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holocaust
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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Repressive Governments Never Let an Assassination Go to Waste
The murder of two Israeli embassy employees in Washington, D.C. has all the elements to enable increased persecution of U.S. citizens and residents who advocate for the safety and rights of Palestinians.
May 24, 2025
On November 7, 1938, Polish Jew Herschel Feibel Grynszpan shot diplomat Ernst vom Rath in the German embassy in Paris.
Grynszpan’s family had been made stateless by German and Polish governments, and were stranded in miserable conditions along with thousands of Jewish refugees at the Polish-German border.
The shooting of vom Rath provided the trigger for the Nazi pogrom across Germany of Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass”—attacks of Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues. This date is thought to mark the progression from German persecution of Jews to the beginning of the Holocaust.
The poisonous identification of Jewish identity with the Jewish supremacist state of Israel—with its knee on the neck of Palestinians—to proclaim Judaism cognate with murderous nationalism—has its victims.
Today’s moment, the murder of two Israeli embassy employees in Washington, D.C. at an event sponsored by the American Jewish Committee (AJC), has all the elements to enable increased persecution of U.S. citizens and residents who advocate for the safety and rights of 2 millions residents of Gaza, and the rest of occupied Palestine.
Just as with Grynszpan’s crime, the effect of this killer’s decision will be out of his hands, and the cause of his desperation will only matter to those who already care.
The wretched, amoral lunatics who have command of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) will have a clear field to “investigate” the curriculum of universities that host Palestinian studies, and criminalize the slogans “Free Palestine” and “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free.”
We can count on crimes being committed by Pam Bondi (DOJ) and Kash Patel (FBI) in exploitation of this moment. The crocodile tears of this Proud Boy-aligned Christian nationalist government as they express solidarity with Jews against “antisemitism” will challenge our gag reflex.
The conflation of protesters for Palestine with “terrorists,” already in full force by the Departments of State and Education with expulsion of international students who have spoken out and organized, will be untrammeled by due process. Or due process will be twisted with the power of a state unbound by ethics in their determination to “make an example.”
The day following the Washington shooting, the AJC’s Ted Deutch was on MSNBC’s afternoon “Dateline White House” program, instructing that permitting campus demonstrations for Gazans’ right to live allows us to “tolerate hatred and antisemitism that leads to this violence.” Deutch made the rounds of Fox and CNN also.
In his morning MSNBC program appearance, he said, efforts must “double down” to insure that “what we saw last night never happens again and that words of antisemites, incitement that we’ve seen at too many places around the world, be treated as it is, that this could be the deadly result if we don’t act.”
The AJC, once fully cognizant of the dangers of turning the heterogenous Jewish people spread across the world in to a nationality, made sure in the aftermath of these pointless deaths that suppressing “delegitimization” of Israel was the focus, not Jewish rights to safety in their countries.
Since October 7, 2023, the world has watched the methodical torture of 2 million people in Gaza by the Israel Defense Forces, month after month of civilian displacement; destruction; hunger; disease; and killing by bomb, artillery, drone, and bullet. U.S. Air Force member Aaron Bushnell, in February 2024, immolated himself in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington to protest America’s assistance in the misery. In December 2023 and September 2024 fatal self-immolations were enacted in front of Israel’s consulates in Atlanta and Boston.
The world watching—protesting, agonizing in helplessness—the horror of premeditated and systematic destruction of the people of Gaza has the obvious hazard of endangering Jews. A gossamer sense of object permanence is exhibited when Zionist advocacy at one moment proclaims Israel the state of the Jewish people, and the next decries hostility to Israel a symptom of some mysterious eternal human disease of antisemitism.
It is certain that the Washington killings will be used to maximize the sense of dread and siege in Jewish spaces, shaped to legitimize the Zionist stance that Israel is rational and her opponents crazed, irrational, bloodthirsty.
After the 9/11/2001 attacks, journalist James Bennett contacted Benjamin Netanyahu, then out of office.
That evening, I tracked down Benjamin Netanyahu, the once-and-future Israeli prime minister, to ask what the attack meant for U.S.-Israeli relations. “It’s very good,” he replied, with startling enthusiasm. Then he caught himself. “Well, it’s not very good, but it’s going to generate immediate sympathy.”
The poisonous identification of Jewish identity with the Jewish supremacist state of Israel—with its knee on the neck of Palestinians—to proclaim Judaism cognate with murderous nationalism—has its victims. Today, Zionist partisans in the United States of America, in and out of government, have their “bloody shirt.” Mazel tov!
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February Strike of 1941: When Citizens Took to the Streets Against the Nazis
Remembering how Amsterdam's working class stood up against Adolf Hitler's extermination of the Jews.
Feb 15, 2025
In three days, Amsterdam organized the only general strike in Europe to protest the first roundup of Jews. People poured into the streets on February 25, 1941—an estimated 300,000 of the 800,000 total who lived in the city.
The first to march were the tram and dock workers. The civil servants followed and word spread through the whole city, even to the small sewing workshop where a woman named Mientje Meijer worked. She and her husband had talked about it, and he came to the window to let her know it was really happening. She stopped her treadle, rose to her feet, and said, “Ladies, all of Amsterdam has come to a standstill because they’ve been rounding up Jews and taking them away. We’ve got to join in.”
The ladies poured out, even the boss, and joined the multitudes: teachers, metal workers, factory employees, shop clerks, people from across the political spectrum. Some were furious that their fellow citizens’ rights had been violated, some wanted to protest the Nazi occupation, and some just hated the Germans. Whatever their motives, they stopped the city in its tracks.
How did they organize so fast? A road builder and a street sweeper who belonged to the banned but well-organized Communist Party decided to call a meeting and take action. They had heard that hundreds of Jewish men had been rounded up on the square between the immense Portuguese Synagogue and the four smaller Ashkenazi ones. The communists gathered with trade union representatives and others at the Noorderkerk in the workers’ part of the city. They enlisted political and moral allies. Soon, a mimeographed leaflet urged everyone to “Strike! Strike! Strike! Shut down all of Amsterdam for a day!” And they did. The Strike even reached a few other cities before the German occupiers reacted with force.
Only limited public protest was heard the year before, at the time when Jews were fired from the civil service, including professors from the universities. Therefore, the Germans were dumbfounded in February 1941 when the Dutch, their Aryan brothers and sisters, took to the streets en masse. But the Nazis recovered fast and ordered the use of rifles and hand grenades to stop the strike.
By the time it was over a few days later, about 200 people had been arrested, nine had been killed, and 50 injured. For the rest of the war, the February Strike remained the only general strike in Europe to protest the roundups. Tragically, it was futile: about 75% of the Dutch Jewish population was mass murdered. Yet the strike remains in our memories as one of the few times ordinary people stood together against the deportation of their Jewish neighbors. It meant something to many Dutch survivors as long as they lived.
I learned about the Strike at the time of its 60th commemoration in 2001. Every year, people gather to remember, right where the first roundups took place. They stand around the statue of the Dockworker who is the symbolic figure of the Strike. Sculpted by a resistance worker who survived, the hefty figure wears a worker’s cap, looking not at us but beyond us, his hands at his sides, open but ready to form fists.
In 2001, the square was crammed with people, some old enough to have been alive at the time, others young families, others men of all ages with yarmulkes, and individuals formally dressed in black who proved to be diplomats. Everyone was quiet, even little children. The commemoration began with a few short speeches and a poem, but the main event was this: people were invited, a few at a time, to approach the Dockworker, stand for a moment, and lay flowers.
The elders approached first, those who might have been present at the Strike. Next the Jewish organizations placed their big wreaths, often laid by children. Similar offerings came from the European Trade Union Federation, from the people of Sweden and the United States, and others. But the vast majority of the flowers were small bouquets tied with ribbons, like a dozen red tulips bound by aluminum foil with a bit of wet paper inside. Some were accompanied by a personal note written in ink in a scrawly hand.
It took an hour and a half on that frigid afternoon to lay all the flowers, and they stayed there unmolested for days. The flowers remained until they were all dead and had to be carried away.
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