How October 7 Galvanized Boston’s Jewish Community

Mia was a high school sophomore living north of Boston when her life changed in an instant on October 7, 2023, the day Hamas militants launched an attack on Israel, killing nearly 1,200 people and taking some 250 hostages, including young children and elderly people. Over the next few weeks, Mia—who, like many Jewish people, has a strong connection to Israel—couldn’t stop thinking about the unspeakable brutality of the attack; it haunted her every hour of the day.

But while Mia’s friends in Israel constantly called her with frightening updates, her high school friends, who had no connection to Jews or Palestinians, were very upfront about their pro-Palestinian views—views that only strengthened as Israel retaliated with its scorched-earth military campaign in Gaza. That made Mia, whose name has been changed to protect her identity for fear of reprisal, feel a sense of isolation and fear, emotions she’d never really felt before. She’d always proudly worn her Star of David necklace, but after the Hamas attack, she left it at home or tucked it underneath her shirt. “I didn’t think that my Judaism set me aside from my classmates,” she says, but after October 7, “I started feeling very on edge.”

Soon, Mia’s mother began to worry about her daughter. A few weeks after the attack, she took Mia to an event at Gann Academy, a Jewish high school in Waltham, where local teenagers were invited to discuss what they were going through. During the car ride, Mia didn’t think much about where they were heading; she’d bottled up her emotions for so long. But once she was in a room among other Jewish kids, sharing their thoughts and fears in a safe place, she watched her own feelings being put into words. “There was so much raw emotion in the room that I hadn’t seen in so long,” she says. “It was really, really comforting and affected me a lot more than I thought it would.”

As they walked out of the meeting, Mia asked her mother if she could transfer to Gann for the spring semester.

Mia’s mix of emotions reflected how many Jewish Bostonians processed the days and months after October 7, a time when the region’s college campuses became epicenters of anti-Israel protests and antisemitism—blatant or inadvertent. On the day of the attack, nearly three dozen student groups at Harvard cosigned a letter in the Harvard Crimson blaming the Jewish state for the violence inflicted against its citizens—a letter which, given the complexity of the region’s history, many people defined as antisemitic. Soon, college campuses, including Harvard and MIT, were overtaken by pro-Palestinian encampments. Meanwhile, across the region, there were reports of bomb threats to synagogues, swastikas being painted on roads and school property, and harassment of Jewish people in public spaces. All of this was underscored by the Atlantic’s April cover story by Franklin Foer—who has a brother living in the Boston area—declaring that the golden age for American Jews was ending.

In sum, October 7 was a pivotal moment for Boston’s Jews, leading many to reevaluate everything from their identity and connection to Israel to their most basic political beliefs. In an effort to understand how much things have changed over the past year, we asked dozens of people, from rabbis to community organizers to worried mothers and fathers, to share their deeply personal stories. Together, they describe a people who are keenly aware of rising antisemitism but also deeply divided on their commitment to the Jewish state—even as, more than anything else, they yearn for unity.

Growing up as a non-observant Jew in Newton, Todd Bresler remembers the moment some 30 years ago when his father sat him down and told him that one day he would have to defend Israel. “It’s going to happen in your lifetime,” his dad warned. “Be ready for it.”Bresler, whose grandfather was a Holocaust survivor, had been taught that one of Israel’s primary functions is to provide a safe haven for Jews when antisemitism boils over, which has happened with frequency over the course of history. Since the Romans conquered Jerusalem some 2,000 years ago, Jews, who were indigenous to the region, have lived in diaspora. They’ve found temporary homes in Russia, Europe, North Africa, and Asia, but their safety has never been guaranteed. As a minority clinging to unique traditions and values, they are often regarded with suspicion and have been among the first ethnic groups to be attacked during times of economic or political instability.

The movement to establish a Jewish state began in the 19th century in response to a deadly rise in antisemitism, particularly within the Russian Empire. After World War I, the British took over Palestine, a region in the former Ottoman Empire where Russian Jews had settled since the 1800s. During World War II, the lack of an established Jewish homeland equated to certain death for millions of Europeans, as all nations of the world, including the United States, were reluctant to accept Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust. Following the war, in 1947, the United Nations approved a two-state solution in Palestine, with a Jewish state and an Arab state each taking a percentage of the land. Most Arab leaders, though, considered the very existence of Israel—a country the size of New Jersey—an infuriating act of Western incursion and vowed to block the initiative until it was destroyed. Still, Israel was established as a nation in May 1948 and an estimated 700,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes in Israel. The region has been engulfed in waves of conflict since.

Seventy-six years later, frequent attacks have led to increased military and political responses, thwarting all peace efforts. Now, millions of Palestinians live as permanent refugees in a handful of countries around the Middle East and on a sliver of land adjacent to the Mediterranean Sea called Gaza, while their continuing outrage over Israel’s existence has become, for many Arabs, a core tenet of their shared worldview.

Meanwhile, in America, antisemitism has escalated, not only on the far right where it has long thrived, but also increasingly on the far left, with many young students and activists viewing Israel as the “oppressor” in the Israel-Palestine conflict and blaming the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians for Hamas’s brutal act of terrorism. Indeed, shortly after October 7, “we were already starting to hear this spin of victim-blaming,” Bresler says, mentioning the Harvard student group’s statement. “I do not use this analogy lightly, but the tone of that statement was saying, ‘Israel stayed out too late. Israel shouldn’t have dressed like that. Israel shouldn’t have gotten so drunk, and she shouldn’t have let her friends leave her. She got what she deserved.’”

Quickly, openly anti-Israel reactions from colleagues and friends caused “the ground underneath the Jewish people in Israel and here in America to fundamentally shift,” says Marc Baker, president and CEO of the Combined Jewish Philanthropies (CJP). “I think some things that we considered to be true proved not to be true—in particular, the safety and security of Israel.”

Bresler was one of many Jews who felt isolated after October 7: “We went to the supermarket, to work, to school, to the park, to pick the kids up from school and drop them off at school. [And we were feeling] intense anger, deep sadness every minute of every day, completely preoccupied with what had happened in Israel to our family, to our friends.”

Bresler responded to his sense of isolation by searching for community. He launched a private Facebook group in his town and was surprised when it hit nearly 100 members in just a week. Through that group, he built strong friendships with other Jews. They organized weekly walks dedicated to keeping the plight of the hostages front and center. Bresler also learned through Facebook about the Massachusetts Teachers Association’s December ceasefire motion, urging the U.S. government to stop funding Israel’s “genocidal war on the Palestinian people in Gaza,” which some viewed as openly anti-semitic. Since then, he has spent his free time working with educators, administrators, and policymakers to combat antisemitism in Massachusetts’ public school system.

Like Bresler, Dena Snyder felt compelled to build community following the Hamas attack on Israel. She refers to herself as “a proud Zionist. Loving Israel was kind of imprinted on my soul.” A few weeks after the Hamas attack, Snyder, who grew up in Lexington and lives in Newton, connected over Teams for the first time with a few of her Jewish colleagues at Northeastern University. She says that October 7 was “such a shocking and horrible time that we were barely functioning, and it was just nice to have a little bit of solidarity.”

Soon, a member of the group suggested that they ask Northeastern’s administration for permission to establish an official Jewish affinity group to support Jewish faculty and staff. There was already a Latinx affinity group, an LGBQTA+ affinity group, and a Black affinity group. Why wasn’t there a Jewish group? “I think it’s because people are like, are you a religion? Are you a people?” Snyder explains. “It’s just one of those things that people don’t really know what it means to be Jewish.”

Northeastern instantly agreed, and the new Jewish affinity group at the school, Snyder says, became a godsend, signaling to her that her employer “recognized the trauma that having anti-Israel protests with a lot of antisemitic tropes on our campus would cause.” Through the affinity group, Snyder says, she felt that the senior administration seemed to understand “why having a group of people yelling ‘from the river to the sea’ or ‘one-state solution intifada revolution’ is antisemitic, because it’s calling for the annihilation of the Jewish state. I didn’t feel like I had to explain or justify why having this was problematic. They got it.” This is no small thing, she notes: “College campuses have been the darkest places for Jewish people to exist in the last year.”

As CEO of Eastern Bank, Bob Rivers took a similar approach to Northeastern, guided by other influential leaders, especially Robert Kraft, who poured his heart and soul into educating the business community and educators about the history of Jews, Israel, and antisemitism following the Hamas attack. After visiting the temporary Auschwitz exhibit in Boston, Rivers prioritized giving employees from all backgrounds a sense of community within their groups so that they could support one another. “Both Jews and Muslims are hurting for different but similar reasons,” he says. He believes that business leaders today are “frozen by this issue—they feel like it’s a no-win for them.” Rivers’s answer: “Don’t pick sides. Just give people safe spaces to come together.”

Social justice activist Andrea Silbert went further; she focused on educating her peers because she felt that they lacked critical context in a situation that lacked easy answers. Growing up in Brookline during the 1970s, “There was a lot of antisemitism,” she says. “My family was one of the first Jewish families that was accepted to the Skating Club of Boston. I was not able to go to the cotillion or the coming-out dances that my boyfriend went to because I was Jewish. So we dealt with it, and my attitude was always, Yes, their loss, right? Whatever.”

Silbert’s family briefly lived in Israel when she was a toddler, and her commitment to the nation is inextricably linked to her Jewish pride, but supporting Israel wasn’t always easy. In 1973, when Silbert was nine years old, she walked into the living room and saw her father sitting in front of the TV as news of the Yom Kippur War streamed in. “He was just catatonic. He was shaking his head and said, ‘Andrea, it’s all going to be lost. No one will stand up for us.’”

In the years that followed, Silbert says, she noticed antisemitism increasingly coming from so-called progressives. “We all knew about the Ku Klux Klan. But frankly, I’ve always known that the greater threat to American Jewry is from the far left,” she says, noting the virulent strains of antisemitism traveling across the Atlantic from Russia and Arab countries in the 1970s. Even so, she concentrated her energy on fighting for gender equity, founding a nonprofit in Roxbury nearly 30 years ago to help women start and grow their own businesses and running unsuccessfully as a Democrat for lieutenant governor in 2006.

It wasn’t until Silbert’s daughter was an undergrad at Harvard that she began to see just how deeply antisemitism had permeated the left. After the Crimson editorial board posted a statement promoting the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel in April 2022, Silbert says she was shocked. And this wasn’t an isolated incident: “There was so much going on at colleges where Jewish kids, if they didn’t disavow Zionism or Israel, weren’t allowed into clubs,” she says, pointing to the University of Vermont’s settlement with the U.S. Department of Education over allegations of antisemitism on campus. “And I kept screaming, this is going on. Why don’t people know about it? They’re going after kids. They’re shunning them. They’re making them feel guilty. This is bigger. And nobody really was focused on it.”

In January 2022, Silbert organized friends, including Colette Phillips—a Black convert to Judaism and an active member of the Jewish community—and other Black and Jewish friends, to talk about how Jewish people needed to be included in the social justice movement. And after October 7, she says, she felt even more compelled to reach the progressive community as a Jew.

In the weeks and months after October 7, Silbert and Phillips, plus Sandy Lish—cofounder of the Castle Group PR agency—began hosting roundtable discussions to help contextualize the Hamas attack within the history of Israel, Jews, and antisemitism. They’ve held seven events so far, connecting with 270 members of the community. Silbert’s fundamental message is that “the history of the Middle East is far too complex to have an oppressed and oppressor narrative.”

Despite her activist work, Silbert admits, her politics are shifting. “At this point, I can’t call myself a progressive because really that means rejection of Israel’s right to exist. So as a defender of the Jewish state, I no longer call myself a progressive or a liberal. I am a centrist.”

One unique aspect of Jewish culture is that children are encouraged from an early age to question, challenge, and debate Judaism’s philosophical underpinnings so that they can find themselves within its traditions and laws. For that reason, “people’s views and relationship to Israel vary considerably,” says Rob Leikind of the American Jewish Committee. “But overwhelmingly, American Jews feel that Israel is essential. They may have very different views about this government. They may have very different views given Israeli policies or about the war in Gaza, but that Israel is an essential part of their Jewishness, and their identity, is overwhelmingly the case.”Yet after October 7, and especially after Israel’s military response in Gaza, many in the local Jewish community have found themselves questioning the parameters of Zionism—the belief that Jews should have their own state in their ancestral homeland. David Starr, a conservative rabbi at Brookline’s Congregation Mishkan Tefila, is one of them. “There are a lot of Jews on the left who love the Jewish people,” he says. “They love Israel, but they’re not revisionist Zionists. They don’t support the occupation.”

In fact, some Jews argue that actions under the guise of Zionism have actually made them less safe. “Zionism is, I would say, a colonial project,” says Eli Gerzon, whose Dutch grandfather lost 44 family members in the Holocaust. “It’s a political movement that I maybe could have supported a hundred years ago. It’s like, let’s move to the holy land. Let’s move to Palestine. But there’s just no excuse for what Israel has done in the name of Judaism.”

After October 7, Gerzon stopped working full-time to volunteer for Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist Jewish advocacy organization that is critical of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories and supports the boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign against Israel. “Biden said Israel is so important as a safe haven for the Jewish people,” Gerzon says. “I’m like, it doesn’t look like that’s working out right now. That’s not what’s happening. Jews are being killed, and the killing of civilians is a horrible thing that should be condemned.”

The current conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has exacerbated a rift in Boston’s Jewish community, even alienating parents from their children.

Indeed, the most recent conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has exacerbated a rift in Boston’s Jewish community, even alienating parents from their children. Until recently, Joelle Hochman felt a very strong connection to Israel; her mother is Israeli, and she has spent a lot of time there. The Somerville resident says that going to Israel has always given her a sense of comfort: “Whenever I’ve been in Israel, I have felt like I was part of the majority, a very positive feeling for me. It felt like a break from being a minority in the U.S., and an unseen minority, in a way.”

After October 7, though, Hochman’s support for the Jewish state alienated her from her 22-year-old daughter, who, because she felt that the power balance between Israel and the Palestinians was uneven, had thrown herself into the pro-Palestinian movement. “She hasn’t walked away from being a Jew,” Hochman explains. “But for a long time, we didn’t talk about it. I felt very torn, very in the middle, and not quite sure where to stand. And I felt that any stand I took would alienate the other people in my life.”

In April, Hochman took a vacation with her daughter, determined to find common ground. At first, it seemed their differences were irreconcilable. Hochman felt her daughter “had no compassion for the hostages and for what was happening to Israel. We had big fights, big arguments, big discussions,” she says. But after “really pushing myself to hear her and to understand her and not to just blow her off,” Hochman explains, she began to see her daughter’s point of view. “I am really horrified by the extent of the damage and the killing that the Israeli government has sanctioned.”

Hochman says she also began to recognize how her own family might have contributed to the plight of Palestinians. Her grandfather had been an Israeli architect—many of his buildings still stand in Tel Aviv. Her great-grandfather was an engineer who helped build the water system in the city. “I’m grappling with whether building the new city of Tel Aviv was the right thing to do. Did my grandfather’s family displace Arabs from Jaffa? Did they move into a home where people had been forced to leave? There’s a lot I don’t know.”

Eventually, Hochman joined Standing Together, a grassroots Israeli organization that aims to unite Arab-Israeli and Jewish-Israeli communities. “They’re basically saying, none of us are leaving. We have a future together. We don’t know what it is, but we’re here to stay,” Hochman says. “And that was an organization I could get behind.”

Other Jews, while horrified by the Hamas attack, saw October 7 as a call to action to challenge Israel’s politics and policies. Jess Feldman, an activist who had just completed a Ph.D. at Brown University and settled in the Boston area, joined Jewish Voice for Peace shortly after the attacks. “I think there’s a real conflation of the critique of Zionism as a political project and wishing harm toward Jews,” Feldman says, explaining when mainstream groups established that Israel was integral to Jewish safety, any criticism of the country’s politics was deemed antisemitic. What’s more, Feldman doesn’t believe that an ethnostate for Jews will protect them.

Jeremy Menchik, an associate professor in the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, offers intellectual heft to Feldman’s argument. Menchik refers to himself as a Jew who “believes in the values of education, pluralism, tolerance, separation of religion and state, making your home wherever you are, and working for justice wherever you are.” Through his research, he says, “I’ve seen what terrible things religious nationalism does, whether it’s Trump and Christian nationalism in the U.S., or Modi and Hindu nationalism in India, or Islamists and Islamic nationalism in Indonesia. It’s absolutely toxic. And I feel the same way about Jewish nationalism.” He says that American Jews are waking up to how contemporary religious nationalism, contemporary Zionism, are “oddly incompatible with liberalism. In my work, Jewish nationalism is antithetical to everything I understand Judaism to be.”

Last fall, Menchik and his family joined Boston Workers Circle, a secular Jewish organization born of the labor movement, which provides Jewish education and supports labor causes. “I have two kids, a nine-year-old and a five-year-old, and we’ve been talking for a while about how to raise ethical, generous, community-minded kids. It’s hard to do. We live in Jamaica Plain, which is a really community-oriented part of Boston, but we didn’t feel like it was enough.”

Though Boston Workers Circle is a Jewish nonprofit, Combined Jewish Philanthropies has withdrawn its funding for the group because it partnered with anti-Zionist groups in its ceasefire organization efforts—though the group itself does not take any stance on Zionism. “CJP’s funding guidelines prohibit us from funding what I would call actively anti-Zionist organizations,” Marc Baker explains. “And so a number of organizations in our community who have continued to express, I would say, activism against Israel—that’s put them out of the bounds of our funding.”

Which leads to the central conflict of being an American Jew at this moment in history. “My people began in the land of Israel,” Baker says. “So much of our history took place in the land of Israel. We are indigenous to the land of Israel, and so Israel is integral to our identity and therefore to our community, to our people.”

But some people, like Boston Workers Circle member Haley Kossek, believe that part of being a Jew also means taking responsibility for the state of the world, including Gaza. “It’s my obligation to create a better political situation so that people can exercise their rights to freedom, dignity, and self-determination,” she says. “I’ve got to find a way to be hopeful and to outlast my own despair. These are my commitments as a Jew and as a human.”

Wherever their politics lie, over the past year, many Jews have found a renewed sense of purpose, emboldened to engage more fully with their communities.

Regardless of how, exactly, it changed them, October 7 was clearly a galvanizing moment for Boston’s Jews—including Mia, who is currently thriving at Gann Academy. She says that being in a Jewish high school where she doesn’t have to explain her pain and her fear, as well as her Jewish traditions and pride, has been life-changing. Going to Gann, she says, “has saved me the past few months, knowing that I’m not alone in feeling horrified and devastated.”

As the grim anniversary of the Hamas attack approaches, Boston’s Jews will observe Yom Kippur, the holiest of holidays. It is the Jewish day of atonement, a period to reflect collectively on what all of us have done, or not done, to repair the world. Over the past year, many Jews have found a renewed sense of purpose, emboldened to engage more fully with their communities. Wherever their politics lie, those who observe the holiday will acknowledge a core Jewish belief in global peace and good works, as the Yom Kippur service closes with a communal wish: May we all be sealed in the Book of Life for a year of goodness.

Updated October 4: This story has been updated for clarity since publication.