"It's Complicated"

Esther. photographs of Bri Watson, Elliot Porcher, Sage Cassell-Rosenberg, and Rachel Sadaty-Ellerson by Luis Mercedes Winter for the "Flowers for Our People" exhibition, 2026. the exhibition was directed by Sage Cassell-Rosenberg and produced by Is Perlman with assistance from Ariella Cohen. Saffron Mala Kaplan provides a written reflection for this piece:

I don’t.

The reason I have no time for this excuse is because of the distinction between emotion and action.

What Israel has done to Gaza is horrific, and I would hope that regardless of your views on the conflict, we can all acknowledge that there are now many people living among what is an almost-destroyed country. The IDF has committed war crimes at a minimum, and Israel’s current government (at the time of this post) is blatantly racist and anti-Palestinian. And I get that when we see those things, especially with social media where you now see children being blown up on your feed, that is going to give you negative feelings about Israel. And when you have negative feelings about a country, you very quickly end up having negative feelings about a country’s people.

That’s normal. It is normal to feel like this. It is normal because from the very start of our species, our brains had to group people into boxes in order to survive. This Group of people give you berries and help sharpen your hunting sticks and so they are Good; This Group of people chase you with their hunting sticks and steal your berries and so they are Bad. Placing friend or foe into simple boxes is how human beings made it through so many centuries.

Which is why whilst it is sometimes difficult to read, I do not blame Palestinian, Lebanese, etc people for fearing or hating Israelis. They are genuinely in fight or flight, life or death mode right now. Trusting the wrong Israeli could end with them getting attacked or killed. Mending the hatred and fear between all of these populations is going to take centuries, generations. That trauma will not go away easily.

Westerners watching this all on social media? No, I’m sorry, you do not get that excuse. You are not over there. You are not being bombed. You are not being killed. You are watching this on your TV, and you can turn off whenever you want. If you really wanted to, you could disassociate from the entire thing and never think about Israel again, by constructing your social media feeds and being careful about what news channels you watch. You have an immense amount of privilege in that if you are wading into this conflict, you are choosing to do so, and you are making the choice that you will be presented with death and destruction and suffering. You are choosing to interact with this.

And yeah, good. It’s good for people to witness this and to take an interest and to want to end suffering. But you do not get to hijack that suffering and act as though you seeing the destruction of Gaza on a screen is the same as actually being in it.

You hate Israelis? Fine. Now it’s your responsibility to unlearn that. Because you can unlearn it, because you are not the one having your villages ransacked, or guns pointed at your head, or your home taken over by settlers. You are not directly in that horror and fear and fury.

And you need to take a step back, and start taking some responsibility for your emotions. If you hate Israelis, that is your issue to solve. Israelis do not need to perform in the way you want in order for you to recognise their humanity.

You have the Internet. You have libraries. You have bookstores. Go look for the Israelis who protest against their government. Go look for the Israelis who try to help Palestinians. Go look for the Israelis who write nuanced, conflicted essays. Go look for the Israelis who create books and films in order to explore their reality via fiction. Go look for the Israelis who set up interfaith groups. Go look for the Israeli children who aren’t old enough to understand anything about what’s happening. Go look for the Israeli scientists who are creating incredible progress in medical science that can benefit everybody in the world. Go look for the Israeli engineers who help create the same technology you use to publicly deny their humanity. Go look for the Israeli musicians who have created beautiful music for the world to enjoy. Go look for the Israelis who were traumatised by Oct 7th, but still want to give peace a chance. Go look for the Israelis who want nothing more than to have a happy childhood, get a job, marry a nice spouse, raise their children, then retire—just like everybody else. Go look for the Israelis who are just like you.

If hearing Hebrew frightens you, go listen to Hebrew until it doesn’t.

If you think all Israelis hate Palestinians, go talk to them until you find one who doesn’t.

If you think all Israelis are ugly, go Google Image them until you find one you find beautiful.

If you think all Israelis are bloodthirsty, go research it until you find one advocating for peace.

If you point the finger at Israelis, remember there are three more pointing straight back at you.

I don’t really care if the past couple of years has ‘caused you’ to dehumanise and hate an entire population of people. Your emotions are your responsibility to tackle. Dehumanisation is your problem. Take some goddamn responsibility and sort yourselves out.

Photos of LGBTQ+ Israeli Couples by Michael Liani (מיכאל ליאני)

Soul & Noga

Khader & Aviv

Yehudit & Aviva

Yuval & Hani

Coral & Ariel

Elior & Paz

Jonathan, Noam & Daniel

Dganit & Nina

-mass buy in from the SE Asian subcontinent to the British Isles. I’m talking government, populace, infrastructure, the whole nine yards. Every government from Bangladesh to Morocco to Scotland will have to issue immigration papers, determine sources of income, and set up social safety nets. Etc etc etc.

That in turn will require:

-populations the world over to commit themselves to never creating an environment so hostile to Jews that Jews come to feel that a nation state in the Southern Levant is the only option.

Now let’s go full idealistic. Let’s say that the world decides to free Palestine and send the Jews “home.” Let’s say all the people and governments are committed to making that happen humanely and equitably. What would that look like?

-trillions of dollars in reparations for murder, property theft, bank accounts, businesses, etc compounded over minimum 80 years

-full buy in from all levels of society to educating themselves about anti-Semitism, and eradicating it. I’m talking from executive branch to the working poor.

If you want Palestine to be free from the river to the sea, you really need to sit down and actually think about where you will send those Israeli Jews and descendants who only ended up there in the first place after they were violently expelled from somewhere else. I’m not talking about the Yishuv. I’m talking about the world after 1945. Are they supposed to go back to Poland? Or Yemen? Or France? Or Syria? What would that look like? Genuinely, how do we administrate and create the infrastructure for that?

It’s a hard, shitty question which flies in the face of blind optimism and overly simple narratives of the Israeli-Palestinian situation. But from where I’m sitting as a non-Zionist (I don’t do nationalism point blank; this is not a value judgement or a smug assertion of diasporic Jewish moral superiority) Holocaust scholar, it seems like those Jews are supposed to disappear or like, painlessly immigrate somewhere?

This is another iteration of The Jewish Problem, and if we’re going to seriously say that Israel should cease to exist and be replaced by a Palestinian nation state, we have to answer these questions.

Because in the current global climate? The “solution” to the “Jewish Problem” in the Southern Levant looks like mass murder. And that’s half the Jews in the world right there.

That bothers me. Does it bother you? Or is it the price you’re willing to pay? You don’t have to answer that. Deep in your heart you already know exactly what your answer is.

I mean, this is beyond ridiculous. Not only is this obvious from being presented right besides the classic example of hospitality from Abraham, the Tanach very much spells this out is Yechezkel 16, 49. It's very obvious if you bother looking - and there's also the parallels in the Levite's Concubine story! Where the issue is very clearly not homosexuality or anything, since the concubine is a woman who is gang raped. And sure, you could take it to be about rape instead, but assuming we're juxtaposing Lot as the relatively righteous guy in the situation we can see that his offering his daughters to gang rape is considered marginally better than what the people of Sodom suggest. In short, this story is very very clearly about hospitality! But no, of course people have to focus on something very specific as the worst thing ever and call it Sodomy.

Judith Love Cohen was born in Brooklyn in 1933. As a child, she loved math and was often the only girl in her math classes. She would go on to study engineering in college while also dancing in the Metropolitan Opera ballet company. She received her bachelor and masters degrees in engineering from USC while working for an aerospace engineering company. She stated that she never once saw another female student in the engineering program. She went on to work on some major projects, but she is most well-known for her work on the Apollo 13 mission. She helped create the Abort Guidance System which would ultimately save the Apollo 13 astronauts after an oxygen tank exploded on their way to the moon. While she was working on the AGS, she went into labor with her fourth child, while at work. She took the problem she was working on for the project with her to the hospital, solved it, and gave birth to Jack Black. In 1990, she retired from engineering to establish a publishing company dedicated to inspiring children, primarily young girls, to pursue STEM and learn about the environment. She wrote and published a series called "You Can Be A Woman...", starting with engineer, with illustrations by her husband. Her son, Neil Siegel, is a computer scientist and engineer who has invented many systems used in military technology and consumer electronics. She passed away from cancer in 2016, but Neil wrote that "she must have influenced tens of thousands of young girls to become interested in professional careers of one sort or another."

Judith definitely deserves more recognition for her work and legacy as a pioneering woman in STEM and an absolute icon in Jewish-American history.