Below is a LinkedIn post by Mara Kronenfeld, executive director of UNRWA USA, which is helping to provide food and medicine to people in Gaza.

This is a Jewish person’s clear and passionate response to the oft-heard and ludicrous charge that to be anti-Zionist or anti-genocide (and therefore anti-Israel) is to be anti-Semitic.

Thank you, Mara, for your courage, integrity, and tireless work for social and economic justice. You, Hani, and everyone else at UNRWA USA in Washington, D.C., and in Gaza are among my heroes.

This is a perverse and surreal era in which even Holocaust survivors who don’t toe the Zionist line and speak out against the Israeli genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza are criticized and sometimes attacked.

As Mara points out, If you stand against hate, racism, and discrimination, you stand against ALL of it. There is no gray area. No equivocation. Silence is complicity.

I urge you to donate to UNRWA USA by following this link. Please support their lifesaving work.

Peace, MAA

Some personal and painful thoughts this morning: I am tired of having my Jewish identity, and that of my dear beautiful co-religionists, being weaponized to silence and intimidate those of us who speak out against the atrocities that Israel is committing in Gaza.

It is antisemitic to tell me as a Jewish person what I or ANY Jew can believe, say, espouse, and advocate for.

I speak from the heart, with deep pain and compassion for all the innocents living a hell none of us can truly imagine right now in Gaza. I speak as a Jewish person whose grandfather escaped Nazi Germany, whose sister and his sister’s family was sent to die in the gas chambers.

This is particularly true in this country right now, where the term “antisemitic’ has been so deeply weaponized and devalued by a dark and cynical politics to wreak havoc on the bonds that hold us together as human beings, as Americans.

Meanwhile, the rampant Islamophobia and anti-Muslim hate that we are all witnessing vis-à-vis the New York mayoral primary is absolutely vile and extremely dangerous.

Don’t use my Jewish identity — and that of all my Jewish loved ones — to give you an excuse to spew your ugly words. Don’t sully the name of my thousands of beautiful Jewish ancestors to heave your racism and hate.

If you stand against hate, racism, and discrimination, you stand against ALL of it.