Maya Rosen

2 days ago | jewishcurrents.org | Aryeh Bernstein |Maya Rosen

In September 2024, an Israeli sniper shot and killed Turkish American human rights activist Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi outside of Nablus in the northern West Bank. Her murder was a devastating example of a sharp uptick in military and settler violence against both Palestinian residents and the international and Israeli activists who work with them.

Oct 25, 2024 | jewishcurrents.org | Maya Rosen

For me, the first chapter of Breishit—which opens both this week’s parshah and the Torah itself—is perhaps the most nostalgic text in our tradition. I can still remember learning to write the letters of the Hebrew alphabet by tracing its opening verses onto large sheets of butcher paper in my kindergarten classroom. Indeed, wistfulness seems built into the very structure of the text, which has the comfortingly repetitive rhythm of a children’s book.

Aug 19, 2024 | jewishcurrents.org | Maya Rosen

On July 30th, in a matter of hours, Israel assassinated senior Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut and Hamas’s political bureau chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, in attacks that regional experts have called an unprecedented escalation. “It’s crossing a red line,” Karim Makdisi, a professor of international politics at the American University of Beirut, told Jewish Currents.

Jul 11, 2024 | jewishcurrents.org | Maya Rosen

On July 1st, Samira was feeding her two young children in her home in Umm al-Khair—a small Palestinian Bedouin village of some 250 people in the southern West Bank region of Masafer Yatta—when she heard cries for help. She rushed outside to find her 16-year-old cousin on the ground, tears streaming down his face as Israeli settlers from a nearby outpost stood over him, pepper spray in hand.

Jul 3, 2024 | jewishcurrents.org | Maya Rosen

In late February, I stood at the site of the Nova Festival in southern Israel, some three miles from the Gaza border, where more than 360 partygoers were killed in the Hamas-led attacks of October 7th. Families of victims had come a month earlier and planted trees in memory of their loved ones; the saplings were now decorated with plaques, notes, piles of stones, and yahrzeit candles. In a nearby clearing, rows of placards, each with a picture of a victim, were flanked by more makeshift memorials.