Like most of my generation, my mail typically falls into one of three categories: packages, bills, and spam. So I was surprised to find a magazine in my mailbox a few days ago. I was even more surprised when I saw the cover. “Hadassah Magazine” was written in white across the top, above an image of a woman holding a glass of wine.

If you haven’t spent time around American Reform Jews, you might not be familiar with Hadassah. Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, was named after Queen Esther’s original Hebrew name, from the Book of Esther in the Hebrew Bible (her story is where the Jewish holiday Purim comes from). Despite being explicitly Zionist, Hadassah has actually done some good work around the world. In the US they’re a major advocate of women’s rights. Internationally, they’ve established a lot of medical and social aid centers for children in Palestine (pre-Israel), and are responsible for a lot of modern medical technology in modern-day Israel. They are still Zionist, of course, so they advocate heavily for US support of Israel. And since 1947, Hadassah publishes a magazine every other month.

Hadassah was always a fixture in the background of my life. I knew it was a Jewish women’s organization. I knew my grandparents were members, and there was always an issue or two of the magazine on their coffee table. I’d never actually read one though. So instead of chucking it in the trash with the credit card solicitations, insurance scams, and other spam, I read it cover to cover and took notes.

Some of the articles were nice: a story about a college student getting a memorial stone dedicated for a family of Holocaust victims, a longer piece written by a Jewish woman whose genealogical research uncovered some details about a long lost family member, and a few articles about newer healthcare techniques using art and AI.

Some articles were kinda weird. One detailed the creation of a new airline to service Israeli tourists. Another made an odd connection between spirituality and thrifting, where finding a nice sweater could only be a product of divine intervention. There was also a surprisingly long article about Miami’s transformation into a hotspot for Jews, which felt more like an advertisement for Florida tourism than anything else.

Speaking of, a lot of the magazine was focused on tourism. Panama, Mexico, Poland, Croatia, Cuba, London, and of course Israel itself were advertised as kosher holiday destinations. The cover articles about Israeli wineries repeatedly blame the Israel-Gaza conflict for disrupting tourism, a significant source of revenue for wineries (we’ll dig into the wine articles in a bit). I know tourism is a major portion of Israel’s income, but I find it odd that there’s such a focus on it now, while we constantly hear that Israel is besieged by terrorists on all sides.

And now, onto the more serious parts. We’ll start with the Letters to the Editor. The first discusses the principle of tikkun olam which means “repairing the world,” and how it relates to ahavat yisrael, “love of one’s fellow Jew.” Andy Amend from Highland Park, IL writes, “Tikkun olam encompasses the whole world – the land, flora, fauna, and all people – and supports the idea that we are all made in the divine image and the precept of ‘love your neighbor as yourself.’” I don’t know Andy’s feelings on Israel’s conflicts with its neighbors, but I do find their omission from his letter notable.

Responses to stories about antisemitism/anti-Zionism were exactly what you’d expect. There was a fairly reasonable take from Laura Davids Todd of Phoenixville, PA that brought up the Trump administration using antisemitism as an excuse to suppress free speech. She finishes by saying “Even if we don’t agree with what pro-Palestinian activists say, are we ready to approve of them being arrested and deported without due process? Is the enemy of our enemy really our friend? I think it’s time to explore this issue.” Laura’s letter was immediately followed by Brooklynite Shoshana Averbach’s: “May Hashem protect and vindicate modern-day Maccabees like Valerie Gerstein as well as Shabbos Kestenbaum, who sued Harvard, and President Trump for demanding that universities take a stand against antisemitism.” Yeah… that one caught me off guard, too. Unfortunately, it’s not terribly surprising. I’ve heard similar takes from multiple liberal Jews I know. “I hate Trump, but at least he’s right on the important issues.” Oy vey.

“A Turning Point?” by Pamela S. Nadell is our first major foray into antisemitism and anti-Zionism. And it does a pretty good job. Nadell’s article, which promotes her upcoming book Antisemitism, an American Tradition, recounts antisemitic attacks throughout modern American history, starting with the recent murder of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington D.C., and going as far back as 1905 with the murder of Jacob Weisskind. Weisskind, a Russian Jewish immigrant, was beaten to death for working on Christmas. She does imply that some anti-Zionist acts are antisemitic, such as the burning of an Israeli flag at a counter-protest during New York University’s “Rave for Israel,” which celebrates the country’s founding. Despite that, I think the piece was good.

Next to Nadell’s article is an ad for Magen David Adom, Israel’s emergency medical service. The ad, which covers 2/3 of the page, says MDA “[provides] critical care and hospital transport for everyone from victims of heart attacks to rocket attacks,” which is an interesting bit of framing next to Nadell’s mention of Operation Guardian of the Walls. Operation Guardian of the Walls is Israel’s (very cool) name for their bombing campaign in Gaza in May, 2021. This conflict was sparked by Israel forcibly removing Palestinians from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem, an act of ethnic cleansing under international law. Palestinians facing displacement tried to resist, throwing rocks at armed Israeli police and vehicles (the source for this is “The Times of Israel”, so its veracity should be taken with a pillar of salt). In response, Israeli police stormed Al-Aqsa Mosque with “less lethal” munitions like rubber bullets and tear gas. Israel followed this up by bombing Gazan civilian housing, a refugee camp, schools, hospitals, and the offices of the Associated Press and Al-Jazeera. Maybe MDA should hop over to Gaza. They’d have plenty of rocket victims to help over there.

This is the point in the article where people start to call me an antisemite, so I unfortunately have to explain the difference between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. Again. Antisemitism is prejudice against Jewish people. We all know that one. Anti-Zionism is opposition to the establishment of Israel, an apartheid ethnostate, in the occupied land of Palestine. Israel is not synonymous with Judaism. Therefore, anti-Zionism is not synonymous with antisemitism.

As a linguistic aside, there’s also a difference between antisemitism and anti-Semitism. Semitism refers to a group of languages spoken in the Middle East, including Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic, and the people that speak them. So an antisemite hates Jews; an anti-Semite hates Jews and Arabs! We love inclusive hate. Now back to our regularly scheduled genocide (which is actually a pretty appropriate tagline for Israel’s history).

Next, let’s jump all the way back to the beginning of the mag and the letter from the editor, Lisa Hostein. Hostein’s letter is hilariously tone-deaf. She begins, “We could all use a glass of wine these days,” and recounts her woes. These include almost two years of war with Hamas (which really began in 1948 when Israel started ethnically cleansing Palestine), hostages in Gaza (who Benjamin Netanyahu has all but abandoned in favor of completing his genocide), political unrest in American (which includes the American Israel Public Affairs Committee bribing a majority of Congress), and the Israel-Iran war (which was started by Israel under the false pretense that Iran was almost capable of producing nuclear weapons). She also laments strikes on residential areas in Israel, which is valid. Targeting civilians is reprehensible. Of course, Zionists shouldn’t throw stones here, given that they snipe Palestinian children, massacre refugees at aid sites and camps, and bomb active hospitals and schools. Of course, stone throwing is apparently an offense punishable by execution, so they should probably avoid it in general.

“18 Women with Zionist Cred” is an annual feature in Hadassah, although only four women warranted blurbs in the print edition. The first honoree is Bellamy Belluci, a dancer-turned-digital media creator. Belluci is a Black South African, trans, Jewish convert, which is a wild collection of words to put together. She says she “routinely defends Israel from those who accuse it of being an apartheid state.” Come on. Really? If I wrote a satire about Zionism, a character like her would be too on the nose.

Hilary Hawn, our next credible Zionist woman, is a social media influencer and activist. She is a major offender of conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. She talks about experiencing the “takeover of antisemitic voices on college campuses” at Berkeley, from professors that “espoused clearly anti-Israel views.” She “sensed an extreme bias at Berkeley… and it wasn’t against policy and the Israeli government, it was just against Israel existing.” Once again, anti-Israel views are not antisemitic. Jews would not cease to exist in the absence of a Jewish state.

Allison Tombros Korman is a reproductive rights activist. She credits her activism to the Jewish values of “the right to dignity, bodily autonomy, and self-determination.” Once again, this conflicts directly with Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank, where they very deliberately deprive Palestinians of those three things. Korman mentions her brief tenure as the senior director of the DC Abortion Fund, who put out a statement in support of Palestinian victims of rape, but not Israeli. She asks, “How can you be a feminist organization and not have something to say about rape as a weapon of war?”

The thing is, standing in support of Palestinians is a stand against sexual violence. Members of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are known to rape and abuse prisoners, as evidenced by the leaked video of ten IDF soldiers raping a Palestinian prisoner last year. Interviews with over fifty other prisoners confirm that this wasn’t an isolated incident. Even the Israeli government supports rape as a form of punishment. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir called the rapists “our best heroes.” Hanoch Milwidsky, a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, said “everything is legitimate to do” to a Hamas militant when asked about “inserting a stick into a person’s rectum.” Given that Israel seems to consider all Palestinians, including children, legitimate military targets, I can’t imagine why a self-proclaimed feminist would lend her support to these fucking monsters.

She also uses the “White Lives Matter” argument here. We say “Black Lives Matter” because for most of our country’s history, they have not. Similarly, we raise our voices for Palestine because our country refuses to do so.

The last featured woman is Yocheved Kim Ruttenberg. She moved to Israel from the US shortly after Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023. She organizes volunteers to support their communities. Ruttenberg seems like someone that genuinely wants to help people and, as far as I can tell, isn’t doing it at the expense of others. At least we got one good one.

The cover topic, wine, has two articles dedicated to it. “Women With Vintage Appeal” is about women breaking into the wine industry, which has previously been male-dominated. It’s short and sweet, taking up a little more than a page, and delivers on its promise: a story about women getting into making wine. Solid article.

“Fermenting a Comeback,” on the other hand, is the longest article in the issue. It also focuses on a few wineries in Israel (ironically all owned by men), but reads more like a sob story trying, and failing, to garner sympathy. Each winery they highlight repeats the same refrain: “Our wineries are beautiful. The vineyards are stunning. We all lived together in harmony. Then, everything changed when the Fire Nation-” Uhh, I mean, “when Hamas attacked!” The winemakers talk about portions of their fields burning which, to be fair, is a pretty big loss for a winery. They also lament the decline in tourism (again…), a significant portion of their revenue.

I understand that these are real concerns for these people. But I can’t help but think about how petty these issues are when put into the bigger picture, especially when they reference the war (genocide) every few paragraphs. How can you wine (hehe) about some of your grapes getting destroyed when you’re praising the Israeli effort to level Gaza. I have a hard time sympathizing with Galil Mountain Winery, whose visitor center now “offers just tours, wine tastings, and a limited cheese menu,” while Israel is blocking food and water from entering Gaza. I don’t care that Moshe Alon has “spent most days working in [his family’s] vineyard, where there is no bomb shelter or siren to warn of incoming fire,” while Israel bombs literally everything in Gaza.

This is even more egregious given that just days ago the UN Human Rights Office released statements detailing the starvation crisis in Gaza, which is a “deliberate and human-made disaster,” according to Joseph Belliveau, the executive director of the charity MedGlobal. The few aid distribution sites that do exist are run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which was created as a joint venture between the US and Israel. GHF provides very limited amounts of food and water at these sites, which are only open for periods of ten to fifteen minutes. This forces thousands of Palestinians to race each other to get any scrap of food they can before everything runs out. If they don’t die of starvation or being trampled in the mad dash, they also risk murder at the hands of the IDF. The UN reports that between May 27 and July 21, 1,054 Palestinians were shot and killed by IDF soldiers while trying to get food. This is confirmed by the Red Crescent Society, Doctors Without Borders, and former GHF workers. All this while literal tons of food, water, and supplies are sitting in Egypt at the Israel-controlled border.

There are more things in the magazine I could talk about, but there wouldn’t be anything new. Going through every article would just make this post longer, and it would just make me more upset. When you grow up Jewish, you learn about ethnic cleansing pretty young. When we celebrate Passover and retell the story of Moses and the Israelites, the youngest people at the table ask questions about enslavement and hardship. When we talk to our elders, we learn about the Holocaust, listening to the survivors and honoring the dead. We learn the phrase “Never Again.” Never Again will we be slaves. Never Again will we be hunted and exterminated. I always thought “Never Again” meant Never Again for Anyone. I guess not.