What It’s Like to Be Jewish Right Now

I hesitated before writing this. This isn’t about wellness. This isn’t about career. This is about what it feels like to be Jewish right now — to grieve, to fear, to feel erased, and to keep showing up anyway.

This piece is personal. It’s painful. And I hope it creates even a flicker of understanding.

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By Erica Diamond

We’re a little off self-care talk today, but self-care is also honoring your feelings and doing the work. So here I am.

I’m a Jewish woman. A mother. A speaker. A life and career coach. An advocate for mental wellness and calm. I teach people how to reduce stress, prevent burnout, and live in alignment with their values. But lately, I’ve been struggling to live that truth. Because the heaviness I carry right now doesn’t lift after a meditation or melt away with a walk or a breathwork session.

This isn’t just weighty from busyness—it’s the soul-weariness of being Jewish in a world that feels increasingly unsafe and hostile.

It’s the grief of watching your people suffer and the heartbreak of being accused of supporting genocide. It’s the fear that your child might get targeted at school. The worry that your synagogue might need armed security to feel safe. The nausea of seeing a swastika spray-painted a block from your home.

It’s seeing mainstream media get it wrong over and over again—sharing propaganda, AI-generated images, photos from other conflicts, or scenes from years ago repackaged with incendiary captions. Headlines scream that Israel is starving Gazans, despite that claim being publicly debunked by multiple sources. There’s often no mention of the Israeli hostages still in Gaza—today, as I write this, they’ve been held for 667 days. Children. Women. Holocaust survivors. Raped, tortured, killed—or maybe forgotten by the world.

It’s watching the narrative become so one-sided that truth is no longer a shared goal—just a casualty in the war of perception. It’s knowing that if you dare speak up online—just ask a question or express heartbreak for both innocent Palestinians and Israelis—you’ll be called a Zionist, a colonizer, a monster.

It’s being forced to justify your right to mourn your own people.

Being Jewish right now feels like constantly defending your right to exist.

You’re grieving and defending. You’re trying to explain a conflict that dates back generations while screaming into a digital void that’s already decided you’re guilty. You’re trying to make sense of a world that held space for every marginalized community—until yours.

I want to be clear: I believe in human rights. I believe in peace. I believe in the dignity of all people, and I mourn every innocent life lost in this horrific conflict. I hold deep compassion for any innocent Palestinian civilian who is suffering, whose life has been upended, whose future feels hopeless.

But I also believe in nuance.

And lately, it seems the world has no patience for that.

To be Jewish right now is to live in a world where nuance is dead and complexity is inconvenient.

It’s being told that our grief must come with footnotes. That unless we renounce Israel entirely, our pain doesn’t count. That we are collectively responsible for the actions of a government, but others never are. That we are too loud when we speak, too complicit when we’re quiet, and always, always wrong.

To be Jewish right now is to hold two truths in your heart at the same time:

• That innocent Palestinians deserve freedom, safety, and dignity.

• That Jews deserve safety, freedom, and dignity too.

And yet, to say that second sentence aloud often feels like a revolutionary act.

I’m a woman of empathy. I cry easily. I feel the suffering of the world deeply in my bones. But I’ve been made to feel that my empathy for Israelis—my people—makes me heartless. Or worse.

This moment has tested me more than any other in my life. Not just politically, but emotionally. Spiritually. It’s shaken my faith in humanity. But it’s also revealed who is capable of seeing you in your full complexity. Who can say, “I see your pain,” without demanding a disclaimer.

To those people, I say thank you.

If you’re reading this and your instinct is to recoil or accuse—pause. Ask yourself: Do I really understand what I’m reacting to? Have I listened, or just responded? Have I asked a Jewish person how they’re doing lately? Not the ones shouting back on Instagram—but the quiet ones, the tired ones, the ones feeling invisible?

We are here. We are scared. And we’re still hoping.

Hoping for a ceasefire and the return of the hostages. Hoping for a future where both Israelis and Palestinians can thrive in peace. Hoping for empathy to win out over rage. Hoping for truth to rise above the noise.

And until then, we’re just doing our best to breathe.

To cry when we need to.

To speak when it matters.

To practice the most radical form of self-care there is: staying soft in a world that wants to harden us.

Because being Jewish right now means living with a broken heart and an open one at the same time.

And still showing up.