“When I first heard it, my initial thought was … if there is some way I can use my body,” Bohrer said, “I am ready and willing to do it, and I think about it as a personal, moral and religious obligation to do so.” Bohrer is joining five other members of Jewish Voice for Peace, Chicago — Becca Lubow, Avey Rips, Seph Mozes, Audrey Gladson and Benjamin Teller — in a hunger strike to demand an end to the genocide in Gaza, unconditional military aid for Israel and the blockade of food and medical aid to the 2.3 million Palestinians now living amongst the rubble. Bohrer, who’s also a scholar of social movements at Notre Dame, says she felt the moral and strategic call to use whatever resources or privileges she had to raise the stakes of the Palestinian freedom struggle in the United States as “our Palestinian comrades watch their friends and their family and their community members suffer a genocide in real time — starvation of truly epic proportions that comes [after] 19 months of bombing, 20 years of blockade and 78 years of occupation and ethnic cleansing.” The strike kicked off with an opening rally on Monday, June 16, where a series of political leaders and allies spoke, including Congresswoman Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.), one of 18 members of Congress who last week introduced the “Block the Bombs” bill in the House to condition aid to Israel. “The hunger strike is a way to alert Americans to the desperateness of the situation.” Shah also points to this history of Jewish activism, including Polish Jewish students using the tactic to win educational opportunities and a 1946 incident where 1,000 Jewish refugees were stuck on a ship bound for Palestine in Italy and needed to put pressure on Britain to let them in.
Author: Shane Burley
Published at: 2025-06-16 21:30:00
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