Three weeks after Israel was attacked on Oct. 7, 2023, Mijal Bitton wrote a piece titled That Pain You’re Feeling Is Peoplehood, in which she attempts to explain what many people were grappling with in the weeks after the attack. As she travels the world speaking to groups of people, the sentiments in the piece still resonate.
“Pretty much every week, I meet people from different parts of the world, from Australia to South Africa, who quote that piece back to me,” she said. “They tell me that I gave them language for something they are feeling now, and that they continue to use it and go back to it.”
Bitton, a spiritual leader, sociologist, scholar, Latina Jew of Middle Eastern descent (among other things), will be the speaker at the June 8 Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas annual event. The program, “Jewish Identity and Community in a Changing World,” covers a topic that has become a key concern for many in the Jewish community in the past 600-plus days.
Ethan Roberts, the deputy executive director of the JCRC, said that given the work the organization has done since Oct. 7 – educational offerings for schools and employers, and speaking on Jewish identity and antisemitism, Bitton is perfect to amplify the work.
“Our annual event comes a week after Shavuot, where Jews read the Book of Ruth, which really speaks to who we are as Jews: Choosing to be part of this community of shared destiny as a people,” he said. “For many years, we’ve brought speakers who amplify the work and values of JCRC. it’s an opportunity to educate people in our own community, and those who aren’t, about things people need to hear.”
Bitton said she is a “huge fan” of JCRCs around the country.
“I think that they are some of the most well-positioned groups that have a very difficult task,” she said. “It’s not easy to be able to work with Jews from different stripes, and also to build alliances and bridges outside the Jewish community. This is work that it requires. It takes a lot of strategy to be able to look at this moment in which many of us want to, for good reason, like, you know, react and just feel and be outraged. They have to be the grown ups in the room.”
Bitton said that what she has found through her travels, writing, and conversations with communities is that the Jewish community is looking to connect with each other and is seeking Jewish wisdom.
“It’s about what it means to be a Jewish people right now with bonds towards each other, and what it means to also stand strong with our allies, and what it means to be at a time in which we face new challenges we haven’t faced before,” she said. “And what are the different tools of resilience that we have in this moment.”
Bitton said that, after the horrors of Oct. 7, it woke up something “timeless” of who Jewish people are.
“[It’s] the sense of being family and in solidarity with each other,” she said. “That wasn’t a new opinion in terms of Oct. 7; it was actually kind of naming that our changing reality has woken up a muscle that we maybe forgot we had, so that I’m still very, very convinced of that way of seeing the world.”
Bitton said the sense of Jewish pride that she’s seeing from students on campuses – even those besieged by protests and encampments – is encouraging. A group she recently met with on an East Coast campus went to their graduation with a Star of David on their cap and holding signs saying “Jewish graduate.”
“These students would not have done that two years ago,” Bitton said. “But the sense of Jewish identity, Jewish pride, Jewish solidarity, Jewish peoplehood that they and so many others exhibit, I think teaches us that there’s been this reclamation project of this muscle of Jewish peoplehood.”
