I teach Jewish history in Boulder. Is my community taking the wrong lessons from Sunday’s attack?
Jumping to blame ‘rhetoric’ can make it harder for us to understand the phenomena behind violence
An Israeli flag is fixed to a street sign near Pearl Street in Boulder, Colorado, on the scene of a Sunday attack on demonstrators calling for the release of Israeli hostages held in Gaza. Photo by Eli Imadali/AFP
I was slated to be part of a panel discussion at my Boulder, Colorado, synagogue, Bonai Shalom, on June 1, the first night of Shavuot. The subject: “Building a New Language for Israel / Palestine After Oct. 7.” The goal: To find “unity within disunity,” and offer perspectives on how to work within, or move past, our current contentious political climate.
Instead, we gathered to pray after 12 Jews, including several elderly members of my synagogue, were set on fire in a horrific attack on Boulder’s pedestrian mall while drawing attention to the Israeli hostages still held by Hamas in Gaza — an attack that fueled the troubling dynamic our panel had planned to discuss.
The refrain I have heard, over and over since the attack, is one that made me deeply uneasy: It’s the rhetoric. The divisive, hateful rhetoric that has characterized public conversations in Boulder caused this horrific event. But by flattening our understanding of why one man chose to commit an act of unspeakable violence, we risk making it harder — not easier — to talk to, rather than past, one another.
It’s true that in Boulder, like much of the United States, rhetoric around Israel and Palestinians has become painfully politically charged.
Our city council meetings have been sites of pro-Palestinian protests, which have become increasingly disruptive. After a resolution that would have stated the council’s support for a ceasefire failed, protesters, several of whom are also Jews, have come to each meeting. Resolutions have been put forward to condemn antisemitism (passed) and to condemn Islamophobia (failed). Some protesters have called Tara Winer, a Boulder city councilmember who was meant to speak on the same Bonai Shalom panel as me, a “Jewish supremacist.”
But there is, at least yet, no evidence that the person who carried out the attack had any relationship to any kind of pro-Palestinian protest group. So why automatically connect him to those movements?
As a recent immigrant from Egypt, the suspect likely had a completely different set of experiences informing his hatred than the very different sentiments possessed by American protesters. And in fact, pro-Palestinian leaders broadly condemned the attack, likely understanding it will only harm the cause of Palestinians in the U.S.
In addition, the so-called rhetoric in Boulder has often been poisonous against those who speak about the plight of the Palestinians — not just against those who express support for Israel.
As someone who teaches Jewish, Israeli, Palestinian and Middle Eastern history at the University of Colorado Boulder, and who has spoken about these issues publicly, I have been called an antisemite and anti-Israel, or accused of not being pro-Israel “enough.” I’ve been told that my work has promoted the blood libel, and that I myself was essentially the KKK.
All this, despite the fact that I have never attended any protests; participated in any pro-Palestinian or Jewish leftist groups; supported the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement; or publicly used the words “genocide,” “apartheid,” or even “settler colonialism” to refer to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Taishya Adams, another Boulder city councilmember, faced criticism for talking about the struggles faced by Palestinians after a visit to Boulder’s sister city, Nablus, in the occupied West Bank, but not mentioning a terror attack that had recently killed a pregnant Jewish-Israeli mother in the same area. Yet I fear these same critics would not expect to discuss the plight of Palestinians when mentioning the hostages or their own visits to Israel.
I worry about what this kind of nuance-free thinking — either you are for my side, and good, or against my side, and bad — will do to our communities. My community is grieving and scared, but if we don’t seek to understand what actually happened, we will find ourselves in an environment of even deeper terror.
I worry that we can no longer discuss the history of Israel, Palestine or Palestinians without fear of retaliation, in any way or in any format.
I worry that many on the right are already using this attack to justify arguments to crack down on advocacy to save Palestinians and for further actions against universities. As so many others have noted, the defunding of universities sets Jews up as a scapegoat for the loss of funds for everything from Holocaust studies to breast cancer research.
Jews, like all Americans, will suffer in direct and indirect ways for years because of these funding cuts.
I worry that antisemitism will only become more profoundly weaponized by President Donald Trump’s administration in the wake of this attack. The immigration status of the perpetrator, whose visa had expired, is a boon to xenophobia. Trump has already used Sunday’s terror to issue a call to deport more people, and the attacker’s family has been taken into ICE custody.
I worry that we — my community members and I — will continue to face danger because antisemites mistake the actions of an illiberal country for the work of all Jews. As I tell my students, it is an antisemitic trope to blame Jews worldwide for Israel’s actions, based on the idea of dual loyalty: that Jews can only be loyal to each other, never to the countries in which they live.
Yet Israel and its allies in the U.S. both tend to exacerbate this dynamic, by claiming Israel acts in the name of the Jewish people — meaning however we feel, whatever we do, we will be blamed for Israel’s actions.
I worry more will suffer the fates of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim — the couple, both employees of the Israeli Embassy, murdered in Washington, D.C., in late May — and Wadee Alfayoumi — a 6-year-old boy murdered in Chicago in 2023 — all of whom lost their lives because of the toxicity embedded in how we talk about Israel and Palestinians. Simultaneously, I worry that our focus on discourse distorts our perspective, making us pay less attention to actual violence, including that Israel is committing in Gaza amid the ongoing war.
I hope my community will never face an attack like this again. And I hope, too, that we will avoid becoming political pawns, for Israel’s government or for the current administration. The Middle East is still experiencing devastating violence; while it does, Jews and Palestinians here in the U.S. will both face unpredictable and complicated threats.
To help combat them, we must stop making assumptions about one another. Doing so means finding a space to listen — to do the nuanced work that moments like this can endanger, in our classrooms, our communities, and our country.
