To our beloved Jewish communities:

How are we to find safety?

At this pivotal moment in human history, we come face-to-face with the question our people have confronted for thousands of years.

We have suffered scapegoating, persecution, inquisition, banishment, ghettoization, pogroms — and a shoah. In recent years, we have seen neo-Nazis march through the streets of Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us” and a white nationalist open fire on a synagogue in Pittsburgh one Shabbat morning. Today, the President’s closest advisors openly perform Hitler salutes as they seize congressional authority, defy the judiciary, and pit communities against one another to consolidate power.

Of course we are afraid. We carry thousands of years of historical trauma in our bones. 

But how are we to find safety?

No more empty promises.

In response to that question, political and communal leaders from Europe and the US — some Jewish, most not — have made an empty promise: Jewish safety at the expense of Palestinian safety and freedom. By depicting the Israeli government and military as the representative of all Jews, and Palestinians and those who stand up for their human rights as the great threat facing us, western leaders have evaded accountability for their own antisemitic violence, and exploited our trauma for their own benefit.

For decades, they have used “Jewish safety” as a pretext for land theft, home demolitions, military checkpoints, annexations, trade sieges, night raids, bombing campaigns, and other means of forcibly dominating the Palestinian people — all enabled by endless funding from the US. Palestinians have not known a day of safety or freedom in decades as Israeli bombs massacre elders, parents and children in their homes, blockades starve people, and walls and checkpoints tear families apart.

These actions would be wrong even if they did achieve Jewish safety, but in fact they have not: none of this protected Israelis from the devastating horrors of the Hamas-led attack on October 7, 2023. Nor will safety emerge from the Netanyahu government’s campaign of death and destruction in Gaza, which human rights organizations, international legal experts, and preeminent Jewish Israeli Holocaust scholars consider a genocide — and which has left for dead the remaining Israeli hostages held in Hamas captivity.

Meanwhile, here in the US, leaders have made their own empty promises of safety through repression. According to them, the main danger to US Jews is the movement for Palestinian human rights, which they have tried to crush by smearing advocates as antisemitic — despite the strong Jewish presence among them — passing laws against non-violent boycotts, firing professors, endorsing definitions of antisemitism that prohibit criticism of Israel, and more.

None of this has made us safe. Today, the Christian Nationalist Trump regime advances the antisemitic “Great Replacement Theory” while using the safety of US Jews as a pretext for sending secret police to abduct and disappear student antiwar protesters, simply for protesting the carnage in Gaza — over the objections of some prominent Jewish leaders, but to the applause of far too many others.

The empty promise that US Jews would find safety by strengthening Israeli military might, censoring voices for Palestinian human rights, and assimilating into upper-class white society — at least for those of us who could access it — has supplied our people with false hope, isolated us from other communities facing bigotry and violence, and further enriched and empowered the corporate and political elite.

The time has come for us to choose.

Will we cling to the empty promise of safety through walls, bombs, apartheid, and repression? Will we continue to support the Israeli government in inflicting suffering on Palestinians, while sabotaging our own safety? Will we allow our fear and heartbreak to be exploited by far right demagogues? Will we sacrifice immigrant Jews, trans Jews, Jews of color, and others facing multiple forms of bigotry and violence?

Or do we have the courage, the integrity, and the love necessary to chart a new direction for our people, whether they live between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, or anywhere else in the world?

We are the Jewish future, and we choose shared safety.

We will find safety only by uniting with all communities facing bigotry and violence at the hands of far-right regimes across the world: trans and queer people, immigrants, Black people, poor people — including the Jews in all of these groups — and, vitally, Palestinians. Jews can never know true safety as long as Palestinians remain in danger. Jews cannot be free while Palestinians are not. That means charting a path to a long-term political solution that ends Israel’s systems of apartheid and occupation, and guarantees equality, justice, and a thriving future for all Palestinians and Israelis. And it means ending our communities’ support for these unjust systems.

That is why we are building a movement for shared safety. In our synagogues, in the streets, and in the halls of power, we are calling our people to rise to our proudest traditions and highest aspirations. At this moment in history, when everything hangs in the balance, we must choose the side of life, freedom, and solidarity.

The only true safety is shared safety. The only durable freedom is freedom for all. If first they come for one and the rest of us fail to stand up, any of us could be next. Our best shot at withstanding the attacks on our communities is linking arms, and not letting go. Every life is a universe.