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.
Rather than responding with horror, many seemed intent on justifying or even glorifying the massacre.
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.
