When Speaking Up Means Being Shut Out

On the morning of October 7, 2023, as families celebrated the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, Hamas launched a brutal, coordinated assault on Israel. Over 1,200 people were murdered in their homes, in their beds, at a music festival. More than 240 were dragged across the border into Gaza — hostages, many of whom remain in unimaginable conditions to this day.

The horror wasn’t confined to the battlefield. In the hours and days that followed, a coordinated information operations onslaught hit Western campuses and progressive spaces. “Resistance” was lauded. Posters of kidnapped children were torn down. Conversations about colonialism and oppression replaced any acknowledgment of the atrocities that had just taken place. Before the world could mourn (or even make sense of what had happened) a narrative had already taken hold.

Many progressives still fail to recognize this dual assault — the physical attack on Israeli civilians and the psychological campaign that followed. It wasn’t spontaneous. It was planned by Hamas in advance. And its success has left many in the Jewish community reeling — not just from loss, but from isolation in spaces they once considered home.

Rewriting History, Erasing Identity

Much of the discourse has centered around portraying Israel as a Western colonial invention — white Europeans oppressing brown people. But this framing erases not just historical truth, but living memory. Jews have lived in the land of Israel continuously for nearly 3,000 years — through conquest, diaspora, and return. The connection is not a political claim. It is cultural, ancestral, and spiritual.

What’s more, nearly half of Israel’s Jewish population descends from Jews expelled from countries in North Africa and the Middle East — Jews who are black and brown, indigenous to the region, and whose communities were violently dismantled. These refugees were absorbed into Israel without international aid, fanfare, or endless media coverage.

To frame Israel solely through the lens of European colonialism is to erase these Jews entirely — to deny their trauma, their existence, and their belonging. It flattens an incredibly complex history into a simplistic binary and weaponizes identity politics in service of a lie.

Omissions That Distort the Truth

When conversations focus only on suffering in Gaza — without mention of October 7, the hostages, or Hamas’s reign of terror over Palestinians themselves — it becomes impossible for the Jewish community to feel seen, heard, or safe. The grief of October 7 isn’t historical. It’s ongoing. And yet it is often pushed aside as inconvenient.

This selective framing paints Israel as the aggressor — an unprovoked villain. But it was Hamas who broke the ceasefire. It is Hamas who still holds civilians hostage. It is Hamas who kills Palestinian protestors and uses their own people as human shields. That matters. Context matters.

When someone tries to acknowledge this and they are told they’re “justifying war crimes,” the conversation ends. But when people mourn Gaza without any reference to how we got here, to the horror that preceded it, they too are dismissing pain. They too are silencing grief. And Jews feel that erasure deeply.

Suppression Disguised as Solidarity

Progressive spaces have taught us to react with moral urgency against racism, sexism, homophobia, and bigotry. But over time, that instinct has hardened into something reflexive and absolutist. Emotional reactivity now often replaces any thought or analysis.

People respond to political disagreement as if it’s personal trauma. Discomfort becomes harm. Dissent becomes abuse. And so rather than engaging with nuance, many simply shout others down. The result isn’t justice — it’s groupthink, where only certain types of pain are valid.

In this climate, when Jews or their allies try to speak, to explain, to contextualize, or to grieve they are often treated not as victims, but as oppressors. That reversal isn’t just painful. It’s alienating. And it’s driving people away from the very movements they helped build.

Watching Him Grow Quiet in the Crowd

I’m not Jewish. But my partner is. I’ve watched him sit quietly in spaces he once cherished (spaces where he showed up, spoke out, gave back) and feel completely unwelcome. I’ve seen the pain on his face as people he once stood beside refuse to even acknowledge his community’s trauma.

He grew up like so many Jews I now know — shaped by stories passed down through generations. His grandmother was the first in her family born in America. Her mother arrived pregnant, after being pushed from place to place across Eastern Europe as pogroms and persecution forced Jews to keep moving. From that lineage came a quiet warning: Always be ready. Never fully trust safety. The world can shift overnight. What once felt like a distant echo of a darker time now feels chillingly present.

The Jewish community is not imagining this. When people tear down hostage posters, erase the massacre that started this war, or rage at anyone who mentions Hamas, it confirms a deep, ancestral fear — that even in spaces committed to justice, Jews will always be outsiders. That their pain will always be inconvenient. And that one day, the world will look away again.

Progressive Values Lost in the Noise

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is exposing deep fault lines within progressive movements. Once vibrant and inclusive coalitions have become brittle — fractured by dogma, moral panic, and a growing intolerance for dissent. The space for disagreement is vanishing, replaced by ideological purity tests.

In this environment, anti-Jewish hate speech is becoming disturbingly normalized. Tropes about Jewish wealth, power, and influence (once recognized as dangerous antisemitism) now circulate freely in progressive spaces under the guise of anti-Zionism or social critique. People who raise concerns are accused of bad faith or silenced altogether. The very stereotypes that fueled centuries of persecution are being repackaged and accepted without question.

Jewish voices are being labeled as racists, colonizers, or oppressors — not because of what they believe or do, but because of who they are. Activists who’ve spent their lives fighting injustice are now told they don’t belong unless they disavow their identity, their grief, and their history.

If progressive spaces want to survive and remain true to their foundational values, they must make room for complexity. They must reject bigotry in all its forms, including antisemitism. They must hold space for Jewish pain, acknowledge historical truth, and abandon the absolutism that shuts down honest dialogue. Because if they don’t, they won’t just alienate the Jewish community. They’ll lose the moral clarity that gave these movements their power and purpose.

(Author’s Note: This piece has been updated to more accurately reflect my partner’s family history — a legacy shaped by generations of displacement across Eastern Europe and a deep-rooted awareness of how quickly the world can shift.)