Friends lost, relatives at odds: How Oct. 7 reshaped lives in the U.S.
In the last 12 months, Lisa Feit in Commack, New York, has seen longtime friendships fizzle. In Atlanta, Joy Metzler cut short a military career and no longer feels she can be herself with her family.
Since last Oct. 7, people across the country have endured antisemitic epithets, anti-Muslim rhetoric and near-violence. Parents have pulled children from school districts. Careerists have left jobs. College students have been suspended or had their degrees withheld.
All because of who they are or their beliefs about the overseas conflict.
A year has passed since Hamas forces attacked southern Israel, killing 1,200 people and kidnapping 250 more. The Oct. 7 assault reignited decades-old hostilities and sparked an Israeli military response that has claimed the lives of more than 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry. The American Jewish Committee says nearly 100 Israeli hostages remain in captivity.
But the situation has taken a toll in the U.S. as well, with lives upended or transformed by the war’s fallout: People have lost family members and seen relatives’ homes bombed from afar. Friendships, family and professional relationships have been damaged or severed as seemingly insurmountable tensions boil between Americans who see the war – and those in support of one side or the other – as morally wrong or hostile to their safety and existence.
Across the country, people feel shocked or betrayed by their friends’ social media posts and activism and frustrated over their lack of support.
Nidal Ibrahim, a Palestinian-American in Atlanta, was an infant when his family fled, as refugees, following the Six-Day War in 1967. He's appalled that longtime associates are unwilling to condemn what he and others view not as a conflict but a genocide, and his circle of friends has vastly diminished in the past year.
“I find it unconscionable that people are not speaking out,” said Ibrahim, 57, former executive director of the Arab American Institute, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C. “It’s difficult to have sustaining long-term relationships with people whose values are so out of whack with who I thought they were.”
Some feel threatened or abandoned by neighborhoods and communities they once felt part of. Jews who sympathize with the Palestinian cause have distanced themselves from their families. Muslim students have found themselves at odds with university officials.
Others have altered daily behaviors or uprooted their lives for the sake of personal safety
Anna Keiserman, 41, a former professor of music at a community college in New Jersey who is Jewish and was born in Russia, resigned and relocated to Georgia to escape what she felt was a hostile climate.
“The atmosphere at the college was unbearable,” Keiserman said, citing "pro-Hamas propaganda" and "a pro-Palestinian narrative" that she said was fomented by the school's DEI department and student life staff.
In the three months after the Oct. 7 attack, antisemitic incidents nearly quadrupled from the same period a year before, according to the Anti-Defamation League. During that same period, the Council on American-Islamic Relations reported that anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian complaints had nearly doubled.
Keffiyehs, or traditional Palestinian scarves, have taken on dual meaning – for some, a form of pride or support for the Palestinian cause; for others, a threatening symbol associated with the attacks. New worries govern how people on different sides of the conflict express their identity or go about their daily lives: Should I wear my Star of David? Am I safe entering my mosque? Am I no longer free to publicly post my location?
For some, the past year has fostered feelings of defiance, pride and determination. People have felt driven to act in small ways, embraced activism and expressions of self-identity or even altered career paths to live out their passions.
Marjorie Cohen, a 70-year-old retired nurse in Norfolk, Virginia, pledged to select a book about antisemitism or the Holocaust as the only Jewish member of her 12-member book club.
“Not once has anyone from the group asked me if I was okay,” Cohen said, recalling her conversations over the past year. “Perhaps these women don’t know what to say…. So I have decided to let good historical fiction speak for me, one book at a time.”
Zayna Elkarra, a Palestinian American high school junior in San Francisco, has lost more than 100 family members over the past year in Gaza, which she visited for the first time last summer.
“Even getting up and going to school every day felt so unfair,” said the 16-year-old, who has since co-founded a Palestinian youth organization in California’s Bay Area. “You walk in and people are acting like everything’s okay in the world, and, in reality, you don’t even know if your family is alive.”
Feit, a 56-year-old retired attorney in Commack, New York, joined a weekly walking group calling for the Israeli hostages’ safe return, while New York City lawyer Melinda Thaler, 61, started attending pro-Israel rallies and testifying in support of Jewish civil rights.
Cole Parke-West, a trans activist in Durham, North Carolina, spent six years fighting antisemitism as a Jewish community ally before quitting their post with a Jewish organization to help found Christians for a Free Palestine.
“I’m doing it publicly as a Christian to mobilize other Christians horrified by what’s happening in Gaza and invested in taking responsibility for the ways in which different facets of the Christian church have fed into the conflict,” said Parke-West, 41. “A lot of people are waking up to what’s happening, and once you wake up, you can’t go back to sleep.”
While the bombs and missiles may be falling thousands of miles away, the reverberations are felt by U.S. citizens caught up in the war's politics and pain. As the one-year mark of the conflict approaches, here are some of their stories.
A community that no longer feels like home
A year ago, attorneys Rebecca Feigelson and Isaac Safier were delighted to live in their Oakland, California, neighborhood, a place the married couple had chosen to call home because of its culturally diverse population.
“We felt we could be part of the community proudly and publicly as a Jewish family,” said Feigelson, 40. “But after Oct. 7, it seemingly changed overnight.”
The oldest of their two children had just started school in the Oakland Unified School District. But in the wake of the attack, the local teachers’ union issued statements Feigelson described as “anti-Israel” and produced “a curriculum that demonized Jews,” she said. “Some statements expressed unqualified support for the attack and suggested that Israel had no place in this world.”
When a number of district teachers conducted a pro-Palestinian teach-in in defiance of district orders, Feigelson and Safier felt they were fighting an uphill battle.
“The way the teachers’ union was approaching the conflict, it was encouraging the othering of and menacing behavior against Jews,” said Safier, 42.
After weeks of pleading with the district to instill a more evenhanded approach, the couple opted to transfer their 6-year-old son to an adjacent district they felt was more welcoming to Jews. Despite his young age, they said, he had already displayed a reluctance to express his identity.
“He didn’t want to wear his menorah sweatshirt because he said it was ‘too Jewish,’” Feigelson said. “It’s really sad that a child as young as six felt those undertones.”
Meanwhile, the public parks where they’d celebrated holidays or played with their kids were suddenly littered with antisemitic graffiti. They felt threatened by Palestinian flags outside of neighborhood homes and signs supporting Palestinian resistance in coffee shops. It seemed many more people were wearing keffiyehs, which the couple perceived as a symbol they supported violence against Jews.
After a stranger approached and yelled at them, “Stop bombing Gaza!” in front of their kids during a public menorah lighting event at Oakland’s Lake Merritt, Rebecca became more cautious about how openly she wears her Star of David.
“It was incredible to us in that a city known for its inclusion that we’re afraid of expressing our religion,” Safier said. “There’s this overall feeling that we’re alone.”
Fighting in the face of massive loss
For Mama Ganuush, a trans Palestinian drag artist and community organizer in San Francisco, there is no “conflict.” There is no “war.” For Ganuush, who said they have lost more than 200 civilian family members in Gaza, it's simply a genocide.
Ganuush, 42, submitted an amicus brief in support of a November lawsuit by Defense for Children-Palestine and others that accuses the U.S. of being complicit in the killing. They ramped up their activism over the past year despite the trauma of catastrophic loss and the challenges of multiple sclerosis.
“The U.S. is complicit in the genocide of my people,” Ganuush said. “My cousin was stripped naked in front of his family and shot by IDF workers. Most of our family homes have been destroyed.”
Ganuush said they sometimes fear wearing their keffiyeh because of the physical and verbal attacks they experienced this year from people who opposed their views.
Drag performing has been part of Ganuush’s trans journey, an art form they embraced to deal with disability and pain. Amid events the past year, they said, there's been no time to mourn. Instead, they are determined “to become a spokesperson on behalf of my people.”
In December, Ganuush joined more than 3,800 queer artists in pledging not to perform in Israel “until Palestinians are free. My solidarity is with Palestinians in their struggle for safety and freedom,” they said.
'I feel like we're strangers'
As a 10th-grader, Joy Metzler was so moved by national war monuments during a family trip to Washington, D.C., that she applied as soon as she could to the U.S. Air Force Academy. She graduated as a second lieutenant and was on track to be an Air Force engineer as a graduate student at Georgia Tech when the Oct. 7 attack occurred.
She was so rattled that her thinking about the conflict began to change after a 25-year-old Air Force serviceman named Aaron Bushnell self-immolated outside the Israeli consulate in Washington, D.C. last February. Bushnell lit himself on fire after stating he would “no longer be complicit in genocide” and died several hours later at a hospital.
“I thought, if someone cares about it this much, there must be something more to it,” said Metzler, 23.
She began researching the decades-old history of the conflict and found she objected not only to Israel’s actions but to America’s support. Feeling her role in the military made her more culpable, Metzler reexamined the tenets of her faith and ultimately applied for conscientious objector status as a pacifist. Having completed the mandatory essays, two required interviews and a hearing, she is awaiting the Air Force investigating officer's final report approving or denying her request.
“I couldn’t just sit by and watch it happen,” she said. “I don’t think using violence is the right answer to bring about peace.”
When Metzler expressed her views condemning Israel's actions and the U.S. role in the conflict as part of a Christian group's YouTube video, some of her conservative Christian family members – strong supporters of Israel – became contentious. She was surprised and pained by their reaction.
“As someone who was raised Christian, these people were my role models, and to see that lack of compassion hurts me,” Metzler said.
She and her father have had hurtful quarrels, and while no family members have cut off communication, the subject remains taboo.
“This was a really defining moment in my life, but we don’t talk about it – even though I really want to, because of how strongly they disagree with me,” she said. “To not be able to talk about what’s making up 90% of my life right now, I feel like we’re strangers.”
A sense of betrayal
For Michelle Steinberg, a 64-year-old small business owner in Phoenix, who has friends and family in Israel, the recent wave of antisemitism is just more pronounced, she said.
“Every time something high-profile happens and the Jewish community is somehow connected, it shows again and again the realities of our Jewish lives,” she said. “While Oct. 7 was horrific and broke our hearts, this is nothing new for us.”
Steinberg said a recent issue of her neighborhood association’s quarterly magazine featured a Q&A with an entertainer who had played a local show. The interviewer concluded by asking the singer if there was anything he wanted to add, and the response was an expletive directed at Zionists.
Steinberg and another neighbor complained to the association, and officials there were apologetic. But the fact that the statement had been printed so casually still surprised her.
The atmosphere in the past year has been unsettling, a series of small circumstances that, in total, prompt uneasiness. A Jewish friend’s angry altercation over a pro-Palestinian bumper sticker in Tucson. The keffiyehs she sees at coffee shops.
“I know people think they’re pretty innocuous, but when I see them I feel pretty unsafe,” she said.
For Steinberg, the anti-Israel sentiment has awakened a sense of Jewish pride. She began volunteering with Jewish organizations and bought a Star of David that she regularly wears.
What disappoints her most is the silence within her progressive social circles, the “unwillingness to disavow this horrible discrimination that’s happening, the violence against Jews."
She said, "It feels like the Jewish community is always there to fight for basic human rights, but now when we need it – where are you? We feel abandoned and betrayed.”
Philosophical conversations prior to Oct. 7 are no longer just differences of opinion. Now they're real and personal.
“I have unfriended people on social media,” she said. “I had one very close friend with whom I don’t feel that way anymore."
She perceived the friend as supporting Hamas.
"It makes it really hard to maintain a relationship when a person who is supposed to be your friend is advocating for people who want to kill you, your friends and family,” Steinberg said.
Dragged into fight not for her views, but her identity
Anat Ronen was born in Israel, immigrated to the U.S. in 2006 and became a citizen in 2022, but more than anything she considers herself an artist. As a muralist in Houston, she spends a lot of time in public and as a means of outreach has occasionally posted her working whereabouts for those who want to see her in action.
She doesn’t do that anymore.
“My Jewishness, or being Israeli, I never wore it as a thing,” said Ronen, 53. “I’m a human.”
The past year has taught her that for some, her Jewish and Israeli identity is all that matters, never mind that she simply wants peace, is critical of Israel’s government and has Palestinian friends overseas she’s tried to help.
With Jews comprising just 1% of the greater Houston population, Ronen feels she’s become a convenient target for pro-Palestinian activists formerly within her circles.
She’s been called antisemitic names. One of her murals – a commissioned work depicting flowers – was defaced with hateful messages. And people have contacted Ronen’s clients “trying to prevent them from working with me, spreading lies.”
“Relationships have gone down the drain because they felt their activism is more important than anything else,” she said. “They’re now engaged in this mission to hurt whoever is in their way and destroy the Zionist enemy. They’re bullying me in a way that is ridiculous.”
Ronen disabled commenting on her Instagram account, unable to get through a day without being inundated with hate. She stopped sharing her location, fearful of who might show up. And she’s stopped bidding on public calls for art, figuring no one wants the controversy she assumes her identity would bring to a project.
“To be honest, it’s integrated in us Israelis to tone our Jewishness down,” she said. “I think we were fooling ourselves, that we could be like anyone else. But it literally blew up in our faces.”
Fading friendships give way to powerful connections
It was in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement that Kafia Haile of Atlanta began to learn more about the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. When she saw the Israeli military response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, she felt the U.S. needed to be held accountable for the deaths of Palestinian civilians.
The 44-year-old activist and filmmaker texted dozens of friends, urging them to call elected officials to demand a cease-fire. She knew many had stepped up in 2020 during the Black Lives Matter movement, and she shared photos with them depicting the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza.
“I said, if you spoke up for Black people in 2020, you know what to do now,” Haile said.
Haile recalled learning about the Holocaust in school and felt this moment was what people like her had been training for their whole lives. It angered her that barely a handful responded to her call to action.
“I realized some people just don’t care,” she said. “Fear is the first excuse, and after that, they just don’t make the effort.”
Old friendships have wobbled, unable to sustain the weight of her convictions. Friends Haile still socializes with often change the subject when she brings up the war.
In their place, she said, she's grown new, cross-generational friendships with fellow activists who share her sentiments.
“I have friends now who are unlike any friends I’ve ever had in my life,” Haile said. “What we know about each other is that we are people who would mobilize their resources in a minute to save each other’s lives. And that is something I treasure.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: How Oct. 7 and Israel-Hamas war transformed lives, friendships in US