Never again, except when it’s us: Jewish identity and Gaza

Photo by Anna Goodman ’28

Some Mount Holyoke College students have been chalking on the roads and pathways around MHC’s campus with messages in support of Palestine.

By Anna Goodman ’28

Staff Writer

Content Warning: this article discusses genocide at length, as well as famine, antisemitism, mass murder, Islamophobia, and the Holocaust. 

I’m eight years old, swinging my legs because they can’t touch the floor yet, the first time I consider myself Jewish. It’s April 2015 and hours past my bedtime when a friend of my father begins the fifth of — what seems to me as — endless Passover readings, and I don’t understand why any of them matter.

I don’t go to Synagogue. I don’t speak Hebrew. I eat Challah bread on Friday evenings and pretend to like grape juice, and that’s about it. But that has never mattered to my family, because to us, being Jewish is not just a religion, but also about the preservation of our culture. In truth, an act of defiance.

Yet, despite my boredom, it’s at this table, at eight years old, that I start to understand that defiance. To grasp what the Holocaust was. And I don’t understand. How could anyone let this happen?

Later, it’s December 2023 and I’m sitting at my desk as my teacher recounts the week’s news. I sit there as my classmates debate terrorism and occupation and retaliation and who deserves to die screaming and who’s innocent. For perhaps the first time in my life, I bite my tongue. 

Because I am not thinking of the people in my class. I’m thinking of family. Of a man — a boy — I consider like a brother, who was drafted into the Israeli Army just after he turned eighteen. Who, for safety reasons, I will refer to by the Hebrew word אחי: “ach-khee,” literally “brother,” but in colloquial use, close male friend.

אחי is only six months older than me. He messaged me the other day and asked if I was also getting gray hairs. 

And a part of me feels for him. Another part doesn’t know if I should.

Just this year, several experts at the United Nations declared, “While States debate terminology — is it or is it not genocide? — Israel continues its relentless destruction of life in Gaza … massacring the surviving population with impunity. … No one is spared — not the children, persons with disabilities, nursing mothers, journalists, health professionals, aid workers, or hostages.”

In the six months since, the scale of destruction has only gotten more horrifying.

As of Nov. 29, 2025, “Palestine’s official health ministry has tallied the dead at over 70,000”: An already horrific number that many experts have stated is likely a severe undercount. 

By the Israeli military’s own numbers, every five out of six of those people were civilians.

“Every genocide depends on the dehumanisation of its victims,” Guardian reporter Owen Jones wrote, “Mainstream media outlets have airbrushed the truth about Israel’s genocide — whether that be broadcasters or newspapers. They’ve failed to report multiple atrocities, failed to show the horrific consequences, repeatedly regurgitated Israeli lies about their war crimes. ” 

Entire textbooks could be written about the horrifying dehumanization of Palestinian people, Palestinian children in particular. But I’ve seen much less said about the opposite: The almost gentle language and strangely subdued anger surrounding the people committing these atrocities. 

Every Nazi — from the guards at the camps who pulled the levers on the gas chambers to the everyday enablers who registered party membership just to keep their heads down and live, to those who shut their windows and turned away from the people with pinned yellow stars being dragged down the street — was a person who made a decision, just like אחי. 

And when we wave our hands and say things like, “well, they had no choice”, or “well, that’s not the same,” we clear the path for ourselves to expunge our own guilt. 

“I didn’t do anything!” But, see, that’s the problem, isn’t it? You didn’t do anything.

There’s a very famous poem called “First They Came” by German Pastor Martin Niemöller, that I’m sure many of you have heard before. “When they came for the Jews,” it says, “I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.” 

We read it every year at Passover. We recount the story of the Holocaust, raise our glasses to those it stole from us, dip our bitter herbs in saltwater. We promise them, promise ourselves, that we will never forget. 

Perhaps, the darkest truth is that we haven’t forgotten. And what does that tell someone? What does that tell not only the Palestinian students on our campus and across the country, but every Muslim person with the right to exist in a world that hates them for no reason? That they’re lesser? Unworthy of basic human decency? 

“The fact that you’re Palestinian, you have to prove that you’re not a threat, you have to prove that you’re not an extremist, you have to prove that you’re just a human,” Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia student whose arrest earlier this year sparked a whole spate of protests, tells Zeteo.

Did you know that the word אחי, brother, in Hebrew, is the same as أخي , brother, in Arabic? Why is my “אחי”  worth any more than theirs?

I am ashamed to say, in the last two years, most days I tried not to think about Gaza. I donated, I protested, I cried, I declared that I would do something. I decided my empathy made me morally superior. And most of the time I couldn’t bear to even read an article, much less write one.

The truth is, I could have written this any time in the last two years and I did not, because I was just too scared. And in a decade, in two, in three, how am I going to answer when one of my students raises her hand and asks me what I did when I watched a genocide happen in real time?

“I felt bad,” I’ll say. “I pretended that that meant something.” 

Now, it’s October 2025, and I’m eighteen years old. I sit down at my desk to write this article. My feet touch the floor now. It’s been 10 years since that first Passover, two years since this genocide began, and I understand now. 

It’s so painful to realize that you are now one of the people whose inaction you condemned, back when you didn’t have any reason to be scared. 

Through it all, I come back to אחי. Who got his friends to help him fake a scar so he could get a permit to grow out his hair. Who admitted to me once that his knowledge of Christmas is based on movies, and then asked for recommendations on the worst ones I could think of. 

Who I couldn’t tell I was writing this article, because it would get him thrown in jail. I see his shadow in every headline. I feel my stomach twist when I remember, every time we complain about our coworkers or share anecdotes about our moms, that his hands are bloody. 

And still I fear that someday I’ll wake up to a call from his little brother telling me that he’s gone, and I won’t know what to do with myself. 

Now, just imagine that same fear, that same agony, multiplied tenfold, for the people whose loved ones are, or, were, Palestinian. Who have crawled out of the rubble of the places they called home over the bodies of the people they called Mom. 

“Gaza has become a place where death is so constant and survival so compromised that even silence now speaks louder than any appeal for justice,” Muhammad Shehada wrote for the joint Israeli-Palestinian newspaper +972 on the second anniversary of October 7th. “And the legacy of this genocide will be with us for generations.”

The legacy of this genocide, as much as we would like to live our lives not admitting to it, is on America’s hands too. For the last two years — and decades before then — it’s been America’s bombs, America’s missiles, America’s money enabling the Israeli army to rage a campaign of abject violence and terror on civilians. Our tax dollars are killing people, and our government has been, at best, quiet, at worst, actively promoting it.

“The decision is stark,” the UN stated in its official report on Gaza: “[we can] remain passive and witness the slaughter of innocents or take part in crafting a just resolution. The global conscience has awakened, if asserted - despite the moral abyss we are descending into - justice will ultimately prevail.”

“Right now the Israeli government is waging a genocidal war on Gaza,” the organization Jewish Voice For Peace says in their mission statement,  “claiming the support of all Jews who live in the US… we say, ‘Not in our name!’”

And I may not go to Synagogue. I may not speak Hebrew. I eat challah bread on Friday evenings and pretend to like grape juice, and really, that’s about it. But when it comes to defiance, I am as Jewish as my ancestors. 

In his response to Niemöller’s “First They Came” poem, written in the wake of the 2016 election, American Rabbi Michael Adam Latz said, “Then they came for the Muslims and I spoke up—Because they are my cousins and we are one human family … They keep coming. We keep rising up. Because we Jews know the cost of silence. We remember where we came from. And we will link arms, because when you come for our neighbors, you come for us—and that just won’t stand.”

It would be naive to say that writing an article that will reach a thousand people at most will cause any tangible chance or will save any lives. But it is still something. 

I may be a child. But so is אחי. So were the countless people and their אחי s, their أخي s,  who have died at his army’s hands.

And I am Jewish. 

I remember where I came from. I remember all those Passovers spent listening to the stories of the Holocaust. I know the cost of silence. I know the power of linking arms. I stand on the shoulders of all that came before me, all those who lived and died and fought for a better world. And on their behalf, I say: not in our name. 

Angelina Godinez ’28 contributed fact checking. 

Queer operas and us: Representation is important

Photo courtesy of Anna Goodman ’28

The all-Korean production of “Bare,” an American musical from the early 2000s, inside a performing arts center in the heart of Seoul, South Korea.

By Anna Goodman ’28

Staff Writer

Content warnings: homophobia, transphobia, queerphobia.

(This article uses “queer” extensively as it is how the author identifies; if this makes you uncomfortable, please do not read.)

It’s already past 6 p.m. and I’m standing at an intersection in the middle of Seoul, conspicuously blonde and conspicuously lost, when I admit to myself that this was a terrible idea. I’m searching for a performing arts center, and in it the all-Korean production of a show most people haven’t heard of.

“Bare” is an American musical from the early 2000s, and in many ways, it feels like it. Set at a Catholic boarding school in 1990s America — MHN’s entire queer readership is already wincing — it follows two boys, Jason and Peter, who are secretly lovers, in their final semester before college. It’s moving, it’s heartbreaking, it features a bewildering amount of Bible verses and Shakespeare quotes for a two-hour show, and, like most queer media of its time, its ending is undeniably tragic.

But why go? In an era with hundreds of hours of media at my fingertips that make it a point to emphasize queer joy, why am I sitting in this theater, hoping for a happy ending when I know there won’t be one? Thinking, “maybe it will be different this time?”

Well, the first time I listened to “Bare,” at the ripe old age of twelve, I had been teetering on the edge of telling my parents the truth for at least a year.

“911 Emergency” is a song written so long ago that its main hook is about putting change into a payphone and telling the operator to connect you. But its message — that your parents will love you anyway, and that you deserve to live as who you are — is evergreen. I replayed it more times than I can count. Because, finally, someone understood.

Peter picks up the phone. And so did I.

I soon began wondering if other people also felt this kind of deep, immediate emotional connection when seeing themselves for the first time. So I asked twelve people, six Mount Holyoke students, six not, ranging from ages 15 to 68, to name me queer media that meant something to them as a teenager or young adult.

The difference in their responses — which amounted to 34 separate pieces of media — is telling. The four non-students I asked, aged 36, 40, 53, and 68, took much longer to answer and had far less to choose from. Every one mentioned at least one work with what I’d consider a “tragic” ending, where at least half of the couple dies or where they do not end up together because of societal pressure.

By contrast, my fellow students, and the two other interviewees younger than me could point to any one of a number of shows, movies, musicals, songs, video games, et cetera, that fit their specific experiences. “Red White And Royal Blue.” “Heartstopper.” “Our Flag Means Death.” “Alien Stage.” “She-Ra.”

My mother, who’s roughly the same age as the writers of “Bare,” said, “When I was in high school and most of college [from 1985 - 1992] it was the time of the AIDS crisis … I don’t think the word ‘gay’ was said in any of my high school or college classrooms. If I try to think back I just picture, hazily, a few caricatures on TV and very serious news reports and films about people dying.”

“The queer media representation that came out of the AIDS crisis can be seen as a double-edged sword,” scholar Lillian Joy Myers says in an overview of the changes in queer media. “On one hand, the representation of this time was incredibly powerful and influential … [in describing] how this crisis shook the queer community…[yet] these depictions continued to perpetuate the queer trauma narratives of years past, maintaining a one-dimensional, negative view of queerness and the association between queerness and trauma.”

The effect growing up in this environment has on a queer person can’t be underestimated and is palpable throughout “Bare.” To this day, I come back to Jason’s lines at the end of Act 1 of: “Not all tales have happy endings …‘cause there's no such thing as heroes who are queer”. To this day I wonder how many children still grow up feeling the same way.

The answer: Too many.

But, hopefully, because of media like “Bare,” less.

Speaking to Playbill on the 15th anniversary of the show, “Bare” writer Jon Hartmere said, “I came out while writing ‘Bare.’ I didn't learn I was gay. But I learned it was okay.”

Hartmere’s characters may not have gotten their happy ending. But he helped create a world that meant that he could. He’s now openly gay, and still with his partner of nearly 20 years.

Hilariously, despite all of my preteen angst, neither my parents nor I remember the specifics of when I came out to them. It ended up being so unimportant in the grand scheme of things that the most any of us could remember was that I was probably still twelve.

And, despite the fact that I (thankfully) had what was probably the least eventful coming out in history, “Bare” has held a special place in my heart since. Not only as the capstone of my own journey, but as my reminder not to grow complacent.

In a way, it’s heartwarming that a show made almost thirty years ago can still connect with someone who is lucky enough to have never experienced what its protagonists — or its writers — have.

But it’s heartbreaking too. Because when I watch “Bare,” I don’t just see Peter and Jason. I see the little kids in each of my friends that aren’t quite healed from that feeling of growing up on their own. I see the kids of generations long gone — and far too recent — that never even had the chance to live the lives they wanted.

And then I see my friend Ella, who I often call my ‘honorary little sister.’ When I asked her about what it was like growing up seeing people like her on screen, she said, “Seeing so much casual queer representation at such a young age was amazing for me and my girlfriend … Nothing to make a huge deal about, just something that you are and can be happy with.”

Clearly, we have made progress. We have made change. But I can’t and won’t sit here and argue that we’ve made enough.

In 2024, GLAAD reported that the number of explicitly LGBTQ characters on television was 468, which, while an incredible change from thirty years ago, is still a decrease of over 100 characters since the year before, and less than 1 in 10 characters overall.

When you consider that over 1 in 5 of Gen Z identify as LGBTQ+ today, it’s clear that our media still lacks the numbers that would allow the diversity and humanity really present in our community.

As Myers puts it, in the same piece as above, “Queer characters and storylines are still underrepresented compared to … non-queer plots … Many of them still center white, cisgender, affluent, able-bodied, adult, and/or male characters… [there’s also] the continued use of stereotypes and the prevalence of queer tokenization.”

It's easy, especially for someone like me, to get so swept away in how far we’ve come that we neglect the fact that we still have so far to go. I have two very progressive parents who, despite the time they grew up in, have always made it clear that their acceptance does not come with an asterisk. I go to Mount Holyoke, a very queer-accepting college. I am publishing this in their newspaper. I do not need “Bare” in the same way my twelve year old self did.

But that’s okay, because someone else always does.

Back in Seoul, when I look to my left in the theater, I see something stuck between realization and fear in the eyes of the boy next to me. When I look to my right I see the palpable guilt in the faces of nearly every person old enough to have kids. When I look down at the stage, I see tears on the faces of every performer as the actors who play Peter and Jason hold each other one more time as the curtain closes.

So, I turn to that boy, with fear in his eyes, and we talk. And we keep talking. He’s 15. He walks me home and he complains about his math classes and I gripe about how terrible my Korean is.

I want to ask. I’m scared to ask.

It’s past midnight and I’m standing at an intersection in the middle of Seoul, when this boy tells me, quietly, half through a translator, half through hesitant English, about his best friend. When he stumbles over the words, and he just can’t say it. I hug him. I tell him I understand. That it’s going to be okay.

He’s just a kid. He should be allowed to just…live.

When my parents’ plane lands the next morning, I hug them harder than I have in a long time.

The truth is, I know how the story of “Bare” will end every time it starts, and still, every time, I think to myself: maybe it will be different. Maybe it’ll have a happy ending. And then I realize: Who says it can’t?

My mom grew up in a world that gave her stereotypes and fear; Ella is growing up in a world that gave her “She-Ra.” I’m not naive. I know it’s not easy. It’s a scary world out there, and it’s only getting scarier.

In just a few months, the Trump Administration has rolled back Biden’s protections of LGBTQ+ youth as a whole, made it even harder than it was before for trans youth to access gender-affirming care and surgery, cut federal funding for HIV research and treatment, and issued an executive order stating that that there are only two genders, based on “biological sex.”

They tried to erase us before, and they’re trying again.

But it will be different this time. Maybe not for Jason, or for Peter. But for Ella. For every friend who’s ever called me late at night on the edge of something they don’t understand or told me they were scared to go home. For the boy who hugged me in the middle of Seoul because he had no one else to tell.

For me and for you.

The people who came before us fought tooth and nail for us to be where we are today. And there is no way on this side of the grave that anyone is going to tell my children that “there’s no such thing as heroes who are queer.” Don’t let someone tell yours either. Call your mom. Hug your friends. Tell someone you love them.

Be brave. Be loud. And live.

Karishma Ramkarran ’27 contributed fact-checking.

Without memory, there is not a future: Fascism and you

Photo courtesy of Steve Goodman

Anna Goodman in a former Portuguese prison.

By Anna Cocca Goodman ’28

Staff Writer

“You know,” my father said, “Portugal is supposed to be sunny.”

But instead, it’s 2 p.m. on a rainy Sunday in January 2024, and I’m tumbling into a museum whose entrance is tucked into a Lisbon street corner, with soaking wet hair, rudimentary (at best) Portuguese, and an umbrella broken in ways I didn’t know umbrellas could break.

To be honest with you, I agree to go inside partly just to get dry.

But once there, ticket in hand, I find myself faced with a deep red wall, painted with the words: sem memória, não há futuro. I ask the first person I see to explain. “It means,” the woman replies, “without memory, there is no future.”

When someone says “fascism,” what do you picture?

I asked three Mount Holyoke College history professors who specialize in different time periods and continents to see what they thought.

“In Ghana, around the …'70s and the '80s, there were several revolutions and what a lot of people may consider authoritarian rule,” Professor of Pre-Colonial African History Ishmael Annang said.

“I mean, there's a lot of oligarchies in history,” Professor of Modern African American History, Caleb Smith replied. “But if you're talking about a dictatorship, I mean, Putin … that's as good an example as there gets.”

“Especially as a Jewish studies professor,” Yiddish Book Center Director and Professor Madeleine Cohen said, “when I think of fascism, of course, I tend to think of Nazi Germany.”

Whatever you think of, I don’t think it’s Portugal.

So let me change that.

The story of Portuguese dictatorship officially begins with a military coup in 1926, when António Salazar came to power; a man, who, according to the Huxley Almanac, was “a rather strange dictator … Despite being an autocrat, he didn’t build any palaces for himself, nor did he wage any wars … [but] he remained at the top for 36 years, becoming the longest-ruling dictator in Europe.”

Salazar’s reign of terror was marked not only with extreme violence but with a widespread suppression campaign which was nicknamed “Lápis Azul,” or “blue pencil,” after the tools his censors used to strike out content deemed unsuitable for publication.

In 1936, after drafting a new “constitution,” Salazar made a speech whose most famous lines were as follows: “We do not discuss the fatherland and its history. We do not discuss the family and its morals. We do not discuss the glory of work and its duty. We do not discuss authority and its prestige. And we do not discuss God and his virtue.”

“It sounds like a really good, almost textbook example of dictatorship,” Cohen said, later in our interview, “So what it makes me think of is, why in the U.S. do we only talk about Hitler?”

And it isn’t just the U.S. either. The Museu do Aljube, the museum I mentioned at the beginning, says in their mission statement, “[We] intend to [take] on the struggle against the exonerating, and, so often, complicit amnesia of the dictatorship we faced between 1926 and 1974.”

The museum itself is actually located in a building that was once used to imprison and torture political dissidents, and it is a hauntingly immersive experience. There are the sudden flashes of camera light. There are the cell bars criss-crossing the ceilings. There are the telephones that ring through the loudspeakers, making your heart race out of your chest before you can remind yourself that you haven’t done anything wrong.

But the most affecting part is a dark, silent space, a seven foot by four foot room, kept pristine from its days as an isolation cell. Inside, there’s just enough room next to the wooden pallet and flea-bitten blanket masquerading as a bed for seventeen-year old me to walk up to the opposite wall and see, scratched with some kind of sharp rock, 12 tally marks and the words: “João, 1940.”

It is an image that will never leave my mind. And, really, that’s the point.

“Sem memória, não há futuro,” or, as the stranger I met kindly translated, “without memory, there is not a future,” is a quote all over the museum. Its mission statement, as it says on its website, is “[to preserve] the memory of histories and active citizenship, and [to break] the silence in which everyone was submerged and rescue them in order to educate the younger generations.”

But who are those younger generations? Who are these people that the museum is fighting for?

I’ll tell you.

It's the Angolan teenager in the cafe who showed me a video of him playing fútbol with his team and said with a wink, “Promise you’ll look for me on the TV one day.” Fifty years ago, they wouldn’t have let him play.

It's the German waiter who bartends part-time for fun, and, in between spouting cheesy pick-up lines and unserious marriage proposals, tells me about his gay brother and what he said when he came out to him. (“The way I see it, if everyone only liked rice, nobody would buy pasta. And then all of Italy would be out of business. You need variety!”) Fifty years ago, he would have been arrested.

It's the Korean exchange student in the Museu do Aljube, who managed to teach me the little phrase in Portuguese that made this article come to life with her own alphabet. (“No-no, ha, ha, like laughing in Hangul.” Ah! Jaraesseoyo!). Fifty years ago, she wouldn’t even have been there, and she definitely wouldn't have been allowed to study journalism.

It’s the seventeen year-old American girl who complains when her father drags her to some museum because he remembers when he was her age and hearing about a revolution half a world away, not knowing that she’ll be just as moved by the story as he was in real time. She’s also a reporter. But she hasn’t written this story yet.

And it’s you too.

Because knowledge, protest, dissent – it isn't just important for those at the highest level. From the dissidents imprisoned in claustrophobic isolation cells to the journalists who printed their calls to action in secret, to the people marching in the streets, to everyone who had the strength to keep living anyway, their actions matter.

After thanking each of my interviewees for their time, I asked if I could read a short quote from a poem by Manuel Allegre, drawn on the museum’s walls. “Mêsmo na noite mais triste, em tempo de servidão, há sempre alguém que resiste, há sempre alguém, que diz: não.” Even on the saddest night in times of servitude, there is always someone who resists, there is always someone who says: no.

“It is so true,” Annang said. “I think society has created the false notion that those who do not get on the streets or those who do not gather on the field are probably not in some form of dissent or resistance. But just saying no is resistance.”

It’s 2 p.m. on a sunny Wednesday in May 1974, and a waitress is walking home from work. When she passes a young soldier, she hands him a carnation, which he puts in the barrel of his rifle. Within hours, every soldier has a red flower in his gun, and thus, because of Celeste Caeiro, the day the Portuguese dictatorship crumbled is known as the Carnation Revolution.

And I would be lying if I said all this and didn’t tell you that, in writing this article, I was a little scared. I’m still scared. Just a little over a week ago, ABC was intimidated by the White House into pulling Jimmy Kimmel’s show from the air after he even dared to insinuate that President Donald Trump was not as broken up about Charlie Kirk’s death as he claimed. I’m eighteen now, and we are watching a fast-paced descent into fascism in real time in our own country.

But I’ve seen change happen with my own eyes, from the women’s marches in 2016 to the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, and, on a smaller scale, on campus, with the protests over fair wages for our staff.

Change wasn’t just made by the members of the Mount Holyoke workers’ unions striking, but by the students who marched with them, by the choir who turned their backs during Commencement, by the speakers who took pains to show their support, by the people who painted signs even if they couldn’t walk, by the photographers who documented the protests and by the journalists here at MHN who wrote so beautifully about them.

“The museum is what taught me that you can do something small,” I said to Smith during our interview. “I'm kind of curious what you think, say, an average person could do?”

“I would challenge the word ‘small,’” Smith answered. “I would use everyday acts of resistance. Truth is, no act of resistance is small ... And so that has been something [constant] throughout, especially looking at the American Civil Rights Movement [in the] African American context. Everyday resistance has always been a thing. And collective organizing, whether it is pickets, boycotts, or even, putting on stage shows. It all counts.”

“I think that there is so much that students can do,” Annang said. “You have the ability to educate yourself and educate your peers so that when we have people protesting, it's not just because they're following the crowd, but they really know and have a conviction of what exactly they are protesting about.”

Sem memória, não há futuro. Without history, there is no future. Without history, there is no us. And without us, there is no history.

Quill Nishi-Leonard ’27 contributed fact checking.