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Illustrations by Dawn Aquarius
Alissa Wise is an author, activist, and rabbi advocating for the Palestinian people. As Founding Director for Rabbis for Ceasefire and a co-founder of the Jewish Diaspora Movement, Wise works with an ad-hoc group of rabbis, cantors, kohanot, and Jewish clergy members to dismantle Jewish supremacy “in policy and rhetoric.” Wise’s commitment to understanding, knowledge, and progress has also resulted in the text Solidarity is the Political Version of Love: Lessons from Jewish Anti-Zionist Organizing, which she co-authored with Rebecca Vilkomerson in 2024.
In going through the Rabbis for Ceasefire’s website, one line stands out among the strong statements and declarations: We cannot ignore the imbalance in lives lost in numbers and in the attention paid to those lives before and since October 7.
For many, the Gaza War has become an awakening. October 7 is an opportunity for dialogue rooted in exchange, not algorithms. As a scholar, author, and teacher, Rabbi Wise’s blend of personal and cultural history offers deeper commentary than any Instagram slides or explainer videos because it’s rooted in a journey. We sat down with Rabbi Wise to discuss her journey, Zionist upbringing, and the almost biblical moments that drive her work.
ANTHONY PAPPALARDO: Thanks so much for sitting down with us, Alissa. I’d like to know where your journey started and how it led you to activism and founding Rabbis For a Ceasefire.
RABBI ALISSA WISE: That's a big question. I grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, which is random, because it's not exactly a Jewish metropolis. Interestingly, it has been a central place in the Reform movement of Judaism. But I was raised in a more traditional family in a very small Jewish community there. We actually ended up in Cincinnati because my great grandfather on my father's side was living in Jerusalem—my family had lived there for over a hundred years—and he was being drafted into the First World War by the Ottomans and didn't want to go. There was a wealthy American studying at his yeshiva in Jerusalem whose family owned a company based in Cincinnati, and he essentially helped my great grandfather emigrate to avoid being drafted. That wealthy American was Herschel Manishevitz, so my family ended up being kosher food distributors to the Midwest. That was the family business.
I grew up with a lot of pride in the family legacy of living in Jerusalem. We were a very Zionist family, but also part of this small, insular religious Jewish community in Cincinnati. I went to Jewish day school and Jewish summer camp, all of which were very Zionist. My education was really a steady diet of the Holocaust and Israel—that was the meat of it. We went to Israel a lot growing up, and it became a really important part of my identity.
I had a kind of rebellion, partially because of the gender dynamics. It's a gender-segregated situation in traditional Jewish spaces, and I didn't like that my brother got to do things I didn't. I wasn't a radical, I just thought it was unfair. As I got older and started chafing against that institutional religion, I had this idea that you could be a secular Israeli, so I went to college in Jerusalem.
Very early on, there was a protest on campus. They were talking about an occupation, and there was a flag I had never seen. I went up to the Palestinian Israeli students who were talking about the occupation of Palestine, and I said, "A land without a people, for a people without a land." That's what I had been taught. And they said, “No.” That was back in 1999 to 2000, and it was really the moment my whole worldview shifted. It's probably more complicated than just that one interaction, but that's what I remember: I started to basically unlearn what I had been taught the previous 18 or 19 years, and relearn it.
I'm really interested in how ideologies tend to faction down and as they get revised, they often become more conservative, more rule-bound, but never more inviting. It can almost feel reactionary or even as if a religion is being marketed based on getting new “followers.” What's interesting about you is that you're trying to bring Judaism back to what you see as its core. To me, you're living in two worlds simultaneously, and I find that really compelling.
That makes sense. To answer your question, I should go back to that moment in 1999 to 2000 when my whole worldview shifted. I want to underscore that I wasn't a leftist, and I didn't have any leftist analysis. I was a person who had a set of values that I had learned growing up. I learned Zionism, but I also learned a lot of other things. So it didn't feel like I was breaking with something; it felt like I was applying what I had been encouraged to understand to the world as it was being revealed to me.
Part of that was just reading—unlearning and relearning the history. And I came to see that even in the biographies of Israel's founders, they said really explicitly that there were Palestinians here and they had to displace them. It wasn't a secret, it was just something nobody talked about. I felt very betrayed by my family, like they had bamboozled me. But I came to understand that they didn't know that history either. Honestly, I'm not sure they would have cared even if they had.
That same year, I had a scholarship that took me to Ukraine to lead Passover seders for small Jewish communities that still existed there. It was this really weird trip, because it kind of added this layer. It was a very opportune moment, because I started to understand Zionism from the standpoint of its Palestinian victims. I was in a van with Ukrainian college students and a translator, traveling through southern Ukraine, which is actually where my mother's side of the family was from. I ended up in the shtetl where she grew up.
It gave me this kernel of an idea—not a super intellectual or political idea, but a feeling: why aren't we trying to let there be Jewish life again in the places where it once thrived? We encouraged every young person we met to move to Israel and I was thinking, “Why can't we rejuvenate Jewish life in Eastern Europe?” I started to see the homogenization happening in Jewish culture through Zionism. That it was like we had to eschew the history of the diaspora.
A lot happened on that trip, but there was this one moment—one of those snapshot moments—when I was talking to one of the few Jewish young people we encountered on that trip and I asked, “Why don’t you just move to Israel? Why do you stay here?” And he said, “Well, who will take care of the Jewish cemeteries if I leave?”
That really hit me: this sense of responsibility to ancestors, to place, to continuity. In Hebrew we call it “chiyuv,” which means an obligation or responsibility. That's the centerpiece of religious life. You are obligated to do certain things. I'd describe it more as a moral compass than as God, but it's not always about what feels good or what you want. Sometimes you have obligations that are bigger than your own desires, your own comfort.
That must have been such a heavy moment.
I felt called to that then. Because of my history, I understood very well the flip side of the support for Israel: kind of this idea of anti-Semitism over time, and the ways in which a lot of my ancestors would have had more safe and pleasant lives if they had abandoned their Jewishness. They could have converted into Christianity and not have had to deal with oppression, violence, pogroms, genocide, right? Maybe not with genocide as much, because there was this bloodline element of it, but in theory, over thousandss of years, there were so many moments when it would have been easier for Jews to abandon their Jewishness, and nobody did. So who was I to do that now?
And it mixed with my sense of obligation to other human beings. The primary concern of my adult life has been the oppression and violence that Israelis are subjecting Palestinians to and the fact that the Jewish communities I was raised in support that, emotionally and financially. My father's side of the family were among the first settlers outside the walls of the Old City in Jerusalem. I have a responsibility to that lineage, too.
So fast forward a few years, I ended up deciding to become a rabbi. That decision was a lot about reclaiming my Jewishness on my own terms. I was also an organizer and a leader. I joined Jews Against the Occupation in New York. I had moved to New York in August 2001 specifically because I knew there would be Jews like me there, and I was right.
During rabbinical school, I spent my summers doing human rights observation work in the West Bank during the Second Intifada. Palestinian communities were inviting internationals to come do protective witness, and I did that with a group of women from around the world for four years while I was studying.
One moment from that time stays with me. I was assigned to accompany a shepherd grazing his flock in the West Bank. The Israelis had built roads through this area that only Israelis were allowed to use and his field was bisected by one of those roads. He was being shot at and harassed simply for crossing his own land. I spent a long day in the field with him. We didn't share much language, so my mind wandered. I kept asking myself, what am I doing here? Some Jewish girl from Cincinnati risked her life to stand with a shepherd while training to be a rabbi… the absurdity of it.
But I got to thinking about the golden rule. In Hebrew it's “Ve’ahavta le’Reyacha Kamocha,” which means "love your neighbor as yourself." But the Hebrew word “re'a,” translated as "neighbor," also means "shepherd." And I thought: love your shepherd as yourself. And I thought, yes! That's what I'm doing.
That's the theology of my life, really. We love each other as ourselves. I had taken on the responsibility to love this shepherd as myself, and I was in the process of becoming a Jewish communal leader in order to perpetuate that morality, that sense of community and connection.
I want to ask about something I noticed recently. There's a poll from the Washington Post showing that among Jewish Democrats in New York City, 52% believe Israel has committed genocide against Gaza. I've never seen anything like this shift in my lifetime. Do you have a sense of why this is happening?
It didn't happen overnight. This has been brewing for a long time and has been accelerated by what I'd call the live-streamed genocide. That's significant. There was no denying it. You can't tell people they didn't see what they saw.
There also hasn't been a day since Zionism appeared on the scene that there haven't been Jews opposed to it—that's a long history. But in the past two decades there's been a real proliferation of organizing. I worked at Jewish Voice for Peace for ten years, from roughly 2010 to 2021, and during that time we grew from a few hundred members to 25,000. That growth can be mapped onto Israeli aggression. Each new wave of Israeli assaults brought a new cohort of people into the movement. There was a big moment in 2007-2008 in Lebanon, and 2014 was the biggest moment before 2023.
Then you get to 2023, and you have a combination of factors: the post-first-Trump era, the pandemic, people feeling ungrounded and skeptical and fearful of authoritarianism in new ways. And then a huge mass movement against the genocide in the U.S. and across the world. The Democratic Party base was demanding its leadership restrain Israel, and the leadership refused. That upended a lot of conventional wisdom about how mass movements can persuade party leadership to change course.
Then the genocide upended the status quo logic further. I think now we're in an ebb — people feeling more disempowered, outrage turning to numbness and normalization. But all of those factors are contributing a mistrust of government, fear, and a loss of solidarity. If nothing else, the pandemic revealed how interconnected we actually are. We are in a world where our actions reverberate and boomerang back, and we can't pretend otherwise.
Here's a wrinkle I can't quite wrap my head around: part of Trump's base includes people with genuine antisemitic and Nazi ideologies. Yet that same base strongly supports Israel. How does that work?
An important thing that's not widely known is that Zionism actually began in Christianity. It started during the Protestant Reformation—what you might call proto-Christian Zionist theology. The key concept is dispensationalism: the idea that history unfolds in certain eras or dispensations, and that the last one is the Rapture. In order for the Rapture to happen, Jews need to return to the Holy Land. That theology was being developed over centuries within the United Kingdom and beyond.
At its core, it was deeply antisemitic. The idea is that Jews go to the Holy Land to hasten the second coming, and at the time of the second coming, Jews must either convert to Christianity and accept Christ as their Lord and Savior, or burn. There's nothing more antisemitic than that. That's the core of Christian Zionism.
Jewish Zionism didn't really begin until the late 1800s. Christian Zionism began more in the 15th and 16th centuries. The phrase "a land without a people for a people without a land,” was actually first spoken by a Scottish cleric who knew very well it wasn't true. It was an idea circulating in Christian Zionist circles. Lord Balfour, the man behind the Balfour Declaration, was himself a Christian Zionist. So there's a very long precedent of enmity toward Jews and support for Israel that has nothing to do with Jews at all.
A lot of the way antisemitism works is by instrumentalizing Jews—using them in someone else's eschatology, as the face of power, the way Jews were used as tax collectors in medieval Christian Europe. This combination of antisemitism and support for Israel isn't a paradox. It's completely baked into the history of Zionism.
I want to ask about language. After October 7, I'd never heard so many people in my circle use the words "genocide" or "Zionism." And now I see people arguing about the words themselves more than what's actually happening. Is that proliferation of language harmful, or does it help?
The words matter. I don't want to call it merely semantic, because it's not. Language comes with a whole suitcase that you have to unpack. For Jews, that suitcase contains an idea reinforced through both history and liturgy: that Jews are eternal victims. Jewish history is long, and the scope of the Jewish state within it is very small. By and large, the Jewish community isn't willing to let go of that victim identity, even when it has a powerful army bankrolled by the most powerful country in the world and is objectively victimizing others in this moment.
The idea I was raised with is that the lesson of the Holocaust is that the world turned its back on Jews, and therefore Jews can only rely on each other, which is why we need a Jewish state, why we circle the wagons, why multiracial democracy feels threatening in that worldview. That's one of the things I had to unlearn.
What I've been arguing for years is that a more promising path to Jewish safety is relationships of interdependence in the places where we live—a deeply diasporic idea. At the heart of Judaism is a religion of diaspora, where you find and make home where you are. The mobilizations we've seen across the country—everyday people coming to the defense of their neighbors being taken by ICE—that's the proof of concept. Jews doing that work of protecting their immigrant neighbors have every reason to expect that, if the table turns, people will do the same for them. It's a relationship. You have to put something on the table.
That will require a fundamental rewiring of Jewish self-understanding—an acceptance that there is a history of Jewish persecution and a contemporary reality of Jewish supremacy in Israeli policy and rhetoric in the U.S., and that we need to update accordingly.
And then you look at something like the New York primary results. You have a Muslim Mayor, Zohran Mamdani endorsing Brad Lander, who calls himself a Liberal Zionist and Lander goes on to win the primary.
Yes, the whole sweep of it (Mamdani-endorsed DSA candidates).
A scenario where New York is building a multiracial electorate with people of different faiths working together felt unfathomable not long ago.
And how threatening that feels to some, but also how central a rising, strengthening Jewish left in that win was.