As a progressive queer Jewish leader who attended the National LGBTQ Task Force’s Creating Change conference in Chicago last weekend, I have been cycling through a range of feelings in the past week: fear, sadness, heartbreak, anger – and very occasionally – optimism. I attended the conference, as I have for 4 of the last 5 years, as a member of the Jewish Movement Building Working Group and a representative of Keshet, where I serve as the Boston Regional Director. There has been a great deal written about the #CancelPinkwashing protest of A Wider Bridge and Jerusalem Open House, some of it concordant with my experiences and recollections, much of it discordant, but I’m not particularly interested in a re-hashing of precisely what happened overall, what was or wasn’t anti-Semitic, what is or isn’t legitimate protest, or what the Task Force and Creating Change could have done better. What I am hoping is that we – and by we I mean all of us with some stake in this conversation: Jews, Palestinians, LGBTQ people, activists and advocates for peace and justice in Israel/Palestine, social justice advocates broadly – can move toward a public conversation about how we operate in these moments of tension and crisis, and how we can do better.
On Friday night, I witnessed a deeply troubling exchange between an attendee of the reception and one of the protestors who disrupted the event. The attendee was, by my read, a middle-aged white Jewish man. The protestor was, by my read, a young Black woman. In the midst of an argument about the issues at hand – charges that the Israeli government and its allies co-opt the experiences of LGBTQ people in Israel to distract from violence against Palestinians, preventing Jerusalem Open House leaders from telling their stories, queer people in Israel and Palestine, racism in Israel and in the policies of the Occupation – the reception attendee yelled: “Don’t talk to me about genocide, more of my family has been killed by genocide than yours!”
I don’t believe that comparing and contrasting people’s histories of trauma and oppression is a useful exercise, and doing so often results in dismissing and diminishing others’ experiences of oppression. Millions of Jews have been killed over hundreds of years due to institutionalized anti-Semitism and individual and state-sponsored violence, including genocide. Millions of Black, African, African diaspora, and African-American people have been killed over hundreds of years, in this country and worldwide, due to institutionalized racism and individual and state-sponsored violence, including genocide.
A growing body of research in epigenetics and the intergenerational effects of trauma is demonstrating that traumatic experiences in one generation can have a direct effect on how descendants of trauma survivors react to stress. Specifically, Rachel Yehuda and her research team at Mount Sinai Hospital have observed generational epigenetic affects on the body’s production of cortisol, a stress hormone, in descendants of Holocaust survivors. Previous research has also demonstrated that increased levels of stress hormones – like cortisol – diminish our capacity to feel empathy for strangers.
And yet, it seems like empathy may be precisely what we need to move through these moments of crisis, stress, and tension. Empathy is one of our strongest tools, as humans, for fostering connection and compassion. In that same room, on Friday night, I turned to the person standing next to me. He was present in the room to provide support for the protestors disrupting the event, and we did not know each other. “My God,” I said, “there is so much pain and trauma in this room. So many people are hurting.” His response to me, in the midst of a great deal of tension and stress, was to look me directly in the eye and say: “Yes. Yes. Yes. Thank you for saying that. For seeing that.”
The mere act of witnessing and naming, with empathy and compassion, the enormous pain present in the room was enough to shift us both away from distrust and toward connection.
Skeptics may point out that we were not actively confronting one another, that had we been screaming directly at each other, this may not have had the same effect. And that’s certainly possible. But what is nonetheless true is that we were strangers to each other, seemingly aligned with opposing sides in a high-stress environment, and an expression of empathy cut through our natural distrust and turned us towards each other. He and I spoke for some time after the protest, and our conversation was marked by warmth, active listening to each other, even humor, and was grounded in the shared knowledge that we already had something in common.
The research tells us that in order to reduce our bodies’ stress hormones, we need to feel a sense of physical and emotional safety, security, and trust. Human connection – physical and emotional – triggers an increase of oxytocin and a reduction in cortisol.
If we are committed to working toward an end to systemic violence and oppression; to ending anti-Semitism and racism, then I believe we need to develop the skills to be resilient and empathetic even in the face of disagreement. We will not always agree with each other, and we will not always behave in ways that make us feel comfortable and safe. If we need people to always make us feel safe and comfortable before we will stand in solidarity with them, we are going to lose.
This, I believe, demands that we ask serious questions of ourselves. What internal resources do we need to be fully present, as our best selves, despite our discomfort? What collective resources do we need to act in alignment with our principles and values when it is hard and painful to do so? What do we need from within ourselves, from our closest people, from our families – our families of origin and the families we create – in order to tap into our wells of empathy even in moments of fear and uncertainty? What do we need to cultivate empathy and compassion for people with whom we disagree?
This is hard, painful, messy work; it demands looking within ourselves at our sources of pain, and risking the vulnerability to ask for what we need. I understand the impulse to turn away. But what if the cost of turning away is too great?
When complex issues threaten to divide us, perhaps our shared humanity can be a beacon forward, guiding us through the brokenness and into a better world to come.