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Some Black Jews feel more ostracized from Jewish communities post-Oct. 7, survey finds
Growing up as a Black woman in the South with a Jewish father, Autumn Leonard often felt like “an outsider looking in” on Jewish communities. She wasn’t raised particularly Jewish, and her Black and Jewish identities felt disconnected from each other — as if she had to choose one.
But after she married a Jewish man and wanted to raise Jewish children, she sought out ways to engage more deeply with her Jewishness. She found groups that affirmed both of her identities, chairing the “Race Working Group” at the progressive Brooklyn synagogue Kolot Chayeinu and becoming a lead organizer with the Black Jewish Liberation Collective.
“That made me feel like, Oh, Jewish is something I can be — as opposed to something over there that comes from my ancestors,” Leonard said.
After the attacks of Oct. 7, however, Leonard said she began to notice a shift. Jewish communities seemed more inward-looking, she said, with a heightened focus on combating antisemitism and a retreat from commitments to racial justice. She began hearing stories from Black Jews who felt increasingly sidelined or isolated.
So she set out to gather empirical evidence to test her hunch.
The result was a survey conducted through the Black Jewish Liberation Collective, a progressive group that connects Black Jews for political organizing and cultural events. The group circulated the survey beyond its own membership and received 104 responses from a geographically diverse group — most from New York state, but also with respondents in Canada, Portugal and the United Kingdom. Participants were between 21 and 75 years old and reported a range of religious observance levels, from just ethnically Jewish to Orthodox. Responses were collected between October 2024 and January 2025.
The survey — which represents a tiny subset of the estimated 1% of U.S. Jews who identify as Black — found that 62% of respondents reported “increased marginalization” in a Jewish community or space after Oct. 7, 2023.
Those feelings of ostracization largely had to do with disagreements around Israel and Gaza, according to the survey. While survey participants generally identified as more left-leaning on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, respondents on both sides of the political spectrum said they felt alienated.
In Jewish spaces, some respondents felt they were assumed to be more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause because of their race. Meanwhile, in progressive spaces, some Black Jews felt they were assumed to be Zionist because of their Jewishness.
“I do feel some kind of internalizing shame where I am more careful around the ways that I share my Jewishness in non-Jewish spaces,” one survey respondent wrote. “I resent the ways that Zionism is conflated with Jewishness, and the ways I have to extricate [or] preface that.”
According to Leo Ferguson, a member of the Black Jewish Liberation Collective’s steering committee, another troubling post–Oct. 7 trend is that people who voice criticism of Israel are increasingly labeled “fake Jews.” Black Jews often already face that accusation because of their race — and adding political litmus tests, he said, only intensifies the problem.
“What I have witnessed is more scrutiny of Black Jews. There is an ongoing question as to whether or not we will stand up and be ‘real Jews’ which means aligning with whoever’s politics is judging us,” one survey participant wrote.
Compounding these trends, some Jewish institutions have shifted away from the idea that advocating for a broad range of minority groups also benefits Jews, focusing instead on antisemitism linked to Israel. Just last month, the Anti-Defamation League entirely removed from the “What We Do” page of its website a section called “Protect Civil Rights” amid threats from the Trump administration. Although that change occurred after the survey was conducted, some respondents already saw the trend emerging.
“The way in which much of [the] Jewish community has turned from barely doing antiracism work wholly toward Israel and self-protection is so discouraging, especially as the racism within Jewish community is so severe,” one survey respondent wrote.
The survey offers recommendations based on the survey’s findings, including welcoming ideological diversity in Jewish spaces; having a time and place for Israel discourse, rather than letting it “bleed into all aspects of Jewish life”; and maintaining connections between Black and Jewish advocacy groups even if they disagree on issues surrounding conflict in Gaza.
“The discussion around Israel Palestine has taken up so much of the oxygen that it has made it impossible to then also talk about things like racial justice,” Ferguson said.
The post Some Black Jews feel more ostracized from Jewish communities post-Oct. 7, survey finds appeared first on The Forward.
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UK PM Starmer Says There Could Be New Powers to Ban Pro-Palestinian Marches
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer gives a media statement at Downing Street in London, Britain, April 30, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Jack Taylor/File photo
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the government could ban pro-Palestinian marches in some circumstances because of the “cumulative effect” the demonstrations had on the Jewish community after two Jewish men were stabbed in London on Wednesday.
Starmer told the BBC that he would always defend freedom of expression and peaceful protest, but chants like “Globalize the Intifada” during demonstrations were “completely off limits” and those voicing them should be prosecuted.
Pro-Palestinian marches have become a regular feature in London since the October 2023 attack by Hamas on Israel that triggered the Gaza war. Critics say the demonstrations have generated hostility and become a focus for antisemitism.
Protesters have argued they are exercising their democratic right to spotlight ongoing human rights and political issues related to the situation in Gaza.
Starmer said he was not denying there were “very strong legitimate views about the Middle East, about Gaza,” but many people in the Jewish community had told him they were concerned about the repeat nature of the marches.
Asked if the tougher response should focus on chants and banners, or whether the protests should be stopped altogether, Starmer said: “I think certainly the first, and I think there are instances for the latter.”
“I think it’s time to look across the board at protests and the cumulative effect,” he said, adding that the government needed to look at what further powers it could take.
Britain raised its terrorism threat level to “severe” on Thursday amid mounting security concerns that foreign states were helping fuel violence, including against the Jewish community.
“We are seeing an elevated threat to Jewish and Israeli individuals and institutions in the UK,” the head of counter-terrorism policing, Laurence Taylor, said in a statement, adding that police were also working “against an unpredictable global situation that has consequences closer to home, including physical threats by state-linked actors.”
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War Likely to Resume After Trump’s Rejection of Latest Proposal, Says IRGC General
Iranians carry a model of a missile during a celebration following an IRGC attack on Israel, in Tehran, Iran, April 15, 2024. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
i24 News – A senior Iranian military figure said that fighting with the US was “likely” to resume after President Donald Trump stated he was dissatisfied with Tehran’s latest proposal, regime media reported on Saturday.
The comments of General Mohammad Jafar Asadi, one of the top Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commanders, were relayed by the Fars news agency, considered as a mouthpiece of the the powerful paramilitary body.
“Evidence has shown that the Americans do not not adhere to any commitments,” Asadi was quoted as saying.
He further added that Washington’s decision-making was “primarily media-driven aimed first at preventing a drop in oil prices and second at extricating themselves from the mess they have created.”
Iranian armed forces are ready “for any new adventures or foolishness from the Americans,” he said, going to assert that the Iran war would prove for the US a tragedy comparable with what was for Israel the October 7 massacre.
“Just as our martyred Leader said that the Zionist regime will never be the same as before the Al‑Aqsa Storm operation [the name chosen by Hamas leadership for the October 7, 2023 massacre in southern Israel], the United States will also never return to what it was before its attack on Iran,” he said. “The world has understood the true nature of America, and no matter how much malice it shows now, it is no longer the America that many once feared.”
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Trump Says US Navy Acting ‘Like Pirates’ to Carry Out Naval Blockade of Iranian Ports
A view of Iranian-flagged cargo ship M/V Touska as the US Navy Arleigh Burke-class Aegis guided missile destroyer USS Spruance conducts its interception in a location given as the north Arabian Sea, in this screen capture from a video released April 19, 2026. Photo: CENTCOM/Handout via REUTERS
President Donald Trump said on Friday the US Navy was acting “like pirates” in carrying out Washington’s naval blockade of Iranian ports during the US and Israel’s war against Iran.
Trump made the comments while describing the seizure by US forces of a ship a few days ago.
“We took over the ship, we took over the cargo, we took over the oil. It’s a very profitable business,” Trump said in remarks on Friday evening. “We’re like pirates. We’re sort of like pirates but we are not playing games.”
Some of Tehran’s vessels have been seized by the US after leaving Iranian ports, along with sanctioned container ships and Iranian tankers in Asian waters.
Iran has blocked nearly all ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz apart from its own since the start of the war. Trump has imposed a separate blockade of Iranian ports.
The US and Israel attacked Iran on February 28. Iran responded with its own strikes on Israel and Gulf states that host US bases. US-Israeli strikes on Iran and Israeli attacks in Lebanon have killed thousands and displaced millions.
The war has raised oil prices and led to the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint for about 20 percent of global oil and liquefied natural gas shipments.
Trump, who has offered shifting timelines and goals for the war that remains unpopular in the US, has faced widespread condemnation over his comments on the conflict, including when he threatened to destroy Iran’s entire civilization last month.
Many US experts said last month that American strikes on Iran may amount to war crimes after Trump threatened to target civilian infrastructure.