The Gaza health ministry says at least 8,796 Palestinians in Gaza, including 3,648 children, have been killed by Israeli strikes since Oct. 7, when Hamas attacked Israel, killing 1,400 people and taking more than 200 hostage, according to NPR. The Hamas-run government also said at least 195 Palestinians died in Israel’s attacks on the Jabalia refugee camp on Wednesday, Nov. 1. Since the Israel-Hamas war began, there have been hundreds of protests demanding a ceasefire. Many Jewish Americans have joined in, some met with hostility from within their own Jewish communities and even families. 

Rabbi Ari Lev Fornari, from Jewish Voice for Peace, said some family arguments have become generational.  “I don’t know a single person in my community who hasn’t had a fight with a family member in the last two weeks.” 

NPR reported that groups like Jewish Voice for Peace have a largely young participant pool, showing a changing dynamic in Jewish-American politics, as well as the Israeli government’s shift to the far right, which seems disjointed to many younger, more liberal Jews. According to the Pew Research Center, around half of Jewish Americans over 65 say Israel is “an essential part of their Jewish identity.” For Jews below 29, only 35% believe in Zionism, or the nationalist movement that emerged in the 19th century to support establishing Israel as a homeland for Jewish people in Palestine.

Arno Rosenfeld wrote for The Forward, that, “the mainstream Jewish community has really unified behind a single message of solidarity with Israel and support for a military response to Hamas. And so really the only release valve for American Jews who are opposed to that or who are calling for a ceasefire, are these youth-led movements.”

From an interview from NPR’s Here and Now, a poll from the progressive think tank Data for Progress showed that most US voters, including an overwhelming majority of Democrats, favor a ceasefire in Gaza. 66% of respondents said the US should push for a ceasefire, 80% Democrats and 56% Republicans, showing the call is resonating in the United States. 

Ally, a student at Columbia University and a member of Jewish Voice For Peace, a progressive organization founded in the 1990’s calling for Palestinian freedom and a ceasefire in Gaza, has family in Israel in the Israel Defense Forces, reported NPR. She has been receiving backlash from her Zionist relatives as well as people on campus. 

“I mean, I’ve been spit on on campus for wearing a Keefyeh. I have received multiple death threats. And it gets very scary because the places where I’m supposed to feel safe to practice my faith and my culture on campus are now places where I’m not welcome,” Ally said, requesting to stay anonymous.

Some young Jewish Americans see Israel as much of their identity. Kaitlin Pollack, a high schooler in Long Island, says she believes “the entire foundation of the Jewish faith is quite literally based on Israel. It’s where our heritage is. I have so much family there, so many friends living there.” She feels anti-Israel protests add to antisemitism.

Rabbi David Ingber, founding rabbi of Romemu, a large Renewal synagogue in the U.S., said that Israel is defending itself, and therefore Jewish people as a whole. 

On Wednesday, October 18, thousands of Jews and allies marched on Capitol Hill,  according to CNN. Rabbi Alissa Wise led a sit-in inside one of the Capitol buildings, organized by Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow, two of the largest US Jewish groups calling for a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The activists called on the US government to stop providing aid to Israel, which Wise says “encourages and funds the mass murder of Palestinians.”

Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and national director for the Anti-Defamation League, criticized the protests for what he called a “complete lack of moral clarity.” Meredith Weisel, the ADL’s DC regional director, also dismissed the protesters on Capitol Hill. “Although they claim to do so, these far-left radical organizations do not represent the overwhelming majority Jewish community,” Weisel said in a statement on X. “Rather, these groups are anti-Zionists that challenge Israel’s very right to exist. Let’s be very clear – anti-Zionism is antisemitism.”

Wise vehemently disagreed. “I am Jewish, I’m not a Zionist, and I reject the idea that critiquing the politics of a government, the way you would any other government, is antisemitic. Israel is not a Jew, Israel is a state,” Wise said. “The claim that it’s antisemitic is used as a cudgel to silence people and it’s really egregious, the way that they manipulate Jewish trauma.”

Wise has experienced backlash for her Palestine solidarity work from within her own community – and even family.

“The next time I’m at a family table, I’m kind of avoiding and dreading it. But I also feel like the important thing is that we have to fight for the future we want. I feel that the heartache of distance from my family has to be mitigated by a sense of another family and another community that you’re organizing with.”

Thousands of Jewish Americans continue to gather in protests across the United States, calling on President Joe Biden and other elected officials to rein in Israel – arguing more civilian deaths is not the answer to Hamas’ deadly attack.

At a congressional hearing on Tuesday October 10, two of Biden’s top advisers were interrupted repeatedly by protesters denouncing American officials for backing what they called “genocide” against Palestinians in Gaza, and according to Reuters, in Minneapolis on Nov 1, during a campaign speech, U.S. President Joe Biden was interrupted by Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg of Minneapolis, yelling, “As a rabbi, I need you to call for a ceasefire right now.”

Biden responded, “I think we need a pause. A pause means give time to get the prisoners out,”  Biden was addressing around 200 people at the time about the Israel-Hamas conflict. The White House later clarified that Biden was referring to the hostages, not prisoners, held by Hamas after its Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

Biden continued, “This is incredibly complicated for the Israelis. It’s incredibly complicated for the Muslim world as well … I supported a two-state solution; I have from the very beginning.” Biden has slowly shifted his response in recent weeks away from staunchly pro-Israel as the humanitarian situation worsens in Gaza and the civilian death toll rises.

Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg, a member of the rabbinical council for Jewish Voice for Peace who yelled at President Biden, said to NPR News’ program Here and Now about her heckling of the U.S. President, “The opportunity to hear from him in that moment was very humbling, especially given the context of hundreds of thousands of people that have been shouting ceasefire now in the streets for weeks and weeks. He has unbelievable power. And he’s the one who can pick up the phone and call Netanyahu today and put the full weight of US aid behind support for ceasefire.” She continued, “Hostages [were] not returned and none of this violence is bringing back any of the Israeli lives that were lost on the seventh,” Rosenberg added. 

“The voices of Jews and allies..are saying that this violence against Gaza does not lead to Jewish safety. None of us are safe until all of us are safe.”

When asked by NPR about being called a traitor by Zionists, Rosenberg said, “I have never felt more clear in my role as a rabbi, and in my power as a Jewish person who’s inherited a tradition of seeking justice and valuing all lives then in my actions last night. I became a rabbi inspired by the millennia of Jewish freedom fighters, and the tradition of the Tzelem Elohim. Every life is sacred. And I know that there’s so much fear in the Jewish community right now that that’s what’s motivating anybody calling me or others of the hundreds of thousands of people [and] Jews calling for a ceasefire [a traitor]. There’s so much fear that’s animating that call that we’re traitors. I’m in a three thousand year old lineage, and I know very clearly what I’m fighting for.”

According to CNN, IfNotNow political director Eva Borgwardt, referring to recent comments made by Netenyahu, said, “As Jewish people whose ancestors went through the Holocaust, when we hear Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant use words like ‘the children of darkness’ and ‘human animals’ to describe Palestinians, we feel the resonances of that in our bones.” 

“We know exactly where that language leads, and we are here to stop what they clearly intend to be a genocide. It’s critical for American Jews to stand up and say, ‘never again’ is never again for anyone,” Borgwardt added. The slogan has been a rallying cry of the Jewish community since World War II.

More than half of Gaza’s population are refugees whose ancestors fled or were expelled from their homes in present-day Israel by armed Jewish groups during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, which Palestinians call al-Nakba or “the catastrophe.” 

“The clock didn’t start on October 7,” Jewish Voice for Peace spokesperson Sonya Meyerson-Knox said. “The horrible acts that Hamas took are in no way isolated from the horrors of Israel’s military occupation and apartheid system that it has run against Palestinians for 75 years.”

In 1967, Israel seized control of Gaza in the Six-Day War with Egypt, Jordan and Syria, and held it for nearly 40 years before withdrawing troops and settlers in 2005. Since then, Israel, in coordination with Egypt, has imposed a blockade that critics say transformed Gaza into “the world’s largest open-air prison.”

Rabbi Wise said, “If we’re going to learn anything from history, it’s that the things that we stand for are for everybody, no exception, and that includes Palestinians.” 

Ally said, “My position as a Jew is that it [has] always been our responsibility, according to our religion, to stand up for all those who are targeted, all those who are oppressed, all those who are facing violence. Because as a people, we’ve been persecuted for so long.”

Fornari stated he doesn’t think it’s antisemitic to critique Israel’s actions or to express rage over now nearly 9000 people killed in Gaza by Israeli airstrikes, as reported by Gaza’s Ministry of Health.

“If you told me to boil down, like, what is Judaism about,” Fornari says, “I would tell you tikkun olam. It means…the repair of the world. I don’t want to be part of a Judaism that is being used, taken in my name, to kill and occupy and imprison millions of Palestinians.”