This is the most personal post I have written in the many years I’ve kept this blog. And it’s one of the most painful. For the first time in my life, I am ashamed to be a Jew and no longer know what it really means.

It’s the most dreadful and shocking thing for me to write. I was up all night thinking this is something I need to say; this is something every Jew learned from childhood: when we see evil, we need to stand up and say so.

As a Jewish person forced into Hebrew School, I forgot almost everything I learned in those boring classes except the words Gemilum chasadim, the Hebrew word for charity, and Tzedakah, the Hebrew word for kindness, a  Jew’s moral obligation in an unequal world, and every Jew’s obligation.

Those words were at the heart of Judaism. The people who suffered so much called for love and kindness.

I never imagined that my faith would be one of the world’s leading creators and braggers of the uneven world. I have never seen those ideas being spoken by the leaders of modern Israel.

I became a Quaker as a teenager because I loved their silence and acts of charity and empathy. But it also seemed, like Judaism, that it was about caring for others, helping the poor, and forgiving the enemy. I was fascinated to learn that Christ was a Jew. No wonder I was drawn to his values.

That’s where I learned them.

In recent days, I find myself, for the first time in my life, something other than a Jew. I no longer know what I am. I never imagined writing that or feeling it. I’m sickened by what they are doing in Israel and Gaza. I am no longer proud to be a Jew. I do remember what it was taught.

The faith I knew and admired has become something different, something angry, murderous,  vengeful, and intolerant, and now hated all over the world. People have always hated us in some places, but many more sympathized with what the Jewish people suffered. That sympathy is fading, and quickly.

That will not defend Jews from antisemites.

I am sickened by the effort of Israeli supporters and leaders and followers to attack people like me because I am sickened by the slaughter of so many innocents in the Gaza Strip.

I don’t use the word genocide; there is no name I can name for the willful effort of civilized people to decide to kill and starve children and their parents and doctors.

I can hardly believe the Jewish people have elected and supported a government like that, turning their heads to the vengeance that has no end and is being funded by the country I also have loved.

I was told in my youth, and since then, that the Nazi’s grew and flourished because no one – including America – stood up to Nazis just because they were killing Jews without justice or reasoning. The famous Jewish refugee and philosopher Hannah Arendt said evil grows when good people fail to speak out against such cruelty.

It breaks my heart to see Jews, my born people, attacking anyone who speaks out against their government and spending billions of dollars to keep their critics from being the ones who speak out, punishing people for their beliefs and bribing our leaders to be silent. I find it hard to believe we are giving them all these bombs, which are used to kill children and families while they struggle for food.

I can’t imagine any faith, especially mine,  that doesn’t know this is wrong and unthinkably immoral. They do know better, if anyone does. It is not simply wrong; it another form of evil.

That is not Gimult chasadim or Tzedakah. That is unspeakable and beyond words for civilized people, unimaginable according to the beliefs and decency of Judaism.

I have no need to deny anti-semitism, a term that has been falsely applied to the millions, now billions of people, sickened by the slaughter of many thousands of children, doctors, mothers and fathers, emergency workers, food providers, and most of all innocent mothers and fathers.

I have read almost daily of people who wish to criticize the Israeli government are now afraid to speak, knowing they will be attacked as enemies or watched as the true enemies are flooded our civic system with blood money.

It is true what many Jews say and feel. Criticism about what the Israeli government is doing is not anti-semitism. Anti-Semitism is giving Jews reasons to kill innocent people and makes them seem meaningless and hypocritical.

They don’t know what they do.

As a Jew, I never feared attacks on me because of my beliefs; as a Jew in 2026, I know many people who are afraid to speak their mind and defend their values. Are they my enemy now?

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“Gemilut chasadim” refers to giving your time and effort (visiting the sick, helping a neighbor) rather than making money. The medieval scholar Maimonides also described eight levels of “tzedakah.” The highest action is helping someone become self-sufficient, for example, with a job or a loan. Tzedakah is the Hebrew word usually translated as “charity,” but its root, tzedek, means justice or righteousness. Muslims first used it; the Jewish faith later embraced the idea.

That difference matters. In Jewish thought, giving to those in need isn’t mainly a voluntary act of generosity. It’s an obligation, a way of setting right an unequal world. Your resources are seen as entrusted to you, and sharing them is simply doing what’s just. That is where I learned to do it.

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The rabbis I heard praised the phrase “People of the Book,” although Jews embraced it as a description of themselves, sometimes rendered in Hebrew as Am HaSefer (“the People of the Book“). I was taught that the phrase was meant to reflect the central role of the Torah, and of study, literacy, and textual debate (Talmud, commentary) in Jewish life and identity. Today, when people call Jews “the People of the Book,” they usually mean this cultural emphasis on learning and sacred text, not on killing mothers and babies without cause.

So it’s both: an Islamic term for Jews and Christians, and a phrase Jews have taken on to describe their own devotion to scripture and study. It doesn’t in any way justify the killing of tens of thousands of children and people in their families.

Now, according to the Israeli leader, it’s the Mayor of New York, one of the best-hearted leaders in our country’s history, who is the bad guy, the one to be hated because he is willing to call the the Israeli leader a criminal.

This is not the Judaism I know, and I won’t accept it or be a part of it.

That is not the Judaism I was taught, the Judaism I was proud of. That is not the Jew I wish to be. People can and have hated us throughout history, but no one ever had a good or just reason.

I think that kept the faith alive. We were taught that we are better than this as a faith; no matter what was done to us, we would never embrace vengeance or cruelty. I woke up this morning wondering if this was all a lie.

In the Torah (the Five Books of Moses), the Jewish Bible presents instructions on helping the poor as commands from God delivered through Moses. The Torah frames support for the poor as law and justice, woven into farming, lending, and daily life. Those are the core beliefs of Judaism.  

Two of the main teachings are:

 Open your hand, and your heart (Deuteronomy 15:7–11)
This is the central passage. If there is a needy person among you, “thou shalt not harden thy heart, nor shut thy hand from thy poor brother,” but “open thy hand wide unto him,” and lend him “sufficient for his need.” It also says to give without a grudging heart, and adds the famous line: “the poor shall never cease out of the land; therefore I command thee.”

Tithes for the vulnerable (Deuteronomy 14:28–29, 26:12)
Every third year, a tenth of the produce was to be set aside for the Levite, the stranger, the orphan, and the widow, “that they may eat and be satisfied.”

These are the Jewish lessons I was taught and have believed, and tried to live by; they seemed so forgiving and caring.

It is not my Judaism now.

I won’t and can’t hide behind the shield of anti-Semitism or the horrific killers from Hamas. They paid an awful price. Many of the people in the book seemed to have forgotten how to read. I can’t imagine how many haters the Israeli government has brought into our world, if any survive.

I grew up in a family of Jewish immigrants, every one of whom lost mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers in the Holocaust.

I don’t need other Jews to lecture me about the cruelty inflicted on the faith for centuries all over the world. It’s no excuse for the murder of children and their innocent families.

How awful that people have reason to reject Judaism. What happened to the core principles of justice, kindness, literacy, and debate?

Are these now the people who deny medicine and food to dying children? Was that in the books? I can’t find it anywhere. The images of starving children I see online are tearing me apart.

I was never once in my life ashamed to be a Jew, and yesterday I woke up in tears because I am one.

I’m sorry to write this piece. I’m glad I did. I told Maria this morning that if I didn’t, I would not be able to live with myself.

Now I have to decide whether I can ever be proud to say I am a Jew again.