The Palestine thread

[Rossfan]

Opposing Zionism??

[tbrick18]

heard this mentioned on the wireless this morning so looked it up - Israel are in the process of approving a death penalty bill for terrorists.
No presidential pardons allowed, don't need a unanimous decision, sentence to be carried out within 90 days - removing any chance of appeal I assume.

Googled it and found this.

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/424519

Reading that article it's obviously directed at Palestinians only.

The depravity of this Israeli/US regime is constantly hitting new levels.
How does this all end? Wiping out the Palestinian people? The US effectively taking control of all the middle-east countries and their oil? Or is the US the Israeli proxy in all this?
There's a real sense of hopelessness about all of this.

[seafoid]

There are 2 processes happening at the same time

1. Israel is becoming more fascist. 93 % of Israeli Jwws support the war.
80% supported the genocide

2. People in the West are starting to turn away. 70% of Democrats and 50% of republicans under 50 hate Israel.

[johnnycool]

There are 2 processes happening at the same time

1. Israel is becoming more fascist. 93 % of Israeli Jwws support the war.
80% supported the genocide

2. People in the West are starting to turn away. 70% of Democrats and 50% of republicans under 50 hate Israel.

Problem is that you've the Zionist money in APAIC buying up all the US politicians irrespective of which side of the house and that is coupled with the Christian fundamentalists like Rubio who are supporters of the Zionist project anyway.

So if you're an under 50 in the US or elsewhere for that matter you've no choice when it comes to voting.

[seafoid]

Mol an óige agus tiocfaidh sí

America First, f**k the Jews, Christ is King https://x.com/MakingSenseHQ/status/2032604712906936514...

 f**k AIPAC, working class, nobody left behind
 https://x.com/AishaforMI/status/2032142315871928497...

Fishback f**k AIPAC
https://x.com/j_fishback/status/2033643694125961236

[DaleCooper]

"Steve Reed MP is today presenting a Bill on Foreign Interference in UK Politics without declaring he is a member of Labour Friends of Israel and has previously accepted donations from this Israeli lobby group"


Meanwhile these spiteful hateful fks have a new play out on Broadway impugning the legendary figure of Roald Dahl, who had temerity to criticise Israels behaviour in Lebanon.

[seafoid]

https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/2026-03-26/ty-article-magazine/.highlight/a-critical-mass-of-u-s-jews-is-now-disgusted-with-israel/0000019d-2b4e-d868-a1bd-7bef4dcd0000Arielle Angel has a recurring nightmare. She is on a plane when she suddenly discovers that the destination is Israel. Panic sets in. Dilemmas flood her mind: Whom will she call when she lands? And whom will she even tell she's there? Sometimes the dream ends with the plane touching down in the Holy Land. Other times, she wakes only after arriving and meeting her Israeli relatives.

Angel, 41, editor-in-chief of the American magazine Jewish Currents, has been to Israel quite a few times. She grew up in a "very Zionist" home in Miami, in one of the most conservative U.S. Jewish communities, and came of age within the old Jewish-American consensus where "Judaism" and "Zionism" were synonymous – two solid pillars of an almost self-evident identity. The Israeli flag at school, the March of the Living in Poland, Jewish summer camp, extended visits to Israel. In her youth, when Angel referred to things Israel did, she spoke in the first person: "We did."

But she has moved on from there and has no intention of returning, even for a visit.

Today, Angel defines herself as anti-Zionist, like a large proportion of her colleagues at Jewish Currents, a left-wing marker in Jewish-American journalism. Since her appointment as editor in 2018, amid an effort to revive the dormant magazine, it has evolved into much more than a collection of articles and essays on culture and politics. For many of the 10,000 subscribers of the quarterly print edition (and some 2.5 million annual visitors to its digital version), it represents a community center and a critical space for discussion on a left-wing Jewish-American identity that is trying to reinvent itself.

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"I think that we are in a kind of epochal shift in the meaning of Judaism, perhaps one that we haven't seen since the destruction of the Temple," Angel now says in an interview. "We have a very meaningless empty vessel, which we haven't had the chance to fill up yet."

The emptiness is also connected, of course, to Israel – whose significance in the eyes of a growing group of U.S. Jews has gradually changed in recent years. Since October 7, it has been rolling down a steep slope. Jewish Currents, under Angel's leadership, has strayed far in its alienation from Zion. On the magazine's podcast, for example, one can hear a conversation about the anti-Zionist vision, in which the editors discuss the degree of cultural autonomy the Jewish community would enjoy in a future state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. But the deeper the alienation, the deeper the fixation. Israel continues to fill the publication's pages, like an unwanted destination surfacing in a nightmare.

It is not easy to characterize the readership of Jewish Currents, and surveys conducted by its staff raised more questions than answers. "I assumed, for example, that they would be more millennials and zoomers. But actually, there were quite a lot of boomers in the readership," says Angel, who tries to outline their identity: "There is a critical mass at this point in the United States that is starting to be – let's be frank about it – disgusted with Israel, and whose attachment to Israel is waning, if not evaporated."

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Angel describes a readership whose positions in the surveys, in her opinion, align with an anti-Zionist identity: for example, the belief that Israel is an apartheid state (about a quarter of U.S. Jews), that it is committing genocide (22 percent in 2022 and 30 percent in 2024 – or 38 percent among those under 44), or support for a single state for all its citizens between the river and the sea (about a fifth of the respondents).

"The numbers are high, and these people don't have anywhere to go," Angel says. "There's no institutional base for this growing population. As people are becoming disillusioned with Judaism that had Israel and Zionism at its center ... they're pushing it aside. But for others, there's a real sense of, well, now I actually have to engage with what Judaism is like. You have, at least among a segment of those people, some kind of recommitment to at least the question of what Judaism is going to mean. And I think that our readers represent that group of people."

Do you see Jewish Currents as a place for this exploration?

"It's a hard question because the need right now is so large and what we do is so specific. We're a magazine, and we do long form, slow thought development. If we started a school, it would be full. The Jewish left has activist organizations, but it doesn't have enough institutions for life-cycle stuff. People want a lot from us. The need is so great."

In a Jewish Currents article, Angel asks: "Might this catastrophic failure of Zionist Judaism mark an opening for anti-Zionist Jews, a moment for us to step into greater influence, make our case for something new?"

Photos: Jewish Currents

Angel addressed this very point in an article last summer titled "We Need New Jewish Institutions." "The Gaza genocide has made plain what many leftist Jews have long feared: that virtually the entire enterprise of Judaism – and nearly every organization charged with stewarding it – is infected with a voracious rot," she wrote. "Over the past 20 months, there is no sacred Jewish ritual that has not been performed by Israeli soldiers in Gaza, in the ruins of someone's home or school, right before or after a slaughter. In the U.S., Jewish day schools bus children to war rallies, and concerned parents identify campus activists for deportation ...

"Amid a torrent of images of children under rubble and desperate families gunned down while waiting for flour, Jewish leaders insist that we are the primary victims ... Might this catastrophic failure of Zionist Judaism mark an opening for anti-Zionist Jews, a moment for us to step into greater influence, make our case for something new?"

The article calls on leftists to abandon the position of outsiders, morally pure but lacking influence, to establish new institutions, take over old ones – and create a cultural and political home for the "wandering leftist Jew." Like many articles in the magazine, it refers to insights gathered from readers in an open survey, thus functioning as a kind of ongoing community symposium. In this case, these were stories of exclusion from Jewish institutions due to opposition to Zionism. "I feel ostracized and rejected by a community I've depended on for most of my life," one reader wrote to the magazine. "It meant so much to me to sit in the synagogue where my grandmother sat," another wrote. "There is a spiritual void in my life."

This is precisely the audience Angel targets. "If we hope to weaken Zionism within Jewish communities, we will need to develop a substantial vision for contemporary Judaism; we will need to meet those who want an exit from the rot with something beautiful and real," she wrote. "We cannot ask them to jump and decline to catch them."

What is the positive content of this emerging identity? Some have argued that the Jewish left that opposes Zionism is so busy criticizing Israel, that Israel remains the anchor of its identity. What else is in there?

"It's such a strange argument, that Israel is still at the center of our Jewishness, just in photonegative. Zionist Jews in America don't have anything to their Judaism except for Zionism. Zionism itself is the thing that emptied Judaism of meaning. Not on its own – obviously there's a whole sweep of history there ... Frankly, it's the same for most non-practicing Israelis, so I don't want to exceptionalize this as a problem of the American Jewish left."

Right, but you aspire to do it differently.

"Of course. There are few things that we know. For example, that people want a justice-centered Judaism, and people are actually returning to Jewish text in search of this moral tradition. But I think one of the most fundamental questions is about the approach to safety. I just talked to three activists in Minneapolis during the ICE occupation. Two of them were Jewish activists. They're setting up community checkpoints outside of neighborhoods to make sure that ICE vehicles can't get in, taking people to safe houses, all kinds of really crazy things that you didn't think were going to happen in the United States.

"There is a real orientation on the Jewish left to think about safety in community – and not just in Jewish community – about what it means to have real relationships of solidarity with our neighbors, out of a shared purpose and an understanding that we're here and we're putting down roots in the place where we live. You can call it Doikayt [the diasporic idea calling for building Jewish life "here" – do, in Yiddish – where Jews already lived, rather than migrating "there," as Zionism urged.] The historian Prof. Devin Naar, from the Sephardic side, calls it multi-rootedness after the French philosopher Edgar Morin."

Zionist Jews in America don't have anything to their Judaism except for Zionism. Zionism has emptied Judaism of meaning. It's the same for most non-practicing Israelis, so I don't want to exceptionalize this as a problem of the American Jewish left.

Arielle Angel

What remains from your spiritual and cultural life as a Jew if you turn to your local community, neighbors and non-Jewish causes?

"Everything. Think about what it means to have a Yom Kippur service while your Muslim neighbors are outside doing community defense for you. Imagine doing the same for them as a community. That's a different view of the world. There's a possibility to leave the doors of the tent open, but still maintain the connection to history, to culture, to ritual, to spiritual life. To recognize that we live in a community and the community is not just us, without losing who we are."

In her article, Angel quoted from an inspiring lecture by Rabbi Benay Lappe, a teacher of Talmud who heads Svara, a queer yeshiva in Chicago. At the heart of every culture or religion lies a foundational story, Lappe says, through which they answer the greatest questions of meaning. However, every story is destined to collapse, and this collapse presents believers with three options. Lappe illustrates these through the historical outcomes of the destruction of the Temple. The first option is to entrench oneself in the old story, as the priests, those with vested interests, did; the second option is to choose a different story, as 90 percent of the Jewish people did, disappearing into the Roman Empire. According to Lappe, these two options assume that stories are rigid frameworks: One can stick to them – or replace them with others.

The third option was chosen by "a small group of queer, fringe-y, radical outsider hippie guys," Lappe says in her lecture. They accepted the collapse, salvaged what still worked from tradition, and concocted a new tradition that a Jew from the Temple era would not recognize. Their meeting places (synagogues), their authority structure (rabbis) and the books they wrote (the Talmud) became the core of an entirely new foundational story. "We are at the tail end of a crash and the option three future is going to be unrecognizable to most of us," Lappe concludes. "But it will be created, just like before, by the queer, outsider, disenfranchised of today."

Angel identifies the current period as an interim era, like those centuries between the destruction of the Temple and the establishment of Rabbinic Judaism. It is an experimental, creative, chaotic time. But why not choose the second, easier option – to disappear into secular American culture?

Angel says she sees Jews daily denying their Judaism out of shame over the behavior of their communities during the Gaza war: "For some of them, that may work. Great. But for many others who are looking for some kind of spiritual and communal life, who are looking for ritual, for grounding – that's not going to be an option. And it doesn't make sense to try to repress that, because whatever is repressed will return with a vengeance."

In nightmares, for example.

"Yes. I see my Jewishness as a fact. It doesn't feel optional. And so within that, what does it mean? And how do I actually make something real from it?"

What will the new foundational story look like?

"It's not for me to say what that is, because the point is that that has to be communally created. But starting from a place of understanding ourselves differently, not as a community opposed to the rest of the world, but as a community within the rest of the world – this starting point would change a lot of things. It would change our liturgy in places. It would change the way that we educate ourselves; our education would focus on or include different events in Jewish history. It wouldn't just be Holocaust and Arab exiles. It would be the hundreds of years under Ottoman rule when many of our ancestors lived in harmony with their neighbors. It wouldn't include a desire to inculcate us with reenactments of trauma.

"Last night I was telling a table full of people about all the reenactments that I've done as a Jewish kid, like being on the Exodus [Holocaust refugee ship], being the Judenrat, being kidnapped by Arab soldiers. We would create a different relationship to the past ... fear would not be the central mode of Jewish experience."

The search, Angel emphasizes, has already begun. People who have abandoned their old communities are meeting in study groups, independent minyanim (non-denominational prayer communities) and living room gatherings. "This is a moment of understanding our principles," she says. "That's the work that we have to do."

Nothing in Angel's background, or that of the magazine she edits, would prepare you for where they stand today. Her father's family members were Ladino-speaking Holocaust survivors from Thessaloniki. Her grandmother survived 20 months in Auschwitz. She used to recall how, as the Russians approached, Josef Mengele asked her for prisoners' clothes. She "played dumb" and said there were only women's clothes – and this refusal was a source of great pride for her. Angel grew up in a very Zionist home, in the shadow of her family's suppressed Holocaust story; in her childhood, she daydreamed about killing Nazis and suffered from night terrors.

[seafoid]

Part 2

In the early 2000s, she moved to New York to study art. She traces the start of her politicization to the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011. The Yom Kippur prayer held in Zuccotti Park, the focal point of the protests, was one of the most significant Jewish experiences of her life. She traces her radicalization to the 2014 Gaza war.

"I was paying close attention to the chain of events, and the story I'd been told – the IDF as the most moral army in the world, and how Israeli society relates to that kind of militarization – just didn't hold anymore, with that scale of civilian casualties," she said in an interview with New Left Review. "I remember seeing an article in the Times about Israeli citizens carrying a couch up to a hilltop overlooking Gaza, to cheer as the bombs fell. And the famous image of the little boys on the beach, essentially decapitated, exploded. And I just broke. I mean, it fell all at once. I spent weeks just weeping by myself. It was a hugely destabilizing event."

A protest organized by Jewish Voice For Peace against the war in Gaza, in Washington, D.C., July 2024. Credit: Tierney L. Cross/Getty Images/AFP

Meanwhile, she wrote her first novel, inspired by childhood friends who were psychedelia enthusiasts and became Chabad Hasidim. Publishers rejected the manuscript, and Angel, who had invested six years in it, parted ways with it in a brilliant article published in Guernica magazine in 2017. Around the same time, Jacob Plitman, then the new publisher of Jewish Currents, was looking for partners to revive the magazine. "Anybody writing 12,000 words on psychedelia, messianism, loss of faith, writing a novel and dreaming of a Judaism that reflects our values is of interest to Jewish Currents," he told The New York Times in 2022.

The magazine itself was founded in 1946 by members of the American Communist Party and began to decline with the disillusionment with Stalinism in the 1950s. When the publication ultimately broke with the party, its management had to contend with the fact that "the bedrock of American Jewish politics was an immoral regime," current publisher Daniel May told The New Yorker. Information about the purges and the martyrs of 1952 – 13 Jewish intellectuals executed by Stalin's order – shattered the world of the then-editor. When he published a report on this in the magazine, it lost three-quarters of its subscribers.

A wave of appointments in 2018, which included Angel's designation as editor, marked a generational shift. Angel was then 33; Plitman, who appointed her, was 27. In its new incarnation, Jewish Currents combines cultural criticism, politics, investigative reports and essays, and perhaps a bigger nod to religious tradition than the founding generation of communists would have accepted. The "Chevruta" column pairs an activist and a rabbi for a conversation on a left-wing dilemma rooted in Jewish texts; in-depth articles based on group discussions are called "responsa," named after the genre of questions and answers in rabbinic literature; and there is also a weekly Torah portion piece. The socialist dating column "Red Yenta," however, is strictly secular.

For the past eight years, Angel has been the editor-in-chief and "animating spirit of the enterprise," in the words of The New Yorker. In the coming weeks, she will conclude her tenure.

There's a tension between the repulsion from Israel that's expressed in many Jewish Currents texts, and the sheer volume of space devoted to it.

"Yeah. The intention was not to have most of the magazine be about Israel-Palestine. But it's very hard to look away during an active genocide. This [issue] has to do with everything in Jewish life in the United States. With the way that Trump has used the pretext of antisemitism to dismantle higher education, to defund schools ... And this is one example. To me, it's a huge problem that we've slowed doing certain kinds of cultural coverage, but it's more because of the way that the national conversation looks, frankly."

Israelis think that it's more dangerous to be an American Jew on a college campus than it is to be an Israeli, when Israelis are being stabbed at bus stops. It's unsafe right now to be an Israeli because they are keeping people in oppressive, desperate conditions.

Arielle Angel

Angel compares the discourse on "saving" the Iranian people from their regime, prevalent during the current war, to American promises at the turn of the millennium to "liberate" Iraq.

"It's not like the Israeli government is working with resistance movements on the ground," she says. " They just made the entire sky rain oil, in a way that's going to make everybody who lives in Tehran and beyond sick for the rest of their lives. And they also targeted the infrastructure that [all Iranians rely on]. That isn't helping anyone. That isn't liberation."

Angel also doesn't accept the Israeli-American narrative regarding the circumstances of going to war. "Iran was complying with Obama's nuclear deal and even continued to comply with it after the U.S. pulled out," she says. "It's a murderous regime of its own people. But they were acting rationally as it relates to the West. And to Israel. They were not escalating. Israel decided to escalate."

More fundamentally, she adds, "The whole militarized way of life in Israel is justified by the fear of Iran. But it didn't use to be Iran. It used to be Iraq. And now it's moving to Turkey."

There's a piece by Palestinian philosopher and author Abdaljawad Omar that you recommended in your Shabbat Reading List newsletter, which argues that the pro-Israeli narrative in America exhausted itself. Do you agree with that?

"I don't know. Look, even people who aren't particularly political have felt the wrath of Jewish donors. People with completely normal jobs who wore watermelon [pins] and thought they were expressing solidarity with Palestinian children, and their boss' boss' boss fired them. They see how Larry Ellison is buying CBS and TikTok to turn them into pro-Israel news sources. The right wing has turned this into a conspiracy theory, but everyone is pissed off.

"There are polls among young people on the right and the left that show a huge drop in support for Israel. And people don't want to live in a world where what they think and can say about this issue is limited by power. [New York Mayor Zohran] Mamdani is running on the cost of living, on people's ability to live their lives, and suddenly the whole city has to vote on our feelings toward Israel? It's crazy, and people are fed up with it. The backlash is real."

Aftermath of the car-ramming attack on a Michigan synagogue, this month. "Israel's actions are endangering world Jewry." Credit: Paul Sancya/AP

This backlash also includes the rise in antisemitism, which frightens Angel greatly. "I see the rise in antisemitism everywhere, but I also think it's very difficult to fight. Because apart from conspiracy theories, mostly on the right but not only, a lot of people are angry at Jews because of what they actually do. In the U.S., you have enormous amounts of power being expended by Jews to dox students, and fire people across industries – to really ruin the lives of people who speak out for Palestine. You have AIPAC, which has long dumped money into campaigns against progressives who are touting popular economic policies, to keep the money flowing to Israel ... You have the Anti-Defamation League calling for the National Guard to come onto campuses to crack down on unarmed students expressing their constitutional rights, while giving Elon Musk a pass for making a clear Nazi salute at a presidential inauguration.

"So people are mad. And they may take it out on anyone wearing a kippah, which is terrible. Israel's actions – and support for them among the global Jewish institutions – are endangering world Jewry."

Angel believes that the war in Iran has only exacerbated this trend. "I'm more hopeless right now since the war started than I've ever been," she says. The war is unpopular among the American public, and the idea is spreading, in essence, that all of this is because of the Jews, she suggests.

"It has gone from subtext to text since the beginning of the war," she notes. "But how can you blame people [for thinking this way]? Netanyahu has been the one who has wanted this war. The American government is telling us that they [Israel] pushed the United States into war, that they said they were going to move forward with or without us. They had to comply. You have Bibi saying things like, 'I know how to deal with the Americans. They're the easiest things to deal with.' And it's seeping into the left. It's everywhere: ideas about Jewish control, Jewish influence. Ideas that go back to Charles Lindbergh, about how Jews have caused every U.S. war going back to World War I.

"And now," Angel continues, "people are driving cars into synagogues. And of course, these synagogues have Israeli flags outside and Israeli flags in their logo and a whole website full of hasbara [pro-Israel publicity]. I don't think that the Michigan synagogue is responsible for the genocide. In 'The Origins of Totalitarianism,' Hannah Arendt says that it's not enough just to say that 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion' is a forgery. You have to examine why the forgery in this moment is taking hold."

Do you see the fight against antisemitism as part of your work at Jewish Currents?

"We need to make a change in this regard, because until now we have been dealing with refuting false accusations of antisemitism. That is still part of the issue, because we still live in an environment where expressing very basic truths about Palestine is considered antisemitism. But now we also have to deal with real antisemitism that bubbles up with the genocide. By the way, when I say it is bubbling, I don't mean that it has always been hidden there and people are just looking for an excuse to express it. It is rising because people feel that their lives and politics are currently limited by Jewish power, and because of the way Jewish institutions in America insist on identifying Israel with Judaism. Right now, Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove or [ADL chairman] Jonathan Greenblatt are analyzing reality in the same way as [neo-Nazi influencer] Nick Fuentes, [asserting] that there is no difference between Israel and Jews. They are saying almost the same thing. That's a problem. It's a crisis."

What do you think about the pro-Palestine activists on college campuses? How do you evaluate this movement in terms of its depth and its ability to understand the issues it protests against?

"It's worth saying something about the way that Israeli media covers these protests and also covers American campus life. The fact that there is no real coverage of what is happening on the ground in Gaza, but you're covering congressional hearings of ridiculous show trials of American campus presidents, is a disgrace. The fact that every Israeli knows the name of [former Harvard president] Claudine Gay, and not Hind Rajab [a 6-year-old girl killed by the Israeli army in Gaza], is absurd.

"[Similarly,] what Israelis are seeing is such a fraction and also such a selective distortion of the entirety of these movements. In terms of what the kids know and what they don't know: They're college students. Some of them are teenagers. And if you think back to Vietnam, you had students who were against the war, which was the correct position, who were also marching with flags of the Viet Cong. You're seeing the same thing on college campuses now. For the most part, you're seeing kids who are against the genocide, against apartheid, who know what's going on. I met students who didn't know much and saw the images coming through their phone and then started to educate themselves ... The fact that they know more about what's happening in Gaza than most Israelis should scare most Israelis. And instead they look at these kids and they demonize them."

A pro-Palestinian protest at Columbia University, October 2023. Student protestors "know more about what's happening in Gaza than most Israelis," Angel says. Credit: Yuki Iwamura / AP

It can be argued that it's a uniquely problematic case for international solidarity. When you call for the abolition of the Jewish state as such, or for the Palestinian right of return, even if you think it's a just cause, you take a risk on Israel's behalf without having skin in the game. This intervention has no consequences for the activists, but grave consequences for Israel.

"First of all, we all have skin in the game. Israel has changed the status of Jews worldwide. We face more violence because of Israel's claiming of us as agents of them. I'm not saying that it's the same exact thing, but I'm just challenging the idea that we have no skin in the game. When foreign governments are giving condolences to Netanyahu for Jews killed in Sydney, that endangers us. Second of all, that's like asking, during the Holocaust, what do you care about these people?"

I regret not taking a moment right after Oct. 7 to say something about Israeli pain, for not putting forth a better model for ethical mourning without assertion of revenge and supremacy, without diluting the context.

Arielle Angel

I'm not saying, don't express your solidarity with Palestinians, or don't protest against genocide. I'm talking about support for a political plan that endangers the people who live here.

"But how do you know that it endangers the people? Why is there not a sense that the thing that endangers people is the occupation itself? You cannot keep people enslaved and expect them not to revolt. October 7 itself is a function of that. Israelis think that it's more dangerous to be an American Jew on a college campus than it is to be an Israeli, when Israelis are being stabbed at bus stops. It's unsafe right now to be an Israeli because they are keeping people in oppressive, desperate conditions."

Many Israelis would say that if you were here and supported an alternative to that political situation, fine. But you're there.

"But here's the problem. They don't support an alternative to the situation right now. There's nothing in the political landscape [that even suggests such a direction]. There is no indication that Israelis are capable at this point of transforming their society from within. And the answer cannot be that they are allowed to commit apartheid and genocide. It's not an acceptable answer. It's almost not even a question of solidarity. It's just a question of basic common sense."

"On October 7th, my own feelings fluctuated wildly," Angel wrote in a Jewish Currents article published on October 12, 2023. She felt dread at the statements in Israel that heralded Gaza's fate. She repeatedly watched the bulldozer destroying the Israeli border fence "with tears of hope," and the Palestinian youths joyfully running in areas they had never known.

"But these images were quickly joined by others," she wrote. "The image of a woman's body, mostly naked and bent unnaturally in the back of a truck; rooms full of families lying in piles, the walls spattered in blood. I wanted desperately to keep these images separate – to hold close the liberatory metaphor and banish the violent reality. By the time I began to accept that these were pictures of the same event, I was distraught, and contending with a rising alienation from those who did not seem to share my grief, especially as the scope of the massacre came into view."

Apart from basic updates, Angel's article was the first the magazine published after the massacre. Despite its proximity to October 7, its gaze was directed toward Gaza.

"Most of our internal disagreements center on the correct container for our grief," she wrote. "Our staff is not unlike the rest of the Jewish world in that many of us are only a matter of degrees from someone who died or was taken hostage. How can we publicly grieve the death and suffering of Israelis without these feelings being politically metabolized against Palestinians?"

Jewish grief, she argued, feeds back into the violence of the ruthless system of oppression that rules between the river and the sea, and she doesn't want to participate in that.

A Jewish Currents summer issue launch event, July 2025. For its readers, the magazine represents a community center and a critical space for discussion on a left-wing Jewish-American identity that is trying to reinvent itself. Credit: Jewish Currents

In contrast to the disagreements regarding expressions of mourning for Israelis, there was broad agreement among the staff that the magazine would not condemn the Hamas attack. On October 13 the magazine published an article by Prof. Raz Segal, a historian from Stockton University who researches the Holocaust and genocide, titled "A Textbook Case of Genocide."

"We definitely lost readers and we definitely lost colleagues," Angel admits now. "Although I think that there's very little that we could have done to have kept them; they were changed by the moment. There was a day or two where we could have published something facing Israeli pain and it didn't happen for a number of reasons. One is that we move extremely slowly. That's how we work in general, and particularly in this moment; we didn't jump into action like news reporters. We were fighting with each other, crying, it was a whole thing that had to be managed and we were slow. By the time we actually got around to publishing something, they [Israel] had already ordered everyone to leave north Gaza, they had already cut off food, water and electricity. It was already clear what was going to happen, and it was too late, frankly, to be expressing just pain about Israelis."

Was it too late to feel pain for civilian Israeli victims because of that?

"It was too late to put something on the table that was just about that. I regret not taking a moment right after it happened to say something about Israeli pain, for not putting forth a better model for what responsible and ethical mourning would look like without its assertion of revenge and supremacy, without diluting the context. In that moment we felt like our job was to balance the concern for Israelis in the rest of the media with concern for Palestinians, especially in light of what was about to happen.

"That was a mistake. We thought of ourselves as a counterbalance without thinking through what was our unique responsibility to model an ethical relationship to the suffering of individual Israelis. And then once we did publish, having the events move beyond the moment of October 7 so quickly, and in such a direction, we never got that moment back."

Many people in Israel experienced that moment as a lack of empathy – simple empathy for affected civilians.

"Yes, but that empathy existed everywhere and was already being manipulated. There is a question of how much people can feel for others who are not themselves. Empathy is not easy. It's always selective. And I think that there is a way in which Israel has tested and eroded the empathy of the world. And that's terrifying and sad."

I'm asking about your empathy, not about the world or politics. From your writing it's clear that you don't hold back from expressing your feelings. You had a lot of empathy for Palestinians right away, and somehow when I ask you about empathy for Israeli civilians, you immediately rationalize it and put into a political context.

"What I'm telling you is that it's hard. The dehumanization of Palestinians that Israelis have enacted and inflicted has affected the way the world sees the full expression of their humanity. It's not to say that I'm dehumanizing Israelis in turn. I have close relationships with Israelis. But when you're staring day in and day out into the sun of what's happening, you understand why something like October 7 happened. You understand it completely, why it happened and how it happened, and this understanding changes the way you relate to the event. It's not to say that it changes the way you relate to human suffering. When we got the news that Hersh [Goldberg-Polin] and the five other hostages were killed, I just broke down sobbing. But the question of what it means to feel something for this Israeli collective, that's very complicated right now.

"When the Soviets came into Berlin, they raped women; the allies bombed Dresden, killing indiscriminately. There were so many German civilians who were killed in this and history seemingly does not care about those people. Most Israelis will not shed a tear for them. I'm not saying that's right. And yet, in the broadest sense, it's hard to shed tears for the Germans, to be on their side. Israelis have to face [the fact] that this is how much of the world feels about them."

In a 2021 piece, "On Loving Jews," Angel wrote that the lack of concern Jewish Currents expressed towards Israelis during the war that May had a parallel in her personal life: Only after a cease-fire was reached, did she realize that she hadn't tried to ascertain whether her older relatives in Israel stayed safe.

I kept going back to your comment about your great aunt and great uncle... It sounds very sad.

"It is really sad. They're both dead now. I didn't go to the funerals. That's painful for me. "

It's something that hurt a lot of people here after October 7, when friends abroad didn't write.

"For sure. I did write to the people in my life on that day. But it became very hard to contend with Israelis as a collective. And I don't think it's because the left is monstrous. Israelis need to do some soul searching about why that is."

Do you feel any ambivalence toward Israel?

"It's tough. I have a very close friend who lives in the Galilee and just had a baby. She said, 'I really want you to come visit me and meet the baby.' I told her I don't think I'm ever coming back. I used to spend a lot of time there. I have family on both sides. I don't think I can have a normal trip and see people. Is that painful? It's really painful. Obviously there's ambivalence. But my feeling is that there has to be a broad shift in Israeli society, and right now Israelis don't recognize this. There's so little real reckoning with what has happened, and how it has disfigured them. When I say them, I don't just mean them. I also mean us, global Jewry.

[seafoid]

This is senior hurling. Zionism is going to collapse.

[marty34]

This is senior hurling. Zionism is going to collapse.

No, it's not. Stop spoofing rubbish.
You've been posting stuff on here for a long time saying Israel is finished etc. etc. and it'll clearly untrue.

As an actual fact, since October '23, the Zionists have been embolded that they can, with the help of the US nd Europe, attack anybody in that geographical area - Palestine, Iran
and Lebanon etc.

They are actually getting worse.

[quit yo jibbajabba]

If ever there was a tl:dr

[Baile Brigín 2]

This is senior hurling. Zionism is going to collapse.

You wish. They have pushed it out and nobody who matters said boo. They have now bounced the Yanks into a war. Netanyahu leaving office might dial down the forever war strategy but nothing indicates an end to Zionism is imminent

[imtommygunn]

This is senior hurling. Zionism is going to collapse.

They do whatever they want and there is nothing you or any of the rest of us can do about it. It is anything but finished.

[johnnycool]

It's hard to know what is actually happening over there as there's some amount of BS floating about.

What we do know is that the USS Gerald Ford, the pride of the US naval fleet is in Croatia and not near Iran if there is going to be a ground force parachuted into Iran.

That was some laundry fire that would require this ship to be that far away from all this.

We also know that Iran is able to take out US aircraft sitting on Arab bases, to what extent we really won't know.

[Armagh18]

It's hard to know what is actually happening over there as there's some amount of BS floating about.

What we do know is that the USS Gerald Ford, the pride of the US naval fleet is in Croatia and not near Iran if there is going to be a ground force parachuted into Iran.

That was some laundry fire that would require this ship to be that far away from all this.

We also know that Iran is able to take out US aircraft sitting on Arab bases, to what extent we really won't know.

"Laundry fire" is strongly rumoured to have been an Iranian attack.