing and surveillance.
For believers that the Jewish story must include a modern nation-state in Palestine, it’s a certainty that I am “betraying my people” by writing out these thoughts. Or, naive to the innate antisemitism of the world.
In the Passover ritual meal, the “wicked son” asks, “What does this mean to you?” By not asking what the Exodus story means to “us,” he separates himself from The Jewish People, showing his wickedness.
I think the only irredeemable sin, among Jews, is faithlessness to “Our People”—aligning with gentiles. As a comment posted on a Zionist website stated, “True Jewish morality begins with loyalty to our own people.”
If all Jews compose a Jewish nation in a literal rather than spiritual, figurative sense, the weight of treason comes into play for faithlessness.
Danish expatriate Israeli Jonathan Ofir wrote in an online essay titled “I Am Freed from Zionism”:
It's hard to define the line where people sense you're not loyal. But it is a kind of social control with cult characteristics. It’s like people have the understanding that you’ve gone too far and now you’re not with "us" but against "us."
Ofir's provocative suggestion that Zionism is cultish makes me ask if there is some vulnerability that Zionism exploits in Jewish hyper-fixation on identity. Are we prone to the cultish division of the world into members and outsider "enemies" that installs an inner policeman to monitor for betrayal?
Certainly there is the cult characteristic of devaluing views from outside of the cult as worthless, ill-intentioned.
Intrinsic to Zionist belief is that Jews are historically vulnerable and non-Jews are unreliable, and that Israeli security is achieved by "realism”—relying on military superiority, "teaching" non-Jews lessons by massive retaliation and iron control.
Zionism began as a secular movement. The secular seamlessly slid to the sanctified, as the words of the Zionist anthem “Hatikvah,” with no mention of the deity, evoke the “Jewish soul,” necessarily implicating a God that made Jewish souls.
Considered with a step back, it has impressive gravity, being a selected people of God. Add the patina of antiquity and who can match the distinction?
The Zionist solution is to be strong and a majority—jettisoning the aspiration of making a better world where the weak and less numerous can be safe.
When arms and sovereignty are grafted to this identity, we have Jewish identity transmogrified to something new—Jewish religious-nationalist power.
With Jews’ role of noble victim is the gentiles’ role of ignoble victimizers. In practice, we may view non-Jews as defective, lacking, having morally-vacant animality.
There is a witticism of uncertain origin, “Jews are like everyone else, only moreso.” I’d leave off the last part, and just say we’re human, with all the human prides and failings.
We are people; people do evil.
Israeli-born genocide scholar Omer Bartov has concluded that Zionism “became the ideology of the state. And it became not only militaristic and expansionist but also racist, extremely violent, and ultimately an ideology that deeply harms both the individual and the collective.”
Bartov continues that in Israel there was “a radical transformation of Judaism itself into a political religion, intertwined with a certain translation of Zionism... In Israel the specific version has, in effect, produced divine or rabbinic legitimation for genocide.”
Zionism becomes revenge, for correction of every humbled moment of Jews in history, and glorification of the god that selected us—to wreak on Palestinians reversal of centuries of obstruction of God’s promise of Jews being mighty and numerous in our land.
Fatally, omitted in the fury is remembering the promise of the land is conditioned on faithful following of God's mitzvot.
The “eternal Jewish vulnerability” narrative is available in Jewish learning to be turned to Zionist purposes. In February, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu laid out concisely the mental landscape of Zionism grafted to Judaism—eternal world antisemitism:
If you look at the course of Jewish history, then what you see is this was a fairly constant phenomenon:
I mean, once we lost our land, once we were scattered among the Nations, we were ready prey. We were ready prey. And eventually, when there was societal change the Jews always were blamed… And these attacks on the Jews were always preceded by vilification. Horrible vilifications that even so-called civilized and educated people adhered to: “The Jews poisoned the wells. The Jews spread vermin. The Jews slaughtered Christian children to use their blood for baking matzos.”
And this goes into modern times. The Nazis basically said the same thing. And all these vituperations, all these slanders were always accompanied, eventually, by exile or pogroms or mass murder.
That's what happened to the Jews one country after another into modern times.
PM Netanyahu then defines the rationale for whatever violence is necessary to preserve the Jewish state in Palestine:
The great change in Jewish history which [Theodor] Herzl saw very clearly is that when the Jews have their own independent state they will have the independent power to roll back the physical attacks against us.
Functionally, it is the strategy of a paranoid person holed up with weapons. As in any religion’s foundational literature, justifications can be found. In the Talmud is the imperative, “If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.”
In territories under Israeli control, it has fostered land stealing and ongoing terrorizing of Arab residents by Jewish “settlers” drunk on ethnic self-assertion, protected by the army of the Israeli state.
When we live among others, the paradox of this outlook on Jewish history, and its "solution" by territorial Zionism, is the abandonment of Jews' right to be French, American, Indian, Syrian, Irani. In harmony with the Nazi legislation that German Jews were not German.
Zionist founding father, secular Theodor Herzl, in Der Judenstaat, summarized the basis of Zionism—that Jews carry antisemitism with them. He said we go where there is no antisemitism and there generate antisemitism:
The Jewish question exists wherever Jews live in perceptible numbers. Where it does not exist, it is carried by Jews in the course of their migrations. We naturally move to those places where we are not persecuted, and there our presence produces persecution.
Herzl describes an irredeemable gentile world: “In the world as it now is and for an indefinite period will probably remain, might precedes right. It is useless, therefore, for us to be loyal patriots, as were the [French] Huguenots who were forced to emigrate. If we could only be left in peace... But I think we shall not be left in peace.”
Herzl's and Netanyahu's formulation is degrading of gentiles—that Jews cannot live among others. That there is something profoundly wrong with everyone but Jews.
This approach disregards the success story of a tribal cult from Judea maintaining and building culture over millennia, integrating converts wherever they’ve settled, up to our present.
Jewish pride can be consciousness of heritage, or be a sort of implicit contempt of gentiles.
The Zionist outlook, expressed by Maurice Samuel in 1924—talking of Jews' "wretched fate"—has Jews living in a trap which alienates us from humanity. One may be proud or lament the identity, but with no escaping it:
A century of partial tolerance gave us Jews access to your world. In that period the great attempt was made, by advance guards of reconciliation, to bring our two worlds together. It was a century of failure. Our Jewish radicals are beginning to understand it dimly...
The wretched fate which scattered us through your midst has thrust this unwelcome rôle upon us.
Do we demand safety, protection, because we share common humanity with rights to be respected, or because of our rare qualities—making us a special case?
Whether we think of ourselves as “ready prey” (Netanyahu) or precious unicorns of advanced civilization—or both—the point is we may think of ourselves as a different ilk than run-of-the-mill-humanity.
In America, the claim of being an extraordinary case makes a sisterly blend with Christians Zionist eschatology and “American exceptionalism” in Israel advocacy.
We are whatever we think we are. It isn’t a lament but a boast, that we are “a people that dwells apart.”
The Zionist solution is to be strong and a majority—jettisoning the aspiration of making a better world where the weak and less numerous can be safe.
In 1938, a Polish leader of the anti-Zionist socialist Bund forecast:
Zionism has always regarded the law of force, of nationalistic action, as the normal law of history and on this law has based its perspective on Jewish life…
If a Jewish state should arise in Palestine, its spiritual climate will be: eternal fear of the external enemy (Arabs); eternal struggle for every bit of ground with the internal enemy (Arabs)…
With Jewish identity focused on its ethnic nation-state rather than a worldwide people gifted Torah and obligations, its majoritarianism and contempt for others shows our vulnerability— as all other groups—to vice. Trauma has not ennobled us.
The whole of Torah revolves around the proposition of singular essential Jewish peoplehood.
Herzl’s proposition that we have “our right to exist as a separate people, according us our rightful place among the nations of the world” is built on it.
The inner policeman tries to stop critical examination of the identity—Disloyalty to faithful ancestors! Betrayal of my people!—to question Zionist corollaries of the statement, “I am a Jew.”
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Iranian Synagogue 'Completely Destroyed,' Reportedly By US-Israeli Airstrike
The representative for Iran's Jewish community in Parliament said Israel "showed no mercy... during the Jewish holidays and attacked one of our ancient and holy synagogues."
Apr 07, 2026
US-Israeli airstrikes early Tuesday morning reduced a synagogue in Tehran to rubble, according to local reports and footage posted to social media.
The Iranian newspaper Shargh reported on Tuesday that the Rafi-Nia Synagogue, which it described as “one of the most important places for Khorasan Jews to gather and celebrate,” was “completely destroyed” as the US and Israel launched attacks across the city.
Iran's semi-official Mehr news agency reported that the temple was hit when the residential building next door was attacked. Attacks across Iran overnight reportedly killed more than a dozen people.
A video shows Rabbi Younes Hammami Lalezar, a leader of the country's Jewish community, walking amongst the still-smoking wreckage with emergency response teams. Other photos show Hebrew-language prayer books scattered among the rubble.
Rafi-Nia is one of about 100 synagogues in Iran, including 30 in Tehran, that serve as houses of worship for Iran's Jewish community, the largest in the Middle East outside Israel. The attack came on the sixth day of the Passover holiday.
“The Zionist regime showed no mercy towards this community during the Jewish holidays and attacked one of our ancient and holy synagogues,” said Homayoun Sameyah Najafabadi, the Jewish community's representative in the Iranian Parliament. “Unfortunately, during this attack, the synagogue building was completely destroyed, and Torah scrolls remain under the rubble.”
While it's the first report of a synagogue being destroyed since the war was launched on February 28, dozens of other religious and historical sites have been damaged and destroyed by US-Israeli bombings.
Israel has denied responsibility for the attack, with an unnamed official telling The Times of Israel that "Israel doesn’t target synagogues."
A separate statement from the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: “Iran is firing missiles at civilians, Israel is striking terror infrastructure. Missiles on civilians versus precision strikes on terror targets. That’s the difference.”
The comments echoed earlier denials from the US and Israel after a school in Minab, Iran, was one of the first targets of the bombing campaign, killing 168 people, including more than 100 children. The US couldn't have been behind the attack, said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, because “the only side that targets civilians is Iran.”
US investigators later found evidence that the US was behind the attack.
According to the Human Rights Activist Network, a US-based human rights monitor for Iran, at least 1,665 civilians, including 248 children, have been killed in US and Israeli strikes since the war began more than a month ago.
Similar to the destruction of Israel's US-backed war on Gaza, tens of thousands of civilian buildings, including homes, hospitals, schools, and religious sites, have been damaged or destroyed, according to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).
The synagogue attack also comes after US President Donald Trump threatened on Easter Sunday to target civilian infrastructure in Iran, including bridges and power plants, and said he was “considering blowing everything up” in Iran if it did not negotiate to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
On Tuesday, Trump issued his most explicitly genocidal threat yet, saying that if Iran did not negotiate, a "whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again."
Iran’s minister of culture and Islamic guidance, Abbas Salehi, said that "damage and destruction of the Jewish synagogue building in central Tehran is bitter and distressing.”
“The American-Zionist warmongers have targeted religious sites and Iran’s civilizational heritage. For them, it makes no difference whether one is Muslim, Christian, or Jewish,” he said. "They have targeted the Iranian people, but Iran will remain, and they will be gone."
Najafabadi accused Israel of using “Judaism as a pretext to legitimize their actions,” and accused them of targeting the synagogue “in light of the [Iranian Jewish] community’s firm stance in condemning the regime’s actions and its anti-Zionist positions.”
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Answering the Four Children in the Shadow of the Gaza Genocide
In a historical moment where Jewish identity is facing political and moral division, the inquisitive nature of the Four Children can inspire a new generation of Jewish families to question what we have been told about Palestinians in Gaza.
Apr 03, 2026
During the Passover seder, Jewish families recall our cultural yearning for freedom and liberation through storytelling and asking questions. This week, families across the Jewish world will gather to retell an ancient story, connecting with ancestors who passed on to us a generations-old struggle for justice and peace.
But what makes this night different from all other nights? This Passover, Jewish communities will continue to witness a rupture over Israel’s actions in Gaza, while Israel’s attacks on Iran and Lebanon will surely generate new questions. But, unlike the Four Children, or the child reciting, “Mah Nishtana,” many Jewish children will have their questions left unanswered.
By exploring what the Four Children might ask in this moment, and offering answers aligned to our Jewish values, we honor rather than shy away from the Jewish tradition of asking questions.
The wise one, what does he say? “What are the testimonies, the statutes, and the laws which the LORD, our God, has commanded you?” And you shall tell him the laws of Pesach.
If we truly want to honor our traditions and values, we must not shy away from difficult questions.
The wise child asks, “What are the testimonies of Palestinians in Gaza? What are the international laws that nations follow? What are the Jewish ethics which our ancestors have passed to us?”
When the wise child asks for testimony, you must share the countless firsthand accounts of Palestinians in Gaza who have endured deteriorating conditions and cruelty at the hands of the Israeli military.
When the child asks for statutes, you must guide them to United Nations reports, International Court of Justice cases, and International Criminal Court investigations that provide evidence of war crimes and genocide.
When the wise child asks for laws, you must show how our Jewish texts instruct us to value all life, command us against standing “idly by the blood of another,” and teach us to honor each soul as a universe.
The wicked one, what does he say? “What is this service to you?” He says, “to you,” but not to him. By thus excluding himself from the community he has denied that which is fundamental.
The wicked child asks, “Why do they deserve this?” “They,” the child says, and not Palestinians, not families, not human beings. When the child excludes others from humanity, they exclude themself. You must call them in and say, “we must stand with Palestinians facing genocide in Gaza.” “We,” and not, “I,” for our safety is intertwined.
The simple one, what does he say? “What is this?”
The simple child asks, “What is this?” What is the truth about Gaza?” He hears opposing narratives in the news, on his phone, and in his Jewish community. He hears Zionists describe the people who live in Gaza as terrorists, animals, and other dehumanizing labels justifying collective punishment. He sees another reality, a mosaic of humanity–children, doctors, journalists, and families– experiencing profound grief and suffering.
The simple child is confused, and we must direct him to seek truth and act in alignment with his Jewish values: Never again means never again for anyone.
As for the one who does not know how to ask, you must open [the story] for him [...]
And for the child who doesn’t know how to ask, you must open a path for them to question the narratives that Zionists tell of Palestinians in Gaza, just as Jewish culture teaches us to question, challenge, and debate our traditions and worldviews.
Passover is a testament to the power of retelling stories that resonate across generations. The Four Children, a key part of the Passover haggadah, have always acted as archetypes of Jewish engagement. In a historical moment where Jewish identity is facing political and moral division, the inquisitive nature of the Four Children can inspire a new generation of Jewish families to question what we have been told about Palestinians in Gaza.
If we truly want to honor our traditions and values, we must not shy away from difficult questions. Nor should our answers ignore the parts of our tradition that teach us to prioritize life, to love the stranger, and to challenge our worldviews. Our children deserve nothing less.
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Trump's Anti-Immigrant Agenda Turns the Ancient Story of Passover Into a Modern One
On Wednesday night, Jews sat down to the Passover seder and retold the story of how our ancestors, once welcomed into Egypt as refugees, were enslaved by a Pharaoh fearful of losing power. This year, it sounds like the news.
Apr 02, 2026
An authoritarian ruler seeks to consolidate his own power by stirring up fear about an immigrant population.
“These people are not like us,” he declares. “They are a potential fifth column, likely to join with our enemies and destroy us from within!” “We can keep ourselves safe only by controlling and oppressing them.”
On Wednesday night, Jews sat down to the Passover seder and retold the ancient story of how our ancestors, once welcomed into Egypt as refugees from famine, were enslaved by a Pharaoh fearful of losing power, and ultimately liberated through divine and human actions.
The Passover story has been retold in Jewish homes for millennia. This year, the ancient story tragically sounds like today’s news.
Now, the Supreme Court is considering overturning a core principle that once allowed those fleeing violence and oppression, my own great grandparents included, to find refuge in the United States.
President Donald Trump built his election campaign around stirring up fear of immigrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers, and, over the past year, has ramped up detentions and deportations, canceled temporary protected status for nationals of multiple countries, flooded major American cities with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, and flouted US policy and international law by deporting people to third countries.
All these actions have been undertaken with intense cruelty. Families have been divided; mothers tackled in airports, on the streets, and in their homes; and people sent to prisons and to nations where they have no connections.
Now, the Supreme Court is considering overturning a core principle that once allowed those fleeing violence and oppression, my own great grandparents included, to find refuge in the United States.
The justices are deliberating on Noem vs. Al Otro Lado, which will determine the constitutionality of the US government’s policy of physically blocking asylum-seekers from presenting themselves at ports of entry along the Mexican border. Longstanding US law requires the government to allow asylum-seekers to request asylum at ports of entry, and to give these claims a fair hearing.
Instead, the US has been preventing asylum-seekers from even making a claim and instead forcing them back to Mexico, where they are often stranded without shelter, adequate food, or protection from violence.
All of the current Supreme Court justices identify as either Christian, mostly Catholic, or Jewish. We hope they look to our shared scripture as they consider their rulings.
The Torah commands the retelling of the story of slavery and liberation, and also specifies what lessons should be learned from this experience. “You shall not wrong or oppress the ger,” God commands, “for you were gerim in the land of Egypt.” (Exodus 22:20). The word ger (plural: gerim) most likely refers to a person who came from somewhere else to live among the Jewish people—in other words, an immigrant or a stranger. Versions of this directive appear 36 times in the Torah.
As God established a lasting covenant with the Jewish people, God also laid out a series of laws aimed at establishing a just society. Central among these are the commandments regarding just treatment of the ger, who “...should be treated equally under the law.” (Numbers 15:15)
God, Godself, cares for immigrants just as God cared for the Jewish people during the period of their slavery in Egypt. “[God] loves the ger, and gives them food and clothing.” (Deuteronomy 10:18) Acting as God acts demands not only protecting immigrants from oppression, but actively caring for their needs.
The Torah also offers a negative example of a society whose cruelty toward immigrants, travelers, and others in need condemns it to destruction. The evil city of Sodom is notorious for its inhospitality toward visitors. “This was the sin of your sister Sodom,” the prophet Ezekiel declares, “She and her daughters had plenty of bread and untroubled tranquility, yet they did not support the poor and the needy.” (Ezekiel 16:49)
The Talmud goes on to tell the story of one brave young woman who regularly sneaks food to a person in need, only to be tortured and killed once she is discovered.
These are the issues at stake in Noem vs. Al Otro Lado. When US officials turn asylum-seekers away at the border, rather than allowing them to plead their case, they are no different from the officials in Sodom who decreed, “Let us abolish the practice of traveling in our land.”
I've personally seen Jewish and other religious communities living out these ancient teachings. At the end of January, nearly 100 rabbis who are members of T’ruah, the organization I lead, half of whom live and work in Minnesota and half from out of state, joined some 600 other clergy to protest ICE in the Twin Cities.
These religious leaders are following the path that God has laid out, refusing to tolerate fearmongering or oppression of immigrants, and insisting on treating all people—whether born in the United States or elsewhere—justly, and according to a single legal code. The justices should do the same.
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Prominent Jewish Figures Call On World Leaders to 'Refuse' Complicity in Israeli Crimes in Gaza, West Bank
The United Nations and member states must "use relevant leverage, including targeted sanctions on governmental bodies and individuals responsible for violations of international law," reads a new letter.
Oct 22, 2025
With the Palestinian news agency in Gaza reporting that Israel has violated the 12-day-old ceasefire agreement with Hamas at least 80 times and killed at least 80 people in the exclave, more than 460 prominent Jewish artists, writers, rights advocates, and policymakers on Wednesday called on world leaders—including at the United Nations—to intensify the international pressure that helped push Israel to sign the fragile truce deal.
"It was international pressure that helped to secure this ceasefire, and it must be sustained to guarantee that it endures," reads a letter organized by Jews Demand Action. "The ceasefire must be the beginning, not the end. The risk of reverting to a political reality of indifference to occupation and permanent conflict is too great. This same pressure must be continued to deliver a new era of peace and justice for all—Palestinians and Israelis alike."
The letter was initiated by former Israeli Knesset Member Avrum Burg, former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy, Israeli-American activist Libby Lenkinski, Belgian former Member of European Parliament Simone Susskind, US columnist and journalist Peter Beinart, and UK activist Em Hilton.
The signatories said that they "deplore the fact that Israeli leaders have repeatedly taken to the world stage to declare" that their bombardment of Gaza—which has killed more than 68,000 Palestinians and decimated nearly all housing units across the exclave along with hospitals, schools, and other civilian infrastructure—has been "committed in the name of the Jewish people."
"As Jews and as human beings, we declare: Not in our name," reads the letter, which was also signed by actor and writer Wallace Shawn, British filmmaker Jonathan Glazer, Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, and actor Hannah Einbinder. "Not in the name of our heritage, our faith, or our moral tradition. The monumental scale of the killing and destruction, the forced displacement, the deliberate withholding of life-sustaining necessities, and the ongoing criminal actions in the West Bank must end and never be repeated."
"It is time to do everything possible to definitively end the Israeli government’s collective punishment of the Palestinians and to pursue peace for the sake of both peoples."
Among the letter's demands is one calling on UN Secretary-General António Guterres and other world leaders to "refute false accusations of antisemitism that abusively deploy our collective history to tarnish those with whom we stand together in the pursuit of peace and justice."
Calls to destroy Palestinian life "are not Jewish values nor are they guided by the lessons we draw from our peoples’ history," they wrote. "Instead we see in many of those standing up for Palestinian rights a reflection of the people who stood with Jews in our times of need. Our solidarity with Palestinians is not a betrayal of Judaism, then, but a fulfillment of it. When our sages taught that to destroy one life is to destroy an entire world, they did not carve exceptions for Palestinians."
The group called on other Jewish people to sign the letter.
The letter notes that the ceasefire signed on October 10 "makes no reference to the West Bank," where more than 3,200 Palestinians have been injured in attacks, including by Israeli settlers, this year. Israeli leaders have promoted the creation of the E1 settlement, which would cut off East Jerusalem from the rest of the illegally occupied territory and make it impossible for Palestinians to establish a state with the city as its capital.
Masked settlers in recent days attacked Palestinians civilians who were harvesting olives in the town of Turmus Ayya, with one clubbing a 55-year-old woman named Umm Saleh Abu Alia, who had to be hospitalized.
The letter was addressed to Guterres and other world leaders and representatives of UN member states as the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel must provide for the "basic needs" of Palestinians in Gaza and allow aid into the exclave. In 2024 the ICJ issued a nonbinding opinion saying the occupation was illegal—in keeping with long-established international law—and calling on settlers to leave the West Bank.
The signatories affirmed their "belief in the universality of justice and the fair and equal application of international law," writing: "We have not forgotten that so many of the laws, charters, and conventions established to safeguard and protect all human life were created in response to the Holocaust. Those safeguards have been relentlessly violated by Israel."
"Accountability for the Israeli leadership’s grievous violations of international law is necessary," they wrote. "It is time to do everything possible to definitively end the Israeli government’s collective punishment of the Palestinians and to pursue peace for the sake of both peoples."
The European Union's foreign ministers paused sanctions against Israel in response to the ceasefire agreement, a decision that was criticized by rights advocates this week.
"That is the last thing that we should be doing, because this is exactly the moment when you need to keep the pressure on. Because we all know that it’s certainly not a foregone conclusion that this plan will be implemented," Nathalie Tocci, a former adviser to two EU foreign policy officials, told The Guardian. “I fear that... European governments and institutions will be... reverting back to the sort of old, familiar patterns."
The letter sent on Wednesday called on the UN and member states to:
- Respect and abide by the decisions of the International Court of Justice, apply arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court, and resist efforts to unduly pressure and influence and prevent the workings of both courts;
- To refuse any complicity in continued crimes and violations of international law against Palestinians by Israel, including by ending the provision of arms and other relevant goods and services, and to use relevant leverage, including targeted sanctions on governmental bodies and individuals responsible for violations of international law; and
- To ensure that humanitarian assistance reaches all Palestinians in Gaza at the scale that is commensurate to their vital need, that the blockade is lifted and materials for reconstruction enter, and that there is a full Israeli military withdrawal.
Al Jazeera reported on Wednesday that Palestinians in Gaza "are still going hungry" despite the ceasefire. In August, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) declared famine in parts of the exclave, and more than 450 people have starved to death as a result of the near-total blockade Israel began imposing in October 2023.
There is now only one entry point open for aid trucks at the Karem Abu Salem crossing, reported Al Jazeera.
"When it comes to the northern part of Gaza, none of the crossings have been opened. For more than 50 days now, the Israeli military has imposed a complete blockade on these crossings, and none of the trucks are coming to this area," wrote Hani Mahmoud, a correspondent in Gaza City. "It continues to be very difficult for people here, particularly those returning to their homes in Gaza City and the northern areas. Apart from the fact that they are lacking access to water, there’s no access to proper food.
"Whatever is available is from business owners, the traders, who have been given permits from the Israeli military to get commercial items into the Gaza Strip," Mahmoud reported. "Despite the illusion that aid is 'pouring' into Gaza, the reality on the ground is different, and people are still going hungry, unable to access food and water."
Levy said that "Israel's actions against Palestinians are antithetical to the Jewish heritage we hold dear."
"We must end this shame and reclaim a better future for Jews and Palestinians alike," he said. "We are calling on world leaders to reject complicity in the status quo of occupation, apartheid, and Israel's genocidal doom-loop towards the Palestinians, and ensure respect for international law and an end to impunity. That is the only path towards hope and sustainable peace.”
The signatories added that despite the ceasefire, they "shall not rest" until the agreement "carries forward into an end of occupation and apartheid."
"We write in the hope that this initiative further emboldens a moment of renewed Jewish commitment to act with conscience and compassion," they wrote. "We vow to work urgently to achieve equality, justice, and freedom for Palestinians and Israelis."
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Dozens Arrested as 1,000+ Jews Demand Gaza Ceasefire at Rabbi-Led Yom Kippur Protest in NYC
Protesters blocked traffic to the Brooklyn Bridge, embodying the ancient Jewish tenets of justice, righteousness, and saving life.
Oct 03, 2025
Dozens of people were arrested in New York City on Thursday during a protest led by rabbis on Yom Kippur—the holiest day of the Jewish calendar—demanding a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and an end to US complicity in Israel's genocide.
More than 1,000 Jews plus allies turned out for the demonstration, which was led by the group Rabbis for Ceasefire. The protest started around 3:30 pm local time at Brooklyn Borough Hall, where rabbis led a Yizkor, a memorial prayer of mourning recited just four times per year, including on Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement and repentance.
Some protesters carried a banner reading, "Not Another Bomb," written in Hebrew and English.
"Our heart is broken for every single person who has been murdered, and we want to convey the fact that this has to end," Rabbi Elliot Kukla told CBS New York.
Protesters then marched to the Brooklyn Bridge, where some sat down, locked their arms together, and sang while blocking traffic to the span. New York Police Department (NYPD) officers subsequently arrested at least 56 people, according to the New York Post.
Many of the arrested protesters chanted, "Let Gaza Live!" as their hands were zip-tied and they were hauled off to an awaiting NYPD bus.
Asked why she was arrested, one keffiyeh-clad woman said, "Because I’m using this sacred holiday of Yom Kippur, as a Jewish person whose ancestors perished during the Holocaust, to protest against the genocide of the Palestinian people in my name."
"And I say, not in my name," she added.
- YouTube
Speakers at the protest included New York City Comptroller Brad Lander—an ally of Democratic mayoral candidate and staunch Palestine defender Zohran Mamdani—who told the crowd that "we must today take collective responsibility for what the Israeli government has been doing, is doing today, on Yom Kippur," with "over 65,000 Palestinians killed, mostly women and children, whole families wiped out, food used as a weapon."
Earlier this week, President Donald Trump welcomed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House. The right-wing Israeli leader is a fugitive from the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which last year ordered his arrest for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes, including murder and forced starvation.
Like former President Joe Biden before him, Trump has approved billions of dollars in US armed aid to Israel, even while senior Trump administration officials acknowledge that children and others are starving to death in Gaza.
Lander took aim at US complicity in the genocide, decrying "the bombs funded by our taxpayer dollars in the name of the Jewish state," as well as the "desecration of Judaism."
Grateful to Rabbis for Ceasefire, @jfrejnyc.bsky.social and the other organizers of yesterday's mass mourning and collective atonement at Brooklyn Borough Hall. Let us steady and care for one another, and persevere together. #YomKippur
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— Office of NYC Comptroller Brad Lander (@nyccomptroller.bsky.social) October 3, 2025 at 8:01 AM
The Jewish religion emphasizes the ancient tenets of tzedek, mishpat, and din—righteousness, justice, and law—as well as pikuach nefesh, or saving life, which overrides nearly every other religious law including kosher dietary restrictions and keeping the Sabbath.
Just 2.4% of the US population, Jews have had an outsize presence at pro-Palestine demonstrations since October 2023, with groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow, and Rabbis for Ceasefire often leading large protests against Israel's war and US complicity under both Trump and Biden.
Jews have opposed Zionism—the mainly European settler-colonial movement to reestablish a Jewish homeland in Palestine—since the earliest days of the experiment. Even some early Zionists foresaw the genesis of events like the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, with Ahad Ha'am, father of cultural Zionism, writing after an 1891 trip to Palestine that "if the time comes when [Jews are] encroaching upon the native population, they will not easily yield their place."
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Speaking Out Against Genocide: Reckoning and Accountability
The truth is that most of us—not all of us, but most of us who grew up in Jewish communities—supported Israel and Zionism, until, often after a very long time, we didn’t.
Aug 31, 2025
I’ve been seeing a number of different discussions lately (posts and articles) about how Jews who have been speaking out against Israel’s genocide since October 2023 are feeling about Jews who are only more recently speaking out. How one feels, how one thinks these “newcomers” should be regarded, and one’s (potential) relationship with them, how one embraces them (or not), are part of the discussion. And questions about the need for accountability, repentance, and reckoning have been central to the conversations.
I believe strongly in processes of accountability and in reckoning, but what concerns me in what I’m reading is that it sounds to me like the discussion is about “us” and “them,” (the “good” and “not so good” Jews)—that is, those who have supported (or been silent until recently about) the genocide and those of us who haven’t. I do not mean to suggest that this kind of “us” and “them” characterization is the intention, but it is how some of it has come across to me. (And what struck me is that some of the posts/articles to which I refer come from those who have just themselves begun speaking out more openly and critically in recent years.)
I, of course, see groups and individuals speaking out now who still have deeply problematic analyses and who don’t begin to address the root of the problem—the original and ongoing Nakba—or decades of complicity. And I, too, have feelings about those who have taken so long to finally act with a semblance of humanity and who have not been vociferous in their opposition to widespread Jewish community support for, and complicity in, genocide. But the truth is that most of us—not all of us, but most of us who grew up in Jewish communities—supported Israel and Zionism, until, often after a very long time, we didn’t. And even after not supporting Israel or declaring ourselves anti-Zionists, there was so much to learn, to de-exceptionalize, to challenge ourselves on. And, certainly for me, that process continues to this day.
My own journey away from Zionism did not happen fully until the late 1980s, after I participated in an international peace conference (Road to Peace) with Palestinians from the US and from Palestine. While I had always been against the occupation of 1967, it was at the conference (and during the yearlong pre-conference planning) that I learned about the Nakba, about the right of return, about the Zionist movement’s role in the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their land and homes. The information was out there way before the conference and way before I identified as an anti-Zionist. But I had blinders on, and I didn’t challenge myself, or listen, nearly enough.
I’m interested in how we can build upon the ways people have (finally) spoken out... toward genuine recognition that this genocide is not an aberration in the history of Zionist and Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people.
So I feel like some of the calls for accountability I’m reading let “us” off the hook, like we don’t have to engage in our own ongoing reckoning and accountability. I don’t mean only for things past, but for the ways we—even unwittingly—continue to perpetuate and support injustice or Jewish exceptionalism or even stay silent (or weaken our messaging) at critical times when our voices could make a difference. Again, I believe we need to continually engage in this process to challenge both the (very present) Zionist framework that values Jewish lives over others, as well as the Jewish exceptionalist framework—with which many of us were brought up—of Jews as the chosen people. (And even those of us who flatly reject the latter concept might still find ourselves perpetuating the notion that there is a Jewish ethical tradition that is—just a bit!—more special or different than that of others.)
Sometimes as I read Steven Salaita–whose ethics and integrity and brilliance impact me deeply—and pay close attention to his words, I’ll start to feel something (discomfort?) and then I think, oh no, I see myself in that. And I know I need to consider long and hard about how to challenge what I see myself perpetuating. He doesn’t point fingers. He just says it as it is.
Reflecting upon the current moment, what I think about when I see all these new people, particularly many Jews, starting to move in the right direction is how they might move beyond where they are at right now to where they and we could and should be—acknowledging and opposing the Palestinian Nakba of 1948 and all that follows from that. Because we know that the complicity of US Jewish institutions in supporting the Zionist movement and then Israel in the ongoing expulsion of the Palestinian people from Palestine, and in justifying and/or remaining silent about the Nakba, goes back for decades—including among many of us who now define ourselves as anti-Zionists.
So I see one part of the work I am committed to as trying to open up spaces for those who are now speaking out in opposition to this genocide, to this starvation campaign, for real learning, and for community accountability about the Nakba of 1948 and the ongoing Nakba. I’m interested in how we can build upon the ways people have (finally) spoken out—just as so many of us were motivated at some point to speak out and renounce our support for Zionism—toward genuine recognition that this genocide is not an aberration in the history of Zionist and Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people.
The goal for me in this particular work is to have more and more of us within our Jewish communities joining, with integrity, in the Palestinian-led movement for justice. There is so much out there to deepen our analysis and organizing—resources and educational materials of Palestinian organizations, scholars, historians, and activists. My own journey has included so much learning over many years and then participating in the creation of educational curricula, first (inspired by Zochrot) Facing the Nakba, and, in more recent years, together with Project48, the Palestinian Nakba curriculum. So many resources abound, and I consider part of my responsibility now, which I embrace, to engage deeply with these resources within Jewish communities where there are openings to strengthen our collective accountability, and our commitment, in word and action, to seeking and pursuing justice.
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Speak Out Now Against Netanyahu's Final Solution for Gaza
It is morally and ethically irresponsible for mainstream Jewish and Christian groups not to condemn Netanyahu's continuation of the war as genocide.
Aug 12, 2025
The world is asking why major Jewish organizations, and congregations around the country, aren't speaking out about genocide. It can't be hidden. The failure to condemn Israel's crimes against humanity is a glaring breakdown of moral responsibility, casting a dark shadow and is a growing source of antisemitism.
I have overheard neighbors, who are not political, talking about what Israel is doing in Gaza. An acquaintance during a conversation suddenly asked, "Are you Jewish?" A Christian friend asked me, "Why aren't the Rabbis speaking out?"
Gaza has more children missing limbs per capita than any other place in the world.
Contemplate this fact as children are preciously guided through Jewish education culminating in the Bat Mitzvah for girls and Bar Mitzvah for boys. As new adults they will grow up with a history different from their parents, grandparents, and great grandparents. Rather than being survivors of the Holocaust, they will inherent a legacy of Jewish people committing mass murder, starving millions, and violently carrying out ethnic cleansing. Growing up, secular or religious, they are living at a time when Israeli politicians, religious fanatics, and a majority of ordinary citizens have supported the commission of genocide as exigent to the survival of the Jewish State.
Omer Bartov, an Israeli professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, wrote in The New York Times:
My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the IDF as a soldier and officer, and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one.
In the future, who among today's Jewish children will be able to say my parents protested, my rabbi spoke out, they supported resolutions to end America's backing of genocide at this crucial moment when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's murderous regime is planning a final solution for Gaza.
Reports by leading Israeli human rights organizations B'Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel concluded that their country is committing genocide.
B'Tselem produced a detailed study titled, "Our Genocide":
An examination of Israel's policy in the Gaza Strip and its horrific outcomes, together with statements by senior Israeli politicians and military commanders about the goals of the attack, leads to the unequivocal conclusion that Israel is taking coordinated action to intentionally destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip. In other words: Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
Whitewashed words and bleached language cannot erase the genocide being committed by Israel and underwritten by the United States. Nor can it hide behind a smokescreen of deflections such as "Israel has the right to defend itself" or "Hamas started the war."
It is morally and ethically irresponsible for mainstream Jewish and Christian groups not to condemn Netanyahu's continuation of the war as genocide. A group of some 600 retired Israeli security officials, including former heads of intelligence agencies, have written to U.S. President Donald Trump asking him to force Israel to immediately end the war in Gaza.
"It is our professional judgement that Hamas no longer poses a strategic threat to Israel," the officials said.
Yet the bombing and starvation continue. And the record numbers of child amputees in Gaza will continue to climb. Making matters worse Netanyahu has announced plans for a new full-scale invasion of Gaza designed to inflict even more pain and suffering for no logical reasons other than the acceleration of ethnic cleansing and furthering the genocide.
No matter how many lies are told, genocide cannot be koshered in the name of support for Israel. Synagogues and their national organizations must loudly condemn crimes against humanity and demand the United States halt arms shipments to Israel.
Even Eyal Zamir the current Israel Defense Forces chief of staff thinks the plan to continue and expand the war is disastrous. But he is powerless as long as Trump supports Netanyahu and Congress continues to approve the sale of 1,000-pound bombs and other weapons used in the commission of war crimes.
In order to reset the record, major Jewish and other religious organizations should take out full-page ads in newspapers around the country calling for an immediate cease-fire to enable the United Nations and others to bring in unlimited food, water, medical supplies, and other essentials. In return, the surviving hostages and thousands of Palestinians unlawfully held in Israeli prisons must be released without delay.
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When the Starved Become the Starvers: A Jewish Voice on Gaza
The images from Gaza haunt me not despite my Jewish identity, but because of it—because I recognize in Palestinian faces the same hollow desperation my grandparents described in the faces of their neighbors.
Jun 11, 2025
The photographs are unbearable. Hollow-eyed children staring into cameras, their faces etched with a hunger that reaches beyond the physical. Families huddled in makeshift shelters, their possessions reduced to what they could carry. These images from Gaza pierce through my screen and lodge themselves in a place where other images have lived for decades—the inherited memories of my grandparents' stories, passed down like sacred wounds.
All four of my grandparents fled the Nazi machinery of death. They carried with them fragments of lives destroyed: a photograph here, a recipe there, stories that began with abundance and ended with ash. They spoke of hunger as a weapon, of siege as strategy, of how systematically cutting off food, medicine, and hope could break a people's spirit before breaking their bodies.
I grew up believing that "Never Again" meant exactly that—never again would any people, anywhere, face the deliberate infliction of starvation and suffering. I believed that we, as Jews, would be the first to recognize the early warning signs, the first to cry out when others faced the machinery of dehumanization.
Today, I am ashamed.
"Never Again" loses all meaning if it only applies to Jewish suffering.
Not ashamed to be Jewish—that identity remains precious to me, woven as it is with traditions of justice, compassion, and repair of the world. But ashamed that a state claiming to represent Jewish values has chosen hunger as a weapon of war. Ashamed that siege has become a strategy. Ashamed that the descendants of those who cried out, "Let my people go" have become deaf to similar cries in Arabic.
This is not what my grandparents envisioned when they dreamed of a Jewish homeland. They dreamed of safety, yes, but not safety built on others' suffering. They dreamed of dignity, but not dignity that required stripping it from their neighbors. They imagined a place where Jewish children could grow up free from fear, but they never imagined that freedom would come at the cost of Palestinian children growing up with empty stomachs.
The Israel my grandparents hoped for was meant to be a light unto the nations—a place where the lessons of Jewish suffering would translate into Jewish compassion. Instead, we see policies that mirror the very tactics once used against us. We see justifications that echo the language of those who once justified our persecution. We see the slow strangulation of a people that feels horrifyingly familiar to anyone who has studied the ghettos of Warsaw or the camps of Europe.
I know the counterarguments. I know about security concerns, about terrorism, about the complexity of this conflict. I know that Israelis have suffered, that Jewish children have died, that fear runs deep on all sides. But none of this justifies using starvation as a weapon. None of this justifies trapping 2 million people in what amounts to an open-air prison. None of this honors the memory of those who died precisely because the world stood by while their humanity was systematically denied.
The Jewish concept of tikkun olam—repairing the world—demands that we speak truth even when it's uncomfortable, especially when it's uncomfortable. It demands that we hold our own people accountable to the highest moral standards, not because we hate them, but because we love them too much to watch them betray their own values.
Being Jewish taught me that moral authority comes not from power, but from how that power is used. It taught me that we have a special obligation to protect the vulnerable precisely because we were once vulnerable ourselves. It taught me that "Never Again" loses all meaning if it only applies to Jewish suffering.
The images from Gaza haunt me not despite my Jewish identity, but because of it. They haunt me because I recognize in Palestinian faces the same hollow desperation my grandparents described in the faces of their neighbors. They haunt me because I see in Israeli policies the same cold calculation that once sought to break Jewish spirits through systematic deprivation.
This is not Jewish. This is not what our ancestors dreamed when they prayed, "Next year in Jerusalem." This is not what it means to be a people chosen for the hard work of justice.
We can do better. We must do better. The children of Gaza deserve better. The memory of those who perished in the Holocaust demands better. The future of Judaism itself depends on better.
The photographs will keep coming. The question is whether we will keep our eyes open long enough to see ourselves reflected in them, and whether we will have the courage to look away from the mirror and toward the work of repair.
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