Throughout history, there have been those who are more attuned to what the moment demands. Whether they came from politics, religion, or the arts, or whether they were just people who happened to be at the right place at the right time, they recognized a need and acted in turn. Below are 18 groundbreaking figures whose actions reverberated across space and time, leaving a mark much greater than they could have imagined. Whether you follow in their footsteps or pave your own path, remember that any one of us can be on this list.

A bush is burning in the desert. No one knows how long it has been burning, or how long it will continue to burn. No one knows who lit it on fire, or why. 

Tending his flock, a shepherd approaches nervously. Years earlier, he had lived in a palace, surrounded by privilege most people could scarcely imagine. Now, his life could hardly be more different. He is out in the wilderness, far from everything he once knew. 

Perhaps experience has taught him the wisdom of keeping his head down and staying out of other people’s business. Having fled his country after killing a slave master he’d come across beating his charge, he already knows what can happen when you make someone else’s problem your own. He has a family now, responsibilities of his own, a quiet life that asks far less of him than the one he left behind. 

But the burning bush catches his eye. Something about it does not make sense. It burns, yet somehow it is not consumed. Bushes are not supposed to keep burning. For a split second—maybe without even meaning to—he turns toward it.

He could keep walking. He could register the oddity of a bush burning without being consumed and simply return to the flock. Instead, he moves closer.

In a few moments, he will utter a single word that will change his life forever:

Hineni.

Here I am.

*

When we first invited contributors to reflect on their own Hineni moments—those moments when something happening in the world becomes a personal summons, when the distance between a problem and our personal responsibility to solve it collapses and “someone should do something about this” becomes “I guess that someone is going to be me”—we thought we knew what the outcome would look like. We had invited a remarkable group of people of different ages, religions, cultures, and nationalities to tell us about the moment they felt called to act. Some had spent decades advocating, organizing, creating, teaching, or speaking publicly. Others had found themselves thrust into those roles just recently. Some were responding to horrors they had experienced themselves. Others stepped forward in reaction to events taking place across the ocean. What united them was not who they were, but the fact that, when the call came, they chose to answer.

Our goal was simple. We wanted to amplify the voices of people who had stood up in the face of darkness and, each in their own way, brought some light into the world. We wanted to bring their stories together, honor what they had done, and show the extraordinary things ordinary people can do when they decide to make a problem their responsibility.

But as the essays came in, we began to notice something we had not anticipated. Stories that appeared radically different on the surface echoed one another. A childhood memory in Israel spoke to a corporate meeting in London. An Egyptian activist inspired by an American comic book seemed to be describing the same psychological journey as an Israeli artist, an American professor, a Mexican activist, and a Christian family in Britain. Though they had all responded to different calls and had done so in different ways, the paths that led them to act began to look strikingly similar.

We had thought we were assembling an anthology of Hineni moments. What emerged, however, was something much more ambitious: a blueprint for how Hineni moments come into being. Once we realized that such moments can happen to anyone, anywhere, we began looking across the stories for the conditions that make them possible. To our delight, we found that these conditions are ones we can all cultivate within ourselves.

Condition 1: Pay attention. 

Hineni moments do not begin with a solution. They begin with noticing a problem. Sometimes, paying attention means listening to an inner voice, as Yardenne did when she began to suspect that the vulnerability she had spent much of her life trying to overcome might actually be a source of strength. Other times, that attention comes with a jolt, as when a young Leat Corinne Unger felt an instinctive pull toward service while watching tired Israeli soldiers step off a bus. Still other times, it means noticing an absence that others have overlooked, as when Steven Phillips first noticed that Jews in the workplace were missing from conversations about inclusion. 

Some people seem to move through life attuned to every call. Others notice only when something shakes them awake. But whether that recognition is sudden or gradual, what separates those who keep walking from those who stop and take a stand is often not what they see, but whether they choose to look closely. The first step toward saying Hineni is simply refusing to look away.

Condition 2: Know yourself. 

Hineni moments do not create us so much as they reveal us. For historian Gil Troy, it was the sudden realization that it was his turn to step off the beaten path after years of studying the moments when pivotal figures did the same. For writer and editor Elissa Wald, it was hindsight that showed her how the stories of her childhood caretaker, a survivor of Auschwitz, had prepared her for work she could not yet imagine. Yet whether the recognition comes in real time or only years later, what ultimately separates those who answer the call from those who do not is often not what they discover about the world, but what they discover about themselves.

Hineni moments reveal what we truly value when values become costly, whose suffering we allow to interrupt our lives, how broadly we draw the circle of people we consider “us,” and what gifts, convictions, and reserves of courage have been quietly lying in wait inside of us. Sometimes, answering the call transforms us. Just as often, it reveals who we were all along.

Condition 3: Don’t wait until you feel ready.

There is no such thing as a Hineni personality—no particular combination of courage, confidence, charisma, conviction, or experience that predisposes a person to answer the call. Debbie Lechtman disliked the attention her work attracted and went out of her way to remain anonymous, yet eventually found herself speaking publicly on social media to hundreds of thousands of people. Adina Chelminsky intentionally tattooed the word Hineni on her wrist just days after the October 7 massacre as a reminder to never stop wrestling with fear, doubt, and uncertainty. Shabbos Kestenbaum arrived at Harvard Divinity School only to find himself confronting institutions vastly more powerful than he was. 

Their personalities, proclivities, and politics could hardly be more different. Yet together, they reject the comforting myth that the people who stand up are simply born braver and more competent than everyone else. Hineni is not a personality trait. It is a decision. We do not answer the call because we have become that person. We become that person because we answered the call. If we wait until we feel like the kind of person who says Hineni, we may wait forever.

Condition 4: Use what you have.

Hineni moments do not demand that we acquire extraordinary abilities. They simply ask us to use the skills we already possess. When a frightened friend told Eitan Chitayat that she had learned to hide her Jewishness in Paris, he did what great storytellers do: he wrote. When Nitzan Mintz and Dede Bandaid watched helplessly from New York as hostages were brutally dragged into Gaza, they reached for the language they knew best: they made art. When Cochav Elkayam-Levy saw the world denying, dismissing, and distorting evidence of Hamas’s use of sexual violence, she drew on her experience as a legal scholar, feminist, and human-rights advocate to correct the historical record. 

None of them waited to acquire new talents. None of them stopped to wonder whether they had what it takes. They simply answered the call with what they already knew how to do. Each responded differently because each had something different to offer. The question, then, is not whether we have enough. It is whether we are willing to begin with what we already have.

Condition 5: Stand with others, + let them stand with you.

Hineni is spoken in the singular, but it is rarely lived that way. Almost none of the stories in this issue is truly about one person acting alone. Andrew Pessin was close to giving up when a petition supporting him drew more than ten thousand signatures from around the world, reminding him that he was not alone and restoring his determination to keep speaking up. Rosa’s urge to support the families of hostages strengthened her own voice, enabling her to advocate for herself and other survivors of sexual assault. Ramon Maislen moved from private anger into civic action and discovered what becomes possible when neighbors organize together.

Though their stories are very different, they all remind us that we create our communities even as our communities create us. When one person speaks, others realize they are not alone. And when one person acts, action become easier for others to imagine. No one says Hineni alone for very long.

Condition 6: Look beyond yourself, and beyond your own. 

Hineni is a Hebrew word rooted in Jewish scripture, but the human capacity it names is neither bounded by Judaism nor limited to those who practice it. Dalia Ziada, an Egyptian Muslim activist who risked everything to make sure her humanist principles were applied universally, began her journey with Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Daphne and Andrew Kirk—devout Christian mother and son who have turned service into a way of life—built their own ethic of Hineni around repeatedly saying “yes” to people in need, regardless of where those people lived or what they believed. Vanessa Hidary, a Jewish spoken-word artist, drew on her family history as a Mizrahi Jew and a moral worldview shaped by struggles for racial justice, women’s rights, and diversity to speak up for her own community when Jews became the targets. 

Though their journeys began in very different places, their stories remind us that we do not have to share someone’s faith, nationality, race, gender, politics, or history for their suffering to make a claim upon us. Our principles are tested not when we apply them to people like us, but when we extend them to those we have been taught to see as the “other.” Hinenibegins the moment someone else’s call becomes our own.

Condition 7: Keep answering. 

The Hineni mindset does not end when the moment itself passes. Often, the response outlives the emergency and becomes a calling. Though Sarri Singer had only intended to hold a press conference the morning after surviving a terrorist bombing in Jerusalem, her advocacy and support for victims of terrorism around the world became a lifelong endeavor. Trauma psychologist Miri Bar-Halpern had posted her phone number online in the wake of the October 7 Massacre as a way of fending off her own helplessness, but that single act evolved first into a network and then into teaching, research, testimony, and advocacy. Shai’s instinctive choice to speak out about support for terrorism on college campuses has grown into an extensive project of research, education, and public speaking. 

Hineni moments do not merely change what we do. They change who we become. The first time we answer the call, we are responding to the moment. The second, third, and fourth time, we act as people shaped by that first decision. Eventually, for many people, answering the call becomes a calling.

By the time we finished reading these essays, the question that had launched this project had changed. We had invited people who inspire us to share what made them stand up, speak out, and answer the call. But as we read their stories, we found ourselves asking something different altogether: How can we help more people say Hineni?

There is no shortage of burning bushes in our world. Some blaze for all to see. Others smolder quietly, just off the beaten path. The question is not whether these fires exist—they do, and the heat is rising. The question is whether we will notice them, turn toward them, and make them our concern.

You may never hear a voice call your name from the flames. But that does not mean you have not been called. Don’t wait for someone else to tell you that you are needed. Pay attention to the raging fire, then look within. Can you feel the moral urgency? What is it asking of you? What are you prepared to do about it? 

The essays that follow began as answers. Our hope is that, together, they will also become a call. Will you answer it? Will you say Hineni?

It was January 2015 and a close friend from Paris told me she was scared. A few days earlier, jihadi terrorists had attacked the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, murdering journalists who had published a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad. Then another terrorist entered the Hypercacher kosher supermarket and murdered four Jewish shoppers. Her father-in-law and brother-in-law had been there earlier that day. 

Although my friend was understandably shaken by these events, what stood out the most was something else she said: that since moving from Israel to Paris, she had barely mentioned to anyone that she was Jewish. She wasn’t open about how she used to live in Israel. She hid that part of herself.

I immediately understood why. Growing up in Hong Kong and London, I learned early that being Jewish could become an issue just because someone else decided to make it one. In Hong Kong, a boy who bullied me marched around doing the Nazi salute while other children laughed. In London, kids spotted the Ten Commandments on my Jewish school blazer and surrounded me while shouting, “Get that Jew.” I got away physically unscathed. The damage was on the inside, where no one could see.

There were other moments over the years—some subtle, some not. Most Jews know the feeling. You can be moving through life when, without warning, someone reminds you that they’ve already decided what a “Jew” is. So, when my friend expressed her experience, I empathized with her fear. I also hated that she felt she had to live that way. That night, after our conversation, I was inspired to write—as if to her. I wanted her to know she wasn’t alone.

The first three words appeared on the screen: I’m that Jew. I stared at them, wondering what they meant. Who was “that Jew”? What Jew was I? Was I the stereotype? The caricature invented before a real Jewish person had even entered the room? What does “that Jew” even mean?

I kept writing. About the thinking Jew, the working Jew, the funny Jew, the arrogant Jew, the humble Jew, the brilliant Jew and the ridiculous Jew. I wrote about our contradictions, flaws, achievements, and humanity. No longer just to my friend, those three words became my own declaration. My personal testimony. Something that had been sitting inside me for years, since childhood, was finally finding its way out. I wanted to flush that familiar, hostile stereotype of the Jew down the toilet and replace it with everything that we truly are. Real people in all our beauty, breadth, and messiness. 

I posted the piece online. People shared it. Strangers responded. One person commented, “I’m that so-nice-to-know-I’m-not-the-only-one-who-feels-that-way Jew.” Right then and there I realized that what I had written wasn’t mine alone. I started imagining the written piece as something people could experience visually. A video with every characteristic paired with a real Jewish person. Albert Einstein would be “that wild-haired-genius Jew.” Jerry Seinfeld, “that not-that-there’s-anything-wrong-with-that Jew.” Amy Winehouse, “that damn-I’m-gone-too-soon Jew.”

I committed to my vision and went to work. After months of writing, editing, and producing, I had a six-minute film. People I trusted loved it but told me it was too long and that nobody would watch it. Though I understood their point of view, shortening it didn’t sit well with me. The hateful stereotypes we were facing were already doing the cutting—taking millions of people and reducing them to one or two ugly characteristics. I didn’t want to respond by reducing us again. In fact, I didn’t want to respond at all. I was making a statement. 

Then came October 2015. Israel was swept up by a wave of terrifying stabbings across the country. Jews were attacked by Palestinian terrorists in shopping centers, on streets, at bus stops and restaurants. Ordinary people in ordinary places. The world’s condemnation was absent, and the silence was deafening. Angry and frustrated, I became consumed with finishing the film and worked for 48 hours straight without sleep. When it was finally ready, the anxiety of posting and putting my name on it became real. 

It meant I’d be telling my friends, colleagues, and clients exactly where I stood as a proud Jew. Knowing it would come with risks, I momentarily considered releasing it anonymously, but doing so felt absurd. “I’m That Jew,” by someone who would rather not say who they are. Sure, I was concerned about inviting hatred into my life (and, possibly, into the lives of my wife and kids) but hiding felt wrong. Hiding would make the whole thing meaningless, and meaning is everything to me. If I was going to say, “I’m that Jew,” I had to be willing to say it as myself. I quickly drafted a caption for my Facebook post, as much for myself as for anyone else: 

Lest any Jew forget, because of all the violence directed at us, the hatred, the incitement to harm and kill, the vile words, the missiles, the rockets, the knives, the rocks, the deafening silence of the world that we all feel right now, we should be proud of our heritage, accomplishments and spirit. Just like anyone else on this planet. And we shouldn’t be shy about it.

Rise up, speak up and keep your chins up. We’ll get through this because we love life, and we’re strong, smart, funny, beautiful, talented, resilient, educated, hardworking, positive and so much more. We’re okay. In fact, we’re more than okay. We rock. And here’s a little reminder.

The video began spreading within hours. The emotional reaction was nothing short of staggering. Thousands shared it and, in doing so, put their own names on it. The numbers kept climbing, reaching a million views within days. Strangers offered to translate the script. Ten languages later, Jews and non-Jews continued commenting, liking, and sharing from around the world. Alone in my study, reading messages from people I’d never meet but who had found their self-expression through something I had made, I sat and wept. What had begun as a letter to a frightened friend had become something much larger than either of us.

Years went by and the film went on to be seen over 15 million times. Anti-Semitism, unfortunately, also held strong. I continued writing, expressing, and creating on social media. Jewish advocacy became my passion.

Then came October 7, 2023. Like so many people in Israel and across the Jewish world, my life changed that morning. I immediately made the decision to pause new client work and turn all of my attention to giving Jews and Israelis strength, hope, and a way to express what I knew we all needed: a reminder of who we are and that we would get through this too. 

I created non-stop, often working 18-hour days. I made new films, wrote articles, designed posters, created campaigns, and collaborated with Jewish and non-Jewish allies alike. I travelled to the U.S., Canada, and Australia to support Jewish communities and strengthen their Jewish identity. More often than not, I was trying to give words to what so many people felt but were struggling to articulate. Every time I put a piece of work out in the world, I hoped others would make it their own. I wanted Jews to feel less alone in whatever they were trying to express. I wanted to help them fight the good fight. Above all, I wanted the world to truly see us.

“I’m that Jew” has never been about me. It’s about Jewish people embracing and openly celebrating everything about who we are. 

That desire was the motivation behind ZIONisM, a recent project of mine, co-created with Dr. Einat Wilf. We’ve all been watching in horror as the word “Zionism” is bastardized to the point of becoming unrecognizable, and many Jews are understandably hesitant to use it themselves. Combining Einat’s unique subject material and historical expertise and my emotive storytelling and communication skills, we tried to explain what Zionism is clearly, accurately, and without apology.

Jewish identity isn’t a subject I casually dip into whenever it’s convenient to do so. It’s my home, my history, and my core. I’m a creative director by training and manage my own agency—Natie Branding. I understand how stories can inspire and move people bravely to action. These are the tools I have, so these are the tools I use. I didn’t create I’m That Jew to defend Jewish identity. I created it to own it.

I imagine that most Hineni moments don’t arrive with grandeur. Sometimes they begin with a conversation. In 2015, a dear friend living in Paris told me she was too scared to reveal her Jewish identity and show the world who she really was. In solidarity, I wrote her a letter that turned out to be a letter for all of us. I had no idea that three words, “I’m That Jew,” would lead to years of creative work more personal and rewarding than I could ever have imagined. I only knew that silence felt wrong. 

And so, I continue.

I’m that Jew. And here I am.

Hineni.

My life was shaped by a hundred tiny yeses—quiet moments when something inside of me answered a voiceless question. My first yes came long before I even knew the word “Hineni.” I was a little girl in the Israeli town of Bat Yam, where my grandparents lived and where my parents would transplant us, every year, for months at a time. To me, it wasn’t a vacation and Israel wasn’t just a place we visited. It was my second home. It was part of who we were. Every summer they brought us back, making sure we knew where we came from and who our people were. They taught us how that connection and that responsibility didn’t stop at the edge of an ocean.

During one such stay, my older brother took me to the neighborhood pitzutziya, where I got a grape-flavored ice pop and he chose a lemon one. We shared a bag of salted sunflower seeds as we wandered outside. I remember my sticky purple fingers. The August heat. The aged white government building across the street. The bus stop in front of it.

Then a bus pulled up. Soldiers stepped off. They looked exhausted. Their green uniforms clung to them in the summer heat. Their berets sat slightly askew on their shoulders after a long day. M-16s rested on tired shoulders. They weren’t standing in formation. They weren’t heroes in a movie. They were just nineteen-year-olds who happened to be our soldiers. And I couldn’t stop staring.

Even now, as I write this, decades later, I can still feel the butterflies that filled my chest. It wasn’t excitement. It was pride. It was belonging. I remember thinking, with a certainty that only children seem capable of, I want to be them. One day, I will be. I didn’t know it at the time, but I think that was my first Hineni moment.

That day, I didn’t just fall in love with the soldiers. I also fell in love with the idea of service. Not because I romanticize war—quite the opposite—but because people who serve carry responsibilities and burdens that the rest of us pray we never have to carry, and they do so with quiet dignity. My parents never taught us to worship the uniform. They taught us to love the people inside it. Loving them has always meant wanting them to have to carry a little less.

The summer I turned ten offers another vivid memory of such an early Hineni moment. I wanted to understand the country that had captured my heart—my country—not only through its people, its streets, its sounds, and its stories, but through its language, too. I was already fluent in Hebrew, but I needed to be able to read it. To decipher its letters. To decode street signs, store names, and graffiti. Reading Hebrew felt like more than learning an alphabet. It felt like learning another way to belong.

My Saba Yosef took me to the mall and bought me a workbook called Hebrew at Your Ease. I sat with it for hours, slowly memorizing and sounding out letters until they became words. By the time I returned home to the U.S., I had taught myself to read and write Hebrew.

The passion I felt for my heritage didn’t stay confined to my grandparents’ place in Bat Yam. Back in the States, I asked my parents to transfer me to a Jewish school. Another small “yes.” Another quiet step toward a place and a people that were already my home.

Years later, I became the first American-born member of my family to return to Israel and volunteer for military service. Years after that, my American-born nephews would follow suit. I wish I could tell you serving was everything I dreamed it would be. Instead, I had to be medically discharged. I didn’t contribute the way I had wanted to. I have never admitted publicly how ashamed I felt—and in many ways still do. I had wanted so badly to give something back to the country and the people I loved. Suddenly, I couldn’t. Or so I believed. But then came the summer of 2014, and with it, another opportunity to answer the call.

I had just graduated from Columbia University with a Master’s in speech-language pathology when a war broke out following the kidnapping and murder of three young Jewish boys: Gilad Shaer, Naftali Frenkel, and Eyal Yifrach. I had landed my first real job in Harlem, and my career was only beginning. Yet all I wanted to do was quit. I wanted to go home, to Israel, and help. But I couldn’t enlist. I wasn’t eligible to do so. So I asked myself a different question: If I can’t serve that way, what can I do? How can I be of service?

I started raising money. I flew to Israel with desperately needed equipment, which I delivered to combat soldiers. I showed up at rehabilitation hospitals, determined to volunteer as a speech-language pathologist, only to find out that I wasn’t licensed in Israel and that the paperwork would take months to complete. Frustrated, I spent my days visiting rehabilitation units instead and offering them my expertise, and most of all, my friendship. Somewhere along the way, the patients I supported became like my little brothers. I sat with them, listened as they strummed their guitars, lounged with them out on the lawn, watching the trails of intercepted rockets streak across the summer sky before scrambling to the shelters together. When each attack was over, we’d come back out, tune the guitars again, and keep singing. One day, I asked them what they wanted most, expecting them to ask for something they had lost. Instead, they asked for something they missed: “A party. No guests. Just us.”

And so that’s what we did. I found a D.J. We fired up the grills and covered tables with food. For one night, the rehabilitation center was transformed into a raucous gathering of old friends. At three in the morning, Israeli musician Kobi Peretz showed up and sang under the stars. For a few hours, these patients were no longer wounded soldiers. They were twenty-year-old kids again. They were having fun again. Never a conscious decision, my heart had simply decided to say “yes” long before my head could catch up.

Then came October 7, 2023, the moment life asked me to show up again. There was no grand decision, dramatic realization, or weighing of options. As instinctive as breathing, I picked up the phone, asked how I could help equip the very soldiers who’d become my family long ago, and how I could help speak for those who couldn’t speak for themselves. My cousin, Omer Shem Tov, having been taken hostage into Gaza, was one of those people. Once again, life asked to keep showing up and I simply kept saying yes, one impossible day after another. 

Just like earlier in my life, I found that my responsibility didn’t just vanish into thin air when the crisis ended. Instead, it simply changed shape. After Omer and the rest of the hostages were released, I began looking for new ways to make a difference. That search led me to found Emet Advocacy— an organization dedicated to helping people understand the Jewish and Israeli story, to building bridges where others put up walls, and to defending truth without surrendering compassion. At its core is a simple belief: that advocacy and humanity should never have to compete. The work changed. The responsibility did not.

People still ask me why I chose this work. The truth is, life decided for me and I simply stopped refusing it. When I try to trace the source of that refusal, all I see is that little girl in Bat Yam, sticky grape ice pop in one hand, sunflower seeds in the other, watching a bus full of tired soldiers step into the August heat. Sometimes I wonder what that little girl would think if she could see where that first yes eventually led. To The White House, to the United Nations, to hundreds of flights, to thousands of strangers, to five hundred and five days of fighting for my cousin’s life. To Emet Advocacy. That little girl couldn’t have imagined any of it. She only knew that when those tired young soldiers stepped off the bus, something inside her quietly called out to her: One day, you’ll show up for them. 

Hineni isn’t necessarily saying, “I know exactly what to do.” It’s saying, “I can’t pretend this isn’t my problem anymore.”It’s answering the call. That little girl has been answering that call ever since. She just didn’t know the answer had a name.

Here I am.

Hineni.

Inside the brand-new museum
there’s an old synagogue.
Inside the synagogue
is me.
Inside me
my heart.
Inside my heart
a museum.
Inside the museum
a synagogue,
inside it
me,
inside me
my heart,
inside my heart
a museum

We had just put the kids to bed and sat down for a late-night meal of macaroni and cheese and margaritas in our pajamas. It was the spring of 2023, and the mood in our vacation rental in Upstate New York was giggly and intimate. But then, with the air warm and the record player softly crackling in the background, one of our friends asked how my writing was going. 

The question always put me on edge. True to the stereotype, I had always been an open and direct Israeli. Yet, with my closest writer friends already having published one or two novels, I had grown accustomed to downplaying my own struggles. Caught between insecurity and impostor syndrome, I had learned to paint an optimistic “any-day-now” picture to anyone who asked, keeping my fear that my memoir might never be published carefully under wraps. 

But that night I was tired of pretending. I had just gone through another fruitless round of pitching to agents only to be told that the writing was strong but that they were “going to have to pass” because they “wouldn’t know how to sell it.” Sitting there with close friends, I no longer had it in me to pretend everything was fine. So instead, I told them everything. 

“I know this is a common problem for writers,” I apologized, as though I was telling them a story they had heard a hundred times before, “but I’d like to think I’ve tried everything I can. But sometimes I think it’s all my fault for not pushing hard enough. That if I had real ambition, I’d figure out a path to make this book happen. Other times, I wonder if I should just accept that I’m a big, fat loser and that no one is interested in what I have to say.”

I braced myself for the pity party I assumed was coming. I had heard it all before. Though I knew I wouldn’t believe them, I waited for their reassurance that my worth extended beyond my writing and didn’t depend on public recognition. Having finally given voice to what I had been carrying for so long, I now sat before them—sad, needy, and exposed. 

Instead, my friend covered his mouth, shook his head, and, his voice brimming with love and wonder, said the four words that would keep coming back to me. “God, you’re so open.” 

Pay attention, a voice whispered in my head. Your vulnerability is not a weakness. It’s a superpower. Keep saying the embarrassing things out loud.

Just six months later, I watched, eyes bleary with grief and horror, as people who knew and loved me rushed to social media to minimize, defend, and justify the massacre, rape, and abduction of Jews and Israelis. Having grown up in Israel knowing that every bus ride or café outing could end in a suicide bombing, it was unfathomable to me how they could support such brutal acts of terror. As a liberal Zionist who had often protested the Israeli government, consistently advocated for peaceful coexistence, and still believed in a two-state solution, I had assumed that empathy for people on both sides of this conflict—particularly among my writer friends—would be the prevailing view. I was wrong.

When I commented on a celebrated novelist and fellow Columbia alum’s social media post dismissing the suffering of Israelis, she responded with a torrent of accusations that escalated with each exchange. I pleaded with her to see the humanity and pain of everyone caught in the conflict. Instead, in a declaration of allegiance to the Palestinian cause, she accused me of my alleged bloodthirst, ridiculing me for daring to challenge someone of South African descent who claimed to understand my country better than I did. Even when I resisted taking the bait of her most provocative remarks—Hey, Yardenne, how many Palestinians did you shoot when you were in the IDF?—she escalated further and sent me a private message. I don’t want to publicly humiliate you, she wrote, but you’re leaving me little choice.

For the first time since the October 7 Massacre, I burst out laughing. You can’t humiliate me, I wrote back, because I have nothing to hide. In training myself to look at my country from every angle, even when it was painful, inconvenient, or scary, I had learned that every country has chapters in its history it would rather not read aloud. As long as I was willing to say the embarrassing things out loud, no one could use them against me. 

As the first weeks of the Israel-Hamas war passed in a haze, it became abundantly clear that the social circles where I’d pitched my tent—the politically progressive literary and academic worlds of New York City—were not what I had believed them to be. Twisting facts and suspending the very empathy they so proudly professed, they excused and dismissed Jewish pain while ignoring, justifying, and celebrating Hamas’ crimes. Close friends cut ties, arguing that my advocacy for the release of the hostages was nothing more than a cynical attempt to distract from the rising death toll in Gaza. Colleagues and acquaintances flooded social media with “hot takes” on Hamas and Israel, ranging from the hateful to the delusional. Even so, I kept engaging. 

Some, in private conversations, replied with care and compassion, but remained adamant about maintaining a public façade of brave, subversive resistance to what they perceived as the powers-that-be. Others tried to school me on the country I grew up in, countering my lived experience with shallow propaganda. Others still demanded that I “unlearn” Zionism—the belief in the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland—before they would even agree to speak to me. Committed to a devil-may-care, “burn it all down” philosophy that never stopped to consider the Israelis trapped in Hamas’s tunnels or the Palestinians suffocating under its oppressive, violent rule, one writer—whose manuscript I had previously volunteered to edit—responded by lashing out and blocking me. 

As the American literary landscape became increasingly inhospitable to Jews who refused to denounce—or at least distance themselves from—Israel, I was faced with a choice. I could follow the advice of some well-meaning friends and relatives, keep my mouth shut, cut my losses, and hope for that professional acceptance I had been longing for. I could scrub Israel from my writing, erasing where I was born and raised, where I had lived for most of my life, and where most of my family still lived. Or, I could remain open. I could remain vulnerable. I could refuse to edit myself out of my own story.

When a renowned literary magazine that had published my work in the past began taking on a decisively anti-Israel, pro-violent-resistance bent, I contacted the editor to share my concerns, citing several of their more egregious pieces, including an essay comparing the Hamas paragliders who massacred Israelis at the Nova Festival to birds breaking free from their cages. In response, she invited me to submit an essay presenting my own perspective. 

Never before had I felt such urgency about a writing project. I worked for hours, outlining, expanding, and fact-checking every point I made. I described the cancellation of authors who so much as mentioned Israel’s existence in their books, the journals that banned “Zionists” from even submitting their work for consideration, the publishers committing to the anti-Israel Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, and the literary magazines publishing anti-Israel bigotry, denying the events of October 7, and belittling the rise of anti-Semitism. I included hyperlinks to corroborating sources. I explained the trap of offering Jews conditional acceptance only as long as they toed the party line. I described how my own long-standing writing group had ghosted me. Above all, I chose vulnerability. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the editor rejected my submission. Proving the exact point I was making, she dismissed my argument—and the many references backing it up—because she did not agree with my premise. A few weeks later, my essay was published by the Jewish Book Council. My former friends read it. My former professors read it. It was out there for colleagues, potential employers, agents, publishers, or anyone else who felt compelled to vet me. Who I was, where I stood, and what I believed were now out in the open. There was no going back. 

The months and years since have been an eerie combination of despair and relief. I had burned bridges simply by being myself. But now I was free. I no longer had a community to lose. I no longer had opportunities to miss out on. Writing, once a cross to bear, became a source of joy again. I feel it whenever someone thanks me for giving words to what they’d been struggling to express. I feel it whenever a reader tells me they disagree with my views but appreciate my integrity. I feel it whenever I say the embarrassing thing out loud. In the midst of horror, grief, and isolation, I found my voice. Here it is.

Here I am.

Hineni.

Just days after the murder of George Floyd, I sat through a long, well-intentioned training program about diversity, equity, and inclusion only to find out that Jews were not considered part of the training. While I realized that being included in a slide deck was not the same as being seen, protected, or valued in an organization, I understood I had to do something. At the time, I had already helped create a small, informal space for my Jewish colleagues and I to meet and talk over drinks. Yet, what started as a mere social gathering now felt like something much larger—the seed of a deeply needed community. Determined to help it grow, I set about transforming it into a global Jewish staff network within the multinational company I was working for.

The process was not straightforward. Hitting repeated roadblocks and goalposts that seemed to move every time we made progress, we were told by our non-Jewish colleagues that the way we define ourselves was completely wrong. Repeatedly told that our burgeoning group was “just a religion,” that our existence as Jews represented “too small a minority to support,” and that our effort to create a workplace community was “redefining what it means to have a formal group,” each response revealed something deeper than mere resistance. Instead, each one exposed how easily Jewish identity can be minimized when it asks to be recognized on its own terms.

At the same time, my colleagues and I were encountering real anti-Semitism in the workplace. Blood libel was free to be shared on our internal Wiki site, and some corners of our instant messaging system were filled with anti-Zionist and often outright anti-Semitic rhetoric. The company was unprepared to deal with it. Soon becoming the go-to person for the Jewish experience at work, I suddenly found myself trying to do more than simply build community. Fighting for our safety, our dignity, and our right to belong without having to constantly justify our existence, I came to realize that the harder I pushed against the system, the more I understood why this work mattered. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Jewish colleagues who needed that community in order to thrive at work, and I had become the person willing to keep pushing that vision forward. I wasn’t simply announcing that I was that guy. I was saying “Hineni.” 

The call I had made was soon answered thousands of miles from my home in London, England. While spending Chanukah in Seattle, Washington, I decided to host an impromptu coffee-and-donut meetup for the “local” Jews I worked with. After talking with the wife of one of the attendees who worked for a similarly large technology company whose Jewish employees were struggling in much the same way that we were, I decided to start what would become JewishERGs—the community for Jewish Employee Resource Group (ERG) leaders around the world. 

Quickly growing to represent the Jewish ERG Leaders of around 30 companies—each of us strugglingly in unique yet strikingly similar ways—our global community began meeting monthly, with many of us staying in touch in between sessions and supporting one another as we charted out the course for the Jewish communities within our organizations. Then came October 7, 2023.

More than just a metaphorical wake-up call, I was awakened from my sleep by the sound of sirens and distant rocket interceptions. Though I have always felt deeply connected to Israel, being in the country that day made the horror immediate and personal. The scale of the violence, the fear, the grief, and the collective shock were overwhelming. But beyond the pain, something else crystallized for me. The world had shifted, and the Jewish people would need more than sympathy. We would need leadership, structure, courage, and people willing to stand in the gap. The stakes had never been clearer: my work creating Jewish communities within non-Jewish institutions was no longer abstract or symbolic. It was personal, urgent, and necessary. 

This necessity was rapidly being reflected in my inbox, with email upon email from Jews looking to build community, support other Jews at work, and find ways to develop their resilience. After a long day of work as a cybersecurity expert, I would come home to work another six hours on building community.

In March 2024, I returned to Israel. Driven by grief, responsibility, and a need to be present for and with our people in their time of need, when people asked why I came back during a war, all I could really answer was “Because I needed to.” 

Touring southern Israel, seeing with my own eyes the devastation of the October 7 massacre, and visiting wounded soldiers at Sheba Hospital, I began to realize that I could not remain on the edge of this work. Having carried it alongside my career for some time, doing so no longer felt sufficient. The moment was too serious, and the need too great. Upon my return home, I made the decision to leave my job in tech and focus on my passion full time.

That decision was not easy. I had spent years building a stable, respectable, and financially secure career in a field I knew well. Yet, stepping away from that work into uncertainty, I thought about Rabbi Tarfon’s teaching in Pirkei Avot. It was not my duty to finish the work, but neither was I at liberty to neglect it. I had found my calling because, when the moment came, I had said Hineni. 

What I have built since then has grown beyond anything I could ever have imagined. What started as a small community of Jews at my own workplace has evolved into a global network bringing together Jews across dozens of organizations. Responding to the needs of the moment, people were hungry for connection, leadership, honesty, and for Jewish spaces where they could be their full selves. More than a response to a crisis, they wanted infrastructure. They wanted a community that could hold people through fear, pride, uncertainty, and action. I wanted to build one for them. 

I did not set out to leave my career and start a movement. I had set out to solve a problem. But the more I saw, the more I understood that the problem was larger than one workplace, one network, or one organization. It was part of a wider pattern of Jewish invisibility and Jewish vulnerability. The work became bigger because the need was greater.

And so, here I am. Not because I have all the answers, but because I could not remain an observer. Because the Jewish people deserve leaders in the non-Jewish workplace. Because the moment asked for more than concern, and I chose to answer. Because sometimes, the most Jewish thing you can do is build what is missing, stand where others have stepped back, and say plainly that the work is not done, and neither am I at liberty to neglect it.

Here I am.

Hineni.

Like most American Jews, I was raised to be an achievement machine, to stand out professionally while fitting in socially. I became a historian, intrigued by people who escaped the expectations of their goody two-shoes straitjackets to make history. Looking back, that fascination unconsciously foreshadowed my own Hineni moment—or, as I prefer to call it, my Herzl Moment: “coming out” as a Zionist activist in April 2001.

My first undergraduate paper explored the silence of American Jews during the early 1940s, as news about the Holocaust started filtering in from Europe. That project inspired my Harvard senior thesis about Ben Hecht, the highly assimilated novelist, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, and Academy Award-winning screenwriter, whose rewrites helped rescueGone with the Wind. Experiencing his own Hineni moment in the 1930s, Hecht broke the mold. Long disconnected from Judaism, he became a sharp-tongued and indefatigable activist upon learning how the Nazis were demonizing and annihilating his people. By 1942, Hecht was publicizing the Nazi mass murders of European Jewry. Later, he fought hard to help establish the State of Israel.

The more I studied history, the more I found myself drawn to people whose lives were transformed by moments like these. In graduate school, my seminar paper described how Henry Laurens, a wealthy South Carolinian, finally broke with Great Britain after the Boston Massacre, went on to succeed John Hancock as president of the Continental Congress, and ultimately lost both his son and his home during the American Revolution. Years later, while writing my book Moynihan’s Moment: America’s Fight against Zionism as Racism, I studied another reluctant advocate, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. This liberal, Irish-Catholic, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations experienced his Herzl moment in 1975. Moynihan spearheaded America’s fight against the Soviet and Palestinian effort to humiliate the United States by demonizing Israel, using a forum of nation-states to single out Zionism as “racist.” I didn’t know it then, but I kept writing about the same kind of turning-point: the moment an ordinary life becomes a public one.

Eventually, I had the opportunity to tell one of these stories together with the person who had lived it: In 2020, I co-wrote Never Alone with Natan Sharansky, about his persecution by Soviet anti-Semites following Israel’s decisive victory in the 1967 Six Day War. Overnight, they stopped mocking him as a weakling and began denouncing him as a bully. Learning that the mere existence of a Jewish state 2,200 miles away could so profoundly affect his life in Soviet Russia, Sharansky was inspired to dedicate himself to activism. Having started fighting for his freedom only once he discovered his identity, Sharansky embodies the Zionist idea, that a meaningful life comes from being rooted enough to defend your freedom and free enough to appreciate your roots—even if doing so costs you nine years in a Soviet Gulag.

Branding these pivots “Herzl Moments” honors Theodor Herzl, the assimilated Austro-Hungarian Jew whose own awakening gave birth to modern Zionism. Though Jew hatred haunted Herzl long before the 1894 Alfred Dreyfus trial convinced him that Jews needed their own nation-state, his life changed in 1895 when he emerged as a Zionist. While many scoffed at the notion that the homeless, powerless Jews could ever rebuild a state of their own, Herzl stood his ground, warning, as he did to a skeptic that year, that “where the Jewish cause is concerned I am not to be trifled with.” Accused of being detached from reality, Herzl insisted that standing idly by and watching when your house is burning down, “is certainly more insane than to rush up with a modern fire engine.” From that moment on, Herzl was no longer merely describing the Jewish condition. He was trying to change it.

While raised to be a passionate Zionist caring deeply about Israel, I enjoyed living the American Jewish ideal: being Jewish at home and American on the street. Proudly Jewish, I nonetheless loved my neutral name—inherited thanks to my father’s choice to perform an “ansky-ectomy” on his own last name, Troyansky. As “Gil Troy” I passed. I felt normal, all-American. Graduating with a Ph.D. from a Harvard embarrassed by its history of anti-Semitism, by 1999, I was already a full professor at McGill University, back when Canada was delightfully boring, polite, and decent. Whenever Jewish students sheepishly explained they would have to miss class for Passover or the High Holy Days, I wished them “happy holiday” in Hebrew. I enjoyed surprising them with my own Jewish identity, while—wink-wink—letting them know they belonged.

Academia’s woke anti-Zionist mania, however, doomed that life. There I was—minding my own business, happily married, raising a family, building my academic career—when, in September 2000, Yasser Arafat led the Palestinian national movement away from negotiations and back toward terrorism. Even then, as my Israeli friends were dealing with suicide bombers blowing up cafes, buses, and shopping malls, the world—including many of my colleagues—blamed Israel. Academics, capable of making anything complicated, suddenly could do no better than spout silly slogans about Israeli apartheid and Zionism as racism. Such hard-hearted soft-headedness shattered my covenant with academia. How could I remain silent while my people were once again under attack?

Rejecting the negativity, I submitted an op-ed to The Montreal Gazette marking Yom Ha’atzmaut—Israeli Independence Day, in April 2001. Titled “Why I am a Zionist,” it was not a response to the scourge of Palestinian terrorism, but a celebration of Zionism itself as an anchoring, inspiring identity. Line after line started with the refrain, “I am a Zionist because…” The conclusion must have resonated deeply with Jewish Montrealers, who emblazoned it on posters thousands of them waved during their annual “March to Jerusalem” two months later. I proclaimed: “A century ago, Zionism revived pride in the label ‘Jew’; today, Jews must revive pride in the label ‘Zionist.’” Just 800 words long, that article changed the course of my life. It was my own Herzl moment. 

Though I remain an American historian, I’ve become a Zionist activist too. Viewed as a broad, welcoming peoplehood platform, Zionism fuses the excitement of returning to our roots in our homeland and our traditional sense of community, with our old-new mission to show the world what a healthy expression of liberal democratic nationalism looks like. As Zionists, we learn from the past, keep building and being rebuilt in the present, while never, ever, stopping to dream about an even better future.

Six years after publishing that op-ed, my wife, four kids, and I took a sabbatical in Jerusalem and never looked back. Jokingly referring to our decision to stay as “the world’s longest sabbatical,” I avoided the fate of becoming a swivel-headed academic, forever looking over my shoulder, wondering what my colleagues might say about me. Instead, I allowed myself to embrace the kind of envy the Talmud praises—the kind that urges you to follow in your heroes’ footsteps. In the process, I’ve discovered who I am, where I stand, and what I stand for. 

Here I am. 

Hineni.

The Jewish fire inside me, which has been there since my earliest memory, was lit by Judith Aftergut Meller, the first caretaker I had outside of my parents. A child survivor of Auschwitz, Judith was orphaned at age thirteen when her mother, father, and siblings all died at the hands of the Nazis. Having started sharing her story with me when I was two or three—far too young to comprehend it—she told it over and over to anyone who would listen, believing that knowing what had happened could teach people something valuable for the next time it did. 

As a very young child, I absorbed Judith’s life story much as I would any other cruel and outlandish fairy tale. A parable, it didn’t seem so different than, say, the story of Hansel and Gretel. From an early age, I understood that villains existed, that they put people into ovens, and that nothing was too awful to be true. Yet, though the Nazis murdered her entire family, Judith harbored no particular bitterness toward Germans or Germany, believing that kind of evil can be found in every group of people on Earth. These days, as I see that evil taking so many different forms all around me, I find myself thinking of her constantly. 

Still, there’s always been a part of me that refused to believe in the realness of the people who lived in mid-twentieth-century Europe. Irrationally, I perceived them as black-and-white people living in the land of black-and-white TV. And so I always wondered: who on earth were these “friends and neighbors” of the Jews, the people who looked away from what was happening? Who were these people who so lacked in critical thinking skills that they fell for Hitler’s hatred in spite of their close relationships with the Jews? Could I ever have friends like that? Though I would have very much preferred to have never found out which of my friends would have made perfectly good Germans, these days I often feel like it’s simply and irreducibly the Jewish fate. In every place and age, we are doomed to see with our own eyes and experience within our own lives exactly how it happens. 

On the day Judith escaped Auschwitz, the infamous Dr. Mengele had just consigned her to the gas chambers. Having been so thin by that morning’s selection process that he simply lifted her off the ground with one brutal fist closed around her neck, Judith looked straight into his eyes—eyes she described as black and dead, flat and inhuman as the eyes of a shark—and every ounce of her ferocious will was suddenly funneled into a marrow-deep, overpowering, visceral conviction. Dangling there, hanging from his hand, she thought, You will not be the death of me. 

That very hour she escaped. When he flung her to the left—the side consigned to death—she managed to dart behind him and bolt into the surrounding crowd. So thin that she easily disappeared into the chaos of Auschwitz, she wended her way into a prisoner regiment leaving for a labor camp. Years later, living in Portland, Oregon, after weathering a series of staggering hardships throughout the rest of her life—marital turmoil, single parenthood to a child with cognitive impairments, ongoing financial insecurity, illness, exhaustion, depression, and chronic pain—she was among the first to avail herself of the state’s nascent Death With Dignity law. Seventy-four years old and suffering of terminal cancer, Judith declared that choosing the specific time, day, and method of her death was her final fuck you to Dr. Mengele. 

Having taught me defiance, Judith also left me with a question that guided much of my life: how would I carry her torch? Though I was not Judith’s biological daughter, she always treated me as one of her own, and I always thought of her as one of my mothers. I wanted to make her happy. I wanted to make her proud. I wanted to avenge her suffering. I wanted to realize her dreams. 

As a kid, I had many ideas about how I would do this. I would become a Nazi hunter like Simon Weisenthal. I would join the Mossad and assassinate terrorists. I would “Save Soviet Jewry,” as signs all over Jewish Pittsburgh exhorted us to do in the 1970s, piloting a plane into the USSR under cover of night, landing on some secret, prearranged Soviet airstrip, ushering refuseniks into the cabin, and flying them back to Israel or America. Watching the Sabbath scene in Fiddler on the Roof, I wanted Golde’s maternal blessing for myself: to come to be, in Israel, a shining name.

Though not as dramatic or heroic, I found other ways of carrying Judith’s torch. When I was 16-years-old, I won first place in the writing division of my city’s Holocaust Arts & Writing Contest with a poem titled Despair in Auschwitz.Then, in what would become the first fan letter I ever wrote, I mailed the poem to Elie Wiesel, the internationally renowned author and Holocaust survivor. To my amazement, he wrote back, thanking me for my letter and reminding me of the enduring power of words. Thirty-four years later, after one of my social media posts defending Israel had been widely shared, a message from his son, Elisha, appeared in my Facebook inbox. 

Astounded that both father and son had each written to me—more than three decades apart and without knowing the other had done so—and that both had told me essentially the same thing, I realized that I would not become a Nazi hunter, an assassin, or a stealth pilot. Instead, I would fight for my people with the skills I had. Writing—my career, my passion—would be my weapon of choice. Looking back, I now see that my entire life has been leading me to this moment. 

Before October 7, 2023, I made a steady income as a ghostwriter. I loved my clients and I loved my work, but after the massacre and the public response to it, I hit an internal wall. I could no longer devote my time and energy to helping other people tell their stories while feeling an overwhelming responsibility to tell our own. And so, I matched each of my clients with other writers, kissed my income goodbye, and made Jewish advocacy my full-time job. 

Since then, I’ve created a Jewish newsletter that goes out several times weekly, two Jewish magazines, the country’s largest Jewish book club, and a still-secret initiative dedicated to strengthening Jewish presence in left-leaning and anti-Semitic social media spaces. With dreams of launching a Jewish publishing house, everything I have built has been—and remains—available for free, with one purpose: to celebrate, embolden, and lift up Jewish writers. At a time when Zionist voices are increasingly silenced and Jewish creativity is subjected to ideological litmus tests, I wanted to build the kind of platform I wished already existed. Though I earn far less than I ever did as a ghostwriter, I have never been more professionally fulfilled in my life. 

The social marginalization of Jews in America, especially in the left-leaning spaces I have called home for most of my life, has been painful and infuriating. But we Jews are well trained in social exclusion. We know how to build when others refuse to let us belong. We built our own hospitals. We built our own medical schools. We built our own law firms. We built our own colleges. We built our own theaters. We built Hollywood. Now, once again, we’re building our own spaces, communities, and platforms. 

I do not miss a single space in which I was once welcomed and no longer am. To all the people and places that have pushed us to the margins—or out the door altogether—I say: good riddance, goodbye, and good luck. Good luck without your Jews. As for me, I’m a Jew in this life, first and last. That is the loyalty I will choose above any other. 

Here I am.

Hineni.

I come from a long lineage of Jews who took incredible risks for the survival of the Jewish people. On my mother’s side, my six great uncles were partisans in the forests of Nazi-ravaged Europe, and all but one lost their lives during the war. On my father’s side, my grandfather fought in the Israeli War of Independence, desperately working to break through the siege of Jerusalem, where 100,000 Jews were deprived of food, water, and medicine by the Arab forces, while simultaneously befriending the residents of Abu Ghosh, the only Arab village on the road to Jerusalem to allow the passage of Jewish humanitarian convoys. 

Compared with theirs, my own hineni moment seems almost embarrassingly ordinary. Not only were my relatives and ancestors significantly more courageous than I am, but their hineni moments were also much more dramatic. For some, it was Hitler’s maniacal plot to exterminate European Jewry that forced them to take action. For others, it was the threat of the annihilation of a Jewish state that had yet to declare its independence. For me, it was simply a string of anti-Semitic acts of vandalism in Pico-Robertson, an overwhelmingly Jewish neighborhood in western Los Angeles.

Let me back up a little bit first.

As a kid, I devoured Elie Wiesel’s Night and Eli Ben-Hanan’s biography of Israel’s most famous spy, Eli Cohen, Our Man in Damascus. As a freshman in high school, I printed a photo I’d shot of the Kotel, Temple Mount, and Al-Aqsa Mosque to show my history teacher how much he didn’t actually understand about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And then, fresh out of high school, I took a summer job at the Museum of the Jewish Community of Costa Rica, taking it upon myself to restructure their visitors’ tour. Not yet knowing it, I had already begun putting together the story I would dedicate my career to writing.

That story erupted in the spring of 2020, in the wake of the murder of a black American man by a white police officer. Digging his knee into George Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds, the incident was caught on camera and disseminated widely, horrifying the nation, myself included, and bringing as many as 26 million Americans to the streets chanting “Black Lives Matter!” as they marched against police brutality. The overwhelming majority of the protestors were peaceful. Some weren’t. 

And then, as so often happens in times of chaos, anti-Semitism began to creep up. At first, it appeared in subtler forms, with whispers of the “Deadly Exchange”—a conspiracy theory claiming American police brutality stems from cooperation with Israeli security forces while conveniently ignoring similar partnerships with Canadian, French, British, Australian, and other police departments. Before long, the rhetoric gave way to action, as protestors turned their anger toward Jewish businesses, schools, and synagogues, defacing them with anti-Semitic graffiti and carrying out break-ins across the predominantly Jewish Los Angeles neighborhood of Pico-Robertson. 

Shocked that Orthodox Jews minding their own business had become targets, I shared my concerns with a friend, only to have them dismissed and the whole affair labeled “a white supremacist psyop.” “The left,” she insisted, “would never hurt Jews,” either unaware of—or unwilling to grapple with—the history of Soviet Jewry. Rather than engaging with my argument on its merits, she dismissed me as someone who “sounds like a Trumper,” reducing my concerns as a Jew worried about the resurgence of the world’s oldest hatred to mere partisan politics. Three years later, in the shadow of the October 7 massacre, she finally drifted out of my orbit.

My shock, however, didn’t end there. At the time, I ran a small online jewelry business called Roots Metals and had built a modest following, consisting mostly of independent artists and small business owners, the overwhelming majority of whom, like myself, leaned left. As activism migrated to social media during the world’s descent into the great void known as COVID-19, I watched how my online community was quick to hop aboard all of the latest social justice trends ranging from Stop Asian Hate to Black Lives Matter. I supported those movements too. But when Jews became the target of hatred, all I heard were crickets.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. Just two years prior, after an American white supremacist murdered eleven congregants in a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, during Shabbat services, I noticed how many left-wing activists were determined to engage with the massacre in every way except for a reckoning with anti-Semitism. Ignoring the murderer’s explicit anti-Semitic motives and his documented hostility to Donald Trump, they reframed the attack primarily as a debate about gun control and cast all blame on the president. The year before, white supremacists and neo-Nazis marched down Charlottesville, Virginia, carrying Tiki torches and chanting “Jews will not replace us!” which the predominantly left-leaning mainstream media had largely reported as “you will not replace us!” Yet now, as that same anti-Semitic rhetoric increasingly gave way to violence, few seemed willing to say a thing.         

Eventually, I reached the point where staying silent felt harder than speaking up. I opened up my Instagram stories and typed out a rant. Though in retrospect I was biting off more than I could chew, I tried to explain the history of the Jewish people, the history of anti-Semitism, and my gripes against the raging silence of my online peers. I’m not sure I was entirely coherent. I’m certain there were typos. After all, it’s hard to make sense when you’re fuming. For the first time, I was using the wealth of knowledge I’d accumulated over the course of my life, sharing it with the world the way friends had urged me to for years. I didn’t know it yet, but those Instagram stories marked the beginning of my online advocacy.

What followed was both expected and unexpected. As my old followers dropped like flies—some leaving the now-obligatory “What about Palestine?” comment on their way out—new followers showed up. Then more. Then more still. They wanted to know more about Jewish history and were hungry for all the details. They wanted to understand the patterns of anti-Semitism I was identifying and learn how to identify them too. They wanted the language to describe what they too had long sensed but had never quite known how to explain.

In a way, I became a loud and proud Jewish advocate against my will. But it was, I think, precisely what I needed. Pushing past my fear of being the center of attention—a fear I continue to grapple with to this day—I discovered something important I had never fully appreciated before: the power of my voice. I realized that I have something valuable to say, even as politically divisive public discourse futilely tried to put me in a box. More importantly, I saw that my words can positively impact other people’s lives. I discovered I am here for a bigger purpose than my own little life: to help other Jews find the terminology to describe what they already know in their bones.

So here I am.

Hineni.

On Tuesday, October 10, 2023, while blood was still flowing and fire was still blazing in the kibbutzim and cities near the Gaza border, I got a tattoo on my left hand: Hineni. In Hebrew. 

Impossible to hide. Impossible to deny. 

It was a tiny and probably banal attempt to buoy my soul amid a sinking sensation that now accompanied being Jewish in this world, though I couldn’t say for certain if this was a cowardly new world that had just surfaced, or the world as it has always been, finally revealed.

Up until October 7, 2023, I didn’t know what Hineni truly meant. I understood what the word signified in pivotal moments in the Bible—being fully present and committed, accepting a divine responsibility to act—but I never imagined it could have any relevance to my life. But on the night after the massacre, everything changed. Reading Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’s To Heal a Fractured World, a book about choosing duty over inaction, the words hit me like a physical blow, an emotional punch in the stomach. There it was, the explanation I didn’t know I needed: “Hineni. Here I am, ready to heed Your call, to mend a fragment of Your all-too-broken world.”

Hineni. That single word echoed through my secular brain. Lacking a traditional relationship with God, I had no idea who was calling to me, what they were saying, or what I was being called to do. I just knew the world was, indeed, all-too-broken, and breaking still. I knew it needed mending. I knew that it was my responsibility to step up.  

Probably the first person ever to have had a tattoo emergency, I woke up the next morning, found an artist, and made an appointment. It was not an act of defiance. It was an act of certainty. With every sting of the needle, I imagined my grandfathers, turning in their graves.

For the granddaughter of immigrants from Eastern Europe who came dirt-poor to Mexico and managed to build a rich and plentiful life with Judaism as its axis, a tattoo was certainly not a Yiddishkeit thing to do. And yet, walking out of that studio and into the all-too-broken world with Hineni visible on my hand, I had never felt more Jewish. 

In the nearly three years since the October 7 Massacre, as I became a Jewish activist in conferences and social and mass media, there have been numerous times when looking at that tattoo offered me guidance and strength. Every time I’m attacked, whether by an online mob or by face-to-face aggressors, I look to the tattoo as my superpower—a shield of a word printed on the back of my hand. 

Was I acting by chance or by choice? I didn’t know, and now I no longer care. I may have been in the right—or wrong—places at the right—or wrong—moments, but it was my choice to act, each and every time. Both in real life and on social media (the line between the two growing thinner and blurrier with every passing day), I have often found myself entrenched in controversial conversations around Judaism, Zionism, and Israel. I suppose it was possible to extract myself from these moments, but I couldn’t—or wouldn’t—stay silent.

Hineni moments—transformative experiences that look almost like ordinary occurrences to an outside observer—are odd. Both familiar and terrifyingly new, they force you to practice direct honesty while taking a stand for the very first time. It is not easy to interpret a conflict that is both so complex and, in essence, so simple at the same time. War and violence never allow for an easy explanation. But standing up for morality and the rights of all people to freedom and safety is simple. Introducing the everlasting promise of Tikkun Olam to an audience manipulated by algorithms is an uphill battle, a repeated discomfort disguised as courage. But striving for a better, more peaceful world should be something we can all get behind.

Am I saying the right thing? Am I using the correct tone? Am I letting my passion and anger get the best of me? Or am I striking the right balance between brain and heart, reason and empathy? Finding it hard to remain morally disciplined while fighting something morally obscene, I spoke up, hoping it would get easier with time.

Unfortunately, it never did. This is when I learned an important lesson about showing up: Hineni does not eliminate doubt. Instead, it demands action despite doubt. 

Over time, the questions changed. Instead of doubting how I was expressing myself, I started asking who I was speaking to. Was I speaking to the unreachable masses, or was I speaking to the few people still willing to listen? Was I having an impact? What was I trying to achieve?

I am not trying to reach the whole world. Some people—those who already share my views and values—do not need my words. Others have decided not to hear a single thing I say. And yet I refuse to back down, speaking to the people who still have enough doubt in their hearts to listen.

Speaking up is hard. Extremely hard. And yet, every time I try to make the safer choice—trying to remain quiet, holding my tongue and refusing to engage—my left hand betrays me. There it is. Hineni. Not a decoration. Not a slogan. A question. A command. A witness.

Getting that tattoo was not just a turning point. It was a point of no return. Every time I have spoken up, every single statement I’ve posted online or made on my podcast, every public talk I have given—I have done so knowing there is a price to pay. Whether it be losing friends, missing out on job opportunities, facing rabid hatred on social media, or enduring uncomfortable, and sometimes violent, personal attacks, I have found it is a price I am willing to pay. Sometimes I pay it with a smile on my face. Other times, with tears in my eyes.

The tattoo is an instant reminder that what we are going through is not new. That encountering hate, and standing up against it, has been not the exception but the rule of our 5,000-year history. Some Jews find their raison d’étre in prayer, I find mine in standing up against hate in the outside world

But the harshest truth is that even when I’m not taking a stand, even when I’m talking about something completely different, the tattoo is an unequivocal testament to my Jewishness. And that doesn’t sit well with a lot of people. Why, then, do I keep speaking up? Why not keep quiet? Why not cover up my hand on occasion?

The answer lies in a comic strip I first saw more than thirty years ago: of an old man and a small child sitting on a park bench. Asked about the number tattooed on his arm, the old man explains that it is a remnant of a time when hate, intolerance, and death ruled the world.

“So, mister, you kept the number to remind yourself of that time?”

“No, dear boy, I kept it to remind you.”

The Hineni on my hand is a source of strength when I speak up. But it is also a reminder to those who see it—Jewish or non-Jewish, curious or uncomfortable—to act, to stand up, to choose dialogue over hate, to believe in tolerance over supremacy. It is a reminder. A reminder to everyone willing to listen of the indomitable spirit of the Jewish people.

Maybe that is the call Rabbi Sacks wrote about—the call to heal this all-too-broken world. Not as a reminder to the self, but to those who have yet to heed the call. To remind you.

Here I am.

Hineni.

As my last name suggests, my family origins trace back to Germany. My great-great grandfather, Rabbi Yosef Breuer, was a leader in the German Orthodox community and a respected figure within German society. His youngest daughter, my great-great aunt, vividly recalls reading Psalms during Kristallnacht while her father was arrested by the Gestapo and their synagogue was being burnt to the ground. As some of the very last Jews to flee Germany from the Nazis, my family found a home in the United States, where they were able to rebuild and sustain their Jewish life and identity. To this day, the synagogue they built in New York City remains standing and active, a living testament not only to the indomitable spirit of the Jewish people, but also to what makes the United States of America such a beautiful, welcoming country.

Because of that history, I have never viewed anti-Semitism as an abstract subject of study or a distant chapter in history. Instead, my story of anti-Semitism is deeply painful and deeply personal. For me, Kristallnacht did not begin with book burnings or broken windows. It began neither with destroyed synagogues nor with expulsions. Kristallnacht began with a pernicious ideology that swept across German society. It began with the acceptance, the normalization, and the celebration of Jew hatred.

Though history never repeats itself exactly, its periods of turmoil often begin in recognizable ways. That is why what I have witnessed at Harvard—the acceptance, the normalization, and the celebration of Jew hatred on campus—has felt so painfully familiar. The treatment of Jewish Americans on college campuses across this country, and in particular at Harvard University, is nothing short of a national emergency. It is blatantly anti-Semitic, frighteningly discriminatory, and deeply illiberal. 

If that sounds hyperbolic, let me show you how my four years at Harvard ended. As I took my seat at commencement, I was handed a ten-page, student-produced newspaper. What should have been a keepsake of the day became something else entirely. To my surprise, the “newspaper” accused Jews of racism for arguing that calls for an Intifada are a direct promotion of violence. The authors went on to defend chants for actual violence like “from water to water Palestine is Arab” and “globalize the Intifada.” 

Then, the 2024 commencement speaker, Maria Ressa, took the stage. “I was called anti-Semitic by power and money,” she boomed into the microphone, “because they want power and money.” Just a week before, she had deployed anti-Semitic tropes in front of tens of thousands of students, professors, and families during a graduation ceremony. That same week, dozens of students and faculty gathered by the gates of Harvard to gleefully exclaim “Intifada, intifada, come to America!” That was how my college education ended—not with a celebration of learning, but with the normalization of anti-Semitism.

These events were just the tip of the iceberg, encapsulating the absolute chaos that has engulfed Harvard University for much of the preceding year. During a nearly month-long illegal encampment in the center of Harvard Yard, students and faculty demanded that the university completely divest from what they referred to as “the Zionist entity.” Although the participants tried forcing open Harvard’s gates with bolt cutters, repeatedly violated all time, place, and manner restrictions for demonstrations on campus, called for the violent destruction of the Jewish state, and established a self-appointed security system that monitored and recorded Jews on their way to class, they were handsomely rewarded by the institution. In exchange for dismantling the encampment and packing up their foul-smelling tents and open-air laundry, the suspensions of all graduate and almost all undergraduate students were revoked. The encampment leaders would later go on to meet with senior university officials to discuss establishing a Palestinian Studies department and sit down with the Harvard Management Corporation to discuss divestment of its $50 billion endowment from Israel. President Alan Garber himself, despite having been depicted by the protesters as a horned Jewish devil, had personally ensured “leniency” in the disciplinary process. 

Then came the final blow, as Harvard’s anti-Semitism taskforce—led by a professor who had repeatedly dismissed reports of anti-Semitism at the university as “exaggerated”—quietly revised its timeline. Jewish students at Harvard had their education disrupted by their classmates calling for an Intifada, sat alongside peers who praised Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, watched thirty-four student groups blame the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust on Jews themselves, endured countless threats, and spent a significant portion of their college years under the leadership of a university president who described calls for the genocide of Jews as “context-dependent.” Yet, rather than fulfilling its promise to deliver recommendations for combatting Jew-hatred by the end of the spring semester, the taskforce announced that its findings would not be released before the fall.

Even now, more than two years later, little has changed. Although both the Harvard Jewish Alumni Association and the Congressional Committee on Education and The Workforce released damning reports documenting the systematic silencing of Jewish and Israeli voices on campus, the university has yet to announce or implement a single policy in response. In fact, despite findings that Jewish and Israeli students were spat on, assaulted, asked to leave class because their nationality made classmates “uncomfortable,” and even threatened by a machete-wielding staff member—as happened to me personally —Harvard has yet to publicly acknowledge any of these incidents. Instead, the university recently announced a policy of institutional neutrality, declaring that it would refrain from issuing statements on matters of public policy or affairs. Just one day earlier, the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee had called for an “open intifada” against “every settler and soldier… in every capital.” Yet, after years of issuing statements on issues ranging from the murder of George Floyd to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Harvard chose institutional neutrality only when confronted with open calls for violence against Jews. 

Yet the Jew-hatred at Harvard does not tell the whole story. Alongside the rising tide of Jew-hatred on campus, there has also been an extraordinary resurgence of Jewish pride. I have witnessed firsthand how thousands of young American Jews rediscovered and publicly reclaimed their Jewish identity. I have seen Chabad houses filled with students gathering for Shabbat dinner. I have seen American and Israeli flags waved on campus by young Jews who have woken up. In the aftermath of October 7, 2023, they—and I—have been both unable and unwilling to go back to sleep.

Here we are. 
Still here. 

Hinenu.

We meet in the graffiti-covered streets of southern Tel Aviv, each of us carrying a different kind of history, shaped by experiences that left deep scars. We recognize something in each other immediately—not an explanation, but a resonance. What we bring into the world is not only who we are, but what we have survived. Art, for us, is never a hobby. It is language. It is endurance. It is the only way we know how to translate what cannot be plainly spoken.

Our connection forms quickly, with intensity and recognition at its center. We create together, talk endlessly, move between walls, studios, and streets, always returning to the act of making. Through art, we begin to build a life, not separate from our histories, but made from them. Eventually, we leave Israel for New York.

We arrive with urgency and hope, searching for a place where we can simply be artists, where identity is not constantly weighed down by politics, memory, and inherited narratives. New York is unstable, unpredictable, often difficult—but it is also full of possibility. We struggle financially, yet we feel something we have not felt in a very long time: openness. We begin imagining a future that includes not only survival and creation, but also the possibility of family. Then war breaks out in Israel.

The distance we believed we had built collapses instantly. From afar, we watch events unfold with a sense of helplessness that is physical, immediate, and inescapable. When civilians are taken hostage, we reach for the only language we trust. We create posters. We design simple images of faces, names, presence. We print them out and begin hanging them all over the streets of Manhattan, sharing them online, hoping that someone will stop, look, and remember what is at risk of being forgotten. 

What happens next is immediate and beyond anything we could have anticipated. The posters begin to spread. Volunteers across the world download them, print them, hang them in their own cities. Images appear in places we have never been. Social media amplifies everything. What began as a small artistic response becomes a global grassroots action almost over night.

Within weeks, we find ourselves at the center of a movement that is no longer ours alone. Media outlets call constantly. Interviews multiply. Public figures hold the posters up to cameras. Demonstrations, projections, and coordinated actions appear across continents. The campaign grows faster than our ability to understand it, shaped by urgency and collective emotion. We become recognizable, not as experts or organizers, but as the accidental faces of something much larger.

At the same time, a backlash grows with equal force. Posters are torn down, defaced, and burned. Videos of confrontations circulate widely. Streets become a site of repetition: hanging and tearing, showcasing and erasing. We receive threats over text, email, and phone calls. Conspiracy theories circulate, projecting foreign intentions onto us. Visibility begins to feel less like reach and more like exposure. Our personal lives slowly dissolve beneath the weight of the campaign. 

We stop making our own independent work. Days melt into interviews, coordination, logistics, and crisis management. Financial pressure increases. Emotionally, we carry not only our own fear and exhaustion, but also the expectations of thousands of volunteers and families who look to us for guidance. In the middle of all this, we still try to build a future that includes a child.

The desire for life grows precisely because so much around us is defined by loss. After years of trying, we learn that we are expecting twins. For a brief moment, something soft opens. Hope returns in a form we can almost hold. We marry quietly at City Hall.

In our wedding photograph, we hold posters of two kidnapped children. The image feels both unbearable and honest—an intersection of love, grief, and responsibility that we do not know how to separate. We return to work the same day. The pressure does not ease up.

Exhaustion accumulates in layers. Stress becomes constant background noise. Eventually, we experience loss—first one embryo, then the second. The grief is profound, private, and difficult to name. Publicly, we carry on. We give interviews. We coordinate. We function. Internally, we feel fractured, numb, and suspended. As time passes, the movement begins to shift.

Some hostages return, while others remain behind. Media attention begins to move elsewhere. Internal tensions emerge among organizers and collaborators. Questions of credit, authorship, and recognition create fractures in what once felt unified. We find ourselves repeatedly struggling to correct narratives we cannot control, as interviews are edited and meanings are reshaped. The sense of cohesion that once held everything together begins to break apart.

Outside, the world becomes more polarized. Volunteers experience hostility on the streets. Some lose their jobs after being filmed. Communities divide sharply along political lines. The act of hanging posters, once urgent and clear, begins to feel repetitive, uncertain, almost powerless. We continue, but something essential has shifted. We are both exhausted and unable to stop, caught inside momentum that no longer feels fully ours.

Then things become personal. Our apartment is broken into. Nothing is taken, but something nebulous changes. The feeling of safety becomes even more tenuous. Threats continue. Isolation deepens. During a dinner with a new friend, we meet a well-known medium who unexpectedly describes details of our apartment and warns us that we are in imminent danger. Whether or not we fully believe what is said, something in us responds. That night, we pack our belongings and leave. From that moment on, we live in motion.

We move from apartment to apartment, staying with friends, carrying our belongings, our work, and campaign materials with us. We stay only in buildings featuring doormen, cameras, locked entrances. Stability becomes temporary by design.

We continue working through instability. We give interviews. We speak publicly. We move forward even when we are exhausted. Life becomes a series of extremes. In the streets, we are met with both gratitude and hostility. Some people embrace us, cry with us, thank us. Others curse us or turn away angrily. Former colleagues distance themselves or speak against us publicly. At the same time, families of hostages ask us not to stop. To survive financially, we begin creating smaller artworks for supporters, returning to the very practice that first connected us. 

Over time, the campaign loses visibility. Public attention wanders. Posters remain only as fragments on walls, weathered and partially vandalized. We begin to feel as though we are disappearing from the story we helped write, while others continue to use its language without acknowledging its origins. Exhaustion turns into disappointment, and disappointment into a quieter sense of betrayal. Eventually, we briefly return to Israel to settle up the life we had left behind. We sell, donate, and release what remains. After that, we do not return in the same way again. We attempt to rebuild in the United States.

Slowly, we return to art, not as urgency, but as a means of processing events and emotions. A filmmaker begins to document the broader phenomenon of poster tearing and the social fracture it reflects, placing fragments of our experience inside a wider cultural narrative. We continue to speak publicly about the hostages in screenings and panels, even as our own visibility fades. The campaign becomes less a living movement and more a memory, a trace of a moment when attention and urgency briefly aligned. Still, we keep going.

We decide to try one more round of fertility treatments, in spite of everything we have lost. We travel, we wait, we hope, we endure uncertainty again. Eventually, something shifts. We succeed. A long-awaited pregnancy. 

By this point, all the hostages, whether on their feet, on crutches, or in body bags, have come home. The larger conflict in the world has not ended, and instability remains present everywhere we look. What remains is a question that continues to echo through all that we have lived: How do we keep choosing life, love, and creation in a world that so often pulls toward destruction?

There was no single moment when I decided to establish a civil commission. There was certainly no plan in place. As I watched history being rewritten in real time, before Israelis could even begin to grasp what was happening, I knew something had occurred that would demand more from me than anything I had ever imagined.

As a legal scholar, a feminist, and a human rights advocate, my academic work had long been concerned with gender, international law, and the protection of women’s rights in times of crisis. I believed deeply in the architecture we had built around victims: international human rights institutions, feminist jurisprudence, the painstaking progress that had taught the world to recognize sexual violence not as an inevitable byproduct of war, but as a grave violation demanding recognition and accountability. Then came the October 7 massacre.

In the days that followed, I began receiving accounts of unimaginable violence. Women murdered. Families slaughtered or burned together. People abducted from their homes. Sexual violence. Bodies bearing signs of horrific abuse. The terrorists had filmed and livestreamed the attack, glorifying what they had done and using their victims’ phones and social media accounts to amplify the suffering. Seeing the rampage, I thought the institutions I had grown to trust and rely on would respond with urgency and compassion. I expected urgent actions for the return of the hostages, solidarity with the victims, and acknowledgement of the pain, trauma, and grief. 

What I did not anticipate was that almost immediately, we would have to fight over whether the violence itself—especially the sexual violence—could be established as fact. But within days, a second battle had begun: a battle over the truth.

Victims’ accounts were questioned. Evidence was dismissed. Testimonies were politicized. Even images recorded by the perpetrators themselves became objects of denial or relativization. The sexual violence itself quickly became a tool for political agendas by those who were entrusted with protecting human rights. 

For those of us who had spent years working on gender and sexual violence, this was a devastating violation of responsibility and it challenged one of our deepest assumptions: that the protection of victims of sexual violence transcend politics. The belief system that had shaped our values had fractured at its core. The moral and legal frameworks I had trusted had broken beneath my feet. We were not operating in a sympathetic evidentiary environment. We were not even operating in a neutral one. Though we couldn’t explain it, something was profoundly wrong. 

Seeing all of this, I remember asking publicly, very early after the attack, a question I never imagined that I would ever ask: Does international law apply to Israeli women? Is it going to protect us?  

That may have been my Hineni moment. 

Not because I felt ready, but because I understood that waiting for someone else to act was no longer an option. And so, together with extraordinary colleagues, we established the Civil Commission on October 7 Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children.

At first, the task seemed straightforward: to collect and document every piece of available information. But very quickly, we understood that documentation itself had become part of the struggle. We were witnessing atrocities and bearing testimony to trauma that at times made us physically ill, while simultaneously confronting organized and sophisticated efforts to deny the evidence.

I understood that anti-Semitism does not operate only through the hatred of Jews. It operates at the level of perception. It introduces instability at the level of knowledge itself, affecting whose testimony is recognized, which victims are believed, what evidence is considered credible, which suffering is granted moral significance, and ultimately which stories become part of history.

For someone shaped by feminist legal theory, this was particularly painful. For decades, feminist activists fought to establish that victims of sexual violence deserve to be heard and believed; that their trauma can shape testimony; that disbelief can itself become another form of harm.

And yet, I watched those principles become conditional and fragile. Jewish and Israeli victims were questioned, doubted, and asked to cross impossible evidentiary thresholds that seemed to keep moving. 

In that sense, preserving the factual record was not merely a legal exercise. It was an act of resistance. An epistemic resistance. A feminist resistance. A humanistic resistance.

And so, we listened to survivors and their families. We gathered testimonies, photographs, videos, open-source evidence, and other records. We analyzed everything: watching the excruciating materials over and over again and working with lawyers, researchers, and experts from around the world to build an archive not merely for the current moment, but for future generations. Knowing that every factual assertion would be challenged, we adopted rigorous legal methodologies, extensive corroboration, multidisciplinary reviews, and standards drawn from international criminal investigations. That rigor was not only a matter of good legal practice. It was a response to an environment in which truth itself had become contested, and in which every witness, every survivor, and even we ourselves had become targets. That rigor culminated in our published report, Silenced No More: Sexual Terror Unveiled—The Untold Atrocities of October 7 and Against Hostages in Captivity, which provides the most comprehensive legal and factual foundation for understanding Hamas’s crimes.

But as we worked on the report, our attention was drawn to another aspect of the massacre we had yet to consider. We saw families deliberately attacked and tortured as families: parents murdered before their children’s eyes, children harmed before their parents’ eyes, relatives abducted together and intentionally separated, homes turned into sites of torture, and familial bonds themselves weaponized to maximize suffering. They could have killed everyone. Instead, they chose to weaponize familial love itself and to inflict such suffering on victims that would endure long after the violence had ended, ensuring that the pain would be carried by survivors for generations. 

Survivors’ experiences exceeded the vocabulary available to us, forcing us to expand our language. What we were witnessing demanded new words. To describe it, we coined the terms Kinocide—the systematic targeting and destruction of families and the weaponization of the bonds between their members. And I offer the term kinocidal sexual violence—to describe sexual violence deliberately committed through, against, or in the presence of family members to weaponize the most intimate of human bonds. By giving victims—and the law—the language to describe what had been done to them, we gave them the ability to articulate their suffering and, perhaps for the first time, to feel truly seen and understood.

Someone recently asked me whether, after everything we’ve documented—the evidence, the testimonies, the patterns of violence, the legal analysis—there was anything missing from our report. The question stayed with me. Nearly 300 pages long, there is still one line I wish I could add. A line that I want my children to know. A line that I want survivors and families to know. A line I need to be reminded of myself after years of looking directly at what human beings are capable of doing to one another: Always, always remember that there is as much good in this world as there is evil. Cruelty is real, but so are courage, love, compassion, and the goodness that people are capable of. I have seen that, too.

I have seen it in survivors who chose to speak up. I have seen it in families who entrusted us with the most painful chapters of their lives. I have seen it in colleagues who stayed even when the work became almost unbearable. I have seen it in people across countries, professions, religions, and communities who stood with us and refused to look away.

In that sense, for me, the Hineni moment was a moment of calling. What gave it meaning, however, was everything that followed.  It was the decision to remain, to keep showing up, and to continue answering that call day after day. To speak for those who cannot. To stand by the truth even when it becomes uncomfortable, or unbearable. To stay with victims long after the world has grown tired of their stories and to preserve memory when forgetting is simply easier. And lastly, to defend our shared humanity precisely when cruelty and ignorance tempted us to abandon it. Perhaps that is what it truly means to say, hineni: not simply to answer the call, but to remain faithful to it.

The October 7 massacre taught me that truth sometimes requires fierce protection. It does not preserve itself. Human rights do not defend themselves. Institutions do not automatically live up to the principles they proclaim. They depend on people willing to stand up and say, “I see what is happening. I refuse to look away. I will carry what I can.”

Here I am.

Hineni.

Though my detractors wouldn’t put it that way, I was cancelled for daring to suggest that Jews may defend themselves against attempted genocide. During the 2014 Israel-Hamas war, I wrote a Facebook post defending Israel’s blockade of Hamas-run Gaza, comparing the situation to someone who, threatened by a rabid dog, places it in a cage to protect himself only to be condemned for the dog’s furious barking. Capturing what I saw as the absurdity of much of the world’s response to Hamas’s attacks on Israel, the analogy portrayed the dog as being violent not because it was in the cage, but rather placed in the cage because of the relentless violence it had inflicted while unconfined.

Six months later, long after the war ended, my post was sinisterly twisted into something it was never meant to be: an expression of racism against Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims in general.  Condemnation quickly followed—from people I had once considered my friends through strangers around the globe. Petitions circulated branding me a hateful, racist Zionist and demanding that I be fired, removed, silenced. Hate mail and death threats poured in from all over the world. After my personal information was shared online, my family and I lived in constant fear and paranoia. Even dropping off our young boys at their Jewish day school became an exercise in terror as the attacks continued for weeks on end. 

The public campaign soon threatened to become a private collapse. I went on medical leave, partly to avoid being seen in public and exposing myself to potential attacks. For weeks, I could barely function. I didn’t eat, I didn’t sleep. I stayed up all night defending myself—writing emails, explaining that I was the target of a coordinated defamation campaign, trying to rally support, speaking with lawyers and journalists, giving interviews, and talking to anyone who would listen.

On the cusp of a nervous collapse, the campaign was taking its toll. I felt as though I were leaning over in my chair just a little too far, forever catching myself before I fell, inching closer and closer to the moment when I would tumble over the precipice. I thought about giving up. I thought about surrendering, letting people call me—and any other proud Jew—a racist, and then retreating into silence. The chair, I felt, kept tipping. 

Then something unexpected happened. Someone started a petition in my support, and it began to spread. Going viral, it went around the world, ultimately garnering more than 10,000 signatures—even more than the petitions calling for my dismissal. At that moment, something clicked. The chair was righted.

When you are attacked in the way I was and nearly everyone you know turns against you, you feel profoundly alone. It was as though everyone I knew had suddenly pulled off their masks and revealed a Hitler face beneath. In that loneliness, the easiest and most tempting thing was to give up, give in, and capitulate. Instead, that petition reminded me that I was not alone. It showed me that more than 10,000 people around the world stood behind me and with me. Realizing that, in some way, I represented these people—that while I was the Jew currently under attack, it really was all Jews on trial—I understood that I must not, indeed could not, let them down. I may have been the tip of the spear, but they were the ten thousand pushing it forward.

Moments away from collapse, from giving up, I stood back up. With the truth on my side, that petition convinced me that I had no choice but to keep fighting. And I have ever since. From that moment on, my academic and professional work became increasingly devoted to defending Israel and the Jewish people, both on campuses and beyond. It could so easily have ended differently. Yet, when I was at my very lowest, Am Yisrael stood up for me. And so now, I stand up for them.

I never could have imagined that one decision to seek justice for myself would lead me to a completely new community, cause, and purpose. What began as a deeply personal journey toward healing and accountability would eventually connect me to something much larger than myself.

In November 2005, when I was 15-years-old, I was sexually assaulted. Though the crime was reported to law enforcement, my parents did not want to pursue criminal charges. And, since I was a minor at the time, the case did not move forward. Nearly 18 years later, having seen a video posted on social media by another survivor of sexual assault, I finally got the push I needed to reopen my case and pursue justice once again.

Protected by the extension of the statute of limitations for childhood sexual abuse—in Connecticut, victims can seek justice until thirty years after reaching adulthood, when they turn 48-years-old—I made the decision to revisit a chapter of my life that I had carried with me for nearly two decades. By March 2024, the police investigation was complete, and the detective assigned to my case had applied for an arrest warrant against the perpetrator. He was exceptional to work with and, despite the passage of nearly two decades and the absence of DNA evidence, was able to uncover sufficient evidence to move the case forward. For the first time in years, I felt like justice might finally be within reach. 

That same month, my attention was drawn to another story of trauma and the search for justice. Posting about the hostages kidnapped into Gaza during the October 7 massacre, a Jewish friend shared information about their plight on social media, and it immediately captured my attention. Less than three months later, I joined the Run for Their Lives chapter in Fairfield, Connecticut, part of a global initiative of more than 230 groups advocating for the release of the hostages. At the time, I expected it to be a one-time gesture of solidarity as a Christian ally. Instead, I found myself returning almost every week, missing only a handful of walks between June 2024 and October 2025 when the last remaining living hostages were finally brought back home.

Run for Their Lives ended up changing my life just as profoundly as my own pursuit of justice. I never anticipated that a weekly walk would become one of the most meaningful and transformative experiences of my life, but from the very first gathering I was struck by the warmth, gratitude, and kindness of the people involved. I felt an overwhelming sense of compassion, hope, love, and connection, and knew that this community was different from the many other I have been a part of throughout my life. 

By the time I pulled into my driveway after that first walk, one of the group leaders had already sent me a friend request on social media. Feeling welcomed and seen, I returned the following week, and the one after that, and the one after that. Over time, I came to know all three group leaders—Beth, Lauren, and Laurie—whose kindness, dedication, and commitment helped create the incredible community I had found.

Shortly after I began participating in the walks, I started following the personal stories of the hostages more closely. As I learned about their experiences, I discovered that many had endured sexual abuse while in captivity. Several men, women, and children who survived captivity courageously stepped forward to share their stories, telling of harrowing experiences no one should ever have to endure. As additional hostages were gradually released, more accounts emerged through news articles, documentaries, and television interviews. Their stories resonated with me in ways I was only beginning to understand.

Though I was already deeply committed to advocating for the hostages, learning that some had experienced sexual violence created an even stronger personal connection for me. As a survivor myself, I understood how difficult it can be to speak publicly about such trauma. I knew that telling your story often means reliving some of your most painful moments. And yet, the released hostages refused to stay silent. Their courage in sharing their experiences only strengthened my resolve to stand beside them and help ensure that their stories would never be forgotten.

One aspect of the fight to release the hostages rang painfully familiar. Having experienced skepticism, judgment, and misunderstanding about my own assault, I noticed that both the hostages and those calling for their release often faced similar hostility. Despite advocating for the release of innocent people who had endured unimaginable suffering, the movement was frequently misunderstood, criticized, or accused of motives that did not reflect its purpose. Even the hostages themselves, held for months in underground tunnels, separated from their families, deprived of basic comforts, and subjected to profound physical and emotional trauma, often saw their experiences dismissed, minimized, or questioned. The more I learned about their stories, the more deeply committed I became to ensuring that their experiences—and their humanity—remained at the center of the conversation.

My own experience navigating the criminal justice system also exposed me to the many challenges survivors face in seeking justice. Working alongside advocates and activists to support legislative changes that would better serve survivors, I learned about Jane Doe No More, a Connecticut-based organization dedicated to the prevention of sexual violence through education, awareness, and survivor empowerment. By then, my involvement with Run for Their Lives had given me the confidence and strength to speak publicly about my own experience. The friendships I made through both communities reminded me that advocacy often requires courage, persistence, and a willingness to be uncomfortable. Watching the example set by my newfound friends, I learned that meaningful change often begins when people find the courage to use their voices.

Years ago, I never would have imagined speaking publicly about my experiences, let alone doing so on a regular basis. Today, as one of 72 Survivor Speakers with Jane Doe No More, sharing my story has become a powerful part of my healing journey while also creating opportunities to educate others and support fellow survivors.

The experiences I endured have changed me, but they did not define the limits of my life. Instead, they became the reason I continue to speak, stand with others, and fight for a world where survivors are believed, hostages are fought for, and people who have gone through unimaginable trauma are met with kindness, understanding, and compassion. Looking back, I could never have imagined where standing up for myself would lead. Yet, what began as a decision to seek justice for myself became a journey that connected me with communities, causes, and people who would transform my life.

My journey as a survivor taught me that healing is not a straight line. Sometimes healing looks like returning to the hardest moments of your life. Sometimes it looks like standing beside others in their darkest moments. Sometimes it looks like finding the courage to say, “Hineni”—here I am.

I do not know what my next “Hineni” moment will be, but I know that the next time I am called to stand up, speak out, and show up for others, I will be ready to answer: 

Here I am.

Hineni.

I have always taken the road less travelled.

My mother was raised in an Orthodox home. Her parents, both immigrants, owned a Kosher restaurant, Poliacoff’s, in midtown Manhattan. My parents separated when I was young and I was raised by a black stepfather for many of my formative years. I dropped out of high school but read voraciously while my peers attended class. I studied Buddhism for years as a teenager, sitting through meditation retreats while others my age were out partying. I was searching for something I couldn’t put words to. 

That search unexpectedly led me to Israel when, in 2001, my non-Jewish best friend convinced me to join him on a trip there. Though I had never set foot in the country before, I immediately felt at home in a way I never had elsewhere. Seeing kids my age serving in the military illuminated the differences between the youth in America and Israel. In Israel, young people weren’t only prepared to give away three years of their lives, they were willing to put their lives on the line to keep others safe. My friend and I traveled through Israel, the Palestinian territories, the Sinai, and Egypt before heading to Europe on the very day the Second Intifada began. Returning to the U.S. to start college, I never could have imagined that that journey had quietly set the course for the next two decades of my life.

Almost immediately, the questions raised by that trip followed me into the classroom. During my first week as a student at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, I sat in a coffee shop, watching as the second plane hit the World Trade Center on live TV. In my Middle Eastern History seminar, which included, among other students, an Iraqi Kurd, a Pashtun Afghan woman, Christians of various traditions, and me as the only Jew, we tried making sense of that tragedy. A Muslim classmate expressed a deep fear of being blamed for the attacks. His anxiety is something that has stayed with me.

The events of September 11, 2001, and my experiences in Israel both deepened my relationship with Judaism despite my staunch secularism. Inspired by the carnage of the Second Intifada to better understand the tribe I belonged to and the violence directed at Israeli civilians, I decided, in the summer before my sophomore year, to do something I never could have imagined doing just a couple years earlier. And so, despite widespread protests from friends and family, I moved to Israel. I made Aliyah.

Beyond the blessing of meeting and marrying my wife during my time in Israel, the years I spent in the country gave me something I hadn’t even known I was missing: a sense of Jewish peoplehood. Coming to understand that no matter where I am in the world there will always be a Shabbat table I could join and people who care about my well-being before we’ve ever met imbued me with a new kind of power. Communicating in the language of my ancestors with my distant cousins whose families came from across the Middle East, North Africa, Ethiopia, and Europe felt like a newfound superpower. 

After five years in Israel, my wife and I crossed the Atlantic once again and settled in New York City in 2008. We focused on graduate school, then our burgeoning careers, and eventually raising children. Aside from volunteering briefly with the Community Security Services, joining a Synagogue to register our children in a Jewish daycare, and maintaining close friendships with New York’s Israeli community, we were relatively disconnected from organized American Jewish communal life. 

That changed forever on October 7, 2023.

Waking up earlier than usual to drive our sons to their respective soccer tournaments, my wife and I noticed hundreds of unread messages on her family WhatsApp group. We read through them together, listening to voice note after voice note with tears running down our cheeks, learning that some of her family members were trapped inside their homes on kibbutzim overrun by Hamas. Some had watched their neighbors being murdered. Others begged for help as they hid inside homes that were partially on fire, Hamas terrorists trying to smoke them out. In a matter of minutes, the ordinary life we had spent years building in New York City no longer felt ordinary at all.

Still in shock, my wife and I kissed each other goodbye and drove in opposite directions. Praying for family members we hadn’t heard from yet, I stood on the field’s sidelines cheering for my son as the death toll kept rising. 50 dead. Then 100 dead. Then more, many more. My mind was taking in the horror thousands of miles away, even as my body appeared to move normally through the familiar routines.

But the devastation of the October 7 Massacre was only the beginning. Upon returning home, I learned that the Democratic Socialists of America—a radical, anti-Israel political organization—had put together a rally in Times Square in celebration of the massacre. On Monday, my wife’s colleagues at the Brooklyn public school where she worked avoided her because she was Israeli. I learned the name of my city Councilwoman, Shahana Hanif, when I read about her arrest on October 20 during an anti-Israel rally. The message from our community was unmistakable. Rather than responding with horror, many seemed intent on justifying or even glorifying the massacre.

In the weeks that followed, I operated in a daze. All around me, hostage posters were torn down as fast as we could put them up. By the end of October, activists began to gather outside of my own grocery cooperative, the Park Slope Food Coop, to gather signatures for a petition to join the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign against Israel. I was furious. Not just at the proposal, but at the activists who had taken to accosting members outside the entrance, spreading anti-Zionist libels and treating the word “Zionist” (someone who believes in the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland) as a slur. People called me a racist genocide supporter. Some repeated delusionally inflated casualty figures, claiming that 700,000 Palestinians had been killed. Others insisted Hamas hadn’t intended to harm civilians. Faced with activists whose cult-like certainty seemed impervious to evidence or argument, meaningful conversation felt impossible. One Israeli friend was screamed at while stocking shelves by a woman who told her she “smelled of Palestinian baby blood.” Had a white coop member screamed something comparable at a black member, expulsion would have been immediate and unanimous. Heartbreakingly, the coop’s tepid response led us all to the same conclusion: when it came to Jews, the rules were different.

Dismayed that people weren’t willing to take an active stand against this hatred, I decided to run for the Coop’s Board of Directors. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I lost the election by a wide margin, which only grew my resolve. Bolstered by the fact that so many people privately expressed to me how happy they were that I was decrying the boycott attempt and its corrosive effects on our community, my urge to stand up to anti-Zionism was more acute than ever.

Turning my attention to Shahana Hanif, my City Council member who had visited Columbia’s anti-Israel encampments, tweeted “Globalize the Intifada,” and refused to recognize Israel’s right to exist or condemn Hamas, I joined a group of similarly reluctant local activists.  Organizing in people’s living rooms, I formed a broad coalition of many of Hanif’s Jewish and non-Jewish constituents who were troubled by her conduct, to co-found Brooklyn Bridgebuilders, a truly local, grassroots organization dedicated to confronting hatred in all its forms. What began as outrage over one elected official quickly became an effort to rebuild the kind of community we wanted to live in.

Alongside my newfound activism, I worked with the Brandeis Center, a Jewish civil rights legal advocacy organization, to file a discrimination complaint against the Park Slope Food Coop with the New York State Human Rights Commission. If the coop wouldn’t stand against anti-Zionist hatred, I would ask the courts to. If my Council member was promoting anti-Zionist hate speech, I would ask voters to hold her accountable. Raising money, training volunteers, and organizing the community, the pressure we built gradually worked, forcing Hanif to condemn an attack on a local Jewish-owned restaurant, delete some of her inflammatory tweets, and speak more critically of Hamas. For the first time, I saw that even ordinary citizens could influence public life when they organized, persisted, and refused to be intimidated.

Unfortunately, not every fight ended the same way. As Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign gathered momentum, it became increasingly clear that Hanif would comfortably win reelection. Then, in April 2025, the stakes at the coop snapped back into sharp focus when a member declared, to sustained applause, that “Jewish supremacy is a real problem in this country.” Although I took the stage to challenge the room, by then the outcome already felt inevitable. The following month, the coop voted to boycott Israel. 

Everything in my life has prepared me for this moment. At sixteen, I dropped out of school to pave my own path. At twenty-one, I made Aliyah when everyone told me not to. At twenty-eight, I founded my own business in the midst of a global financial crisis. Time and again, I have learned that the right path is often the uncomfortable one. Today I’m a little wiser, a little more stubborn, and infinitely more certain that Am Yisrael has my back. 

Here I am.

Hineni.

History is often transformed by moments that, at first glance, seem too modest to matter. A woman refusing to give up her seat on a city bus. A young pastor urging a wounded community to confront injustice without violence. A human rights activist deciding that a forgotten comic book deserves a second life in another language. Because such moments rarely announce themselves as revolutionary, their power lies precisely in their ordinariness. Only later do we recognize that each marked the beginning of a larger moral and political awakening. For me, that moment began in 2006 with an unexpected encounter with Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks in a comic book from the 1960s.

When I first read Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, I never imagined it would alter the trajectory of my life. Recounting Rosa Parks’s story, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s philosophy of nonviolent resistance, its language was simple, its format accessible, and its moral message unmistakably human. Yet what moved me most was not King’s courage or Parks’ quiet defiance, but the comprehension that neither regarded themselves as heroic. They had simply reached a point at which silence was no longer morally possible.

For the first time, I understood that history is rarely changed by extraordinary people or Marvel superheroes. More often, change begins with ordinary individuals who accept extraordinary responsibility. That was my first encounter with the idea Jews call Hineni, not merely as a declaration of presence but as an ethical response to a demand that can no longer be evaded.

At the time, I was a young human rights activist working to advance liberal democracy, religious freedom, and women’s rights under an authoritarian regime. Though many young Egyptians believed that meaningful political change was impossible, I knew that our deepest challenge was not political repression alone but the widespread conviction that change was only possible through violence. Having learned from Dr. King a different grammar for political struggle, I came to understand that moral courage could become political power without sacrificing human dignity.

Convinced that my fellow Egyptians deserved to encounter that vision as well, I worked with the American Islamic Congress—a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit—to translate the comic book into Arabic and print it, not without risk, at an underground Cairo print shop. With Egyptian authorities questioning why an American comic book about civil rights should be published in Arabic, I spent hours explaining that this was not an American story alone but a universal account of citizenship, responsibility, and peaceful resistance. Eventually, thousands of copies of the comic book were printed and distributed across the Middle East. Even before the book reached the streets, it had already demonstrated the persuasive power of dialogue over confrontation.

At the time, I believed I was just translating a comic book. Only later did I understand that I was translating an idea, one that would inspire millions of young people in Egypt, the Middle East, and the entire world to stand up for themselves. Spearheading the Egyptian “Arab Spring,” I was present at the forefront when hundreds of thousands of my fellow citizens filled Tahrir Square in January, 2011. After days of sustained protests, I saw that idea come to life in a nonviolent revolution that successfully ousted a hardline dictator and paved the way for a democracy to emerge in our political landscape.

Like millions of others, I believed we were witnessing the birth of a democratic Egypt. For eighteen unforgettable days, our differences in religion, ideology, class, and gender seemed to dissolve into a shared demand for freedom, dignity, and an accountable government. Among the crowds, copies of the comic book I had translated were passed from hand to hand. With international media later reporting that the Arabic edition had helped introduce young Egyptian activists to the philosophy of nonviolent resistance, playing a role in bringing that small book from Montgomery to Cairo remains one of the most humbling experiences of my life.

Like many Egyptians, I believed that removing Hosni Mubarak from power would be the hardest part. I was wrong. Building democracy proved far more difficult than demanding one. As the old regime collapsed and many young revolutionaries found themselves debating constitutional principles, independent institutions, civil liberties, and the rule of law, members of the Muslim Brotherhood were gearing up for the coming elections, consolidating their organization, and positioning themselves to dominate the new political order. While we were trying our best to build democratic institutions, they were preparing to capture them.

Surprised that so many respected journalists, academics, and policymakers in the West concluded that the Muslim Brotherhood’s participation in a democratic election made the organization itself democratic, I refused to accept that logic. Having spent years studying political Islam (a politicized, radicalized adaptation of the religion of Islam widely promoted by the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots, including Hamas), I understood that democracy cannot be reduced to the ballot box, nor judged solely by the outcome of an election. True democracy requires constitutional limits on power, the protection of minorities, freedom of expression, judicial independence, and the willingness of political actors to accept losses peacefully. Without these principles, as my fellow citizens would soon discover, elections can become the most efficient route to a new authoritarianism.

No longer able to remain silent as democracy was misunderstood by both its enemies and many of its admirers, I began writing and speaking more openly about the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideological ambitions. I warned that replacing one authoritarian system with another would betray the revolution’s aspirations. I continued criticizing human rights violations by the Egyptian state because I believed that liberty loses its meaning when applied selectively. Very quickly, I discovered that intellectual consistency is often the loneliest political position. Considered an enemy by Islamists for challenging their power and viewed with suspicion by the opposition for refusing to excuse authoritarianism in the name of stability, I belonged to neither camp.

Years later, on October 7, 2023, I faced a defining moral test that every generation must eventually confront. As Hamas carried out the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, much of the public conversation across the Middle East celebrated or justified the attack. Friends whom I had known for years defended the murder of civilians as legitimate resistance. Others chose silence. For me, there was no dilemma. 

The principles that had first inspired me through the story of King and Parks left me with only one possible response. If terrorism against civilians is wrong in Cairo, then it must be equally wrong in Jerusalem. If human dignity is universal, then it cannot depend on the nationality, religion, or ethnicity of the victim. Principles cease to be principles the moment they become conditional.

I used my platform to explain to my fellow Arabs exactly what had happened on that day and demonstrating the breakdown of morals that was entailed for such a blatantly cruel massacre to take place. Telling the truth about the October 7 massacre changed my life forever. Overnight, I became the target of an unprecedented campaign of threats and incitement, eventually forcing me to leave my country and cutting me off from my roots just in order to survive. Facing the risk of being killed by extremists who declared me “an ally of the Jews” or being imprisoned by a government that accused me of “high treason” and “adopting Zionism,” I was so lucky to find another home in “the land of the free”—the land of King, Parks, Washington, and Jefferson—where I adopted the fight against anti-Semitism as my latest Hineni cause. 

Looking back, I no longer see Hineni as a single moment but as a way of life. I now see it as the quiet realization that once we recognize the truth, we inherit the responsibility to defend it. Sometimes that responsibility begins with translating a comic book. Sometimes it means standing in a public square. Sometimes it means speaking when nearly everyone around you wishes you would stay silent.

I could never have imagined that a story that began on a bus in Montgomery would one day shape my journey from Cairo to Washington. Rosa Parks taught me that courage begins with refusing to surrender one’s seat. Martin Luther King Jr. taught me that moral conviction can move societies. Egypt taught me that democracy requires more than elections. October 7, 2023 taught me that principles either apply universally or they are not principles at all. That, for me, is the meaning of Hineni. It is not standing up because one is fearless. It is standing up because conscience has left no other choice.

Here I am.

Hineni.

Every family has an origin story. Ours began when Daphne was six or seven years old and someone gave her a stationery set, complete with pretend stamps. Around that time, Daphne first learned of the persecution of Jews and Christians in the Soviet Union. In her childish hand, riddled with spelling mistakes, she began writing letters “to the Russian leaders.” Let the Jewish people go, she implored. Let the Christians go.

Of course, Daphne had no idea how letters reached governments. She knew nothing of addresses, embassies, or consulates. She simply sealed each letter in an envelope, attached her pretend stamp, and proudly dropped it in the mailbox. 

Thinking this would teach her an early lesson about being “careful,” one adult warned Daphne that “if you keep writing those letters, the Russians will come and get you.” Undeterred, she gathered every remaining sheet of paper, every envelope, and every stamp. In the biggest letters she could write, she scrawled across each one: LET THEM GO! 

She mailed every single one.

We are not a Jewish family, and though Daphne did not know the word then, we believe that was our family’s first Hinenimoment—the fearless response of a child. Etched into her heart, that childish determination became a simple, wholehearted “yes.” Over time, that “yes” became the defining response of our family and, later, of our organization. 

There was nothing remarkable about our beginnings. We were a homeless single-parent family, overcoming day to day, with no ambition beyond our own survival and no vision beyond our own community. Then, one Sunday, while Daphne was sitting quietly in church, an American woman approached her and invited her to speak at a church in the United States.  

We had never travelled internationally, had no experience, and certainly no resources. Plenty of nights we went to sleep not knowing how we would find the money to manage through the following day. But the answer was Hineni. Daphne would step on the stage, speak from the heart, and invite people to discover their purpose and calling in life. We would simply say “yes” and discover along the way whether the impossible was, in fact, possible.

That single response opened a door that has never really closed. Taking us where we would never naturally have gone, leading us to people we would never have met, and bringing us to more than forty nations, that “yes” has placed us in life-threatening danger. We have faced terrorist threats in Indonesia, police raids in Malaysia, hijack attempts in Hong Kong and Côte d’Ivoire, machete attacks, wars, and other dangerous situations. Yet, that “yes” has also brought more blessing and purpose into our lives than we could ever have imagined. Eventually becoming the very heartbeat of our family and our organization—Generation 2 Generation—that “yes” inspired our goal of raising a generation that will discover its own Hineni as a lifelong response.

When a tsunami ravaged Southeast Asia in December 2004, we gathered a team and traveled within days to Thailand to help clear the devastation and rescue the local communities whose lives had been shattered. We built a base of operations where hundreds of volunteers would fly into help, provide medical services and food, and help restore and provide new boats to kickstart the local economy. When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in August 2005, we went immediately to clear homes that had been under water, mobilizing some of the volunteers we trained in Thailand to provide food and supplies to struggling families. When the United States withdrew from Afghanistan and thousands of local men and women targeted by the Taliban desperately sought to escape from what they described as a seemingly impossible situation, Andrew worked to test the boundaries of the impossible and helped rescue more than 300 people. When we learned of the horrific plague of human trafficking devastating vulnerable women, Daniella, Daphne’s daughter and Andrew’s sister, began faithfully traveling into some of Thailand’s darkest corners, helping rescue girls who had become trapped there.

What we have learned from willingly entering the places most people do everything in their power to avoid, is that we cannot control the outcome, only our response. Today, that response is no longer a whisper. It has become our declaration.

Then came the greatest test of that commitment. On October 7, 2023, while many governments around the world were frantically organizing evacuation flights to bring their citizens home from Israel, we were determined to move in the opposite direction: instead of fleeing from danger, we ran toward it. Our response was immediate. “Comfort, comfort My people.” No money for our flights? We would find it. War? That did not change our answer. Less than two weeks after the massacre, our first team of volunteers landed in Israel. Hineni had carried us this far. We saw no reason to answer differently now.

Since then, we have mobilized seven teams to serve throughout the country. Whether walking the streets of Jerusalem simply to stand alongside the people of Israel, volunteering on farms in the Golan Heights, cooking for young soldiers at Gilat Junction, comforting grieving children and elderly survivors, or showing up wherever we were needed, we have carried with us one simple message: “You are not alone.” Though not Jewish, in this age of growing anti-Semitism, we have chosen to stand with our Jewish brothers and sisters with even greater conviction.

People sometimes ask how we manage to be so brave. The truth is that we are not. We are ordinary, fragile people. We wrestle with fears, distractions, weaknesses, and competing priorities just like anyone else. And yet, for us, not coming to people’s aid would have been harder. Not saying Hineni would have been far more difficult than saying it. 

Hineni is not a ritual, but a reminder of who we are. Every time we say it, that response becomes a little more deeply woven into our lives. Wherever we are needed, we will be there.

Because here we are.

Hinenu.

On October 8, 2023, a lightning bolt, cartoonish in nature, ran its violent course from my scalp to my toes. It was not a call to prayer, but rather a call to assignment. An appointment from above to use my gift to bear witness, to document, to archive the deadliest day against Jews since the Holocaust.

The jolt felt strangely familiar, as though I had been waiting for it my entire life. As though up until that moment, I had simply been waiting for my commander’s nod. I wasn’t choosing a path so much as recognizing one had arrived. It was time. The ancestors had called. It became the moment my life changed forever. The moment I went from being universally liked to becoming a liability. The moment the version of me everyone knew ended, and a version no one was prepared for began. In a split second, I understood instinctively that my current life—as a Jew, as a woman, as an artist—was over.

As a veteran of New York City’s spoken word scene—a scene deeply intertwined with social justice activism—I had spent decades using my art to speak out against racism, inequality, and injustice. While I often used my voice to confront wrongs directed at other marginalized communities, I was also one of the first Jewish poets to unapologetically center Jewish pride, challenge anti-Semitism, and give voice to an urban Jewish girl who defied stereotypes. I was a feel-good bridge builder, weaving comedy, grit, and poignancy into stories that celebrated the kaleidoscope of New York City. This was the world that raised me. It is who I am.

I grew up on the old Upper West Side in a liberal, Democratic household. My parents were public school teachers in the Bronx who walked around carrying PBS Channel 13 tote bags. My P.S. 166 class photo was a vibrant mix of Jews, Latinos, and African Americans who listened to The Sugarhill Gang on vinyl. Raised on a steady diet of racial justice, women’s rights, and LGBTQ pride, I was taught that you don’t define other minorities’ struggles for them. You listen when they tell you what they’re experiencing.

Throughout my years as a spoken word artist, I had also managed, almost instinctively, to steer clear of the one issue that could unravel it all: Israel. The message was implicit: Liberals—please check your Zionism at the door. Openly supporting or celebrating Israel wasn’t part of the community’s script. I would never check the anti-Israel box, but somehow, I had managed to build a career celebrating my Jewish identity while leaving my convictions about Israel off the page.

Until I couldn’t anymore.

There was one event that, in hindsight, foreshadowed my lightning-bolt moment. In 2012, after discovering I had worked for Birthright Israel, a group of Palestinian activists on Facebook declared me a “Zionist infiltrator” and protested my being featured at a venue in Washington Heights. Fortunately for me, “Zionist” had not yet become the social media slur it later would. Most of my colleagues were simply confused by the accusation and uninterested in the controversy. The outrage fizzled almost as quickly as it had begun.

But that was then, and this was now.

Now, my assignment would require a kind of public controversy I’d never known. The version of me that had survived by reaching out and building bridges would no longer be enough for what lay ahead. This new life demanded different tools. It demanded armor—and a kind of strength I had never been asked to summon.

My weapons would be words. Words that challenged the growing narrative casting Jews as nothing more than white colonial settlers, erasing our identity as an indigenous people with deep historical ties to the land of Israel. Words that told the stories of my grandparents, Syrian Jews, who were among the more than 800,000 Jews expelled or forced to flee Arab lands. Words that confronted a narrative which, in some circles, had become a way to justify—or excuse—the atrocities Hamas had committed against us. With nothing left to do but hunker down, sharpen and polish my weapons, I prepared as the community around me disintegrated. There are images from those first days now permanently seared into my psyche: Naama Levy’s bloodied sweatpants. The Black Lives Matter Chicago paraglider post. A flyer advertising a spoken word fundraiser for Gaza, containing no mention of the Israeli hostages. The image of Shani Louk’s body being paraded through the streets of Gaza.

I posted the Israeli flag, photos of hostages, and tributes to slain kibbutzniks. Every post felt like the intertwining of danger and destiny. I watched other warriors—people I believed had been summoned by the same unseen force—bravely defy the unraveling, hateful anti-Israel narrative. I knew I was next on the front line.

On October 12, 2023—my birthday—at 8:30 a.m., I watched a woman furiously rip down hostage posters right next to my daughter’s elementary school. I stood frozen and said nothing.

That evening, over celebratory drinks with five non-Jewish friends, I huddled over my cocktail, dumbfounded that everyone at the table looked so functional. So whole. We were living in completely different universes.

On October 15, at a pro-Palestinian rally at Cornell University, a history professor said of the October 7 attack, “It was exhilarating. It was energizing… I was exhilarated.” In the weeks that followed, a female poet I’d always admired posted on social media: “Beware Poets—There are undercover ZIONISTS among us.” Later, at Columbia University, protesters formed a human chain to keep Zionists from entering the encampment.

Watching my identity as a Zionist weaponized against me and my fellow Jews by people with no skin in the game, I knew I had crossed a passageway I could never uncross. I knew it the way I know my own name. I knew it in my bones.

I now understood what would be required of me. I wasn’t only going to have to speak out in support of Jews and Israel. I would have to go to Israel and bear witness to the atrocities firsthand, sharpening my skills as an emotional stenographer, a storyteller, an archivist of grief.

I would also have to reclaim the word “Zionist” from those who had twisted it into an accusation. I would have to come out as a Zionist, even though I had never thought of myself as being in the closet. I would have to publicly and unapologetically tell the Jewish story—our diversity, our history, our connection to the land of Israel, and our right to exist as a people.

The cost was high: being heckled on stage, attacked online, losing lifelong friends, and becoming an outsider in a community I had called home for decades. But for the first time in my life, I felt a profound call to generational sacrifice—for my daughter, my nieces, and my nephew. I knew, as so many Jews before me had known, that there are moments in Jewish history that demand you show up. This was one of those moments.

And so I went to Israel. I stood on the scorched grounds of Kfar Aza and made a promise to a grieving mother. I walked through the ruins of the Nova music festival and made a promise to a young survivor. I sat beside the graves of eighteen-year-old soldiers at Mount Herzl, where the dirt was still fresh, and made a promise to the friends they had left behind.

The promise was always the same: I would never stop telling the world what had happened. For three chaotic years, people have told me to turn off the news and “go live my life.”

What they don’t understand is that I have never felt more alive.

I will keep watching the news others can’t bear to watch. I will keep following my assignment.

Because when Jews say “Never Again,” we really mean it.

Because I sleep at night knowing I chose conviction over comfort.

Because what I’ve lost in friends, I’ve gained in backbone.

So here I am.

Hineni.

There are moments in life that divide everything into a before and an after. For me, that moment came on June 11, 2003, when I boarded bus No. 14 in Jerusalem. Minutes later, a suicide bomber detonated himself just a few feet away from me. Seventeen people were murdered on that day, including all those seated and standing around me. More than a hundred of us were injured. I survived, but the person who was pulled off that burning bus was not the same person who boarded it that day. 

Most people think of the Hebrew word Hineni—“Here I am”—as something said from a place of certainty. A conscious decision to step forward when called to do something. Although I have always been someone to step up when things needed to get done, stepping up in the wake of profound pain may not be most people’s first instinct.

My Hineni moment began in the middle of incredible trauma. While I do not remember everything about those first few hours, I can recall that becoming an activist was the last thing on my mind. I remember being scared, feeling all alone, and lying in a hospital bed trying to understand what had happened. Yet, by nine a.m. of the very next day, after coming out of surgery in the early morning hours, I was already sitting in front of a room full of reporters from around the world. 

Looking back, it seems almost impossible that someone in my condition would agree to speak to the media. But I did. Still trying to process what had happened, I wasn’t thinking about advocacy or public speaking. I wasn’t trying to become a voice for anyone. At that point, I didn’t even know what had happened to others on the bus. It was the Second Intifada and, looking back, I think that I felt a responsibility to share what had happened to me so others around the world could better understand what was going on in Israel. 

At the time, terrorist attacks had become a routine part of the daily news cycle. For people around the world, it was just another headline. For those of us in Israel, it was reality. I didn’t want people to see this as just another attack. I wanted them to understand that innocent people—people with families, dreams, and everyday lives—were the ones paying the price. I had no idea that saying yes to that interview would shape the course of my life. I thought I was answering a reporter’s questions. I had no way of knowing it then, but that one interview would become the beginning of everything that followed.

More than two decades later, I now realize that was my first Hineni moment. Not because I felt ready, but because remaining silent was not an option. Over the years, I have continued to answer that same call. When I share my story, I share the story of those seventeen innocent people who did not get to go home to their families that day. As long as I keep speaking up, my voice will remain their voice, and they will never be forgotten. Given the opportunity to survive, I also received a responsibility to make sure their stories continued to be told.

As happens too often in terror attacks, the world moves on while survivors and families are left to rebuild their shattered lives. Because the victims should never be forgotten once the headlines faded, and because those who enable such attacks must always be held accountable, I now dedicate my life to advocating for victims’ rights, working with governments and policymakers, and becoming a plaintiff on lawsuits against those who finance terror.

Amidst this work, I have found the most meaning in founding my non-profit organization, Strength to Strength, established to support victims of terrorism around the world. Over the years, what started as a way to connect with other people who truly understood what I had been through has grown into a supportive global community for bereaved family members, survivors, and first responders. Seeing others realize they are no longer alone, watching lifelong friendships develop, and knowing that people have rediscovered a sense hope because of Strength to Strength has been the greatest gift to come out of such a horrific experience. What began as tragedy has become a purpose that continues to remind me and all those involved that healing is possible. 

Though many people assume that saying Hineni happens only once in one’s life, for me it has been a continuous choice that I have made over and over again. Every speech. Every interview. Every meeting with a victim who needs someone to listen. Every conversation with policymakers. Every time I have chosen to revisit the worst day of my life so that someone else might be heard, understood, or feel less alone. Each is its own Hineni moment. 

The choice to speak up has not come without a cost. Every time I tell my story, a part of me relives that day. Because trauma doesn’t disappear simply due to the passage of time, there are moments when speaking publicly reopens old wounds. Though the memories never go away, over time I have learned that healing isn’t about forgetting but about finding ways to carry the memory of what happened while moving forward. And while there have certainly been times when I’ve wondered if maybe it was time to step away, whenever I think about the incredible people I have met along this journey—the survivors, bereaved families, first responders, and advocates who have inspired me deeply—I am reminded of why I must keep answering that call.

Throughout my life, it has been an honor and privilege to stand beside those who intimately understand this journey in a way few others can. The opportunity to take one of the darkest moments of my life and turn it into something that brings other people hope is something I will never take for granted.

I never wanted to become a victim of terrorism. I never imagined this would be my mission and life’s work. But every time I choose to stand beside another victim and remind the world that the impact of terrorism lasts long after the headlines fade, I find myself answering the same call.

Here I am.

Hineni.

I woke up at 6: A.M. to a vibrating phone. It was Saturday morning in Massachusetts. In Israel, it was already afternoon. The screen was filled with missed calls, text messages, and notifications from family and friends. Are you awake? Call me. Turn on the news. My stomach dropped before I even knew why.

At first, I assumed there had been another rocket attack or suicide bombing. Growing up in Israel during the Second Intifada, I was familiar with this routine. But as I refreshed my phone, the messages kept coming. Friends were asking if my family was safe. Videos began to appear online. Then more videos. Then reports. And then the horror. A video. A headline. A name. Another video. Another headline. Another name. Within moments, there was nowhere left to hide.

Throughout my life, I thought that I truly understood trauma. I am a third-generation Holocaust survivor, grew up in Israel, and married a man who lost his father on September 11, 2001. When our kids were born, we almost lost them both to medical complications. Yet, even as I dedicated my professional life to studying the psychological impact of terrorism, I did not truly understand. 

I was glued to my seat, refreshing the news over and over. My coffee sat untouched until it turned cold. I couldn’t swallow. At some point I even collapsed on the floor, crying and yelling at my husband: “They even took the kids!” 

I remembered watching my own children being intubated as part of the procedure that would ultimately save their lives. Seeing them endure a kind of pain they’d never experienced before, I was struck by an excoriating agony that reached the core of my soul as one terrifying thought ran through my mind: What if I lose them? Overwhelmed by the helplessness and hopelessness that almost stole my ability to speak, I wrote a guide for other parents facing similar situations, explaining what to expect and sharing coping skills for surviving the uncertainty. Helping others gave me something trauma tries to take away: a sense of agency. That simple act of doing for others helped me survive some of the hardest moments of my life. October 7, 2023, was no different. 

Within hours of learning of the Hamas-led massacre, I posted my phone number to an Israeli Facebook group and offered my support as a trauma psychologist. Since trauma often leaves us feeling powerless, helping others was my way of reclaiming agency. Instantly, the calls started coming in. People were crying, panicking, looking for loved ones, trying to make sense of the incomprehensible. For hours, I held space for other people’s fear, helping them find calm while the ground was still shifting beneath my own feet.

Soon, other therapists followed suit. Then even more did. Before long, what began as a single social media post had grown into a network of support that changed my life. Looking back, I realize that was the first time I answered the call to transform my expertise into service. Not consciously, not courageously. Just instinctively. 

But then came October 8, 2023. While October 7 changed my understanding of trauma, October 8 changed my understanding of people.

Like many Jews, I expected to receive compassion from non-Jewish friends and colleagues. I didn’t expect people to agree on politics. I didn’t expect a consensus. I simply expected a recognition of human suffering. I expected my phone to fill with messages from my non-Jewish friends asking if my family was alive. Instead, before most bodies were even identified and buried, before families even knew whether their loved ones were dead or alive, the world was already starting to justify the massacre. 

Trauma is painful, but when people deny your pain, your history, your grief, or your reality, they communicate something profoundly damaging: your suffering does not count. This is the salt poured onto the wound, and it has a name: Traumatic invalidation. I found myself wondering whether it was I or the world that had gone mad. The facts were clear, the videos were everywhere and the horror and grief were plainly real. Yet so many voices insisted on a different version of reality. The betrayal, in turn, hurt almost as much as the trauma itself. Friends disappeared. Professional colleagues went silent. Communities I thought I belonged to suddenly felt uncertain. I felt unsafe, unseen, and targeted. I felt alone. All alone. Experiencing a particular kind of helplessness as an Israeli living in the U.S.—knowing my country was bleeding, my family was there, and my friends were there while I was thousands of miles away—I wrote to a friend, I have a big hole in my heart. It is the size of a country. 

For months, I oscillated between helplessness and action. Sadness told me there had been a loss, while fear told me there was danger and anger demanded a response. I was feeling guilty as my children were laughing in the next room while other parents were desperately searching for theirs. Trying to stay afloat in my everyday life, I took care of my kids, answered emails, attended meetings, cared for my patients, and supervised my trainees. Hugging my children tighter than ever before, I breathed in their scent wondering why my chest hurt as I watched them walking off to school. When I didn’t know what else to do, I leaned harder into helping others and myself—meeting strangers, listening to their stories of invalidation and pain, finding a new community of people who gave me strength. 

Gradually, I realized that the work I had been doing for years was no longer enough. The moment called for something different, and I could either wait for someone else to answer the call, or I could answer it myself. There was no single moment when I decided to change the course of my career. No speech. No revelation. Just the quiet realization that I could no longer remain on the sidelines. Expanding my therapy room beyond its four walls, I turned therapy into testimony, research into advocacy, and teaching into bearing witness. Somewhere between grief and responsibility, the career I had spent years building became my calling.

I organized mental health support. I trained clinicians and educators. I spoke at hospitals, schools, universities, and state commissions. I published research papers, advocated for the release of the hostages taken by Hamas, and stood beside survivors. I wasn’t simply studying trauma or teaching post-traumatic growth anymore. I was living them.

As I began writing and speaking publicly about traumatic invalidation, messages started pouring in from around the world, each a reminder that naming an invisible wound is, in itself, an act of healing. People thanked me for giving language to experiences they had struggled to explain. In trying to make sense of my own pain, I gave thousands of others permission to acknowledge and put words to theirs. What started as a response to my own grief grew into advocacy, public speaking, research, and policy work. The awards and recognition that followed have been meaningful, but the greatest gift has been discovering the vulnerability and courage that led to connection, calling, and hope. The pain never disappeared, but neither did the purpose it revealed. 

I often teach that resilience is not the absence of suffering, but the ability to continue living despite suffering. There is, however, another possibility: Post-traumatic growth. The idea that trauma, while never desirable, can become a catalyst for transformation. Not simply bouncing back, but leaping forward and growing into someone you might never have become otherwise. 

Today, I have a new and more complex understanding of my identity and my community. I see courage through new eyes. I can comprehend what it means to stand up when doing so comes at a cost. Most important, I understand that hope is not a feeling. Hope is a choice. I now realize that, as a Jew, I know something about surviving darkness. I know something about carrying grief while continuing to build. I know something about refusing to surrender my humanity. 

The morning of October 7, 2023, was the moment the world changed. But my own Hineni moment came later, when I recognized that despair was asking me to become smaller, quieter, and more afraid. Instead, I chose to become louder, reclaim my space, and act with more courage than ever before. Not because I felt brave. Not because I had certainty. But because responsibility had become unavoidable. I have learned that courage is not the absence of fear, but the decision not to let fear have the final word. I often think about my grandparents; they survived a world that tried to erase them. My children deserve a world that refuses to erase them again. 

Somewhere between those two generations, I found my answer. 

I aim to embody the wisdom of Pirkei Avot: “It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it.” I cannot heal every wound or change every heart. But I can answer the part of the work that is mine. Every lecture, every article, every difficult conversation is my way of having that final word. Every patient I sit with, every child I help protect, every act of bearing witness is another way of answering the same call. 

Here I am.

Hineni.

Eleven days after the October 7 massacre, as darkness settled over Columbia’s campus, I stood in the middle of a small gathering and realized that silence was no longer an option.

There were around thirty of us—Jewish and Israeli students, faculty members, and friends—holding candles and posters bearing the faces of the hostages taken by Hamas. Though most of us did not know each other, we were all, in one way or another, experiencing the same thing. Having spent the previous eleven days watching images we could not forget, reading names we did not yet know by heart, and trying to understand how so much life could be destroyed in a single day, we had come together because we needed an outlet for the fear, rage, and helplessness that had been building inside us. We had come because, in that moment, we had no one to turn to but one another. We had arrived as strangers. Grief made us a community.

We had not gathered there by accident. A week earlier, just five days after the massacre, I had stood in that same spot watching two opposing events. On one lawn, Jewish students stood silently for twenty minutes—one second for each victim of the massacre—crying, hugging, and trying to absorb what had happened. On the other lawn, hundreds of students, faculty, and staff beat drums, praised “the resistance,” rallied against coexistence, and called for the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state. They weren’t making an argument about borders or governments. Nor were they demanding a peaceful resolution to the century-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Even before a single Israeli soldier had stepped foot in the Gaza Strip, a riled-up mob on campus was already celebrating the slaughter of civilians.

Watching in disbelief, I was unable to reconcile what I was seeing with everything I thought I knew about the people and institution around me. I had barely begun grieving the dead, grasping the sheer scale of the massacre, or worrying about my own family in Israel. Yet suddenly it felt as though another front in the war had opened—not by Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Houthis, but by my very own academic community on Columbia’s campus. I stood there, jaw clenched, speechless.  I could not fathom how so many seemingly educated people could watch the murder, rape, and kidnapping of civilians and respond not with horror, but with glee. This was not political activism. This was not ideological disagreement. It was hatred. Pure and unadulterated hatred. Once I saw it, I could not unsee it.

The following week,  our vigil— for which we had secured all the required permissions—was supposed to take place on the steps of Columbia’s Low Library. But anti-Israel protestors had beaten us to the spot and occupied the space. In response, the university did what would become second nature over the coming year whenever protestors engaged in unsanctioned disruptions: Instead of telling them to move, the university told us to do so.

There was something deeply humiliating about being displaced from our own vigil. There was something profoundly painful about being unable to grieve in peace on our own campus. While we could have refused to leave, insisting that the university enforce its own rules and treat us with the same respect it afforded every other minority on campus, we stepped aside. We didn’t want a confrontation. We didn’t want to argue about politics. We weren’t looking for a fight. All we wanted was to mourn and be left alone. We had all come wounded, looking for somewhere safe enough to admit it. Grief-stricken, we found another corner of campus and formed a circle.

One by one, people cautiously stepped forward and began to speak. An Israeli woman whose husband taught at the university recounted the story of a young survivor of the Nova music festival who had watched her best friend dragged into a vehicle and taken to Gaza. A student holding an Israeli flag in one hand and raising two broken fingers with the other described how he had been attacked on campus while putting up posters of the hostages. A third speaker described the feeling that, once again, Jews had nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. Each story was different. Together, they described the same unbearable reality.

Some shared their frantic concern for relatives in Israel. Others spoke about the fear of being visibly Jewish on campus. Still others recounted interactions with classmates who’d celebrated the attack, professors who said nothing about it, and friends who suddenly seemed to treat Jewish grief as politically suspect. To the people in our circle, Israel was not an abstraction. It was the place where their parents lived, where their cousins had been called into reserve duty, and where people they loved were hiding in bomb shelters. Standing on one of the world’s most beautiful campuses, the distance between our lives and theirs felt almost unbearable.

As the final speaker stepped back, the circle fell silent. No one moved. It felt like the pause after lightning strikes, a collective holding of breath as we waited to find out how loud the thunder would be. Something was missing—we had named the pain and the astonishment, but not yet the source of the problem. I realized it was my turn.

At that point, I was still a business school professor who believed that my role was simply to teach, conduct research, and care for my students. I had never imagined becoming a public advocate. I had no prepared remarks. I was simply a Jew who had spent eleven days watching the world respond to the slaughter of Jews with denials, distortions, deflections, and delight. I was also a father—a Jewish-Israeli father—who saw his own children’s faces in the images of the murdered and the kidnapped.

Everywhere I looked, I recognized the same moral failure. The very communities and institutions that had taught me to show up for others had failed to show up for my own people in their time of need. The university that prided itself on belonging and inclusivity had allowed Jewish students to be pushed out of the conversation during their time of mourning. Faculty members who had built their careers around social justice had found reasons to excuse, minimize, or ignore the murder of Jewish civilians. Students who proudly proclaimed that they believed all women suddenly decided that Jewish women didn’t count. Colleagues who had taught me that silence was violence suddenly had nothing to say. Hostage posters were being torn down. Terrorist violence was being praised as resistance. Jewish fear was being treated as an inconvenience. Everything the university claimed to believe remained true—until the victims were Jews. Jewish lives had become the moral exception.

This moral failure was never about choosing Israel over Palestine. Nor was it about valuing one people’s lives over another’s. It was about recognizing that no political cause, regardless of how righteous it claimed to be, could justify burning families alive, raping women, or kidnapping children. It was about asking whether universities could still recognize that some acts lay beyond moral justification. It was about what we, as a society, stood for. Columbia’s leadership had pontificated endlessly about context, power, and history, yet fell strangely silent when Jewish lives were on the line. While we were still counting the dead and searching for the missing, people at one of America’s most prestigious universities were already glorifying those responsible. Someone had to say something. 

Someone had to say that this was wrong. Someone had to explain that Jewish students should not have to prove their humanity before being allowed to grieve. Someone had to force the university to see what was happening before it was too late. Columbia had broken the unspoken covenant every university makes with the parents who entrust it with their children: to educate them, challenge them, and keep them safe. Someone had to say that out loud. That someone would have to be me.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I thought about the people who had been murdered and would never breathe again. I thought about the children taken from their homes, their small faces a painful reminder of my own children. I thought about how easily my family could have been visiting Israel that weekend, with only geography and chance separating our fate from the victims. I thought about my Jewish students, who came to learn and were now deluged with hate. I thought about my non-Jewish students, exposed to so much brainwashing and normalization of horror, in desperate need of guidance. I thought about how, one day, I would have to explain this moment to my children. Exhaling all the air from my lungs, I stepped into the center of the circle.

I did not know what I was about to say. I didn’t know that the words I was about to speak would change the course of my life and career. I didn’t know how many people would later tell me they had felt the same fear but had been unable to put it into words. All I knew was that the leaders of our most prestigious universities had failed their Jewish students. All I knew was that silence had become impossible. If no one else was going to say it, I would.

So I did. And I have not stopped since.

Here I am.

Hineni.