Israel is bombing and starving Gaza in the name of Judaism and our family members murdered in the Holocaust. Exterminating them in the name of our great-grandparents who were exterminated. Avenging their deaths by the Nazis by becoming Nazis themselves.
I was taught that being Jewish meant not just honoring our history, but also being fierce defenders against injustice and genocide inflicted on ANYONE ELSE.
I was taught to be proud of Jews like Michael Schwerner, the young man who left New York City in the 1960s to join Black Americans in the deep south protesting for their civil rights, and who ended up getting murdered alongside them.
I was taught to admire the Jews who defended the poor, who worked to build bridges with Muslims and Christians, who helped Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and who worked to protect the human rights of Latin Americans made refugees by our country's funding of death squads in their homelands that killed their family members.
I was inspired by Jews who were curious and respectful of the larger world around them and wanted to understand it and be a force for good, rather than force the world to contort and disfigure itself to accommodate their delusions.
I learned NOT to admire Jews like Netanyahu, the Jewish supremacist illegal settlers, or the so-called "liberal" Jews who abhor the corruption and ugliness of both but seem completely unbothered by the many decades of the so-called Jewish State's apartheid system, terror campaigns and slaughter of our Palestinian cousins.
Jewish people who so far have been silent or have even supported this: when will you raise your voices against it?
When will you demonstrate your humanity and your true Jewish values?
More and more Jews are publicly going on record against this genocide; when will it be your turn?
When will you stop reciting the same lazy and tired talking points of how "it's complicated", how the Palestinians voted for Hamas and therefore deserve to be bombed into oblivion, that "Hamas uses civilians as human shields" so it's impossible to avoid killing tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children, that Palestinians hate Jews and that Israel is "just defending itself", that Palestinians are sexist and homophobic and intolerant which are offenses so unforgivable that slaughtering them all is therefore justified.
When will you risk sacrificing popularity within your social circle, friendships and family acceptance to go on the record and debunk the dominant and false narrative that being a Jew means being a paranoid, Islamophobic, genocide-supporting, Jewish supremacist bigot? When will you realize that this narrative in itself foments anti-semitism?
When will you confront your own bigotry and racism, which was instilled in you from the earliest age through rancid Jewish supremacist Zionist propaganda, which was not your fault back then, but which now demands a grown-ass reckoning?
When will you stand up for the young people and students in the U.S. being kidnapped, imprisoned, deported, kicked out of their universities, denied their degrees and blackballed in the job market for speaking out against what's happening? When will you honor your Jewish values by standing up for their rights?
How do you expect the world to not hate Jews if it sees Jews as either loudly supporting or complicit in this genocide by the so-called Jewish State?
When will you stop covering for this genocide with your silence?
When will you see that you are being used, that the memory of your Holocaust dead is being prostituted, that your faith and your history is being wiped with sh*t?
When will you refuse to lend your name to legitimize this filth?
When will you say, "Keep my religion, my dead relatives, and my identity out of your F*CKING GENOCIDE?"
When will you say, "NOT IN MY NAME!"?