Abridged from source. [Opinion. Jews are hardly a “uniquely oppressed people”! If that’s all that defines Jews as Jews, Israel is not worth saving. However, there is the “capacity to be turned into hope, even celebration: the coming of a new and global Jerusalem, an Olam Ha’Bah, a just society built everywhere by Jews working alongside their neighbors. Ahem, those neighbours are Palestinians. Jews are not “alone in their experiences”. There has been monumental suffering in many other peoples, both historically and right now, today. Maybe show a little compassion for all those suffering and quit wailing about yourselves! Yeah, sure boo-hoo. Are Jews suffering now? Don’t grieve for yourselves! Grieve for the prisoners. Grieve for those killed by the IDF. Grieve for those killed by the colonists! Israel’s govt is “Fortress Judaism”. Any society built on wars alone is bound to fail. It’s not working, is it? Israel is dependent on US money and US weapons to perpetuate the genocide.] The Possibilities of Grief as a Rupture Abolition Judaism and rethinking the holiday of Tisha B’Av Andrue Kahn And Dania Rajendra In These Times: July 16, 2026 SOURCE: https://inthesetimes.com/article/grief-as-a-rupture The Jewish holiday of Tisha B’Av next week is built — entirely — around grief. Originally focused on the destructions of the Temple in Jerusalem by both the Babylonians and Romans, it’s now come to encompass every catastrophe to befall Jews from the expulsion from Spain in 1492 to the outbreak of World War I to the mass deportation of Jews to the Treblinka death camp in 1942. The traditional way to observe the holiday is to perform Jewish mourning rituals while recounting these histories along with the poetic record of the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem, the Book of Lamentations. It can be a powerful practice, with deep possibility for personal and political transformation — if we face what we’re mourning. It can be a powerful practice, with deep possibility for personal and political transformation—if we face what we’re mourning. During the 19th century in the United States, the early Reform Rabbi David Einhorn, a slavery abolitionist, rewrote the meaning of Tisha B’Av in his prayer book Olat Tamid. He acknowledged the horrors that accompanied the destruction of the Temples, but refused to make the rebuilding of a physical Temple, or a return to a single Jerusalem, the point. The mourning, in his hands, had the capacity to be turned into hope, even celebration: the coming of a new and global Jerusalem, an Olam Ha’Bah, a just society built everywhere by Jews working alongside their neighbors. Contemporary rabbis have mostly abandoned this tradition, instead using this holiday to recount a litany of horrors to reinforce the idea that Jews are a uniquely oppressed people whose trauma is what unifies and defines us as Jews. This produces an artificial separation of Jews from our neighbors, evoking grief to amplify a right-wing lie that we are alone in our experiences. It also reinforces the stature of legacy Jewish institutions (what we call “Fortress Judaism”) that since the second Red Scare have expelled leftist Jews from communal life — political repression that has worsened since October 7, when support for the genocide has become “a defining feature of employability” in Jewish institutions.
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