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 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.
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.
