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Being Jewish and Gay Today Is an Act of Resistance
Jews of Pride members are seen marching in the Pride parade 2025, part of LGBTQ+ community’s Midsumma Festival. Photo: Alexander Bogatyrev / SOPA Images via Reuters Connect.
I’m a lesbian. I’m alternative. I’m an Israeli-born Jew, and I’m a nurse with more heart than people expect. I adore human beings, with all their qualities and flaws.
Why do these things feel like contradictions in 2025?
Contrary to what the popular narrative has been, especially here in Canada, I don’t want innocent lives taken on any side of the current Israeli-Hamas conflict, and certainly not in the Israeli-Iran conflict. I could never wish suffering upon anybody.
More so, by nature, I’m a healer, which is what drew me to healthcare. Is this, paired with my identities as queer and Israeli-Jewish, such a phenomenon, or are people more closed-minded than they claim to be?
To be queer and Jewish in the year 2025 is to be fluent in complexity. Perhaps where it is most evident is during Pride Month. We should all be celebrating, right? For me, Pride Month has always been a way to celebrate who I am, and to celebrate the freedoms I have here in Canada and in Israel.
Every single Pride celebration around me is associated with anti-Israel movements, and more particularly, all the queer spaces I was once a part of in Montreal have forced me to leave my Jewishness at the door. To have a social life in these spaces means leaving my Jewish Israeli identity behind. That’s the constant heartbreak that I, and people who have the same duality as me, endure.
Thoughts have cycled through my brain over the past almost two years: People say love is love, but would you still preach it, if I told you I was born in Israel? Does my Jewish Israeli-ness take away my validity as a queer person? How can the spaces, the communities that are supposed to be so open minded, promote such hateful speeches? And why do Jewish people in queer spaces have to carry the weight of a country they don’t even live in?
Despite the lack of acceptance, the hate speech and hateful demonstrations in the name of “human rights” in queer and progressive spaces, I show up. I live, I breathe and I love all this community — still.
Despite the cycle of thoughts and questions — rooted in very real experiences I have had — I remain. When met with hatred, I am capable of showing love, perhaps the best demonstration of empathy and resilience.
Resilience is a word, a feeling that carries a lot of meaning for me. It’s waking up everyday knowing that you are hated for who you are, even when you have nothing to do with the war against Hamas, and still keeping your head up. It’s dancing at queer bars, even when it’s littered with people adorned with Hamas red upside-down triangles and keffiyehs, and self-serving claims that “This is an anti-Zionist space.” It’s keeping my heart and my soul open to everyone, even when I’ve been met with hatred repeatedly.
I know my resilience is not my own, because people like Jonathan Elkhoury are proof. As a gay Christian Lebanese man whose family fled Lebanon and found asylum in Israel, he has faced rejection from Arab communities for being gay, from queer communities for being Israeli, and from some in the Jewish community for being Arab. And he still stands tall and proud and is using his voice in online spaces, as a proud advocate for Israel. His story resonates with what many of us Jewish people feel, that we’re complicated, we don’t fit into categories.
Or Emily Damari, a former Israeli hostage released earlier this year, who hid her queer identity from her Hamas captors in order to survive. She lost two of her fingers during the Hamas attack and did not receive proper medical treatment while being held. Her injured hand gesture that she so proudly held on her release became a symbol of resilience appearing on t-shirts and posters in combating antisemitism movements. Another queer Israeli Jewish woman standing proud and solid in her identity.
We often see Jewish resilience being positioned as something that has been in us for generations. The difference between now and then is that resilience now is not, and cannot be, running away or keeping yourself hidden. Resilience can now be dancing at Pride, walking into a queer space and being kind to everyone despite the overt hatred for Jews. Resilience can be simply choosing to exist openly as a queer person, a Jewish person, with no caveats.
I genuinely don’t hold any hate towards anybody. I’ve cried for innocent lives on both sides. I only ask to be gay in peace, without having to leave my identity behind the door for safety measures. I want to walk through Pride celebrations with my Lesbian pride flag, loud and proud, without being confronted with thinly-veiled antisemitism disguised as hatred for Israel.
I want to fall in love without having to hide who I am. I know I will. That’s what Jewish resilience looks like to me.
The author is a nursing student living in Canada.
The post Being Jewish and Gay Today Is an Act of Resistance first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Former Columbia University President Appointed as UK Economic Adviser
Columbia University administrators and faculty, led by President Minouche Shafik, testified before the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce on April 17, 2024. Photo: Jack Gruber/Reuters Connect
i24 News – British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has named Minouche Shafik, former president of Columbia University, as his chief economic adviser at Downing Street, a move aimed at stabilizing the country’s fragile economy and averting a potential budget crisis.
Shafik, an economist of Egyptian origin with dual British and American nationality, has held senior roles at the Bank of England, the IMF, and the World Bank.
She later led the London School of Economics and was elevated to the House of Lords in 2020.
Her tenure in the United States was more turbulent. Shafik stepped down as president of Columbia University in 2024 after just a year in office, amid fierce criticism over her handling of pro-Palestinian protests following the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, and the subsequent war in Gaza.
US officials accused her of failing to confront antisemitism on campus, while students and faculty condemned her decision to call in police to dismantle protest encampments.
Since returning to Britain, Shafik has played an active role in policy and cultural institutions. She advised Foreign Secretary David Lammy on international aid reform, has chaired the Victoria & Albert Museum since January, and led the “Economy 2030” inquiry for the Resolution Foundation, where she argued for reforms to the UK’s system of wealth taxation.
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Israel Mulls West Bank Annexation in Response to Moves to Recognize Palestine
The Jordan Valley. Photo: Юкатан via Wikimedia Commons.
Israel is considering annexation in the West Bank as a possible response to France and other countries recognizing a Palestinian state, according to three Israeli officials and the idea will be discussed further on Sunday, another official said.
Extension of Israeli sovereignty to the West Bank – de facto annexation of land captured in the 1967 Middle East war – was on the agenda for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s security cabinet meeting late on Sunday that is expected to focus on the Gaza war, a member of the small circle of ministers said.
It is unclear where precisely any such measure would be applied and when, whether only in Israeli settlements or some of them, or in specific areas of the West Bank like the Jordan Valley and whether any concrete steps, which would likely entail a lengthy legislative process, would follow discussions.
Any step toward annexation in the West Bank would likely draw widespread condemnation from the Palestinians, who seek the territory for a future state, as well as Arab and Western countries. It is unclear where US President Donald Trump stands on the matter. The White House and State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A spokesperson for Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar did not respond to a request for comment on whether Saar had discussed the move with his US counterpart Marco Rubio during his visit to Washington last week.
Netanyahu’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether the prime minister supports annexation and if so, where.
A past pledge by Netanyahu to annex Jewish settlements and the Jordan Valley was scrapped in 2020 in favor of normalizing ties with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in the Abraham Accords brokered by Trump in his first term in office.
The office of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The United States said on Friday it would not allow Abbas to travel to New York for the United Nations gathering of world leaders, where several US allies are set to recognize Palestine as a state.
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Israel Pounds Gaza City Suburbs, Netanyahu to Convene Security Cabinet
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks to the press on Capitol Hill, Washington, DC, July 8, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
Israeli forces pounded the suburbs of Gaza City overnight from the air and ground, destroying homes and driving more families out of the area as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s security cabinet was set on Sunday to discuss a plan to seize the city.
Residents of Sheikh Radwan, one of the largest neighborhoods of Gaza City, said the territory had been under Israeli tank shelling and airstrikes throughout Saturday and on Sunday, forcing families to seek shelter in the western parts of the city.
The Israeli military has gradually escalated its operations around Gaza City over the past three weeks, and on Friday it ended temporary pauses in the area that had allowed for aid deliveries, designating it a “dangerous combat zone.”
“They are crawling into the heart of the city where hundreds of thousands are sheltering, from the east, north, and south, while bombing those areas from the air and ground to scare people to leave,” said Rezik Salah, a father of two, from Sheikh Radwan.
An Israeli official said Netanyahu’s security cabinet will convene on Sunday evening to discuss the next stages of the planned offensive to seize Gaza City, which he has described as Hamas’ last bastion.
A full-scale offensive is not expected to start for weeks. Israel says it wants to evacuate the civilian population before moving more ground forces in.
HAMAS SPOKESPERSON TARGETED
Netanyahu confirmed on Sunday that Israeli forces had targeted Abu Ubaida, the spokesperson of Hamas’ armed wing. Defense Minister Israel Katz said that Abu Ubaida was killed. Two Hamas officials contacted by Reuters did not respond to requests for comment.
Gaza health authorities said 15 people, including five children, were killed in the attack on a residential building in the heart of Gaza City.
Abu Ubaida, also known as Hozayfa Al-Khalout, is a well-known figure to Palestinians and Israelis alike, close to Hamas’ top military leaders and in charge of delivering the group’s messages, often via video, for around two decades, delivering statements while wearing a red keffiyeh that concealed his face.
The US targeted him with sanctions in April 2024, accusing him of leading the “cyber influence department” of al-Qassam Brigades.
In his last statement on Friday, he warned that the planned Israeli offensive on Gaza City would endanger the hostages.
On Saturday, Red Cross head Mirjana Spoljaric said an evacuation from the city would provoke a massive population displacement that no other area in the enclave is equipped to absorb, with shortages of food, shelter and medical supplies.
“People who have relatives in the south left to stay with them. Others, including myself, didn’t find a space as Deir Al-Balah and Mawasi are overcrowded,” said Ghada, a mother of five from the city’s Sabra neighborhood.
Around half of the enclave’s more than 2 million people are presently in Gaza City. Several thousand were estimated to have left the city for central and southern areas of the enclave.
Israel’s military has warned its political leaders that the offensive is endangering hostages still being held by Hamas in Gaza. Protests in Israel calling for an end to the war and the release of the hostages have intensified in the past few weeks.