The following is a transcript of Episode 168 of the Identity/Crisis Podcast. Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Yehuda: Hi everyone, welcome to Identity Crisis, a show about news and ideas from the Shalom Hartman Institute. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer. We’re recording on Thursday, December 14th, 2023. Today’s episode involves discussion of sexual assault and other violent themes connected to the Hamas attack on Israel from October 7th, so listener discretion is advised. 

I’ve noticed, and this is a personal observation, that there’s an unusual characteristic of how people sometimes talk about sexual assault in ways that are different than other crimes. That when these things happen, we find them both shocking and not surprising. 

This is a paradox that captures the horror of sexual violence. Because if we were to say merely that such an incident is shocking, we might be claiming, incorrectly, that such incidents are implausible or rare. That it’s genuinely not believable that a person might do such a thing to another person. And in turn, if we simply shrug and say, we’re not surprised when it happens, we imply that it’s normal human behavior, that it’s to be expected, and worse, that it fails to shock us anymore, even as it’s grotesque. So we are, and we must be both shocked and not surprised. 

It was not long after October 7th that the first reports of the Hamas invasion in southern Israel included allegations of sexual violence. I remember that there was some confusion about whether it was perpetrated by the Hamas terrorists themselves or by others, the horror-tourists who had come to the sites of Hama- violence from Gaza afterwards, as though that distinction makes a difference. 

Right away there were images circulated online which seemed to suggest that women were sexually assaulted as part of being abducted into Gaza, and then other stories began to circulate about rampant cases of sexual assault perpetrated against victims who were subsequently murdered. I could speak personally that those first few days, especially from far away, were so overwhelming in terms of what we were seeing and processing from the Hamas attack that, to use my own terms from earlier, I found myself shocked over and over again with this mounting sense that the horrors wouldn’t stop.

And I also found myself not surprised, believing entirely every single allegation and accusation, no matter how extreme they were. And almost instantly, I saw others taking the opposite approach, instinctively casting doubt on the worst and most egregious violent violations by Hamas. Even some Jewish media here in America immediately called the accusations of sexual assault into question. Some of those tweets were later deleted. 

The folks who couldn’t believe how bad it was, I guess they therefore didn’t want to believe it. I think some of them were just trying to be good journalists, seeking evidence before circulating their claims. And some of them were simply experiencing their own cognitive dissonance. Totally incapable of believing all of what was starting to become visible was actually unfolding.

And some of the doubt that was getting seeded in the international community’s attention was just the stuff of two sides fighting a war. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has never been just about territorial claims. For a long time now, both sides have been relentlessly seeking to claim the moral upper hand. For many of us, watching the atrocities of October 7th reminded us that there are elements in the Palestinian national movement, not the entire Palestinian people, but elements, whose motives and behaviors are genocidal, eliminationist, and evil. 

Many of us who have been eager for Israel to pursue peace and a two-state solution had to come to terms on October 7th with the depths of the depravity of the Hamas invasion and to wrestle with Israel’s terrible choice, that it either needs to eradicate Hamas or anticipate the possibility that October 7th could happen again.

And I suppose there were some on the Palestinian side who just didn’t want to see this, who don’t want to confront the presence of this kind of demonic evil in their midst. So much of the public Palestinian narrative has been about their own victimhood. What happens when that narrative of victimhood becomes unavailable, even temporarily? What happens if that story is inconvenient? 

But even so, I was not prepared for the extent of denialism about aspects of Hamas’s behavior that has taken root in so many quarters in the West. I suppose I’m not surprised by the most militant pro-Palestinian voices. Not only do they not want to hear this story, they want the exclusive human rights catastrophe that everyone pays attention to right now to be about the civilian human toll in Gaza. This is an information war as much as an actual war. 

But I am surprised by the rest of the West, the NGOs and movements that taught us to believe women and victims as the most basic act of generosity we’re supposed to do in the presence of sexual violence. And some of those NGOs and movements and governments couldn’t muster even basic condemnations, even about cases where there was already clear evidence. 

Beyond being surprised, I was deeply pained watching my Israeli friends and colleagues come to terms with this silence. Early in the war I wrote on Facebook that Israelis were at risk of experiencing what the philosopher Jill Stauffer calls “ethical loneliness,” on a widespread national level. 

Ethical loneliness is the experience of being victimized that is then compounded by not being believed. It’s a phenomenon that Stauffer identifies commonly among victims of sexual violence, who often cannot bring their perpetrators to justice because there’s an absence of evidence or because they’re the only accuser.

And often she also identifies it in societies that experience terrible violence and then have to go through processes of truth and reconciliation that require inevitably that some of the victims have to let go of their victimhood for the greater good. 

I’ve been watching Israelis for months now and worrying. The grief of October 7th was enough. What happens now as they are not being believed? I’m joined today by Dr. Cochav Elyakam-Levy, an expert in international and human rights law, a scholar at the Hebrew University, and a David Hartman Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute. More recently, Cochav became the chair of Israel’s civil commission on October 7th, Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children. She was recently here in the United States speaking at and outside the United Nations meeting with the Biden administration and generally raising awareness about the extent of Hamas’s crimes of sexual violence, which as I said, still remain unacknowledged or under-acknowledged in the international community. 

Cochav, thanks for coming amidst an incredibly intense and busy schedule and the work that you’re doing. I guess let’s just start at the beginning here. 

Cochav: Thank you for having me first of all and thank you for this introduction. I feel like I need to really observe everything that you said. It’s so profound.

Yehuda: Thank you. Cochav, how did this commission get started? This was not the work that you were doing prior to October 7th. Obviously the commission didn’t exist. Where did the commission come from? Who convened it and what is its mandate?

Cochav: Yes, so thank you for even just mentioning my life before, 7th of October. I often find the need to anchor my life in my experiences and my work before October 7th. So I want to say that I teach international law, human rights, climate justice, feminist theories. And I think my life before 7th of October were about the dreams, the visions of gender equality and gender-just societies and the ways we can bring about profound and really transformational change towards closing gender gaps and towards equal society. And it seems all so far now. 

On the 7th of October, I want to say that I was with my father. He was hospitalized. He’s now in a difficult condition. He will come today to the Hartman Institute. We have this ceremony today. So he will come, and I’m glad to share that. So I was with him in the hospital. 

And while we were all terrified by the news, what I understood very quickly is that we’re seeing crimes against humanity committed before our eyes. War crimes in such brutality that was unimaginable, even understanding that it happens few, just a couple of hours, sometimes less than where we live.

So I think it was very obvious to me that the international community is going to be deeply involved. This is not a national crisis. This is really an international crisis, international humanitarian crisis. I knew that, I thought I knew that the international community is going to be very much with us in this terrible situation recognizing what happened, recognizing the atrocities. 

I want to say, let’s start before recognizing, maybe I’ll say another sentence. In the first few days, I was deeply surprised that they’re not even reporting. You know, the UN-mandated bodies, and I’m not just talking about general organizations, the UN-mandated bodies that are responsible to report on such atrocities, have the responsibility to share the information, truth about what happens around the world, the such violations of human rights, and they failed to do it in the very first days where all of us seen what happened. 

And so when you asked me how it all started, it was with this deep surprise that they’re not reporting. They’re not even sharing information about what happened here. And I thought very naively that, okay, I have to do something. And I thought that once I will send them a report, a very credible report, on the eighth day of the war, I gathered this group of international law experts, human rights experts, humanitarian law, victimologists, all of us together have also a gender perspective on all these crimes. I thought together we will be able to draft these petitions, we drafted three petitions. One of them was a legal petition that I drafted under violations of international law, and it was signed by more than 160 law professors and human rights advocates from around the world. 

And I thought once they’ll see it, they’ll of course understand that we’re giving them the most credible information and they will be able to initially report, recognize what happened, to condemn the crime, express solidarity with us as women. I specifically address crimes against women and children, and offer help, right? After condemning, expressing solidarity, we just want them to offer us help, even a civil society, I’m not even talking about the government, we are, we talk to them as academics, as NGOs, women’s rights organizations. 

And so we sent them these these letters. I made sure they get them officially and unofficially, as well as my colleagues. We all made sure that they get our report, and this report was presented to Biden a few days later. I want to say also something that is important to bear in mind. Usually UN organizations, they do not get letters from 160 law professors. They get letters or reports from human rights, small human rights organizations, and they believe. 

We don’t even need to report. They can see for themselves. So Hamas has documented the crimes purposefully. They came here to terrorize us for generations to come, to make sure we’ll see these tortures and these inhumane killings. And the world knew. And I want to say that the world knew even more than us here in Israel because I understood very quickly, once I drafted the letter that I have more information than other Israelis, because the Israeli public is not exposed to the news or to what is reported outside of Israel. 

So I also had this knowing that they know more than us. So I just want to say how did I start this commission? So once I understood they are not even responding, they’re not even answering our emails, and I saw the amount of information that we started gathering together, once I understood it, I had this, I don’t know how to, this deeper understanding that we have a greater mission, that our mission is really historical. 

I remember telling my colleagues at the commission that we must understand that we have a greater mission and it’s a historical mission to document every piece of information regarding what happened to women and children in these atrocities. We know that, as you said, that these crimes, sometimes we have personal denial mechanisms. Even for us it was hard to comprehend that such atrocities happened. So we have our personal denial mechanism, we have societal denial mechanism, now we also have international denial mechanism inflicted on all of us as women. 

So I decided that we are going on this mission to document every piece of information, to communicate it to the international community, to communicate it, to make sure we are a credible source for years to come for the academic community and for our partners around the world. And that’s how I decided that we thought about the name and I decided to call it the Civil Commission on the Crimes Committed by Hamas Against Women and Children on October 7th and that’s how it all started.

Yehuda: You said something very heartbreaking, which I actually I know from other incidents, especially around sexual assault and sexual violence, which is this, you used the word naive, I wouldn’t attribute it to you, you used that word directly, which is, I figured once we say this, once we show people this evidence, they’re going to believe it. 

I remember a case of far less significance a number of years ago that I was involved with around whistleblowing with someone who was a sexual predator. And that was like a constant refrain. Oh, once we tell people, they will get it. And there were all of these resistances. 

And I guess I would love for you to theorized for us a little bit about what’s going on. What you said there’s individual denial, national denial, international denial. There’s a lot of possible hypotheses for what that denialism is about. Why don’t you give us the kind of the, I assume that you’re going through your own head, like one day it’s this, one day a different hypothesis. What do you think that’s, what do you think the obstacles are? Why?

Cochav: Ah, you describe the process precisely. It was a process. At first I remember people asking me why. And I really tried to even explain it to myself, saying that there are structures of the UN, they don’t have a specific infrastructure here in Israel enough for them to respond quickly. 

I never gave excuses, but I just wanted to really get my head around this. I found myself seeking an explanation myself because this is really against everything I believe and everything that we know as human rights scholars. I want to say that there is a reason these crimes are defined as crimes against humanity. They’re not only crimes against Israelis, they’re crimes against humanity. When they’re keeping silent about those crimes, they’re betraying universal values.

And it’s not only betraying universal values. What happened is when the 7th of October disappeared in time itself, what happened is that they provided a fertile ground for denial campaigns, for hatred campaigns, for anti-Semitic campaigns, creating instability in Western countries, risking our lives as Jewish people around the world, human rights at risk in such a terrible way, it’s just, it’s really unimaginable. 

It’s really, for me, I said it at, I was speaking before the UN CEDAW committee, the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women. This is really the most expert body at the UN. They are feminist theorists. They know all the different patriarchal systems that we’re working within. They know that we don’t have representations in war and peace decision-making here in Israel. They know all the kinds of barriers that we experience and they still kept silence. They released a statement a day before I spoke, before, five members of the committee, not even the not 7th of October, not even the crime, the continuous crime of taking hostages. 

So I stopped giving explanation even to myself. I think there’s a deeper sentiments of anti-Semitism and I’ll explain why. They dehumanized us. I found myself asking them, is there international law for Israeli women? Are we even protected under international law? Are Israeli women even human?

For me it was really heartbreaking. I can tell you, wow. Sorry. I can tell you that I feel that they have broken everything I believe in. Because these are, this is my bread and butter. I don’t know what to say. This is what I do. These are the systems that I believe in. I teach human rights law so enthusiastically. I teach feminist theories about the international system so passionately. My students would would tell you this. 

So I want to say that they failed us. They greatly failed us. They failed humanity and what we all believed in. And I think this now requires really radical transformation to think about how the system can protect human rights again.

Yehuda: I read something, maybe it was yesterday, who knows, I have no idea what day it is. I read something recently by Professor Yehuda Mirsky who argued that human rights law, human rights as an idea, really, is about 75 years old. And he says, I think it’s over. I think basically this war has killed the human rights discourse. And on both ends, right, the failures of what you’re talking about of the UN to recognize the extent of the crimes, the horrors of October 7th and what’s taking place in Gaza.

And one of the examples that I’ve read, particularly of late, that is most egregious is that organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty, they tend to argue that their protocols are not to make broad statements about societies, but to only identify particular issues of failures of human rights. And so when it comes to October 7th, there was a statement, I guess, a few weeks ago where they said, we can now corroborate three incidences of intentional killing by Hamas soldiers, Hamas warriors against Israel on October 7th. Three. So you have 1,200 dead bodies and we’re willing to confirm three. 

And I have one theory and I’m curious for you to put your human rights law hat on for us. I have one theory and I’m not sure if it’s right but, so we know that there’s a distinction between human rights and civil rights. You know, human rights belong to everybody, civil rights are guaranteed by a state.

Arendt and others basically said human rights are much less significant than civil rights. You know, show me, don’t tell me that you care about me as a human, show me that you can guarantee it to me within the framework of the state. And I wonder whether when international community and human rights activists basically look at Israelis and Palestinians, they say, look, one side has civil rights and the other side doesn’t. And so they say to Israelis, if you have civil rights, don’t ask me to talk to you about your human rights. You have something better already. 

Now I know that doesn’t make sense. Actually it feels, you know, what you’ve said is it actually feels worse because you’ve taken something away from me. But I wonder whether that’s basically what’s taking place here. They want to reserve the ability to talk about human rights for Palestinians because they don’t have the same kind of civil rights. Does that make sense to you? Is it coherent?

Cochav: Not exactly. Really, the brutal crimes that we’ve seen, the massacre, the killings of children in front of their parents, the killing of parents in front of the children, children hiding in, found hiding in closets calling their relatives telling them that they’ve just watched their parents killed being murdered, the burning of people inside of their shelters, their families burnt alive, everything that we’ve seen, this is the purpose of human rights law. It doesn’t have context. It doesn’t have explanation. These are really the most heinous crimes that humanity has seen. We’ve seen it in other places. I can’t believe that we’ve, I never have imagined we’ll see it in Israel. 

But I want to say that there is no justification, there is no explanation, there is no context. I know that you didn’t try to give context, but just a general theory around what’s happening. And I want to say that human rights exist without justification in such atrocities. So the fact that there is human suffering everywhere, across borders. 

So I’m the Peace and Conflict Resolution Fellow of the Hebrew University, of the Sophie Davis Forum on Peace and Conflict Resolution, and I’m also an ambassador of Itach Ma’aki. I think that my only hope today is that one day women from both sides would bring peace. And so the that we are both victims of a murderous regime, a murderous terrorist organization, and it’s not only us, I don’t think it’s the, Western countries must rise to this challenge. It’s not the challenge of the state of Israel. 

Such a terrorist organization holding a people, the Palestinian people, captives of its cruel regime, holding us victims of such atrocities, it’s something, it’s not the war of Israel. As I said, these are crimes against humanity. The international community should be involved and it’s not the war of Israel. 

If I were the prime minister, I would get the coalition to be fighting with us, to be standing next to us in this impossible war actually. This is really an impossible war. And I can attest for my friends, I do feel the need to just tell you that I have the best colleagues, international law experts now within the IDF and at the Ministry of Justice, doctors of international law. They hold PhDs. They do whatever they can to observe international humanitarian law, not to fall into this moral catastrophe that Hamas has created. 

And I really hope that there will be this understanding that it’s not Israel’s war, it’s the free world war. It’s much larger, it’s much larger. I don’t know, I have this understanding, this can’t be understood as Israel’s war against Palestinians or part of the conflict. I think this is a mistake of all of us, the paradigm of the conflict, Palestinianism, Israel attached to these atrocities, it’s something that we must break. 

Even within Israel, we’re still thinking about solving this in conventional ways and we have to be more creative. I think if you’re asking me about the challenges of the international legal system, whether human rights are over or not, we have to now go out of our ways to make sure that human rights are preserved, that, I found myself saying last week that we must promise that human rights will not be over, that the voices, I see my role, not only making the voices of the victims of the atrocities heard. 

It’s not only about making their voices heard, it’s about making a pledge that their voices will reshape the international system and reshape our understanding of how to protect human rights and really how to solve such conflicts. 

Yehuda: One of the things that I’m struggling with, and I know that you are too from your from your time visiting here, is that it seems like a lot of the people who would share the vocabulary and politics of someone in your role, concerned with human rights, progressive politics, feminism, structural analysis, find themselves politically outside of Israel identified as part of the Palestinian cause and opposition to the Israeli cause. 

So there’s two forms of loneliness here. One is the particular issue around the believability of Israeli women and the failure of the system to see Israeli women and children and the violence that they experienced, but also a kind of strange, seems like a strange political homelessness for Israeli feminist scholars. 

I wonder what that, like it does seem strange, right? I mean, the intersectional politics here put feminists in a very different place than where Israeli feminists are. Do you have some thoughts about that?

Cochav: Yes, I want to say that we are all experiencing identity crisis. We don’t know where to put ourselves. Even in this question of how to present crimes that are committed against women and children in the political atmosphere here in Israel, that a day before 7th of October, we were protesting on the streets to ensure gender equality, it’s really a weird position. It’s really a difficult position. We really struggled with our most basic values. It started very early in the war. 

And I want to say that also, I want to share another identity crisis. I told my husband after 7th of October, we felt such a existential threat. We weren’t sure, right? Everyone that were here, we weren’t sure that we’re gonna get through this. It was just, it’s like closing our shelters with these blocks of wood. 

I told my husband to get a weapon. And as a feminist scholar, it’s against everything I believe. It’s against everything I believe. And when you’re speaking about being in this community, feminist communities, that was debating what’s the position in light of such an atrocity, such atrocities. It was challenging, but I have to say I feel much better now. 

Every time I meet women’s rights organizations I feel like I’m meeting my sisters. I feel like I’m able to communicate with my colleagues in ways that I don’t know transcend any argument. I think once we have direct conversations, the conversations are just very deep. And I want to also share two stories. 

One, first of all, yesterday there was a statement sent by women’s rights leaders that I shared and Catherine MacKinnon signed it, Gloria Steinem, leaders around the world, women’s rights advocates, they signed it, and I think it was overwhelmingly accepted. So we are not alone. And I say this from the very beginning, because every time I have this conversation with my colleagues from around the world, I feel like I’m heard. 

It’s different with the UN. I think I want to really differentiate between the two aspects of it, between the UN and the bodies that have become so politically charged, or you could choose any other explanation to what they are doing. But when I meet my colleagues face to face, I’m experiencing humanity, I’m experiencing solidarity, sisterhood. 

We met Catherine MacKinnon very early. I think it was two weeks into our work or three weeks into our work. And we were very anxious before meeting with her. We were prepared with information, we were prepared with everything that we could, because we were ready to just let her know what happened here in the same mode that we were before the UN organizations. And then when she went on to the Zoom, she looked at us, and this is the woman who defined war crimes against women, and she looked at us and she said I know you’ve been through hell. I can’t imagine what we’re going through. Can I be of help? Can I help you?

I just want to say that she demonstrated belief. She was with us. We all started crying. We all started, I think it was when I understood that this lack of recognition doesn’t allow us to heal. It sent us to another battle. As you said, I think in your introduction, we needed time to heal. We need time to heal as a society, we need time to grieve. 

And the second war that we were pushed to by this lack of recognition, by this denial, by hatred campaigns around the world is just, does not allow us to heal and I think this is something that I found most troubling, and I understood it once she just believed us, once she just allowed us so we cried, we are all grown women right? We’re all grown women, experts started crying there and I shared with her that I have a plan in my head what I’m going to do with my children, once, I have four kids, I’m going to put the baby in the closet, I’m going to put two others under the bed, my two girls under the bed, and my son hiding somewhere else. 

And I also have this nightmare where I can’t get the older ones from their beds because they’re on the other side of the house. And just to say that we were able to have a different conversation about our fears, about our existential fears, about, even what I told you earlier, my fear from the weaponization of society while I myself feel the need to be protected. 

And for me to have a weapon in my house, and I don’t have it yet, but maybe I shouldn’t say it now that I’m being threatened in so many ways. I want to say, even for me to be in this position, it says a lot, because we are afraid of the weaponization of our society at this point, especially in the implications for women.

Last week visiting the United States, visiting Jewish communities, I understood the grief that we’re sharing. I didn’t think about it before coming to the United States. I didn’t understand the trauma that we are experiencing as a people. We’re talking about 9 million people that are traumatized here in Israel. 

And I looked at them and I said, we are millions of Jews around the world that are, that are traumatized now looking at them coming to see me with their eyes red, crying together in every session that I had. It was very, just understanding the, the trauma. I don’t know how to say it in English. So I’ll just say it in Hebrew, “hatrauma ha’amit.” It’s something that we share as a people and I’m thinking about the implication for generations to come. I’m even thinking about what will happen to our grandchildren when they open the archives that I’m working on.

Yehuda: Because so much of the slander against these stories and these allegations, and it’s all over social media, I mean, I hope that you don’t spend too much time on Twitter, so much of that slander is rooted in evidence. You don’t have evidence. I mean, there was this extraordinary tweet by a person who was an aide to Bernie Sanders who said, well, there’s no evidence because the victims are dead, as though that eliminates the need to get evidence. 

What that’s doing is that it’s forcing Israelis like you and the diplomatic missions here to screen videos about the atrocities. And there’s another downstream trauma that’s being created of all of the people who have to watch this as though we need to see it in order to believe it.

And not to mention the fact that so many people walk around already victims of sexual violence, who are being basically re-traumatized through having to observe someone else’s victimhood and to engage with this larger fear of the disbelief that our society holds about sexual violence to begin with. How are you seeing that playing out in Israel? Cause I’m generally worried that, in order for the world to believe this story, Israelis have to keep reliving the trauma of October 7th.

Cochav: I couldn’t agree more. I find myself truly deeply concerned about how traumatizing this is. I have to share that I myself am exposed to these videos and to these images on a daily basis and I’m thinking about my children and I’m thinking about what they see and I’m thinking about, needing to prove to the world what it does to those journalists that are meeting with me after they watch these movies, what is happening, when I shared with you that I spoke with women’s rights organizations, so they were invited to an event where they were invited to just watch these videos.

And I told them that I want them to stay safe, because it’s really, this trauma is going to spill over society at large. I’m really worried about what it’s going to do to us as a society. Even just the fact that, I can’t say that we’re becoming numb to those issues because every time now that I see something it’s traumatizing again and again and again. 

So, on the one hand you want to prove what happened. We find ourselves in this really ridiculous war to prove it because, I’m saying it’s ridiculous because everything was you don’t need to really work hard to find the evidence, right? We don’t have to work hard to find what Hamas did. It’s perhaps one of the most documented atrocities humanity has known, as I said. They came in ready to terrorize us for generations. 

As international law scholars and experts, we know that any international tribunal that is going to try this case or prosecute or investigate into this is going to get piles of piles of information and testimonies and evidence even before any formal investigation. Just for the days that no one collected anything, but people were there, people were experiencing these crimes. 

So I feel like I just want to tell people, do not worry. The international, any international tribunals that would get this would receive masses of information, of evidence and testimonies of the survivors, of the victims’ families. Some of the videos were sent on social media to the families while their family members were killed. And so I’m not worried. We’re not debating whether the atrocities are gonna be proved. I think the challenge would be to expose the kinds of crimes that Hamas has committed, how to bring justice to the victims, to the families, how to remedy such atrocities. 

So I just wanna say, I do believe that they will find justice because the atrocities are horrible. I’ve seen it myself so it’s not something that is going to be, it’s undeniable. Let me say just that. It’s undeniable.

Yehuda: You’ve been generous with your time with us and I know you don’t actually have any and you have more important things to do than come on podcasts/ But I’ll I want to say one thing and then ask you one last question. The first thing I want to say is just thank you. We the Jewish people, lovers of Israel, people who love human rights, we’re indebted to people like you who are giving up so much of your time, your emotional energy. This this kind of work leaves scars for a long time. So we’re grateful.

And it’s a podcast that many American Jews listen to. What do you want from us?

Cochav: What do I want? I need support. I feel like I found friends and family beyond family. I spoke with Tamar Elad-Applebaum yesterday and with Rabbi Barry from the Riverdale community. I just told them to text me and send support messages. Oh my god, I don’t want to cry. I think this is a historical mission, so I know that I feel like I have too much on my shoulders. So now I’m finding the people who are carrying with me this burden.

What do I want? I want to say that I feel like it’s time for, for us, the Jewish in the Diaspora and Jews in Israel, to create much more meaningful relationships than those we had friendships, really invest time in our shared Jewish values in ways that we haven’t done before. 

So I’m not sure what I’m saying, but I do wanna say that we have to be more diligent about it, is that the word? We have to really try harder to create friendships between us, between Jews in Israel and outside of Israel, not to be formal, to visit each other like family. I think this is a time to come together and to create new coalitions. 

You know, I met with devastated human rights advocates, Jewish human rights advocates, of their lack of solidarity from their fellow human rights activists. And I told them, create new coalitions with your Jewish partners. Create new coalition among yourselves. They will join, they will join, it will take time but they will join.

Yehuda: Thank you all for listening to our show this week and special thanks to our guest this week, Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy. 

For the next few weeks, Identity Crisis is produced by Tessa Zitter. Our executive producer is Maital Friedman. This episode was produced with assistance from Sam Balough and Sarina Shohet. Edited by Gareth Hobbs at Silver Sound NYC and our music is provided by So Called.

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