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We come to you first and foremost as Jews. Not just Jews in name, but as people who actively choose Judaism; people who hold our Judaism dear; who live our lives according to our understanding of Jewish values, celebrate Shabbat with our families, and raise our children to be Jewish. We grieved for those murdered and abducted on October 7, and our hearts break still for the hostages who remain in captivity.

We come to you not in spite of our Judaism but because of it. Because we share a history of oppression, expulsion, pogroms, ghettos, and genocide. We come to you because you taught us to stand for “Never Again,” and now we ask you to stand with us or for exactly that.

Later, when the people of Gaza are re-fed, we can take the time to unpack our hurt. When bodies are buried and opportunistic infections are scabbed over we can take the time to discuss when and where lines were crossed. When the air in Gaza no longer smells of smoke and rot, we can parse contemporary antisemitism and Zionism. We cannot change what has happened. We cannot rewrite history or relitigate the administration of Mandatory Palestine. But we do have power over what we say and do today, and what is said and done tomorrow. We can save human lives. 

In the nearly two years since Hamas’s attacks in 2023, Gaza has been bombarded by an offensive that has leveled cities, displaced millions, and killed more Palestinian children than Hamas militants. Today, even as Gaza has been largely reduced to rubble and its inhabitants facing famine and worse, Israel’s right-wing government accelerates the brutality, freely killing thousands who pose no credible threat and emboldening settler violence and land grabs in the West Bank.

As Jews, we were encouraged to see ourselves in these innocent victims. Now, though, these atrocities are being perpetrated with the tacit and sometimes explicit approval of our own Jewish leaders.

This cannot continue. 

We need you to speak up. Say this is wrong, call for an end to the war, to the blockade, to the occupation; call for aid to flow. Say you’re unsure, that you’re reconsidering, that horrible things have happened in our names, and we will not simply stand by. 

Rabbi Jill Jacobs recently wrote an OpEd for The Forward titled, “Gaza is Starving. Where are American Jewish Leaders?” The subheader reads, “Privately, Jewish lay leaders are anguished over Gaza. Publicly, they fear being labelled antisemitic,” and we hope that this is true. We hope that our leadership actually is quietly anguished because the alternative — that they are not in fact distraught by this — would be a stunning moral collapse.

But it is not enough to be privately anguished. It is an abdication. Jewish leaders have the power to rekindle a sense of Jewish morality and stem the public support Israel relies on to continue the carnage. 

We ask you to do this not only for the sake of Palestinians but for Jews, for whose sake this carnage is ostensibly perpetrated. Onlookers are angry with Israel, and they’re right to be. Cries of antisemitism ring hollow when they are preceded by justification for killing starving children. Astute listeners know that when we tell them that opposition to these horrors is anti-Jewish, that must therefore mean that the horrors themselves are Jewish.

The continued onslaught in Gaza is metastasizing through our diaspora and it will consume us. 

We, the undersigned, call on you to join us in taking the path we were taught was the Jewish path. We beg you to speak up. Speak out against the carnage. Show the world that this devastation is not Jewish, bring humanity back to Judaism, and be a force to stop this killing and pursue a true path to peace.

Stand with us. Never again, not in our name, not at all.

‘We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.”

— Elie Wiesel, The Night Trilogy: Night, Dawn, The Accident