A Year After October 7th, What We Still Won’t Say

This piece belongs to a series of op-eds and columns to be published throughout this week reflecting on the one-year anniversary of October 7th.

—Tommy Barone ’25 and Jacob M. Miller ’25, Crimson Editorial Chair

I tried to ignore the notifications. The stories of violence were too much to digest and the impending Israeli response too horrifying to consider. Frozen in bed, I dreaded any idea of engaging with my classmates — especially those with no personal ties to the region or in-depth knowledge about its history.

By midday on October 7th, as details poured in and Jewish and Israeli students sat in fear, texting loved ones and praying that their friends and family were safe, the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee had already published their infamously heartless statement. I tried to ignore that too.

On the morning of Oct. 9, I saw my friend Aidan. He and I think very differently about Israel, but we still connect where we agree and fiercely debate where we don’t. We leaned on each other often last year.

With tears in his eyes, he told me that his close friend from United Synagogue Youth, a Jewish youth organization, was taken into Gaza by Hamas. He wasn’t yet confirmed alive.

For all we know, Hamas is still holding Omer Neutra hostage.

That day, we were supposed to throw a party. Our friends were relying on us to show up for them and wear a smile, and we did our best. Nobody knew what Aidan was going through. There are some things you just don’t say.

As I reflect on a year filled with pleas for dialogue and pedantic editorializing about “discourse,” I am struck by what many, including those leading our Jewish communities, still won’t say.

As University President Alan M. Garber ’76 read the Haftarah portion at Rosh Hashanah services, I thought about when encampment goers depicted him with horns and a tail last spring. I’m astonished that, while pro-Palestine coalition members removed the poster after backlash, they couldn’t even find the simple humility and self-awareness to say sorry.

Even left-wing Jewish groups on campus made quick excuses, as if devil horns and a pointy tail on a Jew don’t set off every lowbrow antisemitism alarm in the books. Of course, it was just another bullet point in a running list of “inadvertencies” and an equally long list of shallow rationalizations by students who — when not minimizing Jewish concerns — otherwise act with moral steadfastness and a commitment to justice.

Again, what some won’t say.

There’s no doubt one can be staunchly anti-war, anti-occupation, and unapologetically Jewish, but much of the vocal Jewish left on American campuses is failing — capitulating to ideological conformity and providing valuable content for tokenization.

Just look at Jewish Voice for Peace at the University of Michigan amplifying calls for “death to Israel” last month. Not very peaceful — enough said.

Harvard “Jews for Palestine” risks the same.

Just this weekend, they advertised a flagrantly revisionist “One Year of Genocide, One Year of Resistance” event the day before October 7th, while not even pluralistic memorial gatherings from national left-wing Jewish groups like IfNotNow were worthy of their promotion.

Offering scant Judaism, their online communications lack autonomy from organizations whose unserious leaders laud Hamas’s violence with grins at “Intifada Roundtables.”

At this point, rather than cultivating a robust and impactful Jewish left, Harvard Jews for Palestine has become no more than a de-facto social media megaphone with bundled antisemitism insurance for Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine — the campus pro-Palestine coalition that frames nearly anything Israeli as an absolute ontological evil.

As a leader of a public-service-focused pre-orientation program, I’ve watched the acrobatics used by organizers to avoid acknowledging the atrocities of October 7th and the anti-Israeli prejudice at Harvard when recapping the last year.

I’ve seen firsthand a room of otherwise outspoken students stay silent after a co-leader, unprompted, attacked a student who wasn’t even there under a coded presumption that they were “a Zionist — I mean, a bad Zionist.”

Jewish or not, is there not a single person left in these rooms with the moral courage and ideological conviction to say, “let’s not do that, guys”?

But there, too, is still much that our established Jewish organizations won’t say.

At the vigil for the six hostages murdered by Hamas in late August, I stood in the back with a few friends. We discussed how the crowd contained only a fragment of our diverse Jewish student body.

I thought about why. Maybe out of fear of labels, maybe out of frustration that many leaders of our American Jewish institutions still struggle to even say “Palestinian.”

Maybe it’s because vigil attendees were told “this isn’t a political issue,” as if Jewish organizations on campus haven’t politicized our identities all year long.

As if Harvard Chabad hasn’t attacked student activists and academic organizations with broad strokes, peddling propaganda through its events and on social media with nebulous online organizations like “Israel War Room.”

And so, as we memorialized the hostages, including Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who has become a symbol of desperation and hope for Jews worldwide, I thought about what they didn’t say.

That on Hersh’s bedroom desk as he left it, behind stacks of clothes never to be worn again, was a drawing of the Western Wall and Al-Aqsa Mosque, the words “JERUSALEM IS EVERYONE’S” superimposed above in English, Arabic, and Hebrew.

His values shouted from the floor-to-ceiling stickers on his walls: Sprawling anti-fascist symbols, “Refugees Welcome” decals, and an unmistakable love for left wing football clubs.

They didn’t mention that Hersh’s parents have been calling for a ceasefire deal for months. That negotiations have brought home 105 hostages, while a year of military operations has saved only eight and killed at least six, all the while ravaging and displacing most of Gaza, killing thousands of innocent Palestinians.

That week after week, tens of thousands of Israelis are taking to the streets to protest Netanyahu’s disregard for humanity, abandonment of the hostages, and avoidance of a ceasefire deal.

Without the courage to say what is hard but true, the “bring them home” chants ring hollow.

This Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur challenge us to search for sources of hope in our Jewish community amid a year of darkness.

I find hope in my friends on campus who have organized the Forward-Thinking Jewish Union, and like-minded others who endeavor to host discussions and Jewish events that don’t eschew tough questions yet retain their identity, independence, and pride.

I find hope in the brave activism of hostage family members and in the masses demonstrating in the streets of Tel Aviv and organizing with Standing Together, an Israeli-Palestinian grassroots movement that fiercely advocates against Israel’s deadly war and occupation.

I find hope in Standing Together’s shared vision for a profound reshaping of Israeli society and a theory of change that does not rationalize violence nor close their ideological tent through moral posturing.

I find hope in the memory of those like 74-year old Kibbutz Be’eri resident Vivian Silver — a lifelong activist who would drive sick Gazan children to Israeli hospitals — even as I am painfully reminded that she, like many inspiring Israeli peaceniks living near the Gaza border, was killed on October 7th. Burned to death in her home by Hamas.

I find hope in the multitudes, like my friend Aidan, who have endured the pain of loss and the dread of the unknown in the wake of senseless violence, and who are far too often absent from people’s consideration as they debate geopolitics, antisemitism, and campus free speech.

Amid fear, uncertainty, grief, and frustration, we find hope.

Matthew E. Nekritz ’25, an Associate Editorial editor, is a Social Studies concentrator in Cabot House.