Tzedek tzedek tirdof. Justice, justice, you shall pursue (Deuteronomy 16:20).
We are Jewish students writing to express our solidarity with Williams Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and to call for an immediate permanent ceasefire in Gaza. We have been inspired by the letters and statements written at peer institutions and feel compelled to add our voices to the growing number of Jewish students crying out that “never again” means never again for anyone. As Jewish students, we understand deeply the pain and suffering that comes from genocidal persecution. We are descendants of Holocaust and pogrom survivors, and it is precisely because of this that we condemn the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.
We write this letter from a place of grief and mourning. The profound loss of life since Oct. 7 touches us all deeply and, for some of us, is incredibly personal. We condemn Hamas’s indiscriminate killing of innocent people and we hope for the imminent release of all hostages. Simultaneously, our mourning does not start or end there.
We are horrified at the thousands of innocent people that have been murdered in Gaza by the Israeli government during the past months and over the last 75 years. This pain connects us to our shared humanity. In this moment of immense hopelessness and grief, we feel purpose in leaning into the Jewish values that call on us to act to prevent further death and suffering. The commandment that is put above all others in Judaism is pikuach nefesh, the preservation or saving of a life. We mourn all loss of life while refusing the weaponization of our pain in justifying more death.
In the immediate moment, we are calling for a permanent ceasefire to stop the indiscriminate bombing of Palestine that at the time of writing has killed over 15,000 Palestinians, over 6,000 of them children. A temporary ceasefire is not enough — there must be a complete end to the horror in Gaza.
We also want to acknowledge that violence against Palestinians did not begin in October. The apartheid system under which the Israeli government operates has continually enacted violence against Palestinians through land seizure, segregation, and other forms of economic and social discrimination, stretching back to the Nakba, which originally violently removed Palestinians from their land. When we call for a free Palestine “from the river to the sea,” it is not a call for the complete removal of Jews from the land, but instead a call for Palestinian freedom and self-determination in their homeland.
We do not want to understate the weight and severity of antisemitism, which is incredibly dangerous and has been on the rise. As mentioned, many writers of this letter have family members who survived genocidal antisemitism, and we worry for the safety of the Jewish community. At the same time, we reject the narrative that Israel’s actions — and the theoretical goal of creating a Jewish ethnostate — make Jewish people safer. This violence will not be waged in our name.
Moreover, we reject the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism. Anti-Zionism is a legitimate political critique of the State of Israel and its policies as a governmental entity (not to mention a Jewish political tradition). We believe that this conflation distracts from serious acts of antisemitism. Those who paint Israel as a haven for all Jews also ignore the State’s discrimination against Ethiopian and Arab Jews.
Equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism has also been used to criticize non-Jewish students advocating for Palestinian rights. The rise in antisemitism on college campuses has been accompanied by a similarly worrisome rise in Islamophobia. In the past week, three Palestinian college students were shot in Burlington, Vt., simply for wearing the Palestinian keffiyeh and speaking in Arabic. This devastating act of violence directed towards members of our extended community is a horrific reminder of the very real life and death stakes of this bigotry. We hope for their speedy recovery.
In this time of profound pain and fear, we feel it is particularly important to use our voices as Jewish students to show support for students fighting for peace and justice. We join our worry over antisemitism with equally ardent concerns for other institutionalized forms of discrimination and violence. Our call for justice and their call for justice are one and the same. We are particularly motivated by the Jewish values and teachings of tzedek and tikkun olam — justice and repairing the world, respectively — and believe in their transformative power to build solidarity and to create a more just world. Our liberation as Jews is deeply entwined with the liberation of Palestinians and of all peoples worldwide. None of us are free until all of us are free.
As Jews, we say not in our name, and as U.S. residents and Williams College students, we say not with our money. Since 1951, the United States government has given $225.2 billion in taxpayer dollars to Israel, with 86 percent of this money going directly to Israel’s military, making it Israel’s biggest benefactor. When the Israeli military commits war crimes in Gaza, the United States is, at the very least, complicit, if not actively involved.
Williams College, as not just an educational institution but also a financial one, has responsibility in this crisis too. Although the College’s endowment investment strategy has become more diffuse since the time of South African Apartheid, the College is still responsible for the companies that their fund managers have invested in. The College must publicly acknowledge if any of its money is in weapons manufacturing companies such as Raytheon, Boeing, Elbit Systems, G4S, General Dynamics, and Lockheed Martin, who have profited immensely off of the suffering of Palestinians. Williams has a responsibility to provide transparency for its investments, and there is a precedent for the College taking a moral and financial stance to move their money out of corporations with business models built on human suffering. At this moment, it is time for Williams to act again.
It is because of our Jewishness, not in spite of it, that we call for a ceasefire and share our support for Williams SJP’s demands and invite other Jews and non-Jews to do the same. It is because of our Jewishness, and our shared humanity, that we first mourn and then turn to our community to take action to save lives, repair the world, and seek justice.
For a full list of signatories, see here. Jewish students and alumni wishing to add their names can do so here.
This op-ed was written by members of Jews for Ceasefire: Aliza Cotton ’26, Coco Rhum ’24, Emma Nathanson ’25, Lea Elton ’24, and Mia Calzolaio ’26.
