In light of the antisemitic 10/7 celebrations, I’ve been thinking a lot about the right to grieve. I have decided that nobody can take away the human right to mourn our losses.

A year ago Hamas may not have had a stockpile of bombs. Instead, they had thousands of militants frothing at the mouth to kill and rape and burn to death entire communities of innocent people — one hundred of which Hamas still enslaves including among them two babies.

You heard just last week that Hamas kept an 11 year old Yazidi girl as a sex slave for 11 years. You saw they murdered Islam Hejazy, a Palestinian aid worker who refused to give them aid money. This is how Hamas treats anyone they see as Other. This is not resistance.

Mourning the death of Palestinians doesn’t mean we can’t also hold space for the 10/7 victims. This conflict has taken so much from so many people. Don’t be guilty of letting it take your humanity, too.

Jewish poet Emma Lazarus famously said “until we are all free, we are none of us free,”While many activists quote this, they seem to think they have the right to decide what “us” means. Who is human and deserves to be free.

Nothing gives a person the right to decide who qualifies as human. For when we deny compassion to others, we are also denying their humanity.

And so long as one country’s freedom depends on the obliteration of another, our daughters won’t live long enough to become mothers, our mothers will not live long enough to become grandmothers, and our writers will not live long enough to tell new stories.

What we fought for will be lost. I am with those people who fight for life and not those who feel death is not too high a price for land. I don’t believe we will all magically have more empathy and compassion rather than reactivity and outrage, but some of us will.

Some of us are ready for peace, and we are going to drag the rest of you kicking and screaming. You can complain the entire way there, if you need to, but the people will have peace. Bring the hostages home. Stop the war. Demand peace.

A reminder: Deligitimizing Jewish or Palestinian connections to the homeland is a bad look. Peace is the right look. Let’s focus on that.