My Daughter and I Talk about Gaza with Love and Respect

Photo by Aaron Levy-Wolins, J. Staff

Bay Area family’s generational discord over Israel is captured in series of letters

BY ALIX WALL JULY 23, 2025

Penina Eilberg-Schwartz had an ordinary Jewish day school upbringing in Palo Alto, where she received what she described as a traditional Zionist education that presented only the Jewish narrative. In college, she encountered the Palestinian side of that narrative for the first time.

“I was angry that my education was so focused on Jewish victimhood and that the story of Israel/Palestine hadn’t been shared in an expansive way,” Penina, now 38 and a San Francisco resident, told J. “There was no understanding of what 1948 was like for Palestinians, nor an understanding of what occupation looked like.”

She expressed those frustrations to her mother, Rabbi Amy Eilberg. The Los Altos resident, 70, made history in 1985 when she became the first woman ordained by the Conservative movement. Today, she is a spiritual director, a peace and justice educator, a teacher of dialogue skills and a longtime Torah columnist for J. A recent honoree at the New Israel Fund’s Guardian of Democracy event and a member of the rabbinic council of J Street, she is solidly in the progressive pro-Israel left.

Those early, difficult conversations between mother and daughter 20 years ago reflected a growing divergence of their views about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and were the genesis of a disagreement that has continued to the present day.

Hearing her college-age daughter criticize Israel was one thing, Amy said. Questioning its right to exist with a Jewish majority was another.

“She was naming the Nakba as the original sin, and it was shocking and upsetting,” Amy said. “I was just learning how to be the parent of an adult child, and there was something so shocking about her coming home with something so different from what she was taught [as a child]. So I pushed back.” 

While Amy now reflects on what she might have done differently, the discord gave both of them a grounding in how to manage their disagreements, she said, and has allowed them to communicate openly, especially since the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Otherwise, they might be in a worse predicament, like other Jewish families with even more intense intergenerational friction over Israel’s war in Gaza.

Many Jewish parents and their adult children have found themselves at odds over Israel since Oct. 7. The rift has created pain on all sides and in all manner of Jewish families. Political, religious and cultural differences have been exposed, and communication has been strained. Families report a level of discomfort and pain around the subject that is unlike any other.

While Israel has continued to be a source of dissent for the Eilberg/Eilberg-Schwartz family, they felt that their experience navigating conversations while remaining civil and loving presented an opportunity to model how family members can respectfully disagree and hold empathy for one another.

That’s why they decided last year to begin writing a series of letters to each other, where they would process their feelings and discuss a difficult topic that they knew others were confronting as well. The letters, written between March 2024 and May 2024, were released this spring by independent Jewish publishing house Ayin Press, where Penina is managing editor. The free online essay is titled “The Distance We Have to Travel: Snapshot of an Intergenerational Jewish Conversation After October 7.” 

“In this incredibly polarized and traumatized time, I thought it really could be helpful to other families,” Amy told J. “I thought that Penina and I had really learned how to do this at a high level, to really negotiate differences.” 

Even with misgivings about the toll of the Israel-Hamas war, many Jewish baby boomers and Gen Xers (both groups generally born before 1980) have a deep attachment to Israel. They grew up during a time when Israel was an underdog, surrounded by enemies who wanted to destroy it, and managed to conquer them all. In the decades following the Holocaust, this demographic felt pride in the Jewish state and believed deeply that its very existence made Jews around the world safer.

Their children came of age during a different time, as Israel drifted further to the right. Today Israeli political leaders who advocate for the transfer or expulsion of Palestinians from the occupied territories or the reoccupation of Gaza hold some of the most powerful cabinet positions in the government. Gen Zers and millennials (both generally born after 1980) are more likely to see Israel as an aggressor, and they consider many Jewish adults — including their own parents — hypocritical when it comes to Israel.

Indeed, some families now avoid the subject altogether. Others tiptoe around it, keeping discussion on a surface level. Both Amy and Penina said they know of some families that no longer celebrate Jewish holidays together because the potential for conflict is too high.

“Amy and Penina’s letters show a mother-daughter relationship grounded in love, respect, and a commitment to connection — ​​we see no empathy wall between them,” scholar Sarah Anne Minkin wrote in the foreword to the series. “Even so, they give voice to fissures and fractures so many of us are experiencing in our personal and collective worlds.”

The letters cover two main issues from the early months of the war: Amy’s initial resistance to signing public letters that called for a cease-fire without also calling for the return of the hostages and, separately, the use of the word “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions during the war.

In her introduction to the series, Amy writes: “Our strongest disagreement in this exchange was about language — both its meaning and its impact. We came at the question from different places: she as a writer and activist, and I as a teacher and facilitator of dialogue. As an organizer, Penina believes that in addressing injustice, it is sometimes important to use strong language, commensurate with the wrongs being committed. As a peacebuilder, I believe it is essential to avoid using language that causes unnecessary pain and arouses resistance in the listener.”

In some of the first letters, Penina challenged her mother for not publicly supporting a cease-fire early on. After Hamas attacked Israel, Amy told J., she was in shock and didn’t want to increase the pain of people in her peace activist circle in Israel or of her colleagues and friends in the U.S. — all of whom were hurting deeply. “I felt a profound need to be respectful and empathetic of the profound pain of Israeli Jews,” she said.

As Amy wrote, it was only when a public letter crossed her desk in December 2023 that she felt she could add her name. It came at a time when the death toll in Gaza had reached a reported 20,000 people, and it did not include the word “genocide.”

“My memory is that I had two voices in my head,” Amy wrote to Penina on March 31, 2024. “One was still saying, ‘Am I going to cause hurt to people I care about? Will some people judge me for my decision? Is this the right way for me to use my rabbinic authority?’ But the other voice, as you said, was, I wonder what took me so long.”

Penina felt two ways about her mother’s indecision. “When Ima hadn’t come out publicly in support of a cease-fire, it was hard for me, as I know the respect my mom garners in many Jewish communities,” Penina told J., using the Hebrew word for mother. “Yet I also understood everything she felt and had compassion for her, as I knew the things holding her back.”

The two also were at odds about the word “genocide” — unsurprising, since it has been one of the most triggering points in language that has emerged in the war.

“When someone says a word, like genocide, that flashes out sharply and calls forth an unbearable number of associations, many Jews shut down or fight back,” Penina wrote on April 12, 2024. “It is remarkable, in a way, the amount of force one word can have. Enough force to keep people from organizing to end a situation, whatever we call it, of mass death and destruction. I believe those of us on the Jewish left need to do more to ease people into such words. But I also understand the impulse not to bother: this is work that takes time, and we don’t have any. People are literally dying as we speak.”

Days later Amy responded: “Right now, I need to absorb that someone I love and respect as much as you believes that genocide is the right word to use. The word feels like a violent epithet, a way of attacking Israel with the most visceral language possible. For me (and for many Jews), the word genocide evokes the Nazis (and of course, the word was invented after the Shoah to describe the Nazis’ intentions).”

Penina wrote back, “But I believe most people are using the word because they believe it, and are not speaking to those who still need to be persuaded. They are using the highest tone of urgency to mobilize those who do not need persuading, which is what activists do in an emergency. And whether or not the word genocide is intended as an insult, it has to be said: an insult can also be true.”

Although Penina early on expressed her empathy for the Israeli victims of Oct. 7, including those taken hostage, she also wrote, “The reality we’re living in now, as many have said, began long before October 7th. So many Gazans remember cowering as children under furniture as bombs rained down during past Israeli bombardments. The Palestinian fighters from October 7th also lived through this as children, also saw their people die, and this is the only way I think someone could act as they did: the trauma of watching your family become refugees not just once but twice or three times since 1948, of watching people you love die violently.”

Her mother’s response: “Every conflict — and every oppression — has two parties involved. I know that some people (including you?) object to even using the word ‘conflict’ about Israel and Palestine, because of the severe structural power imbalance between the two parties. But whatever you call it, there are two peoples, two communities, two populations involved. I believe that conflicts do not end because one party is beaten to the ground. Conflicts end when it becomes clear to both sides that resolution is in both of their interests, not to mention in the interests of their children and grandchildren.”

Earlier this month, Ayin Press released recordings of the pair reading their letters aloud. Listening to their exchange, it’s apparent why they used the medium of writing for this project. Not only because they are both talented writers, but because writing gives people the time to think about what they want to say — and what they shouldn’t. Penina felt it was the natural way to process what she had been experiencing since Oct. 7.  “There’s a much richer space in writing,” she said. 

When it came to making their discourse public, Penina said, she felt it was “important to model how to hold conversations across differences and hold space for complexity, contradiction and care.” In so doing, she hopes that people who read the exchange can move beyond the “binaristic, identitarian thinking” and allow “other messages to come through.”

Amy, who currently serves as a co-chair of the Racial Justice Subcommittee of the Conservative movement’s Social Justice Commission, said she hopes their exchange can help other families struggling with this complex issue. “We demonstrate that this is hard, but not impossible, and it requires staying at the table,” she said.

Penina said she has heard from peers who say it is helpful to see their own painful family disagreements expressed in a more civil way by two people who have learned how to truly listen to each other: “Some of them have told me, ‘I’ve been trying to move my parents, and maybe this will.’”

This piece appeared in the JWeekly https://jweekly.com/2025/07/23/bay-area-familys-generational-discord-over-israel-is-captured-in-series-of-letters/?utm_source=J.+The+Jewish+News+of+Northern+California&utm_campaign=bf90ac74bf-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN-WJ-072425&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_93a945700b-f394910354-216388597