The Washington Post reported that Jewish leader Lonnie Kleinman, 33, stood with more than 300 demonstrators calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, wearing a prayer shawl around her neck and a T-shirt bearing the message, “Jews demand a ceasefire now.”
The activists who occupied part of the Capitol complex on Oct. 18 recited Scripture and prayed for peace, chanting “Free Palestine,” the newspaper reported, but Capitol Police arrested Kleinman in the afternoon along with about 300 other members of Jewish Voice for Peace, a pro-Palestinian group that has long supported calls to boycott Israel.
Videos showed activists being led in rows, handcuffed, and having their cellphones confiscated. The organization raised money to pay for the summons, and the group’s organizers deemed the protest a success. But for Kleinman, the personal cost of her political activism soon became too high.
fired from work
A Jewish nonprofit has fired a Philadelphia-based leader after she refused to cut ties with Jewish Voice for Peace, which describes Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory as “apartheid” and says Israeli policy played a role in provoking the Oct. 7 attacks, the newspaper reported.
Even visiting her hometown, the newspaper says, has become difficult for Kleinman, who said her father stopped speaking to her for a few months after the Capitol arrest videos went viral, and her childhood friend accused her and other pro-Palestinian protesters in an Instagram post of having “no empathy” for their Jewish family.
But Kleinman is not the only activist who sees her world torn apart by her political positions and the backlash they have caused. The war in Gaza, which has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians and destroyed much of the densely populated enclave, has sharply divided American Jews.
Disagreements over the war have played out in workplaces, synagogues and across college campuses, even straining relationships between family members and friends. About 50 percent of Jews under age 35 reported having “cut ties” with someone because of something they said about the war, according to a Pew Research Center survey.
Kleinman said her views are shaped by her faith, and by her conviction that she has a responsibility to speak out about what she sees as the morally indefensible suffering of the Palestinian people, and that America is complicit as Israel’s main ally and arms supplier. “The moral damage caused by silence would be too much to bear,” she said.
moral dilemma
The newspaper said that Kleinman and other Jewish leaders protesting the war face a special challenge because their communities are trying to reconcile the horrors of the Hamas attack with the ongoing Israeli bombardment that has left more than half of the Strip’s population homeless and at risk of famine and disease.
Several rabbis told The Washington Post that they struggled with how to speak out enough to accommodate the wide-ranging views of their congregation while maintaining their own personal beliefs. Some have called for a cease-fire while remaining in leadership positions in their synagogues.
Among American Jews and their institutional leaders, there is a wide spectrum of views about Israel’s response to the October 7 attacks, from those who express full support for its military campaign to those who support Israel’s right to security but accuse political leaders of prolonging the war.
“Upholding the humanity of both the Israeli and Palestinian people is a moral tightrope walk,” said Jill Jacobs, CEO of T’ruah: Rabbinic Advocacy for Human Rights, a nonprofit organization that supports a two-state solution. “War does not provide safety, it causes incredible destruction in Gaza, and it does not bring the hostages home.”
“It’s completely disproportionate. You have an army on one side and civilians on the other,” Kleinman said, calling the killing of civilians and the destruction of Gaza’s schools, hospitals, libraries and mosques evidence of obliteration. “You can’t call this a war; it’s genocide of the Palestinian people.”
Despite the backlash Kleinman faced, she continued to participate in pro-Palestinian rallies in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and Austin, New York, where she was arrested a second time, and in June she returned to Capitol Hill to urge congressional leaders to stop supplying weapons to the Israeli military, but with little success.
“My world is shattered”
Kleinman grew up in a conservative Jewish community in Tucson and cherished moments like lighting Shabbat candles with Joan, her Holocaust survivor grandmother. She questioned aspects of her Jewish faith and said female rabbis were rare in her hometown.
Before enrolling at Lewis & Clark in 2010, Kleinman took a gap year in Israel. In the West Bank, she met Palestinians and learned that hundreds of thousands of their people had fled or been forced from their homes before the 1948 war that led to the creation of Israel, which her teachers called the “War of Independence,” and which Palestinians, she learned, call the Nakba.
“Growing up, we were taught that Israel was a land without a people for a people without a land,” Kleinman said. “But when I listened to Palestinians describe their families’ experiences of military occupation and displacement, my world shattered.”
Early in her rabbinical studies, Kleinman came to identify as an “anti-Zionist,” a term she saw as rejecting the idea of “Jewish supremacy” in what is now Israel. “But you know, some Jews see anti-Zionism as a rejection of Israel as a Jewish nation,” she explains.
