Rachel Feldman

On our way to Bangor, Maine for a rally with @grahamformaine. The crises facing our country are too serious for establishment politics and tinkering around the edges. We need candidates like Graham who will take on the greed of the oligarchs and deliver for working families.

A Jewish woman’s yoga studio in southern Vermont was vandalized with antizionist graffiti this AM. Again. Meanwhile, our senators @BernieSanders and @SenPeterWelch are endorsing Jew haters and spreading blood libels on the US Senate floor. Vermont is unwell for a reason.

A Jewish woman’s yoga studio in southern Vermont was vandalized with antizionist graffiti this AM. Again. Meanwhile, our senators @BernieSanders and @SenPeterWelch are endorsing Jew haters and spreading blood libels on the US Senate floor. Vermont is unwell for a reason.

London's Nova Music Festival exhibit had its main sign removed after police requested its removal due to the potential for antisemitic incidents, Israeli media reported on Sunday. jpost.com/diaspora/antis…

The report Silenced No More opens with these words from @CochavElkayam: “There are moments in history that rupture the moral order by which societies define themselves. Moments that do more than shatter lives; they unsettle the very boundaries by which human conduct is understood. October 7, 2023 was such a moment.” In the week after that black Shabbat, my Rabbi described what happened as a spiritual violence. The atrocities were so unbearable that it was hard to wrap words around them. They were so profound that they required a re-ordering of our understanding of the world. Having spent hours with this report, I can attest that they profoundly change the soul of anyone who bears witness. One of the witnesses of the gang rapes, tortures, and murders at the Nova Music Festival said he heard: “Women screaming. Screams that pierced the heavens, and cut the soul to pieces.” The report describes evidence as “materials [that] are almost unbearable in their brutality,” and “their cruelty and magnitude … rendered them impossible to comprehend and harder to believe.” The scale and horror of the atrocities was the point. In committing crimes that defied our very humanity, in celebrating them, live streaming them, and then getting much of the world to deny them almost instantly, to blame the Jewish state, to blame Jews as a whole, Hamas accomplished their goals. They turned the worst evil imaginable into a carnival of hate the West was happy to justify, to endorse, to at the very least dismiss as ‘part of something complex and nuanced.’ As if the sheer scale of evil could ever be nuanced. When you fully realize what happened that day, you know the cost of denial was our souls. In advance of writing this, I spent hours reading the report. After getting through every page of testimony on the Nova Festival before I had to stop, take a break, breathe, try not to vomit. I visited the Nova site this summer. I looked at photos of the young people that died. And they were so young, so hopeful, so full of joy. To read about how they died was to kill something inside me. Because what I read was beyond comprehension. There was gang rape, of men and women. Women were stabbed while they were being raped, raped after they died. Women were shot with their rapists still inside them, and then their corpse was passed to another man to rape, while the men around joked and laughed and praised God. Women were bound and tortured. They were shot in their genitals. Their uteruses were ripped out. They were raped and tortured in front of their partners, who were forced to watch and then murdered. A witness said, of hearing multiple gang rapes and executions, that when the woman was killed, “you say: ok, it’s over at least, she’s done with it. The moment they were killed, I said, ‘Oh my God, finally it’s over.’” And indeed, women being raped begged for death. Women were found split in half, beheaded, exploded by what was placed inside their vaginas. Men were found with their genitals shoved into their mouths. In some cases bodies were found staged, a woman holding a man's severed penis. People were doused in gasoline and burned alive. Nail guns were used to drive nails into women’s groins. Spikes were driven into their vaginas. Knives, axes, screwdrivers, tools, were all driven into a single woman’s body. Women were gang raped, and after surviving they burned alive. Children were killed in front of their parents. Parents were killed in front of children. Dead bodies were taken, along with hostages and paraded down the streets of Gaza to cheering crowds. Hostages were subjected to sexual torture and slavery. The torture was so extreme that a new form of violence had to be defined for this report: Kinocide. “In documented cases, victims were abused in front of relatives. In at least one case, family members were coerced into acts of sexual violence against one another. The Commission defines this as kinocidal sexual violence, violence deliberately designed to destroy family structures by weaponizing familial bonds.” All of this violence was documented, streamed live to the world. We knew. We always knew, because they wanted us to know. They didn’t hide it. In fact, the perpetrators cheered it, celebrated it, called home to their families to boast of how many Jews they had killed. Gazan civilians followed after the initial invasion, joining in the orgy of violence. Women’s dead and broken bodies were paraded through the streets of Gaza, while crowds cheered and the women were spit on. Hostages, women and children, were also paraded, jeered and mocked, before descending into their own hell of sexual torture. On October 9th, 2023, I had to get on a group call for my coaching program. There was no war yet. Or there was a war, and it was still taking place on the streets of Southern Israel. The IDF was still fighting terrorists on the ground, trying to clear the area. Like every other Jew, I was shattered. I could look at my screen of 100 women and pick out the other three Jews by their dead eyes and fractured faces. The lead coach asked to lead a prayer. And who she prayed for was not Israelis, not Jews, not survivors of the attack. She prayed for us and our perpetrators in equal measure. I hit mute. I stared at the wall. I tried not to throw up. And I realized this was a sign of what was to come. In the moments after October 7th, Jews were already being asked to commiserate with the people that committed, supported, and cheered on, these crimes that break the boundary of what it means to be human. We were asked to rise above the devastation of the soul. And then we were asked to put what happened aside. To leave our hostages to the depraved sex and torture tunnels of Hamas. To move on. To be the bigger people. When you look at the facts, the details, the truth of what actually happened, you realize how impossible that request always was. Because society was unwilling to face what happened, it chose denial. That was it’s drug of choice, it’s way to survive the horrors. Just like in the Holocaust, the women and men who suffered these demonic fates were re-framed as sub-human. The victims were not imagined as the people. For society to justify looking away, the victims could not be young adults that went to a music festival, or families slowly waking up on a Sunday morning, kids watching cartoons, women going for a run, families ready to enjoy the holiday. Instead, the atrocities were framed almost immediately as something that would never happen to us, something deserved. To justify and erase crimes of this magnitude, society has to make the Jewish state somehow so monstrous that they deserve this. We have to make up lies. Dog rape. Organ stealing. Child murder. Genocide. And since no state, and no people, could ever deserve this, no matter what their purported crimes, the other choice is to deny that it ever happened, to look away. My latest in full on Substack: fieldnotesforthebrave.substack.com/p/the-end-of-d…

@JeddySnitko @breadrosesDSA @tonykatz @93wibc @RobMKendall @hammerandnigel We want '48 is a call to renegotiate on equal terms, as in prior to when Israel declared that it was a sovereign country without acknowledging the borders from UN Resolution 181. Which was already ridiculously lopsided towards a minority of the population in the region.