Yossel had known enough trials for a lifetime by the time he reached the Netherlands with his family. He was born in Siedlce, Poland, where roughly half the town inhabitants were Jews like him. The town council condemned and hanged his father Meir in place of a Communist cousin when Yossel was ten. As the firstborn son, this calamity meant the end of all formal schooling and the beginning of supporting his family.

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He was in his teens when the First World War rocked Europe. The Polish Army conscripted every young man in the country, but Jewish men had good reasons to try and dodge the particularly harsh fate awaiting them in the profoundly anti-Semitic military. Yossel did not hesitate.

A local vet or farmworker had scraped a horse disease onto some type of plaster. Yossel was supposed to apply this plaster all over his head. The man promised his family that the awful skin condition this triggered would last just long enough for the draft board to dismiss him. This “treatment” was so painful that the sixteen-year-old Yossel cried in his mother’s lap. The draft board did dismiss him, but the infection did not pass as the man had claimed. He suffered from hair loss and constant abscesses on his scalp for many months. Just when his family was sure this agony was permanent, the abscesses finally cleared up. He would remain bald for the rest of his life, but at least he had been saved.

The Second World War apruptly cut him off from his family two decades later. He had been traveling on business in France when Nazi Germany invaded The Netherlands in May 1940 and got stuck behind borders. One day, the Gestapo came to the countryside village he stayed at and began rounding up the local Jews. Amid the noise and confusion of the crowd pouring into the local police station, Yossel ran up the stairs and locked himself in a bathroom. Climbing up on the toilet, he worked his way out of the high, narrow window and dropped several stories into the surrounding tall grass. He lay there for hours until nightfall, when he could finally run off into the dark to look for help, which he found in nearby farmers.

After the war, Yossel learned from his daughter that the Nazis had killed his wife and only son in Sobibor. Still, he remarried after these earth-shattering losses and had another daughter: my grandmother’s half-sister, Heleen.

I never knew my great-grandfather, but my mother and uncles remember him as a man of rare intelligence, creativity, and public conscience, writing endless letters to newspapers on the societal issues of the day. For all the heaviest blows life can deal, he loved Judaism, and, especially in his later years, treasured his religious family life.

The far-reaching implications of my great-grandfather’s extraordinary life are especially poignant today. The notion of trauma, however great or small the event that led to it, has never been bigger in popular culture (which really deserves its own post, but I digress.) Part of the hyperfocus of trauma extends to what psychologists call intergenerational trauma: the idea that there is effectively a chain of pain running down from previous generations to the next. Psychology researchers are also doing fascinating work on epigenetics: the notion that trauma modifies genetic expression, so that what passes down is not only the mind’s inheritance but the body’s.

Given how often the course of Jewish history has run to tragedy more often than not, it’s easy to conclude that the Jewish load is too heavy to bear. Tonight and tomorrow are the 9th of Av, the saddest day of the Jewish calendar. It primarily marks the destruction of both Holy Temples (in 587/586 BCE and 70 CE respectively), but Jewish history recognizes it as a day of calamity throughout the ages. Other disasters that occurred on this date are: the Jewish expulsion from England (1290), the Jewish expulsion from Spain (1492), and the beginning of the Warsaw Ghetto liquidation (1942). This is not an exhaustive list.

I have seen intergenerational drama play out across different Jewish families and generations given that I grew up in the Dutch post-Holocaust landscape of the 1990s and 2000s. The load we carry is heavy when we opt into feeling the weight. It’s arguably never been heavier than it has been in 80 years post-October 7th, 2023. And yet, I think it’s crucial to pay attention to the flip side of intergenerational trauma: that is, intergenerational strength. We desperately need it in the post-October 7th moment. We see so-called anti-Zionism making the lives of so many Jews around the world exponentially more difficult and vulnerable. That is hard enough in itself, but Jews will and do suffer when their Jewish background gets filtered through the lens of suffering and hardship alone.

A famous Talmudic story recounts a group of rabbis visiting the ruins of Jerusalem after the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE. Rabbi Akiva sees a fox emerge from where the Holy of Holies stood—a lowly animal trespassing on a place so sacred only the High Priest could enter it once a year, on Yom Kippur. Rabbi Akiva breaks out in laughter at this terrible juxtaposition, much to the distress of the other rabbis.

He then explains that, witnessing the fulfillment of the prophecy of Jerusalem’s destruction, he now has complete faith in the yet-unfulfilled optimistic prophecy: the rebuilding of Jerusalem. The others, the text records, take comfort in Rabbi Akiva’s words.

Yossel survived extreme physical and emotional trauma in his life. It did not get him down because he was hardwired for survival. There is no survival without hope in humans. Yossel saw many of his earlier lives destroyed by evil hands, but it did not stop him from having faith in a better future. The destruction he witnessed did not deter him to rebuild.

I am his great-granddaughter living in Jerusalem. I feel strong, knowing that I have Yossel’s blood coursing through my veins. The Jews of this generation can’t cower before our enemies. We, like the rabbis of the Talmud, go up to the mountain and bear witness to what was done to us, especially now.

We look our foxes in the eye, and then we laugh.

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Rachel, the modern-day Jewish matriarch, appears to live in sepia tones. Her clothes for media appearances are almost exclusively pale neutrals. Her hollow cheekbones are makeup-free and her salt-and-pepper hair is perennially up. Physically, she is a whisper of a woman, her arms and shoulders birdlike in their fragility. So stunningly forceful, then, is her message. Every word she says takes flight. Every sentence lives.

Rachel writes:

“Since this collision, I have discovered suffering is all the same. Same, same. The set design of how things unfold for each of us varies, but loss is loss. So your suffering is like mine.

And mine is like yours. Mine has been quite public, but otherwise the same.

---

How do we miss someone forever? I stared at the fat cyprus tree towering directly in front of me during the memorial to Hersh, and kept asking that question in a loop in my head. How do we do this forever? This missing? How do we do this forever? How do we do this forever?”

I was in awe of Rachel’s capacity for leaning into the ever-elusive concepts of collective humanity and resilience since she first came to be in the public eye. (One of her key slogans, even after everything that happened, is: “Hope is mandatory”.) Unfortunately, the questions she raises in her book have become acute for me over the past month and a half. My otherwise strong and healthy father suffered a completely unexpected heart attack on March 19th. He passed away ten days later, at the age of 65. My mom and three younger siblings had to bury him on a bright Dutch spring day.

I had known, loved and lost my grandparents before him, but they had left this world in their nineties. Their deaths were sad, but far from tragic, leaving a rich and very peopled legacy behind them. My dad wasn’t even retired and had biked for an hour and a half on the day his heart stopped.

Losing a parent means that part of the psychological foundation of your life shifts in an utterly foreign direction. One of the cornerstones of the proverbial building no longer holds. I was an adult living on a different continent, but I was always going to be my dad’s big girl. I was a 30-year-old, fairly fresh immigrant to Israel who was still in the throes of maintaining a life and career in this beautiful, volatile country. I still am all of those things, but now I’m an orphan, too. One half of the couple that created me no longer exists in the physical realm. His presence belongs only to my past. Whatever the future holds, it will not contain him in it. My dad will not attend my wedding, nor will he meet my future children—his descendants. I am blessed with a supportive network of friends, but they are all fortunate to have both parents. I find that losing a parent young is an additional blow to my identity because my peers typically have no idea of what it entails. Judaism also prescribes mourning practices that last for a year after a parent’s passing, which makes me the resident buzz kill of my friend group. I can’t, for example, go to concerts or any event with live music, of which there are many in the bustling city of Jerusalem. My mourning marks me as a different kind of person until the loss is no longer fresh, which is ultimately comforting instead of restrictive. It effectively means that I don’t have to fake joy or cheer with, and for, other people. Through these restrictions, Judaism acknowledges that coming back to a sense of uncomplicated happiness takes time.

Nothing could have prepared me for the experience of losing my dad, especially because there was no buildup to the event. The boundaries between the loss and me are elastic. Everything and nothing in my life is the same. To quote Rachel again: “I am cooking slowly, boiling away, evaporating. Changing. And freezing solid. All at the same time. Someone call a physicist.” Grief is so much more surprising than I could have imagined. I miss my dad and I realize he’s dead once my head hits my pillow at night. I go grocery shopping and a friend comes over for dinner the next day. The day after, I joke around with my coworkers and resent the fact that I can’t call my dad about anything ever again.

Still, I am no Rachel, who has suffered the cruelest loss any mortal on this planet can endure: the loss of a child. A child that Hamas chose to murder in cold blood after nearly a year of deprivation, torture and imprisonment. I cannot compare myself to Rachel in good faith, but it gives me strength that someone who is grieving on this magnitude seeks to break down the boundaries of individual suffering. That, even when life dealt her the harshest hand possible, she struggles towards a higher perspective and meaning, even when she acknowledges that she will never transcend the loss of her son. Her book is one about “four things in this order: love and pain and pain and love”.

I hope Rachel can take some solace in the fact that Hersh was a hero in his own right, doing his best to offer comfort and inspiration to his fellow hostages in hell. She has spoken before about ex-hostage Or Levy’s account of meeting Hersh after their abduction. He described how Hersh quoted Viktor Frankl’s philosophy from Man’s Search for Meaning, telling him that “when you have a why, you can bear any how”. When We See You Again embodies the struggling towards a “why”. Rachel wrote it because she saw no other way out from under her burden: “The weight of the suffering and the pain was buckling. I couldn’t shoulder it anymore, and I started to write.”

As an advocate, she has already been a lifeline for Jews and Israelis worldwide in the trauma of October 7th and its almost three-year long aftermath. Her new book, crushing as it is, reflects her will to make meaning of what happened to her and her family without giving up on the beauty of the connection she still has with Hersh. As she told Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes: “Maybe, grief is actually just this precious badge of love that you wear because someone has died and your love is continuing to grow.” That interview came out two weeks after my dad’s funeral. Her observation took my breath away. My grief is my badge of love. It always will be. My heart reaches out to Rachel—from below my badge to hers.

It’s 1881 and a young woman from a well-to-do Jewish family is losing her mind. Her name: Bertha Pappenheim.

Bertha, the Patient

She is not the only one. By then, the medical establishment had already diagnosed countless Victorian-era women across the continent with “wandering womb” or the condition of hysteria, that is, the top trending mental illness du jour. This 21-year-old young woman seems to suffer from a particularly severe case: hallucinations, mood swings, and aphasic episodes during which she can only speak English instead of her native German. Meanwhile, her father is dying. She spends whatever time and energy she has on his care.

That summer, her mother can’t bear the situation at home any longer and enlists a local physician to help her suffering daughter: Dr. Josef Breuer. Young Bertha Pappenheim begins her treatment with Dr. Breuer under the pseudonym “Anna O.”

Surprisingly, Anna O. begins to feel better because of what she terms “the talking cure”1: she realizes that her debilitating symptoms improve when she talks to Breuer about her experiences. For the first time in her life, she is able to express herself openly, shedding the stifling restrictions imposed on all young women of good breeding. Breuer documents everything he does in order to help her. He focuses especifically on the impact of her relating painful memories from her past, often under hypnosis. Anna O.’s case notes become the foundation of Studies on Hysteria (1895) co-written by Breuer and another Viennese physician, a man named Sigmund Freud. Her story provides the early data points of what would become Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of trauma, the unconscious and repression.

Bertha Pappenheim/Anna O. was the first premodern psychotherapy patient. She helped pioneer the field of psychoanalysis. If she hadn’t observed and communicated how talking through her pain eased the burden, we don’t know what modern-day therapy would look like. As Anna O., she is barely a footnote in the psychology literature people read nowadays. However, the rest of her incredible life and contributions deserve to be known even if she had never been “Anna O.” in the first place. Unfortunately, the rest of her adult life gets even less attention.

Bertha, The Activist

Breuer had already seen that Pappenheim possessed “a powerful intellect” and “great poetic and imaginative gifts, which were under the control of a sharp and critical common sense”, “energetic, tenacious and persistent” willpower, and “sympathetic kindness” toward people in need.2 Still, it takes her several more years of frequent hospitalization in European sanatoria to find her true calling: saving the lives of marginalized and underprivileged Jewish women and their children.

In 1888, Pappenheim moves to Frankfurt am Main with her mother. She is twenty-nine and single—an all-but-doomed spinster. She starts working at a soup kitchen in the early 1890s that caters primarily to Eastern European refugees, many of them pogrom survivors. These Jewish survivors and Bertha shared a religion and ethnicity. Still, the clash between their respective worlds could not have been greater.

Pappenheim had had her fair share of suffering, but she had also always enjoyed the privileges of her sheltered life as a so-called höhere Tochter (lit. “higher daughter): an upper-middle-class young woman with plenty of free time and a broad cultural horizon. She had baffled Breuer with her knowledge of Shakespeare and fluency in English, Italian, and French despite being forced to quit formal education at sixteen. She might as well have lived on a different planet from the Eastern European Jews that she saw coming through the doors. They had been exiled from their homes, survived hunger, and witnessed the gruesome murder and rape of their loved ones in pogroms. Pappenheim’s first-hand encounter with Eastern European Jews who had survived under such harrowing circumstances would permanently alter her life trajectory.

Her social work focus increasingly turns to the women. After giving a lecture at a convention of the Israelitischer Hilfsverein (Israelite Women's Aid Association) in 1901, Pappenheim becomes the founder of the organization that was later known as the Weibliche Fürsorge, or Women’s Relief, which she intends as a modern social work organization for women and by women. This is not revolutionary in itself. Social work is a socially acceptable pursuit for single middle-class women at the time, with it being an extension of “women’s natural child-rearing functions”3 in the public perception. However, Pappenheim also engaged closely with the women’s movement in her early writing alongside her social work. The Israelite Orphanage for Girls in Frankfurt hired her as substitute housemother in 1895, a role she would stay in for twelve years. By 1899, she published a play entitled Women’s Rights and a German translation of Mary Wollstonecraft’s proto-feminist A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792). The orphanage provided Pappenheim’s charges with solid vocational training (usually as nurses and educators) for a better, self-sufficient future.

It is during her time as housemother and leader of the orphanage that Pappenheim involves herself with the ugliest open secret of the community. The polite public opaquely refers to it as “white slavery”, but it really means (Jewish) women’s sex trafficking. This crisis primarily took place in Eastern Europe, the Balkans and South America. Pappenheim was a member of the audience of the first German conference on combating white slavery in 1902—a revolutionary event in itself. She traveled to Galicia (spanning southeast Poland and western Ukraine) for months to investigate the dire state of at-risk Jewish women and girls and their (to Pappenheim’s great horror) Jewish pimps.

She formally became president of the newly established Jüdischer Frauenbund (Jewish Women’s Association) in 1904 and would stay so for 20 years. Soon, 20 percent of all Jewish women in Germany had become members. During this time, she would make more trips across Europe, raising awareness to fight Jewish prostitution in local communities and, with the help of many of her now-grown former charges, set up outposts at railroad stations and ports to meet unaccompanied girls: “Volunteers actually vied with traffickers who frequently procured destitute young women as they disembarked. The Frauenbund offered food, hostels, financial aid and information to female travelers.”4 Pappenheim was not afraid to dive into this highly dangerous underworld, insisting to face the evil rather than cover it up.

Pappenheim would also become an activist against the agunah problem, a Jewish legal issue in which a woman is trapped in a marriage because her husband is either unwilling or unable to give her a get (bill of divorce). Pappenheim, herself an Orthodox woman, petitioned a rabbinical council in Vienna to revise an “outdated interpretation” of Jewish law that forbade these women from remarrying on the basis that it was inhumane and discriminatory towards women whose husbands were missing in wars or pogroms and lead to women into choices like conversion or prostitution. The Jewish world has made great gains to solve this problem (most notably by providing religious-legal prenups), but it unfortunately still exists more than 100 years later. (Pappenheim would roll in her grave.)

Having extensive experience in running a home, she set up and began managing the Frauenbund’s Girl’s Home in Neu-Isenburg, which officially catered to “unmarried Jewish mothers and unstable or delinquent girls.” The home attracted the suspicion and scorn of the German Jewish community, who mistakenly thought Pappenheim’s work condoned this immorality. She ignored the gossip and worked tirelessly to rehabilitate these women and, where necessary, their children, in a materially simple but emotionally and spiritually warm Jewish environment. The home was strictly Shabbat-observant and kosher, with Pappenheim teaching and encouraging women to celebrate their Judaism. She never married or had children, but she created a family-style base for thousands until the Nazis closed Neu-Isenburg in 1938—two years after her passing at 77. Her Frankfurt headstone includes a quote from Psalm 113: “He seats the barren woman of the house as a happy mother of children.”

Most of the women and children Pappenheim saved and rehabilitated did not survive the Holocaust, which is why her legacy is mostly unknown outside German Jewish historical archives. After years of psychological suffering and institutionalization, the formerly troubled daughter of Viennese society was able to transform herself into a fearless pioneer and feminist activist within her community. Let us not forget that this great woman lived.

Iran began its third week of nationwide protests since December 28th, 2025. At this point, we are witnessing a full-blown uprising against the IRGC regime that extends to every Iranian city and province. In turn, the regime has cut off phone lines, the internet and even electricity across major cities in order to try and cover up the (frequently fatal) violence it readily directs at its citizens. (Defenders of the Islamic Republic have no qualms about blindly shooting into civilian crowds.) In short, the regime is committing a massacre against defenseless civilians and doing a very poor job of hiding the atrocities.

However, and surprisingly to many, the public response from the liberal Western world at large doesn’t hold a candle to the level of outrage we have seen over Palestinian suffering in the Israel-Gaza war.

Indeed, the Western court of public opinion largely remains silent. No viral #alleyesontehran social media campaigns, no 💚🤍❤️ emoji sequence in every liberal m/zillennial’s Instagram bio (i.e. representing support for Iran through its flag’s colors, as is still common for pro-Palestinian activists). No Hollywood actors or TikTok influencers crying into their iPhone cameras over Iranian suffering. No mass campus protests. No international boycotts against all things Iranian. I could go on.

This is where I am seeing conservative pro-Israel influencers ask why: Why are the people who were so vocal about Gaza deafeningly silent on Iran? Why aren’t the same passionate activists speaking out against the massacre happening there?

Well, I know something about the why.

A lot of these influencers blame the silence on radical left-wing thought. The media have double standards! It’s all because of “wokeness and antisemitism”! Okay, but how does that actually work? To assign blame without going into why liberal Western media outlets and content creators are guilty of this double standard beyond invoking the shorthand argument of “wokeness” is a little amorphous and reductive for my liking.

In fact, I find it more helpful to specifically blame postcolonialism, a stream of the school of critical theory which, in turn, underpins what we now broadly call woke ideology. A key postcolonialist thinker is the French philosopher and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. His seminal postcolonial work, The Wretched of the Earth, was published in 1961. Here, Fanon argues that violence is the only tool for the colonized to overthrow the colonizer, as violence is the only language the colonizer can understand:

“The starving peasant outside the class system is the first among the exploited to discover that only violence pays. For him there is no compromise, no possible coming to terms; colonization and decolonization are simply a question of relative strength.” — Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, “On Violence” chapter, p. 61 in the Philcox translation.

Now, you may be thinking that Fanon’s vision of violence could have been utilitarian, wherein the lofty end (liberation) justifies the uncomfortable means (violence). Not so:

“At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect.” — The Wretched of the Earth, Constance Farrington (trans.), p. 94 (Grove Press, 1963).

Fanon explicitly turns violence into the key ingredient of the psychological transformation and liberation of the colonized. It is “cleansing”, i.e. spiritually and psychologically beneficial, for the colonized individual engaging in it. Interestingly, Gandhi and his followers had already brought the British to their knees using nonviolent civil disobedience in 1947, but Fanon never mentions him—even though history had already proven that nonviolence had worked to decolonialize India from the most powerful empire on Earth.

I cannot overstate this enough: Fanon was a psychiatrist and still believed that violence was only true remedy for the oppressed, either ignoring or downplaying every evidence to the contrary.

This Fanonian-style thinking is exactly the kind of rhetoric that much of the left has applied to the Israel-Gaza war. If you agree that Israel is the Western colonizer of the native/indigenous Palestinians, the violence and killing that took place on October 7th both justifies and elevates Hamas’s “liberation” project. In other words, Israeli “colonizers” got what they deserved and Hamas killing and brutalizing thousands of Israeli civilians can be readily excused because of the victims’ ties to the colonialist enterprise. (This is also made easy because most Israelis still serve in the IDF and are therefore automatically guilty of being evil, colonial perpetrators.) If you take the argument to Fanon’s logical conclusion, October 7th was outright therapeutic for Gazans. “Globalizing the intifada”, according to this rhetoric, is basically group therapy.

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The reason I can quote someone like Frantz Fanon at all is because he was on the Critical Theory syllabus during my undergrad degree at the University of Amsterdam roughly 10 years ago. I am one of tens of thousands of former humanities students across the Western world who sat in lectures and read materials propagating violent resistance as part of a mainstream degree from a mainstream institution. The bad news? I attended a public university, meaning that the government subsidized this steady flow of indoctrination. The good news? Neither I nor my parents paid tens of thousands of dollars in yearly tuition fees to consume it. (Looking at you, Columbia University!) Judging by the pro-Palestinian campus protests of the last two-plus years (again, Columbia!), it’s safe to conclude that this type and intensity of indoctrination have not improved and possibly worsened since my college days.

Now, keep in mind that Frantz Fanon wasn’t even writing about Palestinians and Jews 60+ years ago. However, my college professors (and countless others) also added thinkers like Edward Said to their curricula. In Orientalism (1978), Said presented the claim that classical Western scholarship on the Middle East (which used to be called Orientalism), is, or at least was, inextricably tied to colonialism and/or imperialism. That's because Orientalism functions as “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient”1. Such an absolutist framework effectively bans Western scholars from offering critique on phenomena that they would find unethical or immoral when researching the Middle East.

In addition to setting up a framework wherein the field of Middle Eastern Studies is inherently oppressive towards its inhabitants, Said, a Jerusalem-born Palestinian, argued that Zionism is a modern-day continuation of Western imperialism. Voilà: we have got ourselves the perfect storm where any critique of the Middle East (aside from Israel) is always oppressive and wrong. The wave of pro-Palestinian encampments is how we’ve seen that play out in younger generations. We also know that these encampments and anti-Israel influencers were widely funded by no other foreign body than Iran.

Meanwhile, the struggle of the Iranian people against the Islamic Republic cannot be shoehorned into a Fanonian vision of decolonization because there are no easily pigeonholed colonizers or colonized here. The radical left cannot bring the lightning rods of race, religion, and ethnicity into the Iranian liberation struggle. After all, this conflict centers on overthrowing the Shiite fundamentalist religious oppression of the Shiite population majority.

Moreover, the prevailing anti-racist, culturally relativist doctrine completely bars liberal Westerners from arguing against Islamic extremism because it is verboten for (white) Western outsiders to judge the inner workings of non-Western foreign countries. (Throwback to Edward Said!) Taking these two ideological factors into consideration, they have truly tied their own hands on the matter of speaking out.

(Lest we forget, the IRGC does place severe restrictions on religious minorities in Iran. Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians all face discrimination and limited religious freedom. Meanwhile, the Bahá’í, Iran’s largest non-Muslim minority, are systematically persecuted and denied education and employment.)

Nowhere does this hypocritical silence become more apparent than it does in the sphere of women’s rights.

Where are the feminists?

I first started identifying as a feminist since I was fifteen, when I became inspired by an older French friend (thanks, Mathilde!). When I use the label today, I do not mean it in the way I see women in my m/zillennial cohort use that term (i.e. intersectionally). These days, I have come to identify with feminist goals in a bare-bones way. That entails a) the goal of full equality and autononomy under the law worldwide and b) advocating for women’s needs in situations where they are inherently more physically or financially vulnerable than men. Think, for example, along the lines of heightened physical and financial protection from abusive domestic partners. Or, in less fortunate regions of the world, the freedom for girls and women to get an education (even when they start menstruating) and to keep their genitals intact from gender-based torture (see also: FGM), no matter the prevailing cultural and religious systems at play.

Still, to identify as a Jewish feminist in 2026 in any way means grappling with disappointment over how the broader women’s movement has reacted or failed to react to the murder, brutalization, rape and kidnapping of Israeli women and girls on October 7th. We can blame old-fashioned antisemitism as the reason for downplaying or outright ignoring Jewish pain and suffering, and we wouldn’t be wrong to do so. However, going back to postcolonialist rhetoric, there is an additional explanation. Namely, if you consider Israel a colonialist enterprise and agree that violence is a necessary or, at least, logical force for the colonized to reclaim freedom and agency from their oppressors, it doesn’t take that much effort to look away from sexual violence as an unfortunate byproduct of the rightful attempt to “decolonialize Palestine”.

Now, Iranian woman are genuinely attempting to self-liberate from a deeply misogynistic regime and most feminists have nothing to say, again. Iranian women have had to live under the yoke of the Islamic Republic for 47 years—nearly half a century of subjugation and violence under the morality police. This is the biggest social protest since those of 2022-2023, which, not coincidentally, began over one woman: 22-year-old Jina Mahsa Ahmani, who died of police brutality after her arrest. Her crime? Improperly wearing the mandatory hijab.

If Western feminists were honest, they would be openly outraged over the regime forcing generations(!) of Iranian women to cover up at the risk of imprisonment, brutal violence and, worse, death, but their silence speaks volumes. Part of the reason has to do with real fear. If these feminists would go on record arguing against the forced hijab, that would alienate them from the liberal mainstream because it means violating the cardinal rule of cultural relativism I mentioned earlier: (white) Westerners cannot judge anyone but themselves, or at least not openly. Doing so will very likely get you canceled, doxxed, or worse.

Additionally, there is serious intellectual dishonesty at play. These feminists know, deep down, that their freedom is only theirs because they live in the West. No rational Western woman would actually like to live covered up under theocratic Islamic rule, but you can’t go out and say that. Conversely, it is completely ideologically safe and even comfortable to criticize Israel because that will only get you brownie points.

For example, as a so-called intersectional feminist (meaning, practically, one who has broadened the focus from injustice against women to other marginalized groups), it might feel great to accuse Israel of “pinkwashing”, which used to be extremely common online (pinkwashing is the notion that Israel is using its progressive LGBT rights to deflect from Palestinian maltreatment). This is a perfectly okay move within the cultural context because, again, Israel is a widely condemned Western colonizer. However, you can’t take a similarly safe shot at Iran knowing that killing gays and lesbians is completely legal in the Islamic Republic. So much for double standards.

Knowing this, I, still a millennial Jewish Zionist feminist, stand openly with the brave women and men fighting Iran’s rule, even when this does not align with an easy left-wing, postcolonialist agenda. Iranian women and Israeli Jewish women have both been betrayed by the forces of cultural relativism in deeply painful ways, and now you know why. I sincerely hope that we can be true allies one day.

May we all see the fall of the IRGC tyranny as soon as possible, and may the people of Iran live free and prosper! Us Israeli supporters are here for them if they need us.

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Then, before most of the world even lit that first Hanukkah candle, we heard about the horrific mass murder on Bondi Beach, Sydney.

The whole Jewish world has been in shock throughout Hanukkah. 15 people dead and dozens injured because they wanted to celebrate a Jewish holiday on the most famous beach in Australia, which normally comes to people’s minds as a place of surfing and sunshine. Really, one of the most laid-back, relaxed countries on Earth—until now. The oldest murder victim was 87-year-old Holocaust survivor Alex Kleytman. He had immigrated to Australia from Ukraine many decades before and did not get to live out his last years in much-deserved peace. Instead, he used his own body to shield and successfully save his wife from the bullet spray. The youngest victim, Matilda (last name withheld), was 10. Her parents, Ukrainian Jews like Alex, had come to Australia before Russia invaded their native country.

All of the heartbreaking and important stories of loss and/or sacrifice from Bondi Beach have been with us during this first week after the killing spree took place. We mourn our people, even in the farthest corners of the earth. We are thankful for the heroism of Ahmed el-Ahmed, who tackled and wrestled the rifle out from terrorist Sajid Akram. We do our best to make this year’s Hanukkah celebrations especially meaningful.

Tonight, the eigth day of Hanukkah, is also known as Zot Hanukkah, which literally means “This is Hanukkah”. It is the last time we light and the only time we light all of the menorah candles, signifying the holiday’s culmination. However, there is another Jewish celebration that historically took place on the eighth day of Hanukkah: Chag HaBanot, or the Festival of Girls/Daughters (Eid Al-Banat in Arabic).

Chag HaBanot used to be celebrated primarily in the community of Djerba, Tunisia, but there are records of women celebrating across other North African communities in Morocco, Libya, and Algeria. Chag HaBanot fell out of fashion when many of the North African communities rebuilt their lives in Israel over the mid-20th century, but there are women now who want to bring it back from obscurity. I, a Dutch Ashkenazi Jew, only learned about this holiday a few years ago, and I’d venture to say it is overwhelmingly unknown today.

The Jewish women of North Africa would, in addition to celebrating the Maccabees’ military victory over the Syrian-Greek army and restoring the Temple, focus on the quintessential female heroine of the holiday: Judith/Yehudit. There are a few versions of this ancient narrative, but the version preserved by Sephardi Jews is that of Yehudit, a young Jewish widow who charms her way into the encampment of Assyrian king Holofernes, gets him drunk, and beheads him with his own sword, thereby saving the Jews of the city of Bethulia. North African Jewish women would take this story and turn into it into a source of uniquely female Jewish strength and bravery, celebrating Jewish women in general and each other with gifts, candy, prayer and singing piyyutim (Jewish liturgical songs).

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On this Chag HaBanot, I want to bring two new Jewish heroines forward: Chaya Dadon and Jessica Rozen, both from Sydney, Australia.

Chaya Dadon is a 14-year-old girl. When the Bondi Beach shooting broke out and everyone, including herself, tried to take cover. Amid the dying and bleeding bodies of fellow congegrants, Chaya heard a cry for help. A mother who had been shot pleaded for someone to save her two children: she was too wounded to shield them herself. Chaya, who was hiding under a bench, jumped out from under it and ran over. When Chaya threw herself on top of the two children, she was shot in the leg seconds later and still refused to budge, “channeling her pain into strength” and saving the children. (Watch her mind-blowing interview here.) Yes, a bespectacled, braces-wearing 14-year-old who’d just graduated eighth grade saw it as her divine mission to risk her own life for two children she never met.

Jessica Rozen, a thirtysomething pregnant woman, was at Bondi with her husband, their two children, and her in-laws. Her husband was with her daughter and her mother-in-law had just taken her son to the bathroom when the first gunshots rang. While frantically looking for her son in the chaos, alone, she saw a child screaming for her mom: "I turned around and saw a little girl screaming for her mum, so I ran towards her. I grabbed her. I moved maybe five more steps, there was a lot of gunfire and then I lay down on top of her, behind some chairs." Jessica stated that she only “did what any mother would do”. Jessica’s family and the young girl she shielded all survived the shooting.

It has been an emotionally fraught Hanukkah, to say the least, leaving Jews across the world even more afraid for their public safety than before. I do not want to negate those fears. If chilled, fun-loving Australia can seemingly become a deadly Jewish murder site overnight (although not actually, according to local Jewish leadership), what is next for the West? The chilling answer is: it’s not looking good. We all have to reckon with the fact that Australia’s most deadly shooting in 30 years was an innocent Jewish beach party. Jews across the world suffered another trauma, and it’s not like we had a shortage over the past two and a half years since October 7th.

As we’re lighting Hanukkah candles for the last time and remember the miracle our ancestors saw, we can now think of the that we have been witness to in our time, to paraphrase of the key blessings (בַּזְּמַן הַזֶּה). We owe it to the heroes and heroines of Hanukkah past and present.

I wish those who are celebrating a wonderful last day of Hanukkah and, hopefully, an inspiring Chag HaBanot. May we all, and especially the community of Sydney, find strength and healing.

And was drawn to Jerusalem,

He says in a pensive voice:

“Amsterdam, Amsterdam.”

Jacob Israël de Haan (1881-1924)

Amsterdam is the only big city I ever lived and felt at home in as an adult before I moved to that other big city of my life, Jerusalem (which is at least its spiritual opposite). I was actually born and raised in the green, straight-laced suburban town of Amstelveen, roughly a ten-minute bike ride (yes!) from the Dutch capital. However, it’s safe to say Amstelveen has not and probably will not inspire any poetry of significance, ever. Suburbs, I think, mostly exist to take away anything that doesn’t reflect an overriding desire to stay within your comfort zone full-time.

Amsterdam, though, is a paradoxical city. It represents almost every kind of vice in the international imagination (see also: prostitution and weed), yet this tranquil atmosphere has a way of bouncing off the still canal waters. It’s a metropolis that doesn’t feel like one. It feels, for lack of a better word, strangely quaint. Or, Amsterdam wants nothing more than to be quaint despite its heady appeal, like an R-Rated Disney World of sorts. “We don’t care what antics you get up to, as long as don’t kill our cozy vibe” has effectively been Amsterdam’s unofficial motto for centuries. However, said vibe is now dead in the (canal) water for the city’s Jews. The city that welcomed the forebears of, say, Spinoza on the condition of not harshing the vibe has again turned on its oldest and most influential minority.

But what about that other, arguably even more famous Amsterdam inhabitant, a certain Anne Frank? Make no mistake: this ubiquitous Holocaust icon was no Dutch teen in her lifetime. She was born in Frankfurt, Germany and arrived in Amsterdam at four years old, but the Frank family became officially stateless when the Nazis took away their German citizenship in 1941. Anne, her sister Margot and her mother Edith perished in Bergen-Belsen without any nationality to their name, let alone the Dutch. Any kind of Dutch appropriation of her as a symbol that somehow reflects positively on the culture is ultimately absurd. And yet, this is how she is informally represented in the city in 2025:

This poster of Anne Frank juxtaposed with Palestinian girl Hind Rajab has been on prominent display in the city center (Rokin St) for almost a year, which is when I saw it first. Hind Rajab died in Gaza in January 2024 after her family’s car came under allegedly Israeli fire. (The Red Crescent accused Israel of deliberately targeting the family. Meanwhile, the IDF claims it had no troops deployed in the area.) Six-year-old Hind quickly became an international symbol of Gazan suffering. The city of Amsterdam requested that the EYE Museum projected her photo for weeks in a gesture of solidarity. This took place after Mayor Femke Halsema stated she’d prefer to “keep the [Israel-Gaza] conflict out of Amsterdam”. Of course, that statement did not apply after her constituents were happy to throw Israelis into the canals in an outright pogrom only two months earlier.

I have not been able to find anyone speaking out against the above poster anywhere, but I find it particularly egregrious within its historical context. Children’s deaths are always tragic, but Israel did not kill young Hind because she was Palestinian. She was a so-called casualty of war, which is terrible enough because war always devastates innocent lives. However, that does not make her a victim of genocide, unlike Anne Frank and unlike what much of the left is saying.

Conversely, Hamas did kill Ariel and Kfir Bibas (five years old and not yet one respectively) because they were Jewish, and with their bare hands no less. If Anne had been born Adi Efraimi in Kibbutz Nir Oz in the 21st century, Hind’s proverbial neighbors would have sent Anne to her death all over again, no questions asked. Had Hind been born in Beit Safafa, Jerusalem instead of Tel al-Hawa, Gaza City, she would have grown up just fine. She would be a bank teller or a pharmacist or a brilliant med student or any profession that (Muslim) Arab Israelis succeed at every day. Not only are Anne and Hind not interchangeable—they never existed on the same plane to begin with.

Yet clearly, there are modern-day Amsterdammers who are happy to deploy the memory of Anne Frank without a trace of embarrassment as a weapon against Israel—the very country that fell victim to antisemitic mass murder on October 7th with, at its root, the same antisemitism that condemned Amsterdam’s Jews to death eighty years before. I know more Dutch Jewish families than I’d like to admit who have taken down their mezuzas in the past two years. When I come visiting wearing a yellow hostage pin on my winter coat, local Jews often see it as “brave” in most non-Jewish spaces. It takes an especially emboldened man to wear a kippah in public and most vanish underneath either baseball or newsboy caps anywhere outside the synagogue.

Even now that the war with Gaza is smoldering more than it is burning, the anti-Israel propaganda voices don’t let up. I took the following pictures a few days ago:

This is on Dam Square, the heart of Amsterdam’s old city. It’s the exact location where last year’s pogrom against Israeli soccer fans broke out. As I took this picture, there was a megaphone blasting the cries of (supposedly) Palestinian babies across the square. The New Church, which stands directly in the background, shows a pinkish “Mokum” banner for its most current exhibit on, of all things, the history of Dutch Jewry in Amsterdam. The name “Mokum”, for those in the know, comes from the Hebrew word makom, literally meaning “place”. Dutch Jews bestowed this loving nickname on the city when it was still kind to them. How are average passersby supposed to square (pun intended) the visuals of a historic exhibit on Jewish Amsterdam (which had roughly 80 percent of its population murdered in the Holocaust) with demonstrations that ratify the pervasive notion of Israelis as bloodthirsty and genocidal? Dara Horn couldn’t have made this stuff up when she wrote People Love Dead Jews back in 2021.

Adding insult to injury, the Netherlands officially pulled out of Eurovision because Israel is joining as usual next year. AVROTROS, the relevant broadcasting station, stated they couldn’t join because the Israeli government is abusing the festival as a “political instrument” because of a promotional campaign on national TV. Fascinating stuff, given that AVROTROS is also state-funded. Do they also consider themselves a political organ for the Dutch government? Is all cultural campaigning on public broadcasting political? If AVROTROS would take issue with Dutch government politics, would they hypothetically (gasp!) boycot themselves? Strangely, I don’t see that happening. The fact is, however, that the more The Netherlands demonizes having ties to Israel at large, the more contemporary Dutch Jews will suffer in the public landscape. No amount of museifying Dutch Jews and their history will change that.

It’s sad to realize that the Amsterdam I knew from high school and college is, I’m sorry to say, no longer there. It will always have a special place in my heart because it has been so foundational in my life, but I can’t say it has my Jewish Zionist back. There is no true freedom of Jewish expression in the city post-October 7th. I miss the quaintness, real or imagined all along, and its abundance of bikes, bridges, and water. May it stay as still and peaceful as it looks.

Still, even as the non-Jewish year slows down, we reflect. It is almost 2026 and our minds can crush under the weight of what has happened if we let it. However, Israel, mercilessly yet also blissfully, has its own rhythm, its own way of keeping everyone moving along without stopping. Time is an illusion here more than anywhere else. One month ago feels like three. Three months ago is basically a year. October 7th, 2023? It was both a lifetime ago and last week. As 2025 rattles to a close and the war is (still!) not yet formally over, I think of Yehuda Amichai. Yes, the poet. He wrote the following poem as a 70-year-old veteran of four wars in 1994. It might be more relevant now than it has ever been:

Not the peace of a cease-fire,
not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb,
but rather
as in the heart when the excitement is over
and you can talk only about a great weariness.
I know that I know how to kill,
that makes me an adult.
And my son plays with a toy gun that knows
how to open and close its eyes and say Mama.
A peace
without the big noise of beating swords into ploughshares,
without words, without
the thud of the heavy rubber stamp: let it be
light, floating, like lazy white foam.
A little rest for the wounds—
who speaks of healing?
(And the howl of the orphans is passed from one generation
to the next, as in a relay race:
the baton never falls.)

Let it come
like wildflowers,
suddenly, because the field
must have it: wildpeace.

Translated by Chana Bloch & Stephen Mitchell. From The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (2015)

We in Israel have to settle for that what Amichai rejects at the beginning of his poem: the “peace” of a cease-fire that is no real peace yet is not war as we have known it, either. I only have to think about the bleary-eyed 12-day Iran War last June. My friends and I would wake up until 1 AM to “catch” the first siren (our overrun systems made going to sleep beforehand impossible) and sleep a few fitful hours at best until the second one of the new day came blaring.

Thank G-d, our nights pass without interruption these days. We are not running to the shelters and we feel free to leave home for school, work and shopping. My next-door bomb shelter, a place I became a lot more familiar with than I would have wanted, has a review on the Jerusalem Post website. (Spoiler alert: the author “highly recommends” it despite the lack of wheelchair accessibility!)

To paraphrase Amichai, we are past the “excitement” of our cease-fire beginning. We may be thankful for not feeling like we live in a war zone at all times. And yet: I and many others are not past our current collective “great weariness”. The rates of anxiety, depression, and PTSD are at an all-time high for active-duty soldiers, reservists, and civilians. Everyone is doing their best under the circumstances, yet this is the dark underbelly of Israel’s famously heralded resilience. A resilience that is by no means hollow, I’ll add: countless Israelis who have suffered through the horrors of war and displacement are picking up the pieces and living reasonably healthy and productive lives every day. However, this picture of heroism isn’t the full one, either.

Then, there are the hostages. We witnessed the miracle of the living (now ex-)hostages being freed from Gaza barely a month and a half ago. At the same time, it is becoming more clear than ever that their suffering still haunts us. “A little rest for the wounds—who speaks of healing?” Amichai asks. I think of Rom Braslavski and his excruciating testimony during his interview with Channel 13 earlier this month. He was the first male hostage to go public with his story of sexual abuse at the hands of his captors. Guy Gilboa-Dalal followed a few weeks later.

Why do so many people feel the pain of the (ex-)hostages so keenly, even without direct or indirect social connections? On the one hand, they take us to the heart of what we can call the Jewish collective spirit. A much-quoted line from the Talmud is that “all Jews are responsible for one another” (Shavuot 39a). Although this line originally appears in a discussion about sin and liability, it has broadly taken on the meaning of Jews feeling responsible for each other’s welfare in modern times.

Especially in Israel, we are effectively always aware of a shared pain. The past few years have continuously confronted us with suffering and deaths that happened to Jews because we are Jewish, and yet this is how people like Rom Braslavski found unimaginable strength. His Judaism was what motivated him and other hostages not to break down. Many became more religious in captivity, rather than abandoning faith. This, I would say, is possible because even the younger generations have a shared collective memory of Jewish intergenerational trauma as well as strength. If we maintain an awareness of how we have suffered through the ages, even recent tragedies will recast us in the role of our ancestors. Our ancestors’ triumphs, then, become ours as well, whether they survived the Spanish Inquisition, the Kishinev pogroms, the Holocaust, or the Farhud (and many other tragedies).

I think another and, from what I’ve seen, unexplored reason for our strong identification with the hostages have to do with what psychologists call parasocial relationships: that is, one-sided emotional connection to people in the public eye. This often happens with actors, influencers, or, in this context, the ex-hostages. Basically, we feel like we know famous people even when we don’t. This is how it was for many of us vis-à-vis the hostages. We were surrounded by their faces on posters everywhere for two years straight. We watched their families advocate for them, sometimes all over the world. I’d venture to say that the more they resembled our story or values, the more heartfelt this connection. Case in point: I, an English-speaking immigrant in Jerusalem, had so many overlapping connections to Hersh Goldberg-Polin and his family that I almost lost sight of the fact that I never met them personally.

The last living hostages are free, and so we will continue to feel in dialogue with them as they keep rebuilding their lives. They will always be public figures, woven into the fabric of our collective emotional landscape. As fate changed their lives forever, so have ours in the aftermath. We have to sit together among the ravages. May we get up from these our scorched fields, thirst quenched, and watch them bloom again. May we finally know wild peace.

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My building is one of so many in Rehavia that will likely undergo demolishment and rebuilding (pinu’i binu’i) at some point in the future. It, too, exists on borrowed time.

I have lived in the neighborhood for about 3 years now. I see tour groups coming through the park next door nearly every Shabbat because I live next to what used to be the president’s State Residence in Israel’s earlier years (see below). The neighborhood still reflects this aura of early statehood glory. It is arguably the birthplace of a modern, secular and educated Israel: lots of Bauhaus-inspired architecture and tree-lined streets intending to be reminiscent of the German “garden suburb” ideal. The Knesset and the Israel Museum, two of the country’s most prestigious institutions, sit almost side-by-side within walking distance behind Gan Sacher, Jerusalem’s equivalent to New York’s Central Park. The European Jewish intellectuals of old were never going to feel more at home anywhere else in their new city. 

One of the neighborhood’s residents was influential poet, scholar and playwright Leah Goldberg (1911-1970), who lived and wrote on Alfasi Street. Its quintessential Rehavia leafiness might have started as the backdrop of one her most famous poems, Pine (1955): 

Here I will not hear the voice of the cuckoo.
Here the tree will not wear a cape of snow.
But it is here in the shade of these pines
my whole childhood reawakens.

The chime of the needles: Once upon a time
I called the snow-space homeland,
and the green ice at the river’s edge -
was the poem’s grammar in a foreign place.

Perhaps only migrating birds know -
suspended between earth and sky -
the heartache of two homelands.

With you I was transplanted twice,
with you, pine trees, I grew -
roots in two disparate landscapes.

From: Collected Poems [Yalkut Shirim]

The poem begins with an outline of difference between the speaker’s childhood landscape and the one in which she finds herself—the cuckoo’s call does not echo in the Holy Land and snowfall, if any, does not stick to the trees here, either. However, it is the presence of the pine trees that transport the speaker back to childhood, no matter how different her new landscape is otherwise. In this image, the pine trees of her childhood vision are the only element in motion, with its “snow-space” and its frozen riverbank. This homeland of the past, I’d argue, is also frozen in the speaker’s memory: the space that used to be called homeland is no longer. Childhood is long over; the speaker cannot travel back to this time and space.

The speaker then pulls away from this vision with a new contemplation: maybe “only migrating birds” know what it is like having “two homelands”. We are now back with her, in the present that she describes in the “here” and now at the poem’s beginning. Still, it becomes clear that the invoked birds are not the only ones who would know something about displacement and the “heartache” having two homelands involves: the speaker, like the pine trees, are transplants that first sprouted somewhere else before they came to their current dwelling place. Leah, the transplant from Köningsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia) to Jerusalem, grew roots in these “two disparate landscapes”: the cold Baltics versus the Middle Eastern desert drought. She is also somewhat of a migratory bird. 

Goldberg's words still resonate. The vivid metaphor reminds me of endless conversations I've had with fellow olim (Israeli immigrants) about their own aliyah journey. The word aliyah, the act of moving to Israel, literally means “ascent”, to go up. The images of birds, flying and coming back home have been intertwined for thousands of years in our canon. G-d Himself uses an aviary metaphor in the Book of Exodus, days after the People of Israel flee the Land of Egypt and enter the desolate Sinai wilderness: “You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to Me.” Of course, the People of Israel would continue traversing the Sinai for another 40 years, airing their grievances to Moses and Aaron virtually every step of the way.

I find it striking that Goldberg, one of the most successful and well-read modern Hebrew poets, bares any nostalgia for the Old Country so openly. Where else can you find that in the Israel of her time? Modern-day olim love to kvetch about whatever is wrong with our chosen homeland. We are, after all, the descendants of the group that pestered Moses and Aaron relentlessly thousands of years ago. Who else but Goldberg, though, betrayed feelings of nostalgia for the Old Country during the first years of the State of Israel, let alone feeling torn in any way between Old and New? Picture David Ben-Gurion waxing poetically about Plónsk, or Golda Meir about Kyiv. Impossible!

For so many of Goldberg’s contemporaries, there was only the New: a New Jew in a new, energetic young country, free from the shackles of slavery, oppression and genocide. The yearning for place, we learn from two-thousand years of Jewish texts, can only be reserved for the Holy Land: “My heart in the East / But the rest of me in the uttermost West—how can I savor this life, even taste what I eat?” Yehuda HaLevi wrote famously in 12th-century Spain. Missing the Old Country is perhaps the last great Zionist taboo to this day.

What do Israeli immigrants make of this in a post-October 7th world? We have sustained so much trauma alongside the sabras (native-born Israelis), yet we have also witnessed all of our respective Old Countries in the West betray its Jews with renewed anti-Semitic vigor. The world feels smaller than ever, and it might continue to feel that way for a long time. In the meantime, I'll look to Leah's example. One of the most celebrated women in Israeli literature and national culture had her moments of split geographical consciousness. I'm sure they won't hurt my journey, either, through those same tree-lined Rehavia streets.