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My family’s 1948 Israeli trauma has me torn between anger and compassion right now
(JTA) — The projectile landed when the kids were playing in the courtyard.
Well, most of the kids. The 9-year-old was watching from the porch of the ramshackle Jerusalem home, tentative but curious. Suddenly he saw them stop playing.
His older brother fell first. A second later his younger sister dropped. And then his mother was on the ground.
The boy ran down the porch steps. The brother and sister were nearly motionless, blood leeching out. He prodded them — nothing. But his mother was alive. He could see her writhing, grabbing her leg, and he could see the giant metallic fragments protruding from it. “Ezra, ezra,” the boy screamed in Hebrew, “help, help.” But this was a back-alley in a poor neighborhood. No one was rushing to help.
The time was June 1948. The conflict in which the shell was lobbed — from just outside the courtyard — was the first Israeli Arab War. And the boy was my father.
His brother and sister were dead before the paramedics could arrive. But his mother was alive. Sort of. Just two months later, she would die in a Jerusalem hospital from all that lodged shrapnel — on the day before Tisha B’Av, the national Jewish day of mourning. All tragedies come at strange times, but this was the strangest. Every Jew in Jerusalem that summer was experiencing the ecstasy of a new state, the fulfillment of a 2,000-year-old dream. My father was experiencing becoming an orphan.
And my grandfather, off at his milk-delivery job when the attack happened, was experiencing overwhelming uncertainty, widowhood, single-fatherhood. As a teenager two decades earlier he had fled to Mandatory Palestine to escape pogrom-filled White Russia, hoping to avoid the antisemitic violence befalling everyone around him. Now here he was, just one more victim of it. The setting changes. The pain, he might say (if he could ever bring himself to talk about it), stays the same.
Three other siblings survived the attack — my father’s 4-year-old sister and 12-year-old brother, both wounded while playing in the courtyard, along with a baby sleeping inside.
All of them had their existence turned upside down — shaken and deposited at the side of life’s road by an event whose causes they barely understood and whose consequences they couldn’t begin to grip. But the 9-year-old suffered in the unique way 9-year-olds suffer, old enough to register but too young to fathom. He didn’t know he’d never be the same. He just wondered if he could ever again be anything.
More than 50 people were killed and 88 wounded in a blast in the Jewish section of Jerusalem, Feb. 22, 1948. (Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)
We were sitting in his Brooklyn apartment recently watching the news — I and my father, now 84 and long a naturalized middle-class American, the accent and most visible traces of his Israeli roots scrubbed away. He had arrived in this country with what remained of his family two years after the attack and tried to put it behind him. Like trying to put the backseat of the car behind you.
“Thousands of wounded, alive but carrying with them the bullet holes and the shrapnel wounds and the memory of what they endured,” President Biden was saying from the TV about the Oct 7 attacks. I stole a sidelong glance at my father; I didn’t need to see the tears welling up in his eyes to know they were there.
“You all know these traumas never go away,” Biden finished from the screen.
In all the decades I’ve known my father, the memory of that day has never been more than a minute’s distance from his consciousness. How could it? Like an at-ease soldier, it lingers just out of frame, waiting for the order to snap to attention and make a march on your soul.
But this time was different. As the Internet and television overflowed with images of blood-soaked cribs, children stolen from their homes, parents burned to death in their safe rooms, grandparents executed on their front lawns, his mind appeared to be filling with a new kind of horror.
This wasn’t the abstraction of Israeli soldiers slain in war or even the vivid images of Jewish civilians dying in terrorist attacks on buses, as they did in droves in the second intifada of the early 2000’s. This was people murdered by terrorists in the one place they were sure violence would never visit — their own homes.
A home on Kibbutz Kfar Aza, reduced to rubble on Oct. 7, is seen one month after Hamas’ attack on Israel. (Deborah Danan)
When my father goes online to see young Israelis watching their parents die in front of them — or to hear of the trauma the recently released 9-year-old Irish-Israeli hostage Emily Hand has been experiencing — he isn’t just absorbing the general pain of human suffering. He is watching a YouTube video of his own past.
And so, in a sense, am I. As someone who was told this story from the earliest age – who still tearfully recalls my father taking me, as a 9-year-old boy myself, to the courtyard in Jerusalem where everything happened so he could describe it in whispered tones — I’ve eternally been under the toxic spell of that June 1948 day. Angry thoughts would sometimes follow me, and I would stew with retributive feelings. These were faceless devils come to steal our lives. And they deserved a devil’s fate in return.
I carried feelings of that day with me into a post-high school gap year in Israel, as a frequent returnee to the country to see friends and family, and even as a journalist occasionally doing stories from the Middle East. Carried it with me as trauma; carried it with me as a source of so many ambivalences.
My internalization of that tragic day is in a tug, constantly, with the progressive views I hold elsewhere. I chose to do that gap year at a politically left-leaning school – in the West Bank. I became a solid two-stater and Yitzhak Rabin acolyte who nonetheless could feel an ineffable comfort when hearing family talk hawkishly about jihadism and the remedies it requires.
I hear cable-news pundits speculate about the conflict’s root causes, and am filled with ire and victimhood; what do root causes have to do with your family being killed in their own home? What possible rights can these armchair people — who will never experience a minute of political violence in their lives – possibly hold that allows them to tell me how to feel, to make so much empty noise? Rancor is the privilege of the unaffected.
And then I go the opposite way. I watch the bombardment of Gaza and I am drawn inexorably to the parallels; that Palestinian boy in the photograph losing a parent is not at all different from him. I hear a rabbi preach about the Jewish respect for sanctity of life and wonder how the young Gazan doppelganger would feel about that statement. It can make me double down on grievance, but my family’s history also makes me attuned to political suffering broadly; my grasp of what an enemy’s violence can do to you equips my radar to detect what my side’s violence has done to them.
A boy plays in the rubble of destroyed houses and buildings in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on Dec. 18, 2023. (Mohammed Abed/AFP via Getty Images)
Knowing that so much of my family has drowned in this infinity pool of violence has a paradoxical effect: It makes me at once more angry on behalf of my people and more sympathetic to those arrayed against them.
“I am too progressive for the Zionists and too Zionist for the progressives,” I tell a close confidante, and she hears and smiles sympathetically. Perhaps that is my place, tilted between trauma and empathy. Perhaps that is the curse of the survivor’s son. You are destined to live in the lonely middle — haunted by everything, aligned with no one.
My father, on the other hand, can live unburdened by such complexities, a firsthand victim free to dig into the anger and pain.
And he does. As we watch the news he tells me plaintively of the Jewish suffering he sees, stopping himself not because he doesn’t want to finish but because he can’t, tears choking away what’s left of his dispassion. All of these Jewish survivors are him, and he knows with a prophet’s clarity what awaits them in the lost and wandering years ahead. I listen to him and say nothing, hoping in the silence there is comfort.
A militancy is animating him — to aggressively attack Hamas until every last hint of a threat is wiped off the earth. He doesn’t shout it from the rooftops, and he doesn’t explicate it in detail. But his emotions are clear every time his eyes get puffy and in all the moments his voice drops to a hush, every night and every morning since the weekend of Oct. 7, no end in sight. The Israeli army needs to entrench themselves in Gaza, or Lebanon, or Iran, or anywhere else they need to go to decisively wipe out anyone who had a hand in this, who could ever have a hand in something like this.
His anger isn’t revenge. It isn’t even anger in the way any human, invoking ethnic pride or historical specters, might feel anger. His anger is of the most personal sort — of the most personal mission.
I might disagree with his hawkishness or lack of pragmatism. But how could I ever judge it? It comes from a place of bottomless hurt, of wanting to do anything possible to reverse that hurt for him. And if not for him, then for the next him – for all the Jews who have not yet known his pain, and who should never know his pain. If his mother died for anything, it is this: to prevent future mothers from dying.
It is his deeply understandable impulse that makes me sad – not for my father but for a region. Because it is this deeply understandable impulse that will ensure the violence never stops; it is this deeply understandable impulse that is the reason the problem may never be solved.
Not inept, corrupt, self-interested leaders, though those don’t help. Not depraved terrorists or zealous ideologies, though those always make things worse. No, it might never stop because of all the people who make the work of those types possible — who give them both incentive and means.
Because of all of those with bottomless hurt, with deep grievance, with a hawkishness I could never judge. So many of them, over a period of 75 years, on so many religious and political and ethnic sides. So many more being created on every single one of these dark days.
A woman wounded in the bombing of the Jewish Agency building in Jerusalem is ferried to a hospital, March 15, 1948. (Getty Images Archive)
Every time I hear about a civilian killed I don’t see one more number ticking up on some kind of military or moral odometer. I see that person’s children, and all of their children’s children, now themselves laden with irremediable grievance — with a reason to encourage violence that surely, this time, will prevent future violence. I see clusters of permanently tormented survivors, multiplying and metastasizing like some kind of biology educational video, and soon I can no longer count each one or apprehend their number. I see my father, and me.
The conflict may play out with weapons and rhetoric, on a board of land and geopolitics. But it is powered by people who feel they have lost something. And these losses, by definition, can never be diminished; these losses, by their very painful nature, continue to pile on top of each other until there is no longer just a mass of traumatized people like my father, crying in their apartments, but entire cities of them, shouting to the heavens, and to their leaders.
You would think feeling referred pain from a victimized father would make a person less understanding of an enemy’s experience. And sometimes it does; I’d be lying if I said in the past two months I haven’t had flashbacks to those childhood revenge fantasies. But then I remember the thousands of people like my father multiplying everywhere, and I go the other way. Toward carrying the trauma of my people, but because of that trauma also feeling empathy for the other. The lonely middle, alienating as it is, is large and accommodating.
In the face of this, all I could do is to keep broadcasting the pain of my father and his kind, to tell the stories of all those people who have lost and don’t deserve to lose anymore, in the hope it finally slows down the grisly momentum.
In the hope no son ever again has to sit watching the news with his father and know, without looking, the tears welling up in his eyes.
—
The post My family’s 1948 Israeli trauma has me torn between anger and compassion right now appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Anti-Zionists Are Excluding LGBTQ+ Jews From Pride Spaces, New Report Says
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.
Anti-Israel activists in the LGBTQ+ community are subjecting Zionist Jews to extreme levels of discrimination, including expulsions from major progressive groups and even physical assault, according to a new report by the nonprofit A Wider Bridge.
The release of the report — titled “Unsafe Spaces: Addressing Antisemitism Against LGBTQ+ Jews and Ensuring Pride Safety” — comes as LGBTQ community members across the Western world observe Pride Month, a period of festivities which celebrate the expansion of social and legal rights that have allowed gays to live more freely and authentically than ever in human history. For pro-Israel Jews, however, Pride Month 2025 is a challenging moment, as anti-Zionism has creeped into and crowded out many queer spaces which once welcomed them with open arms.
From online forums to the streets, the maltreatment and “erasure” of Jewish queer identity is severe, the report explains. Eighty-two percent of LGBTQ Jews have reported being expelled from social media channels or harassed on them, A Wider Bridge noted.
Earlier this year, NYC Dyke March, a public demonstration held by members of the lesbian community in New York City, banned self-proclaimed “Zionists” from its annual event, citing a desire to stand against the so-called “genocide” occurring in Gaza. Last year, the NYC Dyke March came under scrutiny after organizers settled on “genocide” as the theme of its 2024 event. In a statement, decrying “ethnic cleansing, violence, and dehumanization,” the organization compared the ongoing war in Gaza, to mass killings occurring in Ethiopia, Myanmar, and Sudan.
Also in 2024, the Dyke March Committee formally barred “Zionists” from participating in the Pride March, and during the event Jews were attacked and heckled after being seen wearing the Star of David on their clothing. That same year, an LGBTQ-friendly bar in the Brooklyn borough of New York City refused to hold a screening party for the Eurovision talent competition due to the participation of an Israeli contestant.
Forced, mass exiles are taking place in response to this new reality, the report added. Forty-three percent of queer Jews say they are leaving online forums; 40 percent abstain from participating in LGBTQ social events; and 30 percent said their decision was driven by precipitous deterioration of the manner in which they are treated. The only conclusion to draw, the report said, is that the Pride movement is “no longer universally safe or inclusive.”
“What we have found since Oct. 7 and what the report points to is that the explosion of antisemitism that the whole Jewish community has experienced has in some ways grown even more exponentially in the LGBTQ community,” Rabbi Denise Eger, interim executive director of A Wider Bridge and former president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, told The Algemeiner during an interview on Friday. “What we’re seeing around now as Pride marches and organizations put on their celebration s is institutional discrimination and outright boycotts.”
Eger went on to note that antisemitism in LGBTQ communities is all the more distressing due to the outsized contributions, legal and political, which Jewish gays and lesbians have made towards fostering a society that is more inclusive of non-heteronormative identities and relationships.
“Look at who were the early leaders of the LGBTQ civil rights movement — Harvey Milk, one of the first openly gay elected officials in the US, was a Jewish man. Edith Windsor, who brought one of the first marriage equality cases that we won at the Supreme Court, and her attorney, Roberta Kaplan, who won it — these are LGBTQ heroes, not just LGBTQ ‘Jewish’ heroes and heroines,” Eger continued. “So, for LGBTQ Jews to be continually shut out of these spaces is paralyzing, shocking, and horrifying, and LGBTQ Jews are asking where is their home.”
She added, “These are difficult times, but together, the whole Jewish community, including the LGBTQ part of the Jewish community, can stand strong and be resilient in the face of all this, just as the Jewish people have done throughout our history. We have the tools within our tradition to keep us strong and to help us educate. And yes, I believe so much, as a rabbi, that we can and must help change the world for the better. That’s what we are called to do as the Jewish people.”
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, recorded incidents of antisemitism in the US continue to increase year over year, breaking all previous annual records.
In 2024, as reported by the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) annual audit, there were 9,354 antisemitic incidents — an average of 25.6 a day — across the US, creating an atmosphere of hate not experienced in the nearly thirty years since the ADL began tracking such data in 1979. Incidents of harassment, vandalism, and assault all increased by double digits, and for the first time ever a majority of outrages — 58 percent — were related to the existence of Israel as the world’s only Jewish state.
The Algemeiner parsed the ADL’s data, finding dramatic rises in incidents on college campuses, which saw the largest growth in 2024. The 1,694 incidents tallied by the ADL amounted to an 84 percent increase over the previous year. Additionally, antisemites were emboldened to commit more offenses in public in 2024 than they did in 2023, perpetrating 19 percent more attacks on Jewish people, pro-Israel demonstrators, and businesses perceived as being Jewish-owned or affiliated with Jews.
“Hatred toward Israel was a driving force behind antisemitism across the US, with more than half of all antisemitic incidents referencing Israel or Zionism,” said Oren Segal, ADL senior vice president for counter-extremism and intelligence. “These incidents, along with all those documented in the audit, serve as a clear reminder that silence is not an option. Good people must stand up, push back, and confront antisemitism wherever it appears. And that starts with understanding what fuels it and learning to recognize it in all its forms.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Anti-Zionists Are Excluding LGBTQ+ Jews From Pride Spaces, New Report Says first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Two UK Men Convicted, Jailed Following November Antisemitic Harassment
Illustrative: A pro-Hamas march in London, United Kingdom, Feb. 17, 2024. Photo: Chrissa Giannakoudi via Reuters Connect
A court in the United Kingdom on Thursday sentenced Hussein Altamimi, 22, and Ali Alanzi, 30, to prison sentences of eight months and seven months respectively, for charges stemming from an incident at London’s Western Marble Arch Synagogue in November 2024, according to British media.
The two men received convictions for yelling at four Jewish worshipers such phrases as “Jews aren’t welcome here,” “you don’t belong here,” and “f—king Jew.” They also repeatedly screamed “free Palestine.”
The incident grew violent when Altamimi hit one victim’s arm to try and prevent her from filming the abuse. Alanzi also hurled liquid from an alcoholic drink toward one person. When police arrived to arrest the pair, he assaulted one of the officers.
The court convicted both men of four counts of religiously aggravated public order offenses and religiously aggravated assault. Alanzi also received a conviction for attacking the officer and will endure an additional 12 weeks’ incarceration due to a previous suspended sentence.
On Friday, the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) described its reaction to the hate crime prosecutions on X in one word: “Vindicated.”
Altamimi also faced additional charges and guilty verdicts related to a July 2023 incident which included racial abuse and striking a police officer.
“The CPS is working closely with the police to tackle hate crime, making sure that perpetrators who target victims because of their religion, race, sexuality, gender identity, or disability are brought to justice,” Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) lawyer Anna Hindmarsh said following the trial. “We know that hate crimes have a significant impact on victims and the wider community, and we will continue to support victims and witnesses who come forward to report any examples of hate crime they have experienced.”
The convictions against Altamimi and Alanzi are part of a historic surge in antisemitic acts in the United Kingdom.
The UK experienced its second-worst year for antisemitism in 2024, despite recording an 18 percent drop in antisemitic incidents from the previous year’s all-time high, according to a report released in February.
The Community Security Trust (CST), a nonprofit charity that advises Britain’s Jewish community on security matters, released data showing it recorded 3,528 antisemitic incidents for 2024, a drop of 18 percent from the 4,296 in 2023. These numbers compare to 1,662 antisemitic incidents in 2022, 2,261 in 2021, and 1,684 in 2020.
In the 12 months following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel, CST counted 5,583 antisemitic incidents in the UK, an increase from 204 percent from the same period the previous year.
Many of the incidents involved violence targeting the Jewish community.
Last month, On May 26, a group of six or seven men attacked three Jewish boys at the Hampstead Underground Station in North London, requiring hospitalization for one. CAA said that “this report is yet another stark reminder of the growing threat facing Jewish communities, including children.”
Another antisemitic assault occurred in Manchester in February, when an unidentified individual hit a Jewish man with what was believed to be a bottle, shattering the victim’s glasses.
The heavily Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Stamford Hill in Hackney saw an antisemitic act last week when vandals targeted a Jewish-owned investment firm, smashing its windows and splashing red paint. The group Palestine Action claimed responsibility for the crime, as it had done previously for similar acts at the University of Cambridge’s endowment fund headquarters and the BBC’s New Broadcasting House.
“This should be treated as [an] antisemitic incident without any doubt. [The owners] are visibly Jewish people; the people who run the business and this business itself have nothing to do with Israel,” said Rabbi Herschel Gluck, president of Jewish security service Shomrim’s branch in Stamford Hill.
Days earlier, residents of Brighton in southeastern England discovered antisemitic vandalism at a memorial created to honor the victims of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 terror attacks.
“There have been over 40 attacks on the site including vandalism, theft, and graffiti. The abuse has been relentless,” Heidi Bachram, who volunteers to maintain the memorial, told The Jewish Chronicle at the time. “It’s shocking that grief for innocents is met with such violence. The hate won’t stop us, and every night, a different victim’s story will be told [at the memorial]. We will never let them be forgotten.”
In April, according to prosecutors, Abdullah Sabah Albadri, 33, attempted to climb a wall outside of the Israeli embassy in London while carrying a “martyrdom note.”
Prosecutor Kristel Pous said that Albadri told police that he wanted to “do something to send a message to the Israeli government to stop the war.”
The Israeli embassy stated in response to the foiled attack that “we thank the British security forces for their immediate response and ongoing efforts to secure the embassy.” It vowed that “the embassy of Israel will not be deterred by any terror threat and will continue to represent Israel with pride in the UK.”
The post Two UK Men Convicted, Jailed Following November Antisemitic Harassment first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Large Pro-Israel Event in Texas ‘Indefinitely Postponed’ Due to Threats of Terrorism
A protester holds a sign that reads, ”From the river to the sea Palestine will be free” during a pro-Palestinian emergency demonstration outside the Consulate General of Israel in Houston, Texas, on March 19, 2025. Photo: Reginald Mathalone via Reuters Connect
The 2025 Israel Summit in Dallas, Texas has been indefinitely postponed in response to what organizers described as intensifying threats of terrorism.
Prior to the cancellation, the event was expecting over 1,000 attendees. The Israel Summit had already undergone a last-minute venue change due to mounting safety concerns. The gathering, scheduled for June 9–11, was set to feature prominent voices from both the Jewish and Christian pro-Israel communities.
Former US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, who had been scheduled to speak at the event, commented on the cancellation on social media: “This is what America looks like in 2025. A peaceful pro-Israel gathering with more than a thousand participants had to be scrapped because of threats from violent extremists.”
Ten days prior to this year’s event, local police and intelligence officials in Dallas alerted organizers that the gathering had been upgraded to a “high-threat event.”
According to Josiah Hilton, host of the Israel Guys show, which was scheduled to co-host the event with HaYovel, the organizers had to produce “a mandatory security plan with a substantial budget estimated in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
The organizers then moved the Israel Summit to a facility in an isolated area of Kenneth, Texas. However, the event was forced to cancel after the Palestinian Youth Movement Dallas and Jewish Voice for Peace, a pair of anti-Israel, pro-Hamas organizations, revealed its location to their followers.
“[T]he Genocide Summit had to change plans last minute in desperation due to them claiming to be ‘under attack.’ The reality is they understand DFW’s commitment to confronting the extremist ideology that is Zionism,” Palestinian Youth Movement Dallas wrote on Instagram.
However, the organizers stated that they are going to hold the pro-Israel event “in the near future,” and vowed to “come back bigger and stronger, with more people.”
Hilton said that the cancellation reflects “the growing normalization of antisemitic threats and anti-Israel extremists, which are fueling intimidation and silencing voices of support for Israel across the United States.”
The cancellation of the Israel Summit also reflects growing concern regarding potential violence against supporters of the Jewish state. Last month, two Israeli embassy staffers, Yaron Lipschinsky and Sarah Milgrim, were murdered while exiting an event hosted by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, DC. Then this past Sunday, an assailant firebombed a pro-Israel rally in Boulder, Colorado, injuring 15 people and a dog.
The post Large Pro-Israel Event in Texas ‘Indefinitely Postponed’ Due to Threats of Terrorism first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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