Not in my Name

In case this is your first time reading a column from me — or you didn’t see the first edition of my Lincoln Square newsletter, The Lincoln Logue — allow me to introduce myself: My name is Charles Penneys; I go by C.J. Penneys. I am from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, my pronouns are he/him, and I am a secular Jew.

My whole life I was raised to believe what many Jewish people in the U.S. and around the world are taught: If the country I am from ever rejects me because of Judaism, I have a home in Israel. Even before the idea of rejection, Israel exists to ensure I will not be persecuted for my identity. In the wake of the Holocaust, this home for Jewish people came to be. While it is true that I am secular now — I was already secular before my bar mitzvah — that never separated me from this narrative.

The picture at the top of this article is me as the centerpiece of a traditional celebratory Jewish folk song and dance (usually done at weddings or mitzvahs). It’s me being lifted by friends and family during my bar mitzvah, in the Hava Nagila. I cropped out the friends and family who surround me in that photo because, as much as we disagree on Israel and Zionism, I love and respect them, and I respect their right not to be shown online next to a piece they will almost certainly disagree with. That tension — love, pride, disagreement — has defined my Jewish experience for years.

It’s also the tension I saw reflected when comedian and podcaster Adam Friedland recently sat down with Congressman Ritchie Torres. Torres is one of Israel’s most outspoken defenders in Washington, and he brought the same talking points to Friedland that he’s repeated since October 7, 2023. But what stood out wasn’t Torres. It was Friedland — a fellow Jew — stumbling over his words, voice cracking as he said, “This is hard for me to talk about.” His emotions mirrored the discomfort I’ve felt as a Jew in America these past two years: The sickening realization that a state claiming to exist for our safety is brutalizing another people in our name.

I need to be clear from the start: This is an essay about my Jewish experience, but Palestinian suffering is incomparable and must remain the moral center.

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Formation: Israel = Jewish Safety

Adam spent a year in Israel after high school, the kind of rite of passage many Jewish Americans are nudged toward. From across the border he could literally see how Palestinians were living. That experience planted the seeds of his anti-Zionism.

My upbringing was different in geography, but similar in path: Israel equals Jewish safety. Anti-Israel equals anti-Jewish. It was drilled into me that anyone who criticized Israel was really criticizing me, my family, my people. When I would listen to Pink Floyd, I would be told how much of a shame it is that Roger Waters hates Jews — just to find out later on in my life that he more simply, supports the BDS Movement of Israel.

At Friends’ Central, my Quaker school outside Philadelphia, this equation was enforced harshly. In 2017, two beloved teachers invited a Palestinian Quaker professor, Dr. Sa’ed Atshan, to speak. They were fired for it and Dr. Sa’ed Atshan’s speaking engagement was canceled. Even the Times of Israel caught wind of the story. At the time, I accepted it. I thought it was necessary. That’s how deeply the conflation of “anti-Israel” with “anti-Jew” had been baked into me.

Friedland was right when he said many Jews are raised this way. I was. And the people around me were, too.

Palestinian Suffering vs. Jewish Discomfort

Nothing I endure as a Jew in America compares to what Palestinians live under siege and occupation.

Their homes are bombed. Their hospitals flattened. Their funerals raided. Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian-American journalist, was shot in back of the head, right behind the ear by an Israeli sniper while wearing a press vest. When mourners tried to carry her casket, Israeli police beat the pallbearers. The al-Jalaa building in Gaza — housing AP and Al Jazeera — was bombed to rubble. Families live with decades of dispossession. Children grow up with no sense of safety, their entire lives shaped by violence.

So when Torres leaned on his story about two Jewish students being followed to a kosher restaurant in New York City, he presented it as proof of antisemitism’s rise. Friedland didn’t deny that harassment is wrong (nor do I), but: That kind of incident isn’t the wave of antisemitism he sees surging now. What he’s seen instead is people online openly questioning the Holocaust, turning denial into content. That’s what keeps him up at night, not college kids marching with “Free Palestine” signs. And so he asked Torres directly: Do you really believe the students protesting Israel on campuses across the country — chanting against occupation, demanding divestment — are the same people who are denying the Holocaust? Instead of answering, Torres sidestepped and shot back with his own challenge: Was Adam really claiming there is no antisemitism on the political left in the United States?

Much of the confusion here is by design — the American Defamation League, AIPAC, and Israel itself insist that Judaism and Zionism are interchangeable, that being anti-Israel is being anti-Jewish. When that conflation is institutionalized, it guarantees that anti-Zionism will bleed into antisemitism, because the line has been erased on purpose.

October 7th as the ‘Beginning’

Torres claimed the war started October 7. I remember waking up to a 6 a.m. text: Israel had been invaded “by land, sea, and air.” I knew what that meant immediately. Escalation. Retaliation. A blank check for brutality, wrapped in the familiar excuse of self-defense. Even in that moment, before the full details of the Hamas attack were known, the trajectory was obvious. Israel would take one day of violence and use it to justify decades more.

October 7 was not a beginning. It was a continuation of a system that had been in place for generations. Long before that day, Israel was an occupying power in the West Bank, tightening checkpoints, demolishing homes, and enforcing a regime of control over millions of Palestinians who never consented to its authority. Civilians were killed in “non-war” times — picked off by snipers, bombed in “targeted strikes,” or erased in collective punishment that always seemed to hit neighborhoods and families harder than fighters. Shireen Abu Akleh was shot in the head while wearing a press vest, her death first denied and then admitted. The Associated Press building in Gaza was leveled, its rubble explained away with the same tired phrase: Hamas was hiding inside.

Israel says it is just rooting out Hamas. But Hamas does not explain why apartment buildings collapse on entire families, why bakeries and universities are bombed, why water plants are targeted. Since October 7th alone, Israel has killed more than 270 journalists. Journalists are not Hamas. They are not combatants. They are witnesses. They are aid-seekers. And Israel is killing them systematically.

That’s not self-defense. That’s silencing. That’s murder. This is all ethnic cleansing. It exposes the great lie at the heart of Torres’ argument: This war is not only about Hamas, it is not only about terror, and it certainly did not begin in October. What is being fought here is larger. It is the right of Palestinians to exist — and the right of the world to see them clearly.

Symbols and Family Dynamics

Friedland spoke about the horror of seeing a flag with a Jewish star flying over starving children. It was the most visceral moment of the interview. And it cut deep because I feel that same horror every time I see Jewish symbols tied to violence. The Star of David, which I grew up seeing on synagogues, on family heirlooms, on my own neck, is at risk of becoming irreparably stained — remembered not as a symbol of faith or continuity, but as a banner under which atrocities were committed.

That tension follows me into my own family. After I posted something critical of Netanyahu, relatives called my mom in a panic. They wanted to know what was wrong with me. They wanted to know why I was turning against “our people.” My brother has told me how deeply Zionist relatives bring up Israel in every conversation, shoehorning it in even when it isn’t relevant. It has become their litmus test, their proof of loyalty, their main topic of everyday conversation.

The double-bind is suffocating. To the outside world, Jewish identity now appears fused with domination, inseparable from the actions of a state. To dissent from that is to be told you’re betraying your own people, that you are siding with their enemies, that you are giving fuel to antisemites. And yet the more Israel commits in our name, the more the guilt for being silent grows.

Gaslighting and Talking Points

At one point, Torres looked at Friedland and said, “It just sounds like you are justifying antisemitism.” Friedland snapped back instantly: “ARE YOU CRAZY, RIGHT NOW?”

That moment was not just personal insult, it was political theater. Torres was following the script word for word. Israel exists for Jewish safety. Hamas is to blame. Criticism of Israel equals antisemitism. Protesters are antisemites in disguise. I know that script because I was raised on it.

What Torres was doing wasn’t just condescension. It was gaslighting. To take the lived reality of Jews horrified by what Israel is doing — to take Friedland’s trembling voice, my own sickened stomach — and twist it into condoning hate. To pretend that voicing pain at seeing the Star of David tied to starvation is the same as excusing Holocaust denial. That isn’t just wrong. It’s obscene.

And Torres did it over and over. He did it to Friedland in real time, talking over him, dismissing his experience, reducing his tears to a debating point. He did it to the audience by packaging AIPAC talking points as personal conviction. He has done it to everyone who has dared to speak honestly about the way Israel’s actions.

Friedland tried to explain how Israel’s brutality fuels antisemitism, how Jews become scapegoats when the state that claims to represent us bombs civilians and denies it. Torres reframed it as Friedland excusing antisemitism. I’ve lived that same manipulation — being told critique equals betrayal, that raising my voice equals arming our enemies. It is the weaponization of identity, used to silence dissent and shield power.

Obligation

When Friedland’s voice cracked, he said what I have struggled to say myself: “It hurts my stomach to say this … that this is a genocide … and that a Jew could do that.”

Jewish pain is real. The fear of antisemitism is real. But it cannot be equated with Palestinian suffering. It cannot be used as a shield to excuse what Israel is doing. Our obligation as Jews is to speak honestly about what is done in our name.

Symbols matter. The swastika once meant “well-being” and “good fortune.” It is now forever the emblem of Nazi genocide. The Star of David is at risk of becoming the symbol under which another genocide was carried out.

We can’t let that happen. The only way to preserve Jewish identity from being defined by violence is by acknowledging the difference between Israel and Judaism, between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. If we don’t, we are allowing and taking direct part in the conflation of the two to happen.

(Note: Since the completion of this article, the U.N. has come to the conclusion that Israel is committing a genocide.)

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