When Feminism Lost the Jewish Woman: Kara Jesella on October 7

In her lecture at the 2026 ISGAP Summer Institute, Dr. Kara Jesella accomplished far more than simply excoriating feminist responses to October 7. Instead, she also pushed back against explanations of those reactions by asking how they became intellectually possible. That question is more compelling than charging feminists with hypocrisy for failing to defend women who were at the center of allegations of sexual violence when those women were Israeli and Jewish. Jesella’s response was to historicize the relationships between feminism, race, colonialism, queer theory, anti-imperialism, and anti-Zionism.

To be clear, her argument does not suggest that one strain of feminist thought caused another in some sort of historical determinism. Black feminism is not responsible for the development of intersectionality, which is not responsible for anti-Zionism, which somehow laid the groundwork for reactions to October 7. Instead, Jesella carefully traces how various ideas, taking shape in distinct historical and political contexts, gradually became enmeshed within certain academic and activist feminist communities. October 7 wasn’t the origin point for those relationships, but it did reveal what happens when they’re pulled to a breaking point.

Dr. Jesella starts from her own experiences with feminism in the 1990s. She recalls meeting Jewish women who were able to discuss topics like social justice, feminism, and Jewish identity, even admitting to enjoying Israel!, without those commitments negating each other. Rather, she wants to know how things changed among powerful factions of feminist thinkers to make Jewishness and progressive politics so difficult to reconcile.

Jesella starts out with Betty Friedan and second-wave feminism. The Feminine Mystique captured the dissatisfaction felt by educated middle-class housewives who wanted more from life than children and husbands, but African-American feminists and working-class feminists were quick to note that not all women were stay-at-home mothers, many were working (in low-paying) jobs outside the home. This criticism brought up a crucial realization: gender cannot be examined separately from race, class, and status. Feminism widened its scope to include these topics, but “sisterhood” became more difficult to define.

Why does this matter? Well, being a sister became about more than just being a woman. Race, class, revolutionary politics, national liberation, and later sexuality all could factor into one’s political identity as strongly if not more-so than gender. Jesella explores this change through Angela Davis. Davis embodied feminism in tune with the fight against capitalism, racism, prisons, and imperialism.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict found its way into this evolving feminist environment at a pivotal juncture. Jesella points to the Mexico City meeting for International Women’s Year in 1975 as a place where feminism, Third World politics, anti-imperialism and animosity towards Israel began to overlap with increasing frequency. The presence of language like “Zionism is racism” there marked a particular turning point, she writes, because it signified the moment when Israel began being defined in terms of an expanded political lexicon. Instead of being understood in terms of specific policies, it started being associated with colonialism, Western dominance, capitalism and racism.

This shift goes a long way towards understanding why Israel later became such a symbolic shorthand within movements whose agendas had little to do with the Middle East. If Israel got folded into a larger narrative about colonialism and oppression, reactions to it became a way of signaling political loyalties. Across feminist, racial, queer and anti-imperialist politics, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict became extraordinarily freighted, and portable.

One feature I particularly liked about Jesella’s attention to the fact that Jewishness doesn’t easily fit into models of simple privilege and oppression. Jews have been subjects of discrimination, oppression, exile, and persecution for centuries. But many Jews today in the West also have privilege tied to being white and/or successful and/or well assimilated into society. Jewish people have at times been vulnerable and successful, marginalized and well accepted depending on the era.

This gets even more complicated when Zionism is factored in. The history of the Jewish people is marked by oppression and displacement. Israel, on the other hand, is often talked about by its detractors in terms of colonial dominance. Jewish women can find themselves categorized by gender within one axis of discrimination and by Jewishness/whiteness/support for Israel in dominant groups according to another narrative. Jesella argues that Jewish women are therefore a particularly useful testing ground for intersectionality’s ability to deal with identities that don’t fall neatly into one side of the oppressor/oppressed dichotomy.

Jesella does not eviscerate Peggy McIntosh or Kimberlé Crenshaw. She’s concerned about how ideas around whiteness and privilege got stretched. Crenshaw’s observation that Black women could be disadvantaged in ways that were neither purely racist nor sexist was a crucial insight. Jesella worries about when whiteness and privilege started being political identities instead of strictly analytical tools. Whiteness started standing in for structural power, social mobility, and closeness to power centers.

That expansion caused problems for Jews. Jews could be defined as white while leaving unanswered the question of how tenuous Jewish racial status has always been in this country. It also left unchecked how accusations of Jewish wealth and power have long been a vehicle for antisemitism. A tool that was supposed to help people recognize privilege was obfuscating certain forms of vulnerability. This matters later on when October 7 forced political concepts to grapple with individuals who were seen as privileged but were also quite literally being made vulnerable.

Jesella then brings queer theory and theorists like Judith Butler, Jasbir Puar, Dean Spade, and Sarah Schulman into the fold. But her argument isn’t just that queer theory became anti-Zionist. It’s that queer politics became folded into a broader alliance with anti-racism, anti-imperialism, prison abolition, and Palestinian liberation. Angela Davis’ concept of “intersectionality of struggles” especially encapsulates this development. Solidarity across political conflicts became based on tying those conflicts into broader structures of oppression.

It’s true this politics offers real analytical insights. But there is also danger in this confluence: particularities between histories are lost when all sorts of different conflicts are framed in the same political grammar. American racism, colonialism, prisons, sexuality, and Palestine start to look like variations on the same fundamental type of struggle. Once Israel and Jews have been assigned a place in that grammar, new developments can begin to make sense within that framework before we’ve had a chance to consider their specific details.

It’s why I think Jesella’s critique is at its strongest point. October 7 served as a real-world stress test on categories that had taken years to develop. Then images and reports emerged of gross violence against Israeli civilians. Reports, in some cases, of sexual violence.

Suddenly you have a collision between empirical vulnerability and conceptual privilege. The latter refers to people tightly connected to an oppressed group suddenly being confronted with credible evidence of violence. Jesella poses the question of what happens when reality resists the categories we impose on it and won’t adhere to ideological categories we typically use to make sense of it. Which is more interesting, intellectually, than simply saying ‘some feminists failed to apply their principles consistently.”

Her examination of sexual violence makes this especially clear. Some writers began slotting allegations into a longer timeline where rape accusations against white women had been used to incite violence against racialized men. But Jesella asks the question of what happens when a tool built for analyzing one historical context gets shoehorned too quickly into another. Suddenly the political implications of saying “this allegation is real” start to outweigh what happened factually.

Jesella makes a similar point about “carceral feminism.” Critics are right to be concerned about turning to the police, prosecutors, and prisons to solve the problem of sexual violence, particularly for marginalized communities who have experienced over-policing or discriminatory policing. But carceral feminism critiques also move us away from the event itself and towards the fallout of responding to the event. Who will go to jail? Which institutions will accrue more power? Which communities will be further devastated?

The stakes of this shift are high when applied to October 7. Allegations of sexual violence may be evaluated not simply on whether or not they are true, but on what political impact acknowledging them might have. Will they bolster support for Israeli military efforts? Fuel Islamophobia? Change public sentiment around Gaza? Jesella’s worry is that the politics of recognition become so fraught that they eclipse the thing being recognized.

Jesella concludes her article with one word academics love to throw around: context. Jesella argues that sometimes context gets so large that it begins to blur instead of clarify moral judgment. The more context we provide about why something is difficult to judge, the easier it becomes to delay saying what happened and what it means.

Her argument can be summed up like this: context should deepen moral judgment, not endlessly delay it. Context becomes an issue when it stops illuminating an event and starts dictating whether we’re willing to pass judgment on that event at all. Theory at that point stops shaping our understanding of reality. It starts determining what kinds of realities are possible.

The significance of Jesella’s talk comes from her shift from hypocrisy to genealogy. Instead of condemning feminism’s reaction to October 7 as hypocritical, she traces the development of feminist political identity up until that point, charting how women’s solidarity became more conditional, how political identities became bound up in larger structures of power and resistance, how Israel was situated within that history through anti-colonial theory, and how Jewishness came to struggle to find a place within that structure. October 7 then put those categories to the test.

What Jesella ultimately says about feminism applies to any politicized worldview. Any ideology runs the risk of mistaking its metaphysics for reality, particularly when a surprising event shakes the moral lens through which we make sense of the world. Nuanced politics must allow for the strong to be vulnerable and the oppressed to be oppressive. If it cannot, its theories have become stronger than the facts they were meant to organize.

This is why Jesella’s lecture should make you think twice. Politics doesn’t have to ditch its talk of justice for its assessments to become muddled; it only needs to allow its own theories to trump the real-world events that those theories intend to break down. Complex understandings of power can blind us to injustices that fail to fit our preconceived notions of what we should be seeing. Jesella’s most enduring point is thus also her most horrifying: the same language of justice developed to render women visible can, given a different set of historical conditions, be used to render other women invisible once more.

Bibliography

Jesella, Kara. “‘Me Too, Unless You Are a Jew’: Feminism Justifies October 7.” Lecture presented at the ISGAP Summer Institute, 2026. YouTube video. Posted by ISGAP International, September 3, 2026.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–99.

Davis, Angela Y. Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Edited by Frank Barat. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016.

Goldstein, Eric L. The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.

United Nations. Report of the World Conference of the International Women’s Year, Mexico City, 19 June–2 July 1975. E/CONF.66/34. New York: United Nations, 1976.

United Nations, Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict. Mission Report: Official Visit of the Office of the SRSG-SVC to Israel and the Occupied West Bank, 29 January–14 February 2024. March 4, 2024.