A community conversation on resilience, allyship, and the power of shared experience.
This is the essence of what we strive to do at BCTC: connect, open hearts and minds, and bring new perspectives to people of all backgrounds, standing together and walking forward hand in hand.
At the heart of our work is something simple and extraordinary. We bring people together so they can truly see one another, listen to one another, learn from one another, and build real relationships. Through honest conversation, strangers become familiar and questions replace judgments.
In that space, allies are born — not allies in name, but in action; not silent supporters, but thoughtful, vocal partners willing to stand up, speak up, and show up.
That quiet transformation — from distance to connection, from isolation to relationship — is the heart of our work and the reason we do it.
I think about Malik.
We met Malik Roberts as a film enthusiast at an October 8 screening. What began as a shared interest in storytelling slowly became partnership, relationship, and real allyship.
Malik has attended our events. He has watched more films, including A Letter to David, the documentary produced by Nancy Spielberg.
He keeps learning, engaging deeply, asking questions, and thinking critically, alongside the remarkable talent he expresses through his artwork, his advocacy for democracy, and his commitment to civil rights. For him, Zionism does not contradict those values; it completes the equation, grounded in the same belief in human dignity and truth. And we learn from Malik — from the struggles he has faced, the changes he has chosen to make, and the strength of character he continues to shape with honesty, courage, and reflection.
Then there was the delegation from Nahal Oz.
A small kibbutz community of about 400 people, where every single person carries a horror story from October 7. Four hundred lives. Four hundred different angles of trauma. Some lost family. Some hid for hours. Some are still piecing their homes (and their hearts) back together.
The Nahal Oz delegation was scheduled for a series of conversations organized by the Jewish Federation of Greater Atlanta. They came not only to speak about what they endured, but about resilience, gratitude, and continuation — about their desire to return to life, not just survival, as became clear through the words of Naomi Petel Adler and Yael Raz Lachyani. To rebuild their community, their togetherness, and their sense of normalcy.
They spoke from their hearts. Not in headlines. Not in slogans. In human detail.
BCTC attended one of the conversations. The delegation expressed gratitude for the support they’ve received, and we felt gratitude right back — for their survival, their strength, and their willingness to share their stories with us. I told them they didn’t need to thank us, and Michal Magen laughed and said, “Don’t tell me what I need to do.” She was right. She carries her own story, her own agency. Each of them does. They get to decide for themselves what they want to express and how they want to show up. We all show up for one another.
Nadav Tzabari spoke about his role in the kibbutz, a role rooted in community, driven by purpose, and shaped by a deep desire to make a meaningful impact — a recurring theme among all of them. Their sense of community and collective strength is both admirable and inspiring.
Malik, our friend and someone we are lucky to call a partner, attended another gathering, one open to members of the broader community who came with genuine interest to listen, to learn, and to absorb.
This should be “everyone’s deal”, what they commit to — just as it is at the core of BCTC’s work: to keep creating strong interfaith and multifaith spaces where people of all faiths, and those not of faith, are welcomed into conversations of real importance.
The Jewish Federation of Greater Atlanta, alongside BCTC, recognizes the value of inviting all communities into these conversations — a belief they have demonstrated through their trust in us as JInnovate Grant recipients. We are deeply grateful for Federation’s partnership in helping further our mission and for their clear understanding of the importance of this work.
Together, we are living what we say we believe: Engage. Educate. Empower.
And this is what Malik had to say:
“Recently, the inevitable finally happened.
I shook hands with two survivors of October 7, and I realized immediately: this was a place where history, trauma, and truth collided. I was the youngest person there—and the only Black face—and nothing could have prepared me for what I would hear. From the first words, the weight of what they endured hit me like nothing I had ever known.
The anger I felt was immediate—not just at the harrowing, unspeakable ordeals these two Israeli women endured—but at the absence of voices like mine in spaces where the rawest truths of survival were being shared.
One survivor [Addi Gan Eli Cherri] gave me a lapel pin from Kibbutz Nahal Oz—the place where she and her family lived the day of the invasion. That gesture was immeasurable. It meant trust. Recognition. A bridge across experience. It reminded me that bearing witness is not passive—it is sacred work.
For both of the survivors, there was no distinction between Hamas and Palestinians. Their trauma left no room for nuance, and I understood why. It was personal. Immediate. Absolute.
I shared how I had once been more pro-Palestinian than not. How the narratives I absorbed often misrepresented reality. How I had been led to believe the Palestinians were the metaphorical Native Americans of the region. How completely in the dark I was in regards to Zionism before October 7th happened.
In that room, I realized that stories from afar cannot prepare us for lived reality. Ever.
As a tidal wave of odious demonstrations against Israel erupted all over the world, something in me just broke. News of the invasion, and the international reactions to the invasion, hit me harder than almost anything before it. I came to the realization that, once and for all, I had to do away with all of the lies, distortions, misrepresentations and half-truths about the Jewish homeland that I had been exposed to. Distrustful though I was about Israel, I knew even then that wiping out Israel would never, ever be the answer.
The survivors and I conversed about how deeply intertwined Jews and Blacks were in the fight to end segregation. We talked about how solidarity once crossed lines that today are almost irreparably fractured. And yet, even amid that history, I could not ignore the still-extant, self-contradictory dissonance in activist spaces where empathy for Israel is either muted or altogether absent. Not all of us harbor animus toward Israel—but fewer of us are willing to confront Israeli suffering honestly. That absence is perceptible, at best.
American democracy itself—however imperfect—could not exist in its current state if not for the extraordinary feats that Blacks and Jews did together sixty-odd years ago. Had there not been a March on Washington in 1963, I would not be alive today. Had there not been an American revolution in the tradition of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. & Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, to name but two, we would not have an America.
I was unsettled by the stories I heard because both Jews and Blacks are the most terrorized, traumatized, and stigmatized peoples to walk the earth. The profound animus that has poisoned the relationships between us—relationships that were once fundamental to America’s moral and social future—is beyond belief. That history of solidarity has become ever more distant in the wake of October 7th.
And yet, the world did not pause for that intimacy. Antisemitism rages at a global fever pitch—after the war in Gaza ended; after the remaining hostages were restored to their families; after the attack on Bondi Beach; after Jews were brutalized, abused, and murdered on American soil post–October 7th.
We must also call out the ideology so many fear to name: anti-Zionism. It is not merely criticism of policy—it is antisemitism in mutation, amplified into its current, corrosive form. It denies Jews the indisputable right to exist on their homeland, it delegitimizes their lived experiences, and it disguises hatred as principle. That is not abstract. That is real. That is dangerous. And it demands moral clarity.
Dr. King perhaps never put it more powerfully than he did in a sermon back in 1957:
“You just begin hating somebody, and you will begin to do irrational things. You can’t see straight when you hate… The beautiful becomes ugly, and the ugly becomes beautiful. The good becomes bad, and the bad becomes good. Hate destroys the very structure of the personality of the hater… But long before modern psychology came into being, the world’s greatest psychologist who walked around the hills of Galilee told us to love… because hate destroys the hater as well as the hated.”
Rabbi Heschel said in a lecture six years later, “At the first conference on religion and race, the main participants were Pharaoh and Moses. Moses’ words were: ‘Thus sayeth the Lord God of Israel, let My people go that they may celebrate a feast to Me.’ While Pharaoh retorted: ‘Who is the Lord, that I should heed this voice and let Israel go? I do not know the Lord, and moreover I will not let Israel go.’
“The outcome of that summit meeting has not come to an end. Pharaoh is not ready to capitulate. The exodus began, but is far from having been completed. In fact, it was easier for the children of Israel to cross the Red Sea than for a Negro to cross certain university campuses. Let us dodge no issues. Let us yield no inch to bigotry, let us make no compromise with callousness.”
And so we must love truth and justice, even while confronting hate in its most vicious forms. To deny antisemitism or to cloak it under the banner of anti-Zionism is to participate, whether knowingly or not, in the same distortion Dr. King described: the erasure of reality; the loss of objectivity; the inversion of good and evil.
Bearing witness to the survivors of October 7 reminded me that hatred is not abstract. It lives in rooms, in histories, in gestures small and large. And it is our responsibility to name it, confront it, and refuse silence. Anti-Zionism is not a debate—it is a moral line, and it must be recognized for what it is: antisemitism, plain and unvarnished.
We carry forward the work of love, witnessing, and truth. We must stand, unwavering, for empathy, for human dignity, and for the recognition that hate—whether cloaked in ideology or ignorance—destroys the soul of the world as well as the hearts of those it targets.
Experiences like this remind us that hate is never abstract. It lives in history, in rooms, in gestures, and it is our responsibility to see it, name it, and act with integrity.
Am Yisrael Chai.”
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