You know, after the Holocaust, many Jewish women never spoke of the rape and sexual violence they endured. They felt deeply ashamed. They didn’t want anyone to know.
Before that, during the pogroms that occurred before the State of Israel was formed — pogroms that directly led to popular support for Zionism because Russia had become uninhabitable — men had to ask their rabbis whether they were permitted to be with their wives after they had been raped. This is the legacy of sexual violence against women in the Jewish community that we have suffered with, often in silence.
This is the culture I was raised and educated in. And now it’s 2026, and we have sunk to such an extreme of degradation that we even have to defile our mouths by talking about Hamas, which deliberately sent out men to rape babies.
They deliberately forced family members to have sex with each other and desecrated dead bodies. Even saying these words is disgusting. It makes you feel defiled just to utter them.
And on top of it, The New York Times, supposedly the top newspaper, claims that Jews are training dogs to rape — which is physically impossible. They ignore the real story, and they use the opinion section as an excuse to run Hamas propaganda, because that’s the only place low enough to shove it in.
I’m not really asking you to do anything other than stop for a minute and reflect. Maybe pray to Hashem, to God, that He will save us from these truly degrading, awful conversations that we should never, ever have to have. And may there never be another victim of sexual violence anywhere, because it’s one of the most heinous things you can do to another human being.
Writing by Dr. Dannielle Blumenthal 