American-Israeli Jewish activist, 27, Lawrence, New York

“When I stopped wearing a kippah, I was like ‘That’s it, we’re done’. Now I can wear it when I feel like it. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. This is something that is hard for me, because I’m an all or nothing sort of person. I feel like I’m being inconsistent if I wear it when I wear it only when I want to. But I have to remind myself that it’s something that is supposed to enrich my life, and make me feel like me. And if it’s not doing that in a specific context, then it’s okay to not wear it then. I’m not going to criticize or police how anyone interacts with their Judaism, especially in these spaces where it’s so complicated. But maybe we can completely deconstruct everyone’s associations with these things.”

American Jewish activist & rabbinical student, 30, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

“In the first year after the assault at Damascus Gate [when Israeli Border Police broke my arm], I remember looking on Facebook for groups for people who have experienced state violence to share their stories and what they are experiencing. I had a lot of emotions coming up but didn’t yet know the words associated with them. In the U.S., there is obviously a huge race component that comes into that as well so I’m sensitive to that: I experienced police brutality and I have a different experience of police than Black people living in this country. And yet I was still struggling with the impact of state violence and couldn’t find any support like that.”

American Jewish activist, 35 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

“I was in Umm al-Khair during the Tree of Life Synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh. There I was trying to make some space for that horror - both in terms of the loss of lives and as a synagogue that was an integral part of my childhood, literally in my backyard as I grew up just down the street - while being in Umm al-Khair where Israeli forces are patrolling a foreign population. All I could think of was: ‘Great. This attack on my neighborhood and my community will be another excuse for more suffering and more atrocities of the sort that I witnessed this very morning in Umm al-Khair’. It was too bizarre to try to feel that bit of victimhood while at the same time being in this place of Jewish power. It was extremely disorienting.”

American-Israeli Jewish activist, 31, Denver, Colorado

“What I do in my day to day, where I choose to go, who I choose to connect with, articulate a different version of what it means to be Jewish in the world. I think that the act of going into the West Bank and meeting with Palestinians, not to mention having multi-year friendships, and joining in actions together, and standing against the army together, and being arrested together, even that first step is quite removed from what the dominant Jewish world tells you being Jewish should look like, and is, and can be. And I think that's where the pieces connect to each other. It's that personal articulation of something different, of a different kind of Jewish being in the world. But it's not just about that personal transformation. It's also something that can create new political imaginations, new models for what it means to be Jewish.”

American Jewish activist, 28, Boston, Massachusetts

“So many of the Palestinian demonstrations we go to start with prayer. I feel that, as Jews, we are so respectful of their prayer but if we were to suggest holding mincha prayers before a demonstration, everyone would be like ‘jeez… get over yourselves’. It’s because Judaism has been equated with Zionism in Israel and that ‘jeez’ feeling is not towards the Judaism, it’s towards the Zionism. It feels like a loss. We are stronger, happier people when we are grounded in our identities. In the U.S., a lot of the more religiously-oriented Jews who are doing social justice work are doing it in the framework of Jewish community, or God. Out of a sense of something out there that is bigger than we are. It’s important to say ‘this is the moral truth that I believe in so I’m going to fight for it’.”

American Jewish activist, 72, St. Louis, Missouri

“We come from old stock, old Mizrahi stock… but father said ‘What you do and how religion fits into your life is your business’... That’s another thing: My parents were Palestinian, they lived in Palestine. They were Jewish, but there was no state when they left. I was never a devout Jew. We’d celebrate Shabbat but even that kinda faded out. I never had a strong bond, it was never a large part of my identity. But what I’ve seen here, it’s affected my heart. I’d read enough to know about the oppression and the land theft and the displacement of Palestinians. But to actually see it in process is another thing. And knowing the people who are being displaced is a whole new ball of wax. Not only do you feel sad - you feel angry.”

American Jewish activist, 27, Washington DC

“When things have been hard, when experiences have gotten a bit too intense and hardcore, there are things that enable you to keep going. One is this feeling of immense clarity that you are in the right place at the right time, that you are supporting your Palestinian partners and answering their call and being a body on the ground. The second is the fact that I’m out there doing it with my friends and my community and that I can be sure that the next day I’ll be able to sit down and talk about it, or laugh or cry about it, over Shabbos dinner. The constellation of the Jewish community, in the way that it invites you in and supports you, and offers you comfort, and offers you food, and offers you song when you don’t want to talk anymore is incredibly sustaining.”

Rabbi and American Jewish activist, 28, Brooklyn, New York

“I participated in a Passover seder with [the Palestinian activist organization] Youth Against Settlements in Hebron. All these youth in Hebron made space for a bunch of mostly white American and Canadian Jews to be in their space and to redefine Jewish ritual. I didn’t even appreciate until years later the amount of emotional and spiritual generosity required for that to happen. They took a step back in their own space that is slowly being encroached upon by settlers to say ‘This is a space that we hold so tenuously and yet you’re allowed to use it as a guest in your own process of arriving at solidarity to help redefine your rituals’. It’s mind blowing to me that there was so much generosity and that the hand has been extended so far by Palestinians to let any sort of space like that happen.”