The Boston Workers Circle was expelled from a major Jewish coalition. As a board member, I’m heartbroken — and so proud
The Boston Workers Circle cosponsored a protest demanding a cease-fire in Gaza — a call that fundamentally reflects our Jewish values. Photo by Sylvia Broude
Last week, the Boston Workers Circle, of which I am a board member, co-sponsored a protest with a mix of Jewish and Muslim groups. Our aim: Pressure Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren to join Congressional calls for a cease-fire and de-escalation in Gaza.
For this effort, we were given a choice by the Boston Jewish Community Relations Council, an organization of which we have been a part since 1944: Leave, or be expelled.
The executive director of the Boston JCRC, who delivered the news, took particular issue with our partnership with Jewish Voice for Peace, an explicitly anti-Zionist organization, and the prolific use of the word “genocide” at the rally to describe the Israeli government’s assault on Gaza.
Boston Workers Circle has been part of the Boston JCRC since 1944. The demand for our removal was heartbreaking. But it was also, for me, a moment of pride.
I feel blessed to have found a community that is able to hold complexity — multiple truths and multiple griefs — while not losing sight of the root cause of the current mass deaths of Palestinians and Israelis: The slow, less visible machinations of violence upheld through the daily indignities and brutality of occupation and apartheid.
And while I grieve the gulf between us and so many of our peers in the Jewish world, I am proud to be a member of a Jewish organization that is no stranger to speaking for justice while facing pushback.
Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack left me sick to my stomach over the hideous, cold-blooded murder of more than 1,400 Israelis, and kidnapping of some 229 more. I am the grandchild of two Holocaust survivors. For me, as for many, the communal fear and intergenerational trauma evoked by this slaughter runs deep.
But I am also a Jew who has long organized against the systems of occupation and apartheid that have been administered by the Israeli state over the last several decades. And as I grieve for the Jewish people, I grieve, too, for the Palestinians now experiencing unimaginable terror.
The images coming out of Gaza are beyond horrific. Bodies being stored in ice cream trucks, as morgues have long since been overfilled. Press conferences with doctors, surrounded by walls of piled, limp corpses, pleading for medical supplies to be allowed in. Entire blocks of apartment buildings reduced to rubble, with the elderly, children, and babies being removed. I recently watched a video of a journalist in Gaza, her report punctured by a scream of terror as a massive airstrike bloomed into a fireball behind her. A dreadful thought occurred to me: The IDF is playing Russian Roulette at a population scale, with over 2 million Palestinians still trapped inside Gaza.
By standing for a cease-fire, my colleagues at the Boston Workers Circle and I have lived what is for me a deep Jewish principle, breaking free from the false binary that you either support Jews or support Palestinians. We have recognized that our freedom, dignity, safety and humanity are deeply intertwined.
No honest assessment of the events of Oct. 7 can avoid acknowledging that Palestinians in Gaza have spent years suffering under blockades, home demolitions, routine detainments and detentions without cause, and of course, cycles of “mowing the grass” — a crude euphemism from Israeli intelligence officials describing the strategy of periodic airstrikes to destroy Hamas infrastructure with little regard to the inevitable killing of Palestinians civilians.
Since Hamas’ attack, Israeli officials have been explicit about their intention to kill Palestinians en masse. Israel’s defense minister ordered a total and complete siege on Gaza, saying that Israel is fighting “human animals.” An Israeli defense official told the press: “Gaza will eventually turn into a city of tents. There will be no buildings.”
An Israeli member of the Knesset openly called for a second Nakba, referring to the mass expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians in 1948. “Right now, one goal: Nakba!” he wrote on X (formerly Twitter). “A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of ’48.”
The actions of Israel’s government and military have, thus far, backed up the talk. Until a few days ago, when a trickle of humanitarian aid began to enter through the Rafah crossing with Egypt, Gaza has experienced a severe dearth of access to food, water, fuel and electricity due to the Israeli siege. On Thursday, the head of UNRWA said that according to the United Nations’ agency for Palestinian refugees’ calculations, Gaza had about two days worth of supplies left, after which the medical system will completely collapse.
To describe the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza — more than 7,000 deaths have been reported to date, nearly half children — in any softer terms than the massacre by Hamas, which claimed far fewer lives, is an act of intellectual dishonesty and moral emptiness.
I have seen that dishonesty and emptiness in too much of my extended Jewish community.
I have witnessed a jingoistic lining up behind the state of Israel, with Palestinian deaths described as a necessary sacrifice to protect Jews.
I have seen blame chillingly placed upon the dead themselves — for not moving south quickly enough, for squandering foreign aid they could have used to build bomb shelters, for not doing enough to oppose Hamas, for simply existing in Gaza.
Yes, there were parts of the rally that the Boston Workers Circle co-sponsored that made me uncomfortable. I worried that not everyone at the rally shared the same nuance, holding space for the safety and security of all people.
And I have been frustrated by parts of the left’s response to the war, like graphics and posters asking “Do you believe in decolonization as an academic theory or a tangible process?” That bitterly flippant message and its ilk obscure the fact that most people sharing it are looking to score points while safely at home behind their keyboards. The vast majority of them, in the U.S., are also settlers: living on stolen land, no less complicit in colonization, nor more deserving of safety, than citizens of Israel.
But when chants of “cease-fire now!” were the loudest of the night, the rest is secondary. Decades of occupation and military “solutions” have failed to bring security to anyone in Israel, Gaza or the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and have over time allowed occupation and apartheid to harden into permanent systems of control and daily violence against Palestinians. As the death toll rapidly mounts, it is time to look for another way.
Jewish institutions have a responsibility to speak this truth. So far, the Boston JCRC has not, communicating instead about “unwavering support for Israel’s right to defend its citizens,” with only passing mentions of Islamophobia alongside antisemitism. In that sense, they forfeit the legitimacy to claim to speak for the Jewish community in Boston.
As a Jew, I refuse to allow my identity be used to justify a hierarchy of human life that degrades Palestinian civilians as necessary “collateral damage.” The urgency of this moment demands neither perfection nor purity, but rather action. We must be united by a commitment to justice, and knowledge that safety for the Jewish people cannot come at the expense of safety for others. In fact, it is deeply intertwined with freedom and liberation of all people.
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning journalism this Passover.
In this age of misinformation, our work is needed like never before. We report on the news that matters most to American Jews, driven by truth, not ideology.
At a time when newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall. That means for the first time in our 126-year history, Forward journalism is free to everyone, everywhere. With an ongoing war, rising antisemitism, and a flood of disinformation that may affect the upcoming election, we believe that free and open access to Jewish journalism is imperative.
Readers like you make it all possible. Right now, we’re in the middle of our Passover Pledge Drive and we still need 300 people to step up and make a gift to sustain our trustworthy, independent journalism.
Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
Only 300 more gifts needed by April 30
