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Why Walter Benjamin was all things to all people
Walter Benjamin’s life, to use the kind of metaphor he was so fond of, was not unlike the Parisian arcades, those covered retail passages that he loved so much.
He was born into a world with the finer things on display. He marveled at his mother’s jewelry, the cut-glass champagne glasses and carafe stoppers in the shape of animals and gnomes in their Berlin home. But his passage through life as an adult was seldom easy, and existed in tension with those glittering objects in their vitrines.
An omnivore par excellence, as a young man Benjamin announced his intent to be the “foremost critic of German literature,” but ended up spending much time translating works from French to German, musing on Marxist concepts and generally resisting any easy classification in ideology or literary genre.
“Adhering to any doctrine awakened in him some kind of allergy,” said Peter E. Gordon, the Amabel B. James Professor of History at Harvard. “I think it’s at those moments that his real originality shines through.”
Gordon’s illuminating new book for the Jewish Lives series, Walter Benjamin: The Pearl Diver, is a portrait of a thinker who couldn’t conform. In keeping with his subject’s unconventional spirit, and his unique sense of cyclical time in which tragedies repeat, Gordon begins at the end.
As Benjamin navigated the Pyrenees, escaping from Vichy France and into Spain, he took a lethal dose of morphine. Gordon winds back the clock from that moment, and ends the narrative right on the cusp of his journey through the mountains.
“I thought on Benjamin’s idea that history should not be written by the victors,” Gordon said in a phone interview. “And that means not permitting the fascists to have the last word, as if his death were the end of his influence.”
Indeed, one could say Benjamin’s death was only the beginning of the legacy.
I spoke with Gordon about Benjamin’s life, work and why he may not be an entirely appropriate fit for the Jewish Lives series. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
PJ Grisar: You have a little uncertainty about whether Benjamin fits comfortably into a series like this. How does he fit the bill and in what ways do you think he might fall short of it?
Peter E. Gordon: He escapes almost any traditional categories that are available to us. People have trouble figuring out, was he a critic primarily? Was he a philosopher? Was he a Marxist? Was he an historian? Moving away from academic disciplines, he exhibits the same resistance to being placed within any distinctive tradition. That’s one of the reasons why it’s so difficult to directly answer the question of whether he belongs to some kind of canon of Jewish thought or Jewish philosophy.
He’s always operating at the margins or just outside the boundaries of any settled doctrine or tradition. Bertolt Brecht couldn’t figure out if Benjamin was really a Marxist and had some suspicions that Benjamin’s Judaism was distorting his Marxist insights. And then on the other hand, people like [Benjamin’s close friend, Kabbalist scholar] Gershom Scholem vigorously argued that Benjamin’s best insights were, in fact, ones that belong to Jewish tradition, but he warned Benjamin that he was distorting those Jewish insights because of his Marxism.
So Benjamin was being pulled and pushed in various directions by the people who were closest to him intellectually. But they all saw, I think, that he couldn’t easily be corralled fully within their fold.
It does seem like he did have a tendency, depending on who he’s associating with, to adopt some of those ideas. As you said, he buys into them to a point before making it his own. What do you think of that impulse?
There might be a temptation to see him almost as a chameleon who adapted to the interests of the friends who were near him, but he also frustrated those friends because of his own instincts, and some of those instincts he once described as nihilistic. There was a fierce debate over Benjamin’s legacy, going back to the first edition of his correspondence and writing, published cooperatively by Adorno and Scholem after Benjamin’s death. The more militant Marxists at the time were furious and felt that Scholem and Adorno had falsified Benjamin’s legacy and weren’t honoring its true Marxist credentials. I rather doubt it had true Marxist credentials.
One of the things I say at the end of the book is that there’s a key principle in Marxism that Benjamin’s own Jewish themes seem to contradict. Benjamin describes an intrusion into history from a place that comes from the outside, and he calls that the Messianic. Any moment in history could be the gateway through which the Messiah might enter. And Marxism has a commitment that whatever changes might occur in history, those changes emerge from the immanent contradictions in history itself, not from a place outside history.
So Benjamin’s allusion to a Messiah who enters into history through some kind of gate, as if from the outside, is very hard to square with Marxism. And so there you find him operating with what you could call a syncretism of Judaism and Marxism. But even those two might not be really sufficient to capture everything that’s going on. He was really fascinated by Christian theology as well.
I didn’t know that he struggled so much in his lifetime that he didn’t have a professorship. He had to scrape by to make a living. Because the way the book is structured, we leave him in the Pyrenees so we don’t really see his afterlife. How did he become a well-known thinker? Was it the efforts of Adorno and Arendt after he died?
The peripatetic quality of his thinking, that it crossed so many boundaries has made him available for a great many people with different sorts of commitments, and also for the great community of humanists who share with him a sense of boundary-crossing in their disciplines. The rise of cultural studies in the Anglophone world since 1945 owes a great deal to Benjamin, and perhaps to Benjamin more than anyone else.
That practice of cultural studies is all about drawing the unlikely connection, say, between literature and economics, between history and theology and so forth. And that’s a risky but very original practice. Benjamin’s one of the great avatars for people who wish to pursue that practice. His study of the Parisian arcades is maybe the best example of that, because he’s trying to figure out, how does 19th century Paris contain all of these conflicting energies that are evident in architecture, like the passage itself, but also in its social movements, and in its poetry and he tries to bring all these together in what he called constellations of culture and society.
I saw your recent piece in the New York Review of Books, writing about historical analogies and how it’s an imperative to invoke the memory of Jewish persecution when discussing ICE raids or Gaza. Because Benjamin was a refugee, and he insisted that historical crises recurred as a rule, I’m wondering if he was on your mind when you were writing that?
I’ve been very close to immigrants in my life. My own family were immigrants and refugees to the United States from Nazi Germany on one side and from pogroms on the other side. That experience is always very much on my mind. I would hope it would be on everybody’s mind, regardless of identity or history.
Benjamin says “the amazement that things like this are still happening is not philosophical.” And I very much agree with that. I know no polity is blessed with immunity from the worst things. Benjamin himself was a victim of fascism. He died in a moment of despair, thinking that there was no way for him to survive, and taking his own life which he thought was better than the alternative. Tragically, he was mistaken, but it was an entirely plausible inference, given the situation that he saw around him.
And the U.S. at the time beckoned as a refuge for many people fleeing fascism, whether on account of their ethno-religious origins or their politics. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like we’re that country anymore.
The post Why Walter Benjamin was all things to all people appeared first on The Forward.
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For years, Jewish activists tried to get the NYC Dyke March to accept Zionists. Now, they’re moving on.
Tens of thousands of queer women are expected to take to the streets of Manhattan on Saturday to celebrate the women who fought for their right to celebrate safely and to declare equal rights for all. Some will also be there to condemn the state of Israel, as organizers of the renowned Dyke March insist for the second year in a row that anti-Zionism has become a core value of the event.
But the bitter internal fight that shift sparked last year has vanished, along with many of the march’s longtime Jewish participants. Many will attend a separate event on Saturday hosted by Shalom, Dykes, a group created in 2024 by former Dyke March participants who have been shut out of the celebration.
“There has been an exodus,” said Nate Shalev, who spent a decade on the march’s organizing committee. Shalev stepped down when the organizers turned on them and other Jewish supporters of Israel after the Oct. 7 attacks. “Anyone who has dissented, anyone who has any sort of connection to Israel, anyone who is quote unquote not a good Jew.”
Dyke March organizers reject the notion that the march’s anti-Zionist stance disproportionately excludes Jews.
“We have Jews on the NYC Dyke March committee, and we do not believe anti-Zionism is antisemitic,” organizers told the Forward in a statement.
The split reflects broader fractures in queer spaces nationwide, as Pride Marches from Vermont to San Francisco have also splintered over positions on Israel and Gaza in recent years.
In New York, that divide now feels permanent. After getting doxxed and ousted from their roles, activists who once pushed back on the march’s anti-Zionist stance say they have given up on making change from the inside, instead directing their energy toward queer Jewish spaces.
“There’s this feeling of, where do we want to put our energy?” Shalev said. “Fighting against these folks who clearly don’t care about me or my communities, and don’t have the desire to be able to see multiple perspectives or truths, that’s not worthwhile.”
‘Settled in for the long haul’
Shalev, whose wife is Israeli, said the organizing committee debated for years whether the march would ban national flags — and by extension, the Jewish pride flag with a Star of David. But the committee allowed for open discussion, Shalev said, and they never ended up banning the flags.
That culture changed after Oct. 7, 2023, when Shalev said fellow organizers showed little understanding of the personal toll the attacks had taken.
“Here I was, post-October 7 with my Israeli wife, navigating all of this in our home, trying to understand if her friends and family were OK,” Shalev said. “And then having to navigate this with the Dyke March committee.”
A year later, an attempt at reconciliation was short-lived. In June 2024, the Dyke March Instagram account put up a post acknowledging that the committee’s delay in condemning the attack of Oct. 7 had caused harm and insisting that “unequivocal solidarity and empathy for Jewish safety can coexist alongside unwavering commitment to Palestinian safety and freedom” — then removed it after a half hour.
Organizers’ reason for deleting the post, they wrote in a subsequent post, was that “any language we put out which is not clearly opposed to a Zionist, imperial agenda is harmful to all.”
The 2024 march — dubbed “Dykes Against Genocide” — raised funds for five groups including Within Our Lifetime, a group that voiced support for Hamas after Oct. 7 and defends “the right of Palestinians as colonized people to resist the zionist occupation by any means necessary.”
That same year, Shalev co-founded Shalom, Dykes, a group that describes itself as a place where “Jewish dykes can exist fully and freely as themselves, no questions asked.”
What began as a one-off alternative to the Dyke March quickly became something larger. Roughly 300 people attended the group’s first celebration with dancing and a performance by drag queen Matzah Belle Soup at an East Village bar, scheduled at the same time as the Dyke March.
“I definitely thought it was going to be a one-time event,” Shalev said. “Immediately during and after that event, I understood that this was actually much, much larger than I thought.”
Even after the split, Shalom, Dykes encouraged members who wanted to attend the Dyke March to do so together. But two years on, Shalev said, fewer people are interested in reengaging with the Dyke March, while Shalom, Dykes has continued to grow.
One of those attendees was Amy Vernon, who came out as bisexual at age 50 and said she was still finding her footing in queer communities when she attended her first Dyke March in 2023. Marching proudly through the streets surrounded by thousands of queer women was an “electric feeling,” she said.
But the following year, the march’s statements about Zionism made Vernon feel like she couldn’t attend. Shalom, Dykes gave her an alternative.
“It really just felt like this lifeline,” Vernon said. “Because I was still trying to figure out where I even belonged anymore.”
Last year’s Shalom, Dykes dance party drew about 600 attendees — double the turnout of its first event — and the group has expanded into a year-round community, hosting holiday celebrations and happy hours.
“We’ve reached the point where we’re settled in for the long haul,” Vernon said. “I don’t know what future there is for American Jewry if we can’t eventually build bridges back, but to my knowledge, there is no interest from the Dyke March or other queer organizations to welcome us back.”
Dissenters depart
Founded in 1993 by a group of activists called the Lesbian Avengers, the Dyke March — which unlike New York’s Gay Pride parade the following day takes place without corporate sponsorship, permits, or police presence — originally had a strategically narrow focus: lesbian visibility. By separating themselves from male-dominated parades, the Avengers sought to specifically highlight women’s issues.
Today, organizers frame the Dyke March through a broader, intersectional lens. Its “statement of values” includes not only “anti-Zionism” but also “anti-militarism,” and standing “in solidarity with all oppressed peoples and occupied lands, including Palestine” among its many priorities.
According to Shalev, the change in approach reflected the exodus of dissenting voices in recent years, which left the committee without the intergenerational perspective that had long characterized the march.
By 2025, committee member Jodi Kreines found herself as the lone voice opposing a proposal to reaffirm the march’s anti-Zionist commitments.
“The only qualification was you had to identify as a dyke, and that was really what I was holding to,” said Kreines, who has been marching for two decades. “The idea that creating an explicitly anti-Zionist message would be really exclusionary of a large swath of dykes, especially within New York City.”
After Kreines voiced her concerns about the group’s anti-Zionist stance in the Forward last year, the committee voted to remove her in a 15-2 vote.
Kreines said she never shared her personal opinions about Israel with the committee. Her argument, rather, was that the march should remain open to all dykes regardless of their beliefs.
“You don’t get to determine who is a good dyke or a bad dyke, just as you don’t get to determine who is a good Jewish person or who is a bad Jewish person,” Kreines said. “There is no one way to exist.”
Other Jewish activists who challenged the committee’s anti-Zionist stance last year faced similar treatment, including Judith Kasen-Windsor, the widow of legendary gay rights activist Edie Windsor — the lead plaintiff in the landmark marriage equality case at the Supreme Court. Kasen-Windsor was also told she was no longer welcome at any Dyke March planning or organizational meetings.
“It was our community, and now it’s not our community anymore,” Kasen-Windsor told Gay City News after she was ousted from her role.
Dyke March organizers did not address questions about the committee’s process for removing members or their tolerance for dissent, instead directing the Forward to their “value statement” on Zionism.
“We oppose the nationalist political ideology of Zionism, particularly as it is promoted within U.S. institutions, which continues to be used to subjugate, displace, and marginalize Palestinian people,” the document reads. “We stand against antisemitism in all its forms and recognize that Jewish people have faced historical and ongoing oppression. Our critique is directed at a political system and ideology, not at Jewish people or Judaism.”
Kreines decided not to fight the committee’s decision.
“I needed to choose to protect my peace,” Kreines said. “I was not in any place that I had the capacity to fight anymore.”
The post For years, Jewish activists tried to get the NYC Dyke March to accept Zionists. Now, they’re moving on. appeared first on The Forward.
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For Mel Brooks and generations of his admirers, 100 years is not enough
Of how many Jewish comedians can it be sincerely said that 100 years of life is not enough?
Mel Brooks (born Kaminsky) who celebrates his centenary on June 28, has long been inspiring belly laughs with Yiddishkeit that has only recently been judged worthy of academic attention, as a volume of scholarly essays proved last year. Inspired by slapstick from Jewish vaudevillians like The Ritz Brothers and Moe Howard (born Moses Harry Horwitz) of The Three Stooges, Brooks is at times literary, but never intellectually glib. Brooks’ inclusion of the Jewish clown Harry Ritz in his 1976 Silent Movie was a gesture to traditional sight gags in what may be his most personal film in its revelations about his comedic roots. And as almost all his admirers are younger than he, as seen in Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!, the two-part HBO documentary film directed by Judd Apatow, a full perspective of his life and times is difficult to find.
Brooks’ creativity derived from a Brooklyn upbringing of quaffing egg creams and spending summers at Camp Sussex, a New Jersey oasis for underprivileged Jewish children founded just before the Great Depression, as the Yiddishist Sandra Fox has explained.
Deeply imbued with the Yiddish sensibility, Brooks told an interviewer for Playboy in 1975 that as a boy, he believed that upon reaching adulthood, all New York Jewish kids would suddenly know how to speak Yiddish, the language of family elders, at which point English could be discarded as a useless secondary means of communication.
His early recreational experiences prepared him for a career as a tummler, amusing Jewish businesspeople on holiday. Yet even then, Brooks offered a tragicomic twist, prefiguring Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman by appearing circa 1940 schlepping two suitcases and leaping fully clothed into a swimming pool as a mock gesture of suicidal despair because business was purportedly bad. The young Brooks was flummoxed by school lessons portraying Jews as simultaneously plutocrats and their anarchistic enemies. His 1991 tragicomedy Life Stinks, echoing the Book of Job in the Bible, is perhaps part of his inner investigation of the place of Jews in American society.
Complicating this understanding was antisemitic propaganda during Brooks’ youth. The German American Bund, a Nazi organization, filled Madison Square Garden in 1939 to denounce President Franklin Roosevelt as a Jew whose real name was “Frank D. Rosenfeld,” and scorn Roosevelt’s New Deal as the “Jew Deal.” For Brooks, who worshipped Roosevelt, this ethnic stereotyping was all too credible. At 17, he enlisted in the military, and like Don Rickles, another diminutive Jewish comedian who survived combat during World War II, Brooks emerged with an explosive penchant for humor as violence. The savage ridicule of “Springtime for Hitler” in The Producers was authenticated by early experience against Nazi adversaries in The Battle of the Bulge.
Rather than try to untangle such complexities, Brooks has tended to sum up life’s wisdom in bits of homespun wisdom attributed to his relatives, like “Never run for a bus; There’ll always be another” on the 2000 Year Old Man comedy album.
As a young comedy writer for Sid Caesar, he worked with the head writer Mel Tolkin (born Shmuel Tolchinsky near Odessa, Ukraine) who advised him to read Russian literature, and this acquaintance with Tolstoy, Turgenev, Gogol, and even the antisemitic Dostoyevsky, made an indelible impression. Comedy in the latter two writers, born of absurd pain, transfixed Brooks, who would go on to adapt a novel by two Ukrainian Jews, Ilya Ilf (Ilya Arnoldovich Feinsilberg) and Yevgeny Petrov (Yevgeny Petrovich Katayev) in the 1970 film The Twelve Chairs.
Although not a box office success, Twelve Chairs gave the English Jewish actor Ron Moody one of his few leading roles on film, after starring as the villainous Jew Fagin in the stage musical Oliver! and its screen adaptation in 1968. About Russian anti-Jewish pogroms, Brooks concurred with his friend Tolkin, who told the Los Angeles Times in 1992 that the violence “created the condition where humor becomes anger made acceptable with a joke.”
This comic fury was expressed by Brooks to Jewish friends like Howard Morris, a Bronx-born fellow comedian working with Sid Caesar, who was repeatedly mugged by Brooks, once by tying him up and stealing his wallet on a Greenwich Village street, and again in a Central Park rowboat. These ludicrous, yet intensely realized and enacted pranks were part of his persona over the past century.
And critics, Jews and non-Jews alike, whom he has long referred to as “crickets,” were other targets of aggression, as Brooks’ biographer Patrick McGilligan notes. The apotheosis of feedback deriding opinionated filmgoers is Brooks’ narration as a grumpy old Jew kvetching about avant-garde images in the Oscar-winning 1963 short film The Critic, directed by the American Jewish filmmaker Ernest Pintoff. As animated shapes form and reform, Brooks-as-Jewish-spectator concludes: “I don’t know much about psychoanalysis, but I’d say this is a dirty picture.” With each Jewish cinemagoer being an amateur Freud, the need for most critics is hilariously eliminated.
Similarly, Brooks became his own songwriter in hit musicals, despite lacking any memorable melodic gift. So he borrowed from Brahms the tune for the theme song of Twelve Chairs. The song characteristically expresses a generous life philosophy with the lines “You could be Tolstoy, or Fannie Hurst/ hope for the best, expect the worst.” Mentioning the sentimental bestselling American Jewish author Fannie Hurst was part of Brooks’ all-inclusive optic, writing leading roles for African American performers like Richard Pryor in Blazing Saddles, a part eventually played by Cleavon Little. And Brooks’ affectionate recognition, albeit mocking, of gay men in The Producers continued in 1983 with his remake of To Be or Not to Be, in which he interpolated a rescue of Sasha, a flamboyant dresser, from deportation to a Nazi concentration camp.
Brooks’ equally wide-ranging literary sensibilities are evident in a series of films produced by his Brooksfilms company, a number of them with an Anglophile flavor. Of these, his 1987 production of Helene Hanff’s 84, Charing Cross Road, an ode to bibliophilia, offered a plausible Jewish role for his wife, the actress Anne Bancroft.
But ultimately, Brooks’ passion for Russian literature as a Jewish reader best coincides with cinema in a vignette from the 1975 Playboy interview; in an extended Dostoyevskian narration, Brooks recounts how at age ten, he chased after his “Yom Kippur sweater” that had been swept away by an automobile. Arriving in an antisemitic neighborhood, Brooks was obliged to run further until, mentioning a celebrated freeze-frame closeup on a fleeing boy at the end of the French Jewish director François Truffaut’s film The 400 Blows, little Mel arrived at the ocean in Coney Island, his Yom Kippur sweater safely recovered. This happy ending, as is proper in comedy, echoes the long, productive life and career of Mel Brooks, who deserves all our birthday thanks for his comedic gifts to audiences over the decades.
The post For Mel Brooks and generations of his admirers, 100 years is not enough appeared first on The Forward.
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‘There was a campaign’: UN torture official says colleagues tried to block her letter documenting Oct. 7 atrocities
An Australian lawyer tasked by the United Nations with monitoring and documenting allegations of torture and cruelty is accusing colleagues within the UN human rights system of trying to block the publication of a Jan. 2024 letter she wrote documenting allegations of abuses committed during the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack on Israel months earlier.
Alice Edwards, who since 2022 has served as United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, said she faced weeks of pressure from colleagues who argued that allegations included in the letter she drafted were false and urged her not to send it.
“There was a campaign to prevent that letter going out,” Edwards said in remarks delivered earlier this month at University College London and obtained by the Forward. “There was weeks of being bullied and deterred from writing it and telling me that everything in it was false.”
Edwards’ statements resurfaced a long-simmering conflict in the UN human rights system around its treatment of Israel, which is frequently singled out by UN resolutions and by rapporteurs as a perpetrator of human rights violations.
Meanwhile, other UN rapporteurs have declared doubts on evidence of sexual violence committed during the Oct. 7 attacks — prompting a surviving hostage and the head of an investigative commission that published a report last month compiling witness and survivor testimonies to confront them this week at a hearing in Geneva.
Edwards’ letter, sent in early 2024 to Palestinian authorities and copied to Hamas, detailed allegations of torture, sexual violence, including rapes and gang rapes, burning people alive, and other abuses committed during the Oct. 7 attacks.
According to Edwards, colleagues had given extensive feedback on drafts of the letter, with some items removed from the final version as a result. “All the comments of these individuals had been taken into account,” she said, adding that “the letter shrunk considerably.”
Even after those revisions, Edwards said, only one counterpart — the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions, Morris Tidball-Binz — ultimately signed the communication before it was sent.
Other special rapporteurs and working groups who had expressed interest in signing it, she said, “had also been bullied by others not to sign on.” Edwards added: “There was this concerted effort for this letter not to put on record some allegations that had been received.”
Contacted by the Forward, Danny Danon, Israel’s Ambassador to the UN sent a written statement. “Dr. Alice Edwards’ testimony exposes an uncomfortable truth: when it comes to Israel, facts are too often sacrificed on the altar of politics,” said Danon. “The evidence is overwhelming and undeniable. For more than two years, Israel has documented and presented the horrific crimes committed against its citizens.”
UN special rapporteurs are independent human rights experts appointed by the UN Human Rights Council to monitor, investigate and advise on thematic topics that include torture, violence against women, and education among others. While their recommendations are not binding, their advice informs UN action and aims to influence governments’ responses to alleged violations.
Israeli officials and advocacy groups had long argued that the United Nations devotes disproportionate attention to Israel’s alleged wrongdoing compared to other countries and holds Israel to a double standard. Since the Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, they say, the UN and its rapporteurs have not adequately condemned Hamas’ atrocities and the treatment of Israeli hostages.
Reem Alsalem, the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, has said that the Israeli government’s failure to cooperate with her mandate has undermined investigative efforts and “represents a profound injustice to all the victims.” She also has called into question reports from victims, witnesses and investigators who described rape as part of the Oct. 7 violence.
In a post on X in November 2025, Alsalem wrote: “No Palestinian applauded rape in Gaza. No independent investigation found that rape took place on the 7th of October 2023.”
She also wrote of allegations of Hamas perpetrated sexual violence against Israelis: “I firmly believe that never have we seen such a weaponization of accusations of sexual violence as well as disinformation to manufacture consent for the commission of a genocide – aided and abetted by the media and governments around the world.”
The tensions resurfaced publicly this week at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva when Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy, founder and chair of the Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas against Women and Children, presented findings from the commission’s recently published report, Silenced No More.
The report, which has been received by governments, international organizations, academic institutions, and policymakers around the world and boasts many endorsers, is the most comprehensive body of evidence yet of sexual violence on October 7. It catalogues witness testimonies, accounts from hostages about sexual abuse during their captivity, and analysis of over 10,000 photos and videos, including hours-long videos recorded by the perpetrators.
“For two years, we immersed ourselves in testimonies of unimaginable violence,” Elkayam-Levy said Wednesday during her presentation of the findings at the UN in Geneva. “We revealed 13 patterns of abuse — including rape, gang rape, sexual torture, burning, and the deliberate mutilation of victims’ faces and genitalia.”
She went on to single out the UN human rights representatives as unresponsive to the evidence. “Will the UN rapporteurs who doubted or denied these crimes acknowledge the truth?” she said, adding, “We call upon you to recognize our findings.”
A day earlier, Ilana Gritzewsky, a survivor of Hamas captivity who has spoken publicly about sexual violence she experienced, confronted Alsalem directly during a live testimony in an emotional appeal.
“Ms. Alsalem, you said there was no evidence of sexual violence on October 7,” she said. “I am the living proof of sexual violence by Hamas. When I and other Israeli women begged not to be raped, why were you silent?”
‘She was very brave’
Asked about Edwards’ allegations, the UN office that supports the special rapporteurs and other independent human rights experts provided a statement to the Forward: “While the experts frequently issue joint communications on issues that engage multiple mandates, participation in any particular communication remains at the full discretion of each expert, in line with their mandate.”
According to Dr. Shelly Aviv Yeini, the former head of the international law department at the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, Edwards and the United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Pramila Patten, were among a small number of UN officials who meaningfully engaged with hostage families after the terror attacks. Individuals within the Office of the Secretary-General reached out later in the war.
Aviv Yeini told the Forward that her group and the International Jewish Lawyers Organization provided Edwards with a report that informed Edwards’ later work. Edwards published a report determining that the families of hostages should also be recognized as direct victims of torture and hosted an event in Geneva alongside the forum to present and discuss those findings.
“I think she was very brave, acknowledging the families and defending us in a time when it wasn’t so easy,” said Yeini.
Adam Wagner, who spoke at the event and represented hostages with British ties taken by Hamas, told Edwards that she was “the only UN official” whom hostage families felt “ever reached out to them or did anything for them.”
Edwards’ position at the UN, like those of all other UN rapporteurs, is unpaid. As a part of her work, she is able to go on one official visit to a country for the purpose of investigating allegations of torture per year. Edwards says she supplemented this with several other trips, which she funded herself. In December 2024, she embarked on a self-funded trip to Israel to investigate the Oct. 7 atrocities, during which she visited southern Israel, including kibbutzim that had been decimated by Hamas, and spoke with victims and hostage families, among others.
Edwards said at the talk that she believes she was the only UN special rapporteur to request access to the video compilation assembled by Israeli authorities to personally review footage from the Oct. 7 attacks. According to Yeini, Edwards met repeatedly with hostage families, visited attack sites, and reviewed evidence firsthand.
Edwards told the Forward in a statement that the role of independent experts is “to document violations wherever they occur and regardless of the identity of the victims or the perpetrators.”
“Our credibility depends on maintaining public confidence that human rights are applied universally,” she said. “Where people perceive selectivity, double standards or political alignment, confidence is weakened.”
The post ‘There was a campaign’: UN torture official says colleagues tried to block her letter documenting Oct. 7 atrocities appeared first on The Forward.
