✨🪬✨

They explicitly said that they would still have voted for Platner, campaigned for him, supported him, and didn't care about rape, because Platner hated Israel, and that was worth it

Like just a few years ago I remember when it was a SJW canard to say "kill your rapist"

In another, Jewish men are seen engaged in the demeaning task of disposing of animal carcasses outside the city walls. Vultures crowd the foreground of the picture frame, flapping their wings and kicking up the dust, adding to the sense of filth and abasement. In a kind of topographical palimpsest that may have been a tribute to the community’s tragic past, Haybi even photographed the dry Al-Sayileh riverbed where Sana’a’s Jews lived until their expulsion in 1679 [known as the Mawza exile]. Upon their return a year later they were confined to a swampy area of the city where they constructed the Jewish ghetto."

Excerpt from Available Light: Pictures from Yemen

Shalom Shabazi, a famous Jewish poet in Yemen wrote in the 17th century about Muslim Arabs in Yemen abducting Jewish orphans:

"Thousands of orphaned souls, both boys and girls, were wrested from the arms of their parents, grandfather and grandmother, by force by the nations all the days of the many kings of Yemen."

Jewish orphaned children in Yemen were thus often quickly hidden away with other families to save them from this fate of cultural genocide.

No Jews are known to remain in Yemen today except for Levi Marhabi, who is held hostage by the Houthis since 2016. All the remainder were forced to flee or were forcefully deported. All were dispossessed.

The cultural loss of Jews of the Arab & Muslim world is immeasurable. Their disaster was never recognized, their histories denied. No refugee agency was created for them, no meetings were held on the world stage to discuss their ordeal.

The properties seized from them total around $ 250 billion USD. The land dispossessed from them totals to around 100,000 km² (about 10 million hectares) or around 4.5 times the size of the entire modern state of Israel.

@turkwriter...

No, you don't, but I guess you're one of todays (un)lucky 10,000!

- Sim Kern describes themself as “Jewish in a secular, patrilineal, fun-holidays-only kind of way”. They are a middle school teacher, YA author, and self-described “influencer” and “Booktoker.” The book is written with about the level of maturity you would expect from someone who spends all of their time either on social media or around thirteen year-olds; chapter one ends: “If we can free Palestine, we can save the world, and if we can’t free Palestine, we’re all fucked!” This is the general tone of the book.

- They vehemently deny being a self-hating Jew, and I don’t like using that phrasing, but what was very clear is that — while they might not hate themself, they do hate Judaism. “The Book of Joshua is morally repulsive to me. Many of the commandments G-d gives to Moses are morally repulsive to me. The G-d of the Torah’s genocidal plans are morally repulsive to me. And Abraham, the first Jew, is morally repulsive to me…. I’m too horrified by the foundational text of Judaism, on its face, to want to spend my precious life grappling with its hidden meanings. Not when there are so many other books to read!” I’m reminded of the Wicked child at the Seder.

- The other media that they consume seems to primarily consist of the Hunger Games, which is very inappropriately used as a framing device for Israel/Palestine for the better part of a chapter, and Star Wars, where Yahya Sinwar is inexplicably and heroically compared to Obi War Kenobi. I actually felt so embarrassed for them reading this. They want to be Katniss Everdeen so badly.

- I have this theory, that a lot of grade school teachers think they know everything, and everyone is eagerly waiting to hear their great knowledge, because their job is to talk at length in front of very small people who have everything to learn. And this isn’t inherently a bad thing; I’m very grateful for teachers everywhere. However, sometimes, in areas where they are not the authority, I think it’s necessary to take a step back and ask “do I actually know what I’m talking about and is my opinion needed?”

- “Even I, a Jew, can’t look at a Star of David without feeling sick to my stomach. I flinch at the sight of it, the same way I flinch at the Confederate Flag. I’ve packed away in the attic all our Judaica, because I can’t stand to look at it anymore. Thanks for that, Israel!…. If it would do Palestinians any good for me to renounce my Jewishness… and cease referring to myself as a Jew, I would do so in a heartbeat.” This is odd. Antizionism has become their primary self-identifier.

- When they talked about the complications they had in labor during the birth of their child, they paused and interrupted to tell us that really, they couldn’t complain, because Gazans had it worse. That’s not a normal way to process the milestones of your life on a different continent. They switch away from their Jewish doctor because they “needed a C-section and [were] too scared to go under the knife of a potential Zionist.” They see a Jewish family in kippot in their neighborhood and “couldn’t sleep that night for fear of the Jews living across the street.” I think Adam Louis Klein said that what most defined antisemitism to him was obsession, and that comes through in every line of this book; Kern acts deeply unstable and proud of upending their life over nothing.

- When they talked about getting into Harvard, they mentioned that they were probably selected due to a Jewish poem they wrote, because Harvard is controlled by Zionists (considering the writing quality, I kind of wish that were true). The online backlash to their “Palestinian advocacy,” was probably just an Israeli bot farm trying to silence brave truth-speakers. Their YA novel was rejected from major publishers, probably because of Zionists (I’m reminded of Xiran Jay Zhao). They fully endorse Khazar theory in a very uncomfortable, blood-and-soil way, while admitting that they know nothing about genetics, and misrepresent what the Hannibal Directive was. I genuinely don’t know if this is ignorance or malice; they are a terrible researcher and clearly got their sources from social media before bothering to find an article that vaguely supports their claim (Our primary sources for this book are Al Jazeera and Middle Eastern Eye; hilariously, Mamdani’s dad makes an appearance, as does an instagram post).

- This is interesting: “Palestinian Jews, continuing to resist Zionist aggression, might still have some claim to indigeneity. But those who embrace the Mizrahi identity gleefully serve in the IDF… they have become colonizers. And a colonizer is not indigenous.” See, I could take this same argument back a thousand years and say that indigenous Jews who converted to Islam to rule over the Dhimmis became colonizers. Their entire argument is that the indigenous people are the good guys and the colonizers are the bad guys, and if you switch loyalty to the wrong side, you’re also one of the bad guys. This is the Star Wars metaphor again! This has nothing to do with the actual people living on the land. They’ve turned an actual war into a fandom war.

- “Indigenous people wouldn’t uproot olive trees. Indigenous people would not have drained the marshlands [for the love of G-d please learn about Roman deforestation and malaria]. Indigenous people wouldn’t have broken up the West Bank into 227 enclaves.” Do you genuinely think that indigenous people are magical elven beings with a special metaphysical connection to the land who always make correct policy decisions? Look at what the indigenous people of Britain have done to their island. We’re using fairytale logic.

- This person is, unfortunately, responsible for Holocaust education in Houston, Texas. They decided to read the Protocols to prepare for this. They pause for a moment to say that the Protocols are a forgery, of course, and not an actual historical text — but that doesn’t really matter because Israel is doing everything in them anyway. They actually recommend reading the Protocols to learn about Zionism. They are outraged and indignant that their Jewish family members have called them antisemitic and cut ties with them.

- What does being Jewish mean to Kern? “Ethnically, I have Ashkenazi ancestry — that fact can’t be changed — but why consider calling myself a Jew? Because I like the pretty lights and fried potatoes of Hanukkah? Because I like to pepper my vocabulary with a little Yiddish, for spice?” They do add in occasional Yiddish words with footnote definitions: “mishpocha is a Yiddish word for family, a term I lovingly use to refer to my followers on social media.” They also helpfully define terms like “fascism” for us: “a fascist government is a capitalist government without the nice window-dressings of neoliberalism.” I feel bad for their students.

- They do some surface level research into the ways that Jews were persecuted in Christian Europe, and tie this to paganism and the witch-hunts. They seem a lot more interested in the pagans than the Jews. They skim over Mizrahi history, and blame the expulsions on Zionists. We neglect the effect that Naziism had on Arab countries at the time. They claim the Dhimmi protected the Jews, who “didn’t have to” (weren’t allowed to) serve in the army, taking the word at its literal meaning and glossing over the centuries of discrimination and humiliation (“This is our land and the Jews are our dogs”). Again, their arguments are based on whether the good or the evil side is acting, rather than the actions themselves. I could say that the Palestinians of Israel are under the special protection of the IDF because they don’t have to serve in the army, but that would be dishonest; we both know that serving in the army is not the primary marker of status in society.

- I’m immensely unimpressed by their persecution complex. They’re scared of Jews because of online backlash to their TikTok account, and imaginary Zionists pulling the strings to harm their YA novelist career. In my actual neighborhood, I’ve seen a synagogue firebombed by antizionists and cannot walk to the store without seeing graffiti calling for violence against Jews; I have known someone who was shot and killed in the street by a man shouting Free Palestine, and polls in my country find that 50% of Muslims hold antisemitic views, but I’m not going to lose my mind and have a panic attack if I see a woman in hijab on the street, because I thought we all agreed a few years ago that being afraid of people on the basis of their religion and ethnicity is bad, actually. If an Arab man walks up to me and calls me sister, I’m going to talk to him, not run home and hide. It’s a lot harder to be afraid of the people in your community if you take the time to get to know them. That’s part of why I’m reading these books; having read Khalidi and Pappé and whatever the hell this is, I feel a lot less afraid. Antizionism is a house of cards; it is built on lies and therefore fragile. If you’re so afraid of Zionists that you can’t walk past a Jew in the streets, I think that says a lot more about you than the Jews.

- What happens to half the world’s Jews when Palestine is free? Easy answer for Kern: they don’t care. A whole chapter is titled “Debunking Hasbara: ‘Won’t somebody please think of the colonizers?’” Yes. Seven million Jews live there and both Palestinian governments are invested in killing all of them. What happens to the Jews is half of the equation here.

- Here’s one of the last pages: “Wouldn’t it be nice, Zionists, to put down the fear and hate?” I don’t know if they’re talking to themself or to the Jews.

- As with Pappé, I was curious to see their answer to the question: “what does a free Palestine look like?” The answer is “sounds of winds, waves, and children laughing, no drones, bombardment, gunfire, or screaming.” Sounds nice, if vague. How to we get from here to there? Their proposed idea for a Palestinian future looks like “Israelis giving up the settlements and the homes taken in 1948.” I — that’s it?? 200 pages of arguing that Israel is the greatest, evilest, most genocidal apartheid state there ever was, and the way to fix it is “maybe a two state solution, maybe one, I don’t know; a ceasefire with Hamas, and ending the settlements?” I’m baffled. Those have been mainstream Israeli political positions for decades; that’s entry-level debate material for the conflict. They have a preschool understanding of what’s going on and they wrote a book about it.

- When Israel implements Kern’s revolutionary policies, and Palestine is finally free, we will achieve “a world beyond imperialism and capitalism.” It’s going to be hard, like in Batman, they say, or like in Mad Max, Black Mirror, Wall-E, and the Lorax, but we can do it. “When I say free Palestine, people want to know what kind of nation state do you have in mind once Israeli apartheid is toppled. But I don’t dream of nation states. Because I’m an anarchist!”

“When I say free Palestine, people want to know what kind of nation state do you have in mind once Israeli apartheid is toppled. But I don’t dream of nation states. Because I’m an anarchist!”

So. I am an Anarchist.

This isn't an answer to that question. Sim Kern seems to believe that mentioning the concept of Anarchism is a get-out-of-jail-answering-questions card. I cannot emphasize enough that I am speaking as an Anarchist when I say that promoting Anarchism demands an even more in depth answer to a question like that.

Because, fuck, exactly how many Palestinians does Kern think are Anarchists? Because this is the population that has the political space for multiple, feuding, fascist-or-otherwise-rightwing-authoritarian political parties.

That puts some upper limits on the potential political beliefs of the population in aggregate.

Like- fuck, you might be thinking "Well Frustrated Asatruar, as an Anarchist, how do you propose to solve the I-P conflict statelessly?"

I don't!

Not in the lifetime of any of us, at any rate!

All of them, clearly! They've been at this whole thing for 1.5 million years, and everyone knows that the Palestinians are Democratic Socialist-Communist Anarchists Of All Races And Creeds Who Live In Total Harmony With The Earth In Their Great Wisdom!

Sarcasm aside, this is a major part of what I mean by Palestinianism as a psuedo-religion, one that is extremely Post-Christian in structure.

Gaza is the Holy Land, a place of great spiritual significance, which requires armed pilgrimages under great danger (i.e. crusades) in order to free it. Palestinian Independence, when the world will be made perfect, is just Heaven/The Second Coming. Supporting Palestine/attacking Israel is akin to being Born Again, where your sins are given absolution.

And the Jews, of course, are Christ-killers, devil-worshipers, and the font of all evil in the world.

by Nachum Kaplan

He smiled tightly. The second course arrived: sea bass on a bed of something green and politically sustainable. Theo, who had been silent until then, cleared his throat: “Surely the core issue is that Israel was created by Europeans on Arab land.”

I looked at him. “Which part of that sentence would you like to examine first?”

“It’s simply historical fact.”

“No, it’s a slogan wearing a waistcoat.”

He blinked.

“The Jews who established Israel were refugees and indigenous people returning to their ancestral homeland. Many were already living there. Others came from Europe because Europe had spent centuries persecuting them and then attempted to exterminate them. After Israel was established, hundreds of thousands of Jews were expelled or fled from Arab and Muslim countries. Today, a large proportion of Israeli Jews descend from communities from the Middle East and North Africa.”

Theo frowned. “But Zionism was a European colonial movement.”

“Colonial movements generally have a mother country.”

“Britain.”

“Britain fought the Zionists, restricted Jewish immigration during the Holocaust, and eventually left due to Jewish insurgency. Israel was not established as a British colony.”

“It was enabled by Britain.”

“So was Jordan. You seem less emotionally agitated by Jordan.”

“That’s different.”

Naturally. Everything is different when the Jews are involved.

Simon entered the conversation: “But surely you accept that the Palestinians had their land stolen in 1948.”

“Some Palestinians lost homes during a war. As did some Jews, such as the 850,000 expelled from Arab states.”

“A war started by whom?”

“Israel.”

“No. Israel declared independence after accepting partition. Arab armies invaded. Palestinian and Arab leaders rejected partition and chose war.”

“Because the partition was unjust.”

“That is a position. It does not reverse who started the war.”

“You’re being pedantic.”

“I’m describing the difference between invasion and being invaded. Civilisations have occasionally found that distinction useful.”

Nadia shook her head.

I mean of course, but the fuck does that have to do with us

Sorry if you’ve answered this all before, I’ve been thinking a lot on genocide accusations (mostly because people are calling me a genocide enabler for saying that I don’t know if it’s genocide because I have seen so many scholars arguing and disagreeing) and the bit about ‘intent’ is the portion I am really stuck on.

Love your posts and hope you are well, I especially enjoy how well researched they are!

Hey would you be able to update your post on Israel committing genocide with any new information, if you have any?

Absolutely. While we're at it, I'll tell you what's really going on when they call you an enabler.

Nothing has changed the legal picture since I wrote this post in June 2025.

The ignorant and the dishonest will surely respond to this by citing the September 2025 report from the UNHRC Independent International Commission of Inquiry, announcing its opinion that Israel is committing genocide.

There are at least two reasons this is irrelevant.

First, the Commission of Inquiry is a 3-person body spun up by a Human Rights Council resolution.

It is not a court. It hears no defense, binds no one, and has no authority whatsoever to make a legal determination of genocide.

​The (a priori) conclusion of the COI carries the exact level of legal power as a 67% majority on a three-hour Zoom call at the Park Slope Food Coop.

The board at the Park Slope Coop can make it slightly less convenient for the people of Park Slope to get their Bamba fix, but that isn't a judicial finding - it's just the sort of narrow-minded, groupthink horseshit that happens in every monoculture.

​Second, the report was produced by the COI's three members - Navi Pillay, Miloon Kothari, and Chris Sidoti.

The COI came at this with an agenda.

Kothari, in a 2022 interview, said social media was "controlled largely by the Jewish lobby" and openly asked why Israel "is even a member of the UN," which US diplomats called antisemitic.

Sidoti, speaking to the Human Rights Council, said accusations of antisemitism get "thrown around like rice at a wedding" and brushed off the IHRA definition.

Pillay, who chaired the @#&*ing thing, refused to condemn either, called the antisemitism concerns a "diversion" and "lies," and had publicly pushed "sanction apartheid Israel" campaigns well before she was ever appointed.

The commission they ran is the Council's first ever open-ended inquiry. It has no end date, but it does have a mandate broad enough to pre-load its own conclusions while sitting inside a body where Israel is the only country on earth with a permanent standing agenda item against it.

The US, the EU, and more than two dozen other countries have condemned that structural lopsidedness for years.

Again, the body that will rule on this is the International Court of Justice, in South Africa v. Israel.

​An ICJ accusation requires unassailable judicial proof.

The standard the ICJ set is that if intent is to be inferred from a pattern of conduct, genocidal intent must be the only reasonable inference available from the totality of the evidence. Not a plausible reading. Not even the most likely one, but the only one. If the conduct can be reasonably explained by anything else, the standard is not met.

Has the ICJ has ruled on the merits of that case?

No.

Israel filed its response in March 2026 and South Africa's reply isn't due until late 2027 - so we can't realistically expect a merits judgment before 2028.

So without he ICJ, what's the running running total number of tribunals that have found Israel guilty of genocide?

None.

Not a single one is even weighing the merits right now.

...how do you decide ‘intent’ for genocide, especially because people say contradictory things and act contradictory to stated intent?

Genocidal intent has a technical name, dolus specialis: the specific intent to destroy a protected group "as such" (the definition lives in Article II of the Genocide Convention)

When that intent is inferred from a pattern of conduct, the standard the ICJ set is that genocidal intent must be the only reasonable inference that can be drawn from the totality of the evidence. Not a plausible reading. Not even the most likely one - the only one. If the conduct can be reasonably explained by a different objective, the standard is not met.

If a statement can be read as "destroy Hamas" instead of "destroy Palestinians," it cannot prove genocidal intent, because a competing reasonable inference exists, and the existence of that competing inference is fatal to the charge.

The bar was set this way on purpose, after the Holocaust, by people who understood that the crime of crimes had to be genuinely hard to prove or the word would rot into a slur you throw at any war you dislike...like people are doing right now when they casually spit this word at Israel, using it as an emotional condemnation instead of a legal term.

The court can't decide dolus specialis from statements. It'll ask whether the conduct admits any explanation other than intent to destroy the group as such. In a war against an enemy that fights from inside the civilian population, that's nearly impossible.

There is no Israeli state policy of destroying the Palestinian people. Anyone who disagrees should please show us the evidence to support their allegation. We've been waiting for years to see it.

What would it be called if there was an extermination of people but there was no way to prove intent?

If you are ever looking for the terms to discuss terrible wartime events that don't clear the genocide bar, that vocabulary already exists. It can be genocide, a war crime, or tragic, lawful, awful wartime death.

Telling these three apart requires depending entirely on the facts - which is why they try to shut you up instead of trying to convince you with evidence.

You used the word "extermination."

In both the Rome Statute and in ordinary English, this word implies a campaign aimed at wiping a people out.

It is ridiculous to suggest that has happened in Gaza.

What's happened in Gaza is a war.

Civilians die in wars, sometimes in appalling numbers, and that by itself is not a crime. Measured against modern urban warfare (Fallujah, Mosul, Dresden, the comparisons I ran in the original post), the reported casualty figures from a fight against an enemy that operates out of hospitals and tunnels do not look like the signature of an extermination. They look like the signature of a hard war against an enemy that embeds itself within these places for the explicit purpose of causing innocent deaths.

So, is what Israel is doing in Gaza genocide?

Not by the definition, which requires a specific intent that no policy reflects and that no pattern of conduct compels as the only reasonable reading.

Not by any ruling, because the one court that can rule hasn't done so. The accusation is unproven, and the burden sits with the people making the accusation.

The burden is on the accuser always.

The party alleging genocide has to prove genocide to the only-reasonable-inference standard. Until they do, the correct default is the one you're taking: it has not been established.

You're not sitting on the fence, you're sticking with the presumption that protects everyone, including every group that has ever actually faced genocide and needed the word to still mean something when they reached for it.

Like I wrote the first time: once these words get emptied of meaning, they lose the power to stop the very thing they were built to name. The people demanding you call this genocide without proof are not guarding that power. They're pissing it away and handing the bill to the future.

Let's talk about the people calling you a "genocide enabler" for saying "I don't know."

When someone calls you an "enabler" for saying you don't know whether it clears the bar of the definition, they have it backwards.

You're not the one departing from the standard. They are.

They are treating an unproven, unadjudicated, burden-not-met accusation as settled fact, and then branding anyone who notices this dishonesty a collaborator. That's moral bludgeoning.

Once you learn to see this move, Anon, you can't unsee it.

Calling you an "enabler" is emotional blackmail meant to turn your uncertainty into your guilt.

Their trick is to convert an epistemic position (I have not been shown proof) into a moral verdict (you are complicit in mass death), because almost nobody can stand being told they are complicit in mass death.

They want you to either affirm or go quiet not because the evidence moved you but because the social cost of honesty got set too high.

A decent person emotionally recoils from enabling genocide, and this tactic feeds on that decency, using your good faith and desire to belong as the prybar to extract a level of compliance your reasoning faculties would never offer.

The question should be: "Is this true?"

Instead, they're asking: "Are you a good person, Anon?"

...and if you hesitate, they decide the answer is "no."

They can't win the "is it true" fight, so they start a second fight about your decency that you cannot afford to lose.

By making "I'm not sure" expensive to say out loud...they get people to stop saying it.

The tactic itself tells you a lot about their position.

An argument that can actually prove genocide has no need to criminalize doubt about genocide.

A person calling you an enabler is not trying to win you over, because winning you over was never the point.

They are instead drawing a boundary and sorting who's inside the tribe from who isn't - and they do it loudly because performing the policing of the line in public is how they advertise their own purity.

They don't ask "is it true," because they don't have the epistemological faculties to grapple with that question. It also doesn't matter to them because the genocide claim isn't functioning as a factual proposition - they're using it like a shibboleth.

When you ask "is it true," it isn't heresy because they checked and found you wrong, but because that's not why they asked you for the password.

-----

You can hold both of these ideas at once with no contradiction:

The suffering in Gaza is real

The legal charge of genocide has not been met.

As I said last time, "Not Genocide" does not mean "No Wrongdoing."

Refusing to collapse those two isn't genocide denial, Anon - it's reasoning with intellectual honesty.

"All oppressed people need to stand together" is a dead giveaway that you do not view oppressed people as actual, real human beings. You treat oppressed people like props, and "oppression" as the spiritual, demonic force against good.

The roots of Zionism were born by the rivers of Babylon, when the Jewish people were exiled from their homeland. It transformed the Jewish longing for Zion (Jerusalem) into a defining national and spiritual aspiration as a collective. Modern political Zionism came much later, but its foundation was laid in the Babylonian Exile.  Psalm 137: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat and wept when we remembered Zion.”

But THIS asshole adds a new twist because they're also an antizionist dishonestly cosplaying as a Jew.

To those of us who grew up in some sort of yiddishkeit, the choice of words here is jarring and an obvious tell.

"Shmendrik" traditionally refers to a foolish, inept, weak, or insignificant person. A helpless "nincompoop" or "pipsqueak." It's historically a mild, almost comical insult, popularized by early Yiddish theater. More than once, I've heard a grandparent refer to a grandchild affectionately as a schmendrik.

So this gonif is engaged in a high-stakes, furious internet argument involving terms like "Zionazi" and "Nazi's wet dream," and drops "shmendrik" into that rage.

This is the linguistic equivalent of aggressively yelling 'you absolute poopy-pants!" or 'you utter silly-billy!' in the middle of a screaming match.

A putz like @anarchic-judaism doesn't realize how fucking weird it is because they've never, ever spent time around actual speakers of Yiddish and probably couldn't pronounce the word aloud to save their life.

If you're unfamiliar with the tactic or have never run into @stoptheantisemitism, please understand: This is a non-Jewish user or bot who created an account to launder their antizionist/antisemitic arguments by posing, badly, as a Jew.

They grab a few Yiddish words off Wikipedia or Urban Dictionary to build instant cred among sonei Yisroel, but because they lack cultural context, they drop words like shmendrik into inappropriate contexts where the tonal flop makes their already-ridiculous mask fall off entirely.

Jumblr friends: Please don't waste any time on this falsher yid. They're a cheap chazer mit a kosher pisk. A khokhem be-layla.

No Jew who knows anything at all about their own history would say this:

They're a cosplayer. They're trying to ragebait you.

Please stop giving this mamzer the attention they're looking for.

Block 'em like Lego and move on, fam.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/07/24/jesse-jackson-was-my-father-he-blessed-my-embrace-judaism/

archive

I love the art included with this piece.

Two years before he died, my father came to my synagogue. For many of my fellow congregants, it was the day they learned that my father was the Rev. Jesse Jackson — a stalwart of the civil rights movement, an African American Baptist minister and one of the architects of multiracial coalition politics. To me, he was simply Dad: a gentle father who reached back for my hand on every car ride and taught me to meet difference with curiosity.

As the Saturday morning service proceeded, my father sat in the front row — holding my hand, dancing to prayers in a language he did not speak, eating the Sunkist candies the congregation had tossed to celebrate a bar mitzvah. Beside him, I banged on my siddur like it was a tambourine, weaving into those ancient prayers the rhythm of the Black church I was born into.

On June 12, carrying my parents’ blessings, I completed my conversion — a journey I held close until now. I was raised to believe that faith must lead to action. In Judaism, I found an enduring expression of this belief. Ancient ritual and the rigors of textual study were accompanied by the calling to “repair the world.” The Hebrew liturgy felt familiar on my tongue before I understood its meaning. On my first Rosh Hashanah, the shofar’s cry touched a depth of my soul I had not yet reached, and tears poured down my face.

As my father looked on, I reflected on the identity I would claim as a Black and Jewish woman, a twin inheritance filled with sorrow and wonder. Sorrow because, for Black Jews, racism and antisemitism can surface in even the most intimate and familiar spaces. But wonder, too, in the meeting of two diasporas: kosher soul food, Black oral tradition finding its cousin in Jewish debate, twin memories of an exodus from slavery.

So much of my life was determined before I was old enough to choose it: who I was expected to become, what I would inherit, how the watching world would understand me. My parents understood the burden of those expectations and were careful to give me the freedom to become a seeker — of knowledge, meaning and God.

Though I was raised among people of many faiths, Judaism became personal to me almost by accident. In college, my studies kept leading me back to questions of faith and justice, and during the pandemic, a serious illness and the long isolation that followed gave those questions new urgency. I happened across an online conversation about Jewish life and became captivated. That encounter led me to read about the faith and eventually attend my first Shabbat service. I kept going back. In that community, I recognized myself, and over time, we became bound to one another.

The connection between African Americans and Jewish Americans was forged in the struggle for civil rights. This shared history is now under attack. In some communities, speaking out against antisemitism is seen as siphoning attention from the fight against anti-Black racism. In others, confronting anti-Blackness is seen as a threat to Jewish identity and belonging.

About 1 percent of American Jews identify as Black. Their experience — my experience — shows that the alienation between these two communities can be overcome. The ethical language of my childhood was shaped by a Black prophetic tradition that responded to dehumanization with an unyielding insistence on the sanctity of life. Judaism supports this struggle for dignity, affirming that whoever destroys a single soul destroys an entire world, and that whoever saves one saves an entire world. Both traditions tell a liberation story that begins with a particular people but does not end there.

At the end of my father’s Shabbat visit, my rabbi, Sharon Brous, called his name to offer him a blessing. Before she could speak, the congregation was already on its feet. My father — one of the most recognizable Baptist ministers in America — wept as the congregation offered him a spontaneous ovation.

It was a moment of mutual recognition. Speaking a year and a half later at my father’s funeral, Brous said, “What a holy thing it is to be seen for who you really are.” That morning, my father and my Jewish community saw one another clearly.

In Jewish astrology, the month of Av and the sign of Leo are all about the fiery depths of transformation. ❤️‍🔥

Jewish mysticism views this powerful symbol as representing the relationship between supreme strength and the tender vulnerability required for true rebuilding. It’s a spiritual paradox showing that our moments of greatest brokenness hold the exact blueprint for our ultimate elevation.

This specific cosmic timing is all about containment and deep listening. In our ancient mystical text Sefer Yetzirah, it’s taught that this period was created with the spiritual faculty of hearing. It’s a time designed for tuning out the external noise to hear the quiet promise of inner renewal. The energy of Leo is a fixed fire sign, which brings immense passion, warmth, and the power of heart-centered leadership.

Kabbalists actually view fire as a tool of purification, meaning that how we channel our intensity during this time has the power to burn away old limitations and spark entirely new beginnings.

We don’t have to choose between protecting ourselves with a fierce exterior and staying completely soft at our core. The goal of this month is to hold both states at the same time, channeling our inner lion to rebuild our lives from a place of pure, open-hearted love.

Shabbat Shalom 🦁🧡