My name is Dean Grosbard. I am an Oberlin alum and graduated in 2017. I’m writing regarding Zane Badawi’s article (“Palestine Needs Oberlin’s Jewish Voices,” The Oberlin Review, Sept. 29, 2023). I am a proud member of the Jewish community.
My heart aches reading Badawi’s words, published mere weeks before the rapid and deadly escalation of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people. I hope the whole Oberlin community, regardless of faith or political affiliation, is supporting a ceasefire now to save innocent Palestinian lives.
I am descended from Holocaust survivors. Some lived through horrific atrocities; most did not. My grandmother, Helen, was 14 years old when the Nazis invaded Poland. As I see images and hear the cries of the children of Gaza, I see her pain more clearly than ever before. I am appalled that these war crimes — hospitals and holy places full of civilians bombed, basic needs like water and medicine denied, children deemed animals unfit to live — are being perpetrated in her name and mine.
Badawi calls upon his Jewish peers to think critically about Israel’s settler-colonial history and current human rights abuses. It is a Jewish cultural value and religious precept to “wrestle with the Almighty.” We have a responsibility to question the racist and Islamophobic narratives the Israeli and United States governments have fed us.
As Audre Lorde said in her Oberlin commencement address in 1989, “We are citizens of the most powerful country on Earth — we are also citizens of a country that stands upon the wrong side of every liberation struggle on Earth. Feel what that means.” In Oberlin’s tradition of radically progressive thought and action, let us question. Why have even the most antisemitic presidents championed Israel? Why was the U.S. the only country in the United Nations to oppose humanitarian aid to Gaza on Oct. 18 as thousands lay wounded, dying, and starving? Surely this is not for the safety of the Jewish people, many of whom lay dying as well. What political and economic interests are these governments protecting in the Middle East?
All of our most sacred Jewish holidays center on rebelling against oppressive regimes. I aim to carry that torch today, as is my birthright, and say unequivocally: Palestine deserves to be free.
Let us not repeat the mistakes of the past. Let us remember “never again” is a call for global liberation. I hope that the Jewish community of Oberlin supports the cause of Palestinian freedom — and supports their Palestinian peers in this terrible time. We, as Jews, have a deep capacity and responsibility to remember that we are not free until everyone is.
On the wall of my synagogue when I was a child, there was an engraving that said “I lay before you the blessing and the curse, life and death; therefore, choose life.” When we call our representatives for a ceasefire, march in the streets, and pray for Palestinian liberation, we choose life.
