Judaism Past Zionism: Resistance, Healing, Activism

Join Katie Bogen, a Jewish psychologist specializing in trauma & sexual violence against women, as she shares her transformative journey from unlearning Zionism to becoming a passionate voice for Palestinian liberation. Her Israeli-Palestinian conflict explainer videos have gone viral across the globe. This episode explores the impact of trauma, the importance of reclaiming joy and embodiment, and how these concepts can be applied to heal the wounds of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

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Transcript

Welcome to Superhumanizer podcast where we promote empathy and understanding in polarizing viewpoints through stories told by people living them. Hello everyone, I have Katie Bogan here with me today on Superhumanizer. Katie popped up on my social media feed at the beginning of the never ending nightmare that began on October 7.

She was such a breath. of fresh air and hope truly. She is a Jewish woman with a beautiful heart and soul who has expert level knowledge in psychology, trauma, and the history of Palestine and Israel because she actually studied them. And now she is a published researcher and a PhD candidate, almost done.

Her voice reverberated across the world from the U. S. to even Lebanon, where I found friends. sharing her videos. She was even invited to speak at a Palestine liberation event recently with Dr. Cornel West. So her voice is really touching so many across the world. Katie, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you so much. I so appreciate the invitation and it's truly my honor to be here. Thank you. Thank you. I'm so excited to learn from you. Before we get into our discussion today, I'd like to play a little game with you that I play with all my guests. It's called what brings you joy. Would you play it with me?

I would be delighted, for sure. So I'll start. Are you ready? I am. Okay. Katie, my dear, what brings you joy? Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Wow. So much. Please tell me more about that. Why? Well, it's such a great feminist story. It's this Badass femme kicking butt, even though it's an unanticipated reimagining of the sci fi genre and the fantasy genre.

She's just so cool. I love Buffy. She's my queen. I love that. Totally see the parallels here between you and Buffy, Katie. I love that. Well Thank you. What brings you joy? Watching the Boston Bruins play hockey. Ooh, nice. Hockey. You're a hockey girl. I love that. Yeah, somehow I became an ice girl. Nice, that's beautiful.

Thank you. What brings you joy? Existing in the body, feeling the body, being more present than just the cognitive space. Wow. I love that you went from Buffy to hockey to mindfulness. That is so beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. Okay, are you ready to do that for me? I'm so ready. Yeah, that sounds great.

Okay. All right. What brings you joy? You, my dear, and you being on this show. It's a new show. Nobody knows about it yet. It hasn't been released. So having humans like you come on and share your experience, that brings me so much joy and connecting with people like you and all of this. And my partner saw me obsessing about social media in the beginning, um, because I do a really good job of not obsessing.

When all this was happening and I saw you, you brought me so much joy. So. I'm so happy that you're on. When I told my partner yesterday that you're coming on, he was like, What? Katie's coming on? So that, that also brought me joy, his reaction. Well, you're bringing me a pink face, very bluffy right now. Thank you.

What brings you joy? I would have to echo you on the mindfulness part. Usually mindfulness brings me a lot of joy and it still does. I would say recently, mindfulness has also bringing me some relief. Being embodied, being present. We have a lot of beautiful nature around us, so really trying to spend time in that space as much as I'm spending time in the social media and grief space.

Yeah, absolutely. so much for sharing that with me. I love that game because it allows us to know so much about each other within two minutes and for our listeners to hear about us. I'm so excited to get to know you more. Would you tell us more about you, where you're from and your background? Yeah, absolutely.

So Katie Bogan, she, her, I'm a fourth year doctoral student in clinical psychology out at the University of Nebraska, and my focus is on trauma and sexuality. So I work at the intersections of violence prevention and human sexuality research. I'm really interested. I'm interested in how to help sexual trauma survivors live joyful, consensual, and fully embodied intimate lives.

So that's my research focus and area, but I was raised in a Zionist Jewish household in Connecticut by the son of a Holocaust survivor. So my grandfather survived the Holocaust. My father witnessed and bore a lot of my grandfather's trauma. It is challenging to be the child of a Holocaust survivor. So I was.

Buffered by the impact of that by one generation, and I think that generational buffer has been transformative for me and for the other Jewish folks in my generation, but I grew up in Connecticut. I attended a small liberal arts college in Massachusetts, where I started to do my unlearning of Zionism and took some coursework on the history of Palestine, the Israeli apartheid system, human rights, genocide and comparative politics.

Pretty broadly. So I received my bachelor's degree in comparative political science. Then I took several years off to do research in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Providence, Rhode Island, before coming to Nebraska. And all of my post bacc research was on. Violence prevention and the impacts of trauma on our psyche on the body, being steeped in the trauma and violence literature right after getting a bachelor's degree in political science has really helps me to marry these constructs of how are certain political organizations traumatizing to people?

How does that impact organizing and grassroots movements in terms of people who are? Resisting imperialism, resisting colonialism, resisting oppression. What can we expect the psychological manifestations of that to be generations down the line? So I've been able to wed my BA work, the research that I did before starting my doctoral program and all the trauma research I've done now.

And weave in. The inherent wisdoms born of my identity isn't being raised as a Jewish woman. Wow. This is exactly why I call people like you a superhumanizer because you came out of tragedy and atrocity that could have been scarring to you in so many ways that could have disconnected you from others or kept you in a fear based.

reactivity to other situations. And what you did is you took that, you studied it and you made it your life purpose. And now you're sharing it with us in the world. So thank you so much. I'm so excited to go deeper into all of these things that you just mentioned, but I'm going to start by learning more about your background.

You say on your social media that you are a reconstructionist Jewish woman. Can you explain to us what that means? Yes, absolutely. There are, at least in North America, four traditional Jewish sects. There is on the far right of the political spectrum, Orthodoxy. So Hasidic Jews, Haredi Jews, a little bit further to the left, but still quite far right is conservative Jewry.

Right in the middle, a politically centrist group are Reform Jews. And really far left, the kind of progressive babes of Jewish. Life are the Reconstructionist Jews. Okay, and a description to faith belief also falls along this political spectrum So Orthodox Jews try to adhere as closely as possible to the way that ancient Jewry would have lived and follow the laws of the Torah Believe that the Torah is the Word of God conservative Jews recognized The Torah had to be interpreted by man, but still believe that it's the Word of God.

Reform Jews put a little bit more weight on that process of interpretation where human beings are fallible, and there are ways that Jewish people have to modernize to fit into culture as it transforms. Reconstructionist Jews Take a different lens where so much of what is holy to us, so much of what is intrinsic to our faith journey is the construction of our Judaism.

There's no way to be a perfect Jew because your idea of what your Judaism means to you is going to change over the course of your adulthood. So, This idea of construction is in the name of reconstructionism, where you're going to build what Judaism means to you and learn more from the Torah and learn more from your faith community and transmute it again.

This process of becoming a Jew feels so inherent to my understanding of Judaism. And it's what makes Reconstructionism a bit different. I never knew that. Thank you for explaining that to me. How beautiful to know that one of the oldest religions, or the oldest Abrahamic religion we can say, has evolved so much to get to this space of Reconstructionism, where it's really about community and holding on to the best of what's in this community.

How do we reinterpret the things that aren't relevant to our time? I can't help but think as somebody who grew up as a Muslim, I'm not a Muslim today, but somebody who grew up that way, maybe one day we will see Reconstructionist Islam in that way, which would be so beautiful. Thank you for explaining that.

I know that you went on a birthright trip, right? You say that you were already pro Palestine when you did that. How was that? I grew up as a baby activist. I've always been steeped in the world of social justice. And when I was 12 years old, I came out as queer and I formed the first Gay Straight Alliance at my middle school.

And I did that in two different high schools. And I embedded myself in these progressive activist communities. Because I wanted to learn about social justice as early as 12 years old. So by the time I got to college, I had just started hearing the word. Palestine. I was raised in a Jewish household. I grew up going for at least several years to a Hasidic Chabad in my hometown, because that was the only Jewish faith space in my hometown.

We never spoke about Palestine. I didn't know what Palestine was. I didn't know that it existed. I had never heard the language. Then I got to college and some of my more progressive friends. We're using this word I had never heard before. By the time my friends and my family and my loved ones started going on Birthright, I knew enough to start asking the question, what about Palestine?

What did you learn about Palestine? Did anyone on this trip talk about Palestine? One of my loved ones came back from Birthright and I asked her about. Palestine, because I was curious and this was new language for me. She said to me, I will never forget. I remember exactly where we were in her room having this conversation.

She said to me, Oh, you mean the terrorists? This was a progressive, open hearted person who I had grown up with. I was so shocked to hear this person use this language of terrorism and apply it to an entire group of people. It just, it didn't sit comfortably with me. And I was already in college and I did want to go on birthright.

And But I had this fear of brainwashing. I had this fear of going in ignorant and being swayed to take a certain position. I was defensive of my own intellectual independence. So I took a series of courses on the region. I took Jewish experience, suffering and evil in Jewish tradition, Middle East politics, and Arab Israeli conflict all at my university.

And I was getting my bachelor's degree in political science, so I was taking some courses affiliated with the Holocaust and Genocide Studies Center, courses that were more focused on apartheid and human rights abuses. So I took four courses that were very focused on the region and many peripheral courses that mentioned Israel Palestine.

By the time I finished my coursework prior to going on Birthright, I was already pro Palestine. I had absorbed enough from my education. So the Birthright trip was Interesting. And fraught. Interesting. Interesting. Yes. Tell us more. Um, well, I got along fairly well with my tour guide. I remember his name was Ayal.

He was a veteran of the second Lebanon war and obviously incredibly Zionist. This was a man who had fought for the longevity of a nation state that he believed in. So a lot of what he shared with the group was itself explicitly Zionist about young diaspora Jews having a right to this land and having to protect it.

From Hamas and terror, he just set up this paradigm of basically we own Israel, we have a birthright to this land, other people are trying to attack us. We can defend them by whatever means necessary. We can use whatever violence we need to against the terrorists. So I would ask the question after his presentations, well, tell me about the water crisis.

I know that Israel has this desalination technology where they can turn ocean water into freshwater and Gaza is on the coast and they're not sharing that technology. Why? What about the border crisis in the West Bank? What are settlers doing? How do you square the idea of settlements with Israel and its borders?

I was asking very annoying questions. Yes, questions that I'm sure a tour guide on Birthright did not anticipate one of the attendees to ask and was potentially unprepared to feel. So he was also countering by saying, well, Hamas are terrorists. We have a right to this land. This is yours. Why should we Let these other people come and take it, which is such a perversion and an inversion of what's actually happened in the region.

So he would give these presentations. I would resistance, rabble, rouse and interrogate. And at the end of the presentations, the other birthright attendees would come to my room and say, okay, we know what I all told us, but what do you learn in your classes? There was a learning group of us who were unpacking and trying to research this as the course was going on, as the trip was going on.

And we have this core group of people who went on birthright together who are now anti Zionists. Beautiful. Wow. Oh my God. Again, such a testament to your heart that at such a young age, you saw something and you're like, Yeah. Something doesn't make sense here. You went, you did your research at such a young age, which is so uncommon.

But again, the youth are always leading the charge when it comes to the humane issues, right? But you, against all odds, went and you did your research and then you went and you did even more research with people that came back from the trip. And you went in with all the bravery to ask those questions.

And then you inspired others. And here we are down the line where you still have that community of people that were inspired by your own bravery and your own insight. And to the region and the conflict. Thank you so much for doing that. How are your views accepted within your family? It's a challenge. I think again, I'm very privileged by the distance that I've gotten of how many years removed we are from the trauma of the Holocaust.

I think the older generation of my family carries that epigenetic pain, carries that trauma. So when a threat to Israel. is raised, they truly experience it in their bodies and their psyches as a threat to our survival and our people's longevity. That defense reaction is immediate. So I'll hear from the older generation of my family that it's us or them, or it's kill or be killed, or we need protection for diaspora Jews because we are at risk of being exterminated 100 percent of the time.

Because I'm 30, 40 years from being raised by a Holocaust survivor, I'm two generations removed from this mass trauma. My body does not get activated in the same way when Israel is questioned and when Netanyahu's regime is questioned. I don't have that same defensive trauma response and survival response of it's us or them.

I have the privilege, and other people in my generation have the privilege, of rejecting the premise of kill or be killed. We don't have to hold that the way that our parents and aunts and uncles really feel is in their best interest for survival. So our latitude for compassion and empathy with the Palestinian cause is so much broader than theirs.

Because the burden of that trauma is not as deeply held. I would love to think that if My dad and my aunts and uncles were another 30 years removed from the Holocaust. They would have come to the same conclusions that I did, but they're fighting against a survival instinct in their bodies that is raised every time this comes up.

Yes, it's super interesting that, of course, there's maybe a minority, I would say, of Holocaust survivors that are very outspoken for Palestine. They recognize so many parallels and atrocity and Human suffering. Of course, we learned so much from Jewish suffering. I remember growing up in high school learning about the Holocaust in Saudi Arabia in a British school.

And I remember thinking, wow, I was a child and thinking, wow, this is so awful. And of course, that scar is still alive. People are still alive from that scar. So are people still alive from the Nakba scar. I love what you said about the latitude of us being able to hold that burden, that we are privileged in order for us to speak about these things in a way that isn't as triggered, that allows us to access our higher brain, right?

To be able to speak to this, which is really beautiful. I hope that just the way that you reverberated across the world, At some point, whoever doesn't understand starts to understand because of your beautiful voice and the way you say it. You studied Israel's apartheid. I was wondering, can you tell us a little bit about that?

And do you have any insight at all into why Britain partitioned Palestine? The process of colonization that was happening in the late 1800s, early 1900s by Britain and the United States and this rush at the time to access as much Land that hadn't been mined already that hadn't been raped and pillaged by Western civilizations and there was called in the political science literature the race for Africa at the same time as This colonization process was happening against Palestine in the Levant and just north of Africa and Morocco and these places that were Being raided essentially for their resources Right after the Holocaust, you had 100, 000 displaced refugee Jews that needed a place to go.

So Britain had already been attempting to colonize Palestine. There was this British mandate. And the United States had an interest in acquiring land in the Levant. And Britain and the U. S. had a little debate of what do we do? We've just Fought in this war, and there are 100, 000 Jewish refugees, and anti Semitism is a problem in the UK, and anti Semitism is a problem in the U.

S. We don't really care about these people, but we have to do something with them. Where do we put them? There was Palestine, this land that didn't have stringent borders, that was already in the process of being colonized, that was already under the burden of the British Mandate, that had been moved as a tool in these geopolitics for 30, 40 years already.

Britain and the U. S. came to this conclusion, let's place these refugees that we don't want to manage. Here, task them with doing military labor for the West and invite them to have all of their citizens do conscripted military service to defend these borders, and we'll have access to a land that we haven't yet pillaged, and we will have a military stronghold that we can fund, surrounded by Arab and Muslim neighbors, just in case we want to Spread Western values or spread democracy, which I always put in quotes because obviously the underlying goal here is capitalism and gaining as much wealth as possible.

It's done under this guise of That was my understanding after my coursework. Palestine was a desired piece of land. Britain had tried. Some of their attempts had been unsuccessful. There wasn't enough manpower or labor power to fully colonize that space. Here you have a wave of 100, 000 Jewish refugees that need to be rehoused, that need to be placed somewhere, that are perceived as burdensome by the United States and Britain, who don't want to deal with an influx of these 100, 000 people.

So we'll put them here. We'll ask them to do our labor. We will suddenly have a stronghold in the Levant that we have not been able to manage in the last 40 years of attempting to colonize. We went from there to apartheid. What I've heard in the comments and I comment a lot. I try to be a voice of centeredness and mindfulness and compassion in these comments because we see all these polarized comments.

And one thing I see is that these Jewish people, refugees, there was a lot of atrocity committed towards them. They just needed a safe haven. And then the British empire wanted to save them. The U. S. wanted to save them, put them in this land and all the Arabs hated them and they just couldn't take it peacefully.

So that's why we ended up. Where we are today is what can you tell us about that and how that turned into apartheid who would take peacefully 100, 000 people not only coming to your land and then expanding forcibly removing you from that land. It's different if a neighbor knocks on your door and asks to borrow.

A bag of sugar, right? It's different to ask for a cup of sugar than to ask for the house. What Israel did after 1948 and the creation of the state of Israel was to engage in the Nakba, which is this forced dispossession and displacement and removal of 700, 000 Palestinians that already existed on that land.

So these people that had been slowly growing in their numbers, forced. Nearly a million Palestinians out of the historic state of Palestine out of their ancestral land stole homes rather than doing what they could have done, which is asked for a cup of sugar, figuring out how to share space, a collaborative way of living.

It wasn't that. Arab neighbors hated Jews, it was that Arab neighbors all of a sudden had to deal with an additional refugee crisis following multiple world wars. There was an anxiety raised of, okay, now what do we do with a million people? Why did Britain and the United States get to colonize this space, forcibly remove 700, 000 people who look like us, give us a refugee crisis, and then assume that we're not going to have a problem with the way that they're treating other Muslim people or have the anxiety that they could do this to us as well.

And it was a concern of Egypt and Jordan and Lebanon. When Israel started to expand, they knew that Israel didn't just want to expand their borders to take over historic Palestine. There was a border shift. out and out after every war. Egypt lost land. Jordan and Lebanon had to manage this exodus of Palestinian people.

I use that phrase very intentionally. It was an exodus. So who wouldn't be upset? I am a product of the exodus. My grandmother was a Palestinian refugee who ended up in Lebanon and married my grandfather. You just worded it so beautifully. The Balfour Declaration established a form of, let's say, supremacy, which I know is an inflammatory word, but it raised one group over another and gave them more rights, unfortunately, just like the US and the UK took advantage of these refugees, also.

extremists within these refugees that believed in an ideology of Zionism. Of course, today, we believe Zionism is the right for Jews to have a homeland, which I'm for. But at its core, Zionism is also the exclusive rights of Jews to have a homeland. So when you come in, and instead of asking for a cup of sugar and being a friendly neighbor and integrating, Say, I'm taking this land, and now this land is mine.

Muhammad Hadid, who is Bella and Gigi Hadid's father, recounts, there's a viral video of how his family took in refugees, and then they couldn't come back into the house, they were kicked out. Of course, this reverberated in anger across the Arab world, biggest refugee crisis, and here we are. I wonder sometimes if it came as, here are some new neighbors, let's create a Jewish character, let's give these Jewish refugees rights.

For example, in Lebanon, the Armenians were given rights. They're naturalized. Lebanese Armenians are an integral part of Lebanese society today. If that's the way that these refugees were taken in, where we would be today, it would be just a continuation of Jewish Arab solidarity that existed for thousands of years before the State of Israel.

Thank you so much for explaining that to us. You are a wealth of knowledge and experience and a scientist, and you've studied sexual trauma survivors. Now we're witnessing all these sexual crimes against women that happens towards both Israelis and Palestinians. How are you processing that? That has been one of the most fraught pieces of this for me because I do notice that there is a privileging of Israeli women's sexual trauma over Palestinian women's sexual trauma, and all sexual trauma is a tragedy.

It is a violation of agency to someone's rights over their body. If you go back to feminist literature from the 1970s, Susan Brownmiller had this piece on the threat of rape that was very iconic. She talks about how sexual violence, how rape is a mechanism through which men keep women in a state of fear.

We're seeing these layered aspects of violence, racialized, religious oriented, and gendered and patriarchal violence happening all at the same time. And in order to honor the experiences of trauma survivors, both in Israel and in Palestine, we have to be able to discuss the nuance of these things. Do I believe that sexual trauma happened that Israeli women were raped on October 7th?

I don't know about the sensationalization that's happened in the news. Rape is used as a weapon of war by bad actors constantly. I'm sure there are people in both the Israeli occupation force and in Hamas who will use sexual violence opportunistically. At the same time, this discourse has taken off of what Israeli women are at risk and Jewish women are being assaulted, and they are, and it's true, and it's devastating.

The Israeli Occupation Force has a 75 year history of sexually violating Palestinian women, and not only Palestinian women, but Israeli women who are engaging in conscripted service. The rape stories, the sexual violence stories from the Nakba in 1948 and these ongoing waves of conflict are horrific in the way that rape has been used as a weapon against Palestinian women.

And rates of military sexual trauma perpetrated by IOF soldiers against women in the Israeli military are so devastating that there's a whole focus research group in the United States focused on preventing military sexual trauma in Israel. Wow, really? Yeah. Wow. I've never heard of that. Oh, my God. Can you tell us more about that?

There's a U. S. based scholarship that focuses specifically on treatment of Israeli women's sexual trauma because they're experiencing this dual trauma simultaneously, sexual violence and the omnipresent threat of bombardment. With every sentence, Katie, you teach us something new. A testament to your breadth of knowledge.

How does being a sexual trauma survivor affect one in their daily life? That is such a beautiful question. I think it so depends on the person. I will say I identify very publicly as a sexual trauma survivor. It's one of the reasons I do the work. It's one of the reasons I came to the field. I'm very fortunate.

to have had access to all of the healing resources that I would need to cope with experiences of sexual and gender based violence. I also am a therapist for people who have experienced sexual and gender based violence, so I get to deliver prolonged exposure treatments and cognitive processing therapy and the best gold standard evidence based treatments.

But a lot of sexual violence survivors suffer from post traumatic stress disorder. I keep seeing research now Particularly from non Western scholars and academics, that post traumatic stress disorder is a Western concept. Because, first of all, it implies or suggests that you are out of the trauma context.

That you are no longer at risk of sexual violation, no longer at risk of experiencing violence or trauma. People, for example, in Gaza, are not. Post traumatic right now. They are in the center of a trauma and in order to treat post traumatic stress disorder You have to have a comparative baseline normal that was non traumatizing The fact that the mean age of people in Gaza is 18 years old and they've been in this conflict zone and under omnipresent threat of violence since birth They have no baseline comparison that was pre trauma to go through treatment and they have no post trauma in order to be out of the threat context.

My understanding of sexual violence and the impacts of sexual violence has been very North American, very Western academic. So, siloed in the context in which I know. Those logics don't necessarily apply to the people in Israel, the people in historic Palestine, the folks in Gaza, because they don't necessarily have a pre trauma, they don't have a normal baseline, and they're not currently post trauma.

Which complicates everything about treating trauma. Thank you for your vulnerability and sharing pain, hurt that was done to you and you're turning it into healing, which is one of the best ways really to deal with trauma. Thank you for doing that. I echo you also being somebody who specializes in mental health and going through having to practice my own tools while going through my own grief and my trauma is being reactivated and all of this and questioning.

I teach about mindfulness, about cognitive reframing, you know, how does this apply in this situation? And I've often wondered if I was a provider in Israel, or if I was a provider in Gaza right now, how would I use my own tools? I'm going to put that question on to you because I, myself, I'm so lost. And so how does one heal?

How does one use tools like this and places like Israel and Gaza and the whole region, really? Well, I've found cognitive restructuring exercises to be incredibly helpful. What is a thought that I'm noticing that is causing me distress? Over and over again, or what is the thought I'm noticing in my comments section that is causing, for example, other Jewish people distress.

One of the myths I've heard people evince is that all Palestinians are Hamas. Hmm. That Hamas represents Palestine entirely. So I went through a cognitive restructuring worksheet. on my TikTok and on my Instagram interrogating that is this belief helpful or realistic? What evidence do you have to the contrary?

What might be a more effective or comforting replacement thought? How do you feel when you engage with the replacement cognition rather than the initial cognition as a way of training our minds into self soothing? But also one of the things that's so challenging from A Western socialization standpoint is we imagine things, happiness and sadness, joy and grief, pleasure and pain on single continuous sliders from good to bad construct.

If we're imagining pleasure and pain on a single slider, you can only either be experiencing pleasure or be experiencing pain. If we do the same with joy and grief, you can only either be experiencing joy. Or experience grief. I fundamentally disagree with those conceptualizations. Pain needs to be on it's own slider.

Pleasure has to be on it's own slider. Joy on it's own slider. Grief on it's own slider. Because we can experience profound grief. At the same time that we experience the healing possibilities of pleasure, we can experience pain and truly be hurting in our bodies, examining what is going on, and make sure that we are engaging in daily practices that bring us joy.

When I notice myself being in grief, Knowing that just because I'm grieving right now doesn't mean that I'm not also feeling any of these good things is such a soothing reminder that we can exist all across the spectrums of these many sliders rather than individual. Wow. So well said. Oh my God. Amazing.

I love how you started with talking about challenging our own constructs that are contributing to the kind of the trauma being alive within us. What's feeding into the trauma and challenging that. So as we're speaking, I imagined an Israeli sexual survivor who is thinking, okay, all Palestinians are Hamas, right?

Her trauma is activated. Now she's seeing a Palestinian. Obviously her lower brain is out and saying, this is the same threat. It's the same threat, but challenging that. And reconnecting to the humanity and reframing that in order to heal is so important. I think also this conversation is an example of two people who are in grief.

I know when I see your videos, that's coming from grief. That's coming from humanity. Here I am too. I've been incapacitated with everything that's been going on. I've been saying no to so many things, but then doing this. And being in these conversations has brought me joy, even while I was in my grief. I know that you creating your videos and doing what you're doing is bringing you on some level healing and joy within your grief.

I love what you just said. It really encapsulates all of that. So thank you so much for explaining that to us. You posted, uh, a read an interesting reading on your page where you were talking about your grandfather and the parallels between Jewish and Palestinian resistance. Can you tell us about that?

Yes, absolutely. Global memory, national memory, and community memory. Can be so biased and so isolated in the way we imagine resistance. So my grandfather and his sister Helen were held in the Warsaw ghetto. They were members of the Polish underground. They were both brought to concentration camps. They're two of the three members of their entire family who survived.

So it was my grandfather, his sister, Bella, who's my namesake. I'm Catherine Bella Bogan and his sister, Helen. And so Helen and my grandfather Stash were both in concentration camps and they used. every form of resistance available to them when Warsaw was being overrun by Nazis as members of the Polish underground, and they detailed incredibly violent actions that they had to take against Germans and their oppressors in order to maintain the possibility of future Jewish life.

They truly were fighting for The possibility of Jewish children someday of us being able to maintain a lineage. And so you have to bargain your soul. You have to do horrific things sometimes to face an oppressor who is using chronic violence against you. We've seen that in some of the armed resistance and the violent resistance that Palestine has used against the Zionist project of Israel and the Israeli state.

The fact that I can look back with such pride at what my grandfather was able to do, despite the cost on his soul, I can say I came from a legacy of armed resistance and resilience against oppression and hold that with a fierce. Pride, even as I recognize that it should never have had to happen, even as I recognize that was traumatizing for my grandfather, I'm two generations removed from this.

I have this fierce pride of what he did to make my sisters and I possible. I know because I've done it that Palestinian children. That Ghazan children are going to look at the adult at the Palestinians who fought for their survival with violence. Yes, because the oppressor is also being violent and thank those people for making them possible the two generations down the line of Palestinians who are going to look back at this struggle to just stay alive.

Right now, are going to thank their ancestors for making them possible. It's so strange that we isolate armed resistance when it's white people, when it's Ashkenazis, versus armed resistance when it's people that we have coded as brown. We say, that's unacceptable, but what my ancestors did was fine. Or, I'm gonna look at this with disgust, and I'm gonna look at this thing within my family context with pride.

I really struggle with squaring the different framings of those things. As if armed resistance against an oppressor for the protection of a lineage, for the possibility of progeny. is not a beautiful exercise in survival, no matter who does it. Resistance is vilified or it's glorified. I think resistance in the name of survival should always be understood on some level.

Of course, I know that you don't See any good that's come out of October 7 and what happened to the Jewish people. I know that and me too, right? But the, the famous thing is this didn't happen in a vacuum. So yes, this was awful and atrocious and it should have never happened. So is every other event that came before it that also should have never happened that led to that event.

So thank you so much for explaining that to us. You are so eloquent about talking about Jewish marginalization and comparing that. To Palestinian marginalization. I recently gave a talk to our Rotary Club here in our city. And our city is very religious, very Christian, very pro Israel. When I started, I asked them, how many people here are pro Israel?

Almost 80 percent of the room shot up their hands. I asked them, how many are pro Palestine? There was maybe, I don't know, five to 10 hands. I said, how many are pro both? Half the room. Less than pro Israel, but half the room shot up their hands. I was there to present the Arab perspective, because just like you said, people we put in the box of brown, we instantly stopped seeing them.

So as I was explaining our perspective and the extremism in Israeli society and the events that led up to October 7, I landed on this meme of a Palestinian woman holding her baby. She's very bloody. There's all these microphones around her of all these major news.

And so I showed them that picture right after I showed them the infographic of 17 years of war on these children, and I asked them, as you condemn Hamas, do you now understand why these people have so much hate in their hearts that they can commit terror onto others, the same terror that was committed onto them?

When I left that room, I will tell you about 40 percent of the room were happy with what I said. I don't know about 20%, but I know that there was a good proportion that still did not walk out of my lecture feeling something for us, feeling something for what they've deemed as brown people. So thank you so much for you being a person that can feel something, even though you are marginalized, even though you can comfortably fit into that box and not feel anything.

You didn't. Here you are. You're explaining these things, which to other Jews might be very inflammatory and very hard to listen to. That's really important. So thank you. Thank you again. I can't stop thanking you. You're a published author. Your article in a journal called Women and Therapy. an article that invites readers to join together in imagining and acting radically inclusive paths to healing and collective liberation, which is part of what we're talking about here, is including everyone.

I love that so much. Much of what we've learned about healing from the past of slavery and apartheid in America is also about inclusivity, D E I, right? Diversity, Equity, Inclusion. So can you tell us, about what that inclusivity meant in your article. So this was an introduction article to a special issue of Women in Therapy on anti racism and feminist praxis.

I wound up co facilitating the Association for Women in Psychology Academic Conference for 2021, where our theme was anti racism within psychology. So this collection, all of these different works from Black activists, Indigenous activists, and scholars, folks with non white, non western perspectives, broader, more informed perspectives on radical healing imagined outside of a white and western lens.

So the piece really summarizes all of those contributions from the different authors. So much of liberation praxis and so much of Collective healing is about empathy that moves beyond the narcissistic or empathy that moves beyond the ego. So you have to be able to imagine the shape of your own suffering.

You need to know that you have suffered, know how it impacts you, and know where it came from. Then look at someone else's suffering, their people, their, the legacy that their people have been through, their ancestry, and see the shape of your own suffering in the shape of theirs. And notice that they are a mirror.

Acknowledge that they match. Because human suffering really only has that shape. And it's pain. It's injustice. It's what people shouldn't have to experience. There's no reason that my suffering should be another shape from someone else's. So the ego part of it is knowing your own. The extension beyond that is recognizing the shape of your own in other people's.

Then you have to do something about it. So there are two steps. In feminist theory that are necessary for social change. The first one is consciousness raising of understanding and building, building insight into how your experience maps onto other people's. And the second part is mobilization of you've done that consciousness raising.

Now you understand you have empathy, you have compassion, and you can see these threads and these treasure map paths from your own suffering to these other people's now, what are you going to do about it? Mobilization is not a single event. It is a lifelong process of, okay, this is what you did about it today.

What are you going to do about it tomorrow? How are you going to build it into your life ethic? Are you going to incorporate it into your career? There's just this compounding process, this multiplicative process that has to happen for collective liberation of seeing and knowing the self, seeing and knowing the others and committing to doing something next.

And people get lost somewhere along that path, and reminding them that's what the path is can itself be helpful. So it's so beautiful recognizing the shape of your own suffering, and recognizing that in others, and turning that into a collective movement of healing. For everyone else and incorporating that in your life's work in so many ways and your conversations and the way you show up in the world as you were talking about the shape of suffering, I have never had language to say that suffering is the same.

It's the same thing. Humans experience suffering, and it's the same shape for all of us when we compare, for example, the suffering that happened in the Holocaust to the suffering that's happening to Palestinians. That is such a beautiful way of framing it is that shape is the same. It shouldn't be offensive to compare one form of suffering to another.

It certainly doesn't mean that we are comparing that oppressor to this oppressor, but that suffering. is the same. Thank you so much for saying that. How can we communicate that to Israelis who are very polarized and hate Palestinians to the core? How can we communicate that exact concept to them?

Fundamentally, we have to facilitate a tapping into their own pain of where is this because hate has to come from somewhere. Hate is not just this inherent thing. It is learned and it is built and it's usually built for a purpose. So we have to, Facilitate an insight of where does your pain come from? Is it fear?

that you yourself are going to die? Is it such intense fear that you're going to die that you have toggled off your empathy for the purpose of survival? What would it look like to be afraid or to be angry about Jewish death and to still toggle on your empathy? Can you hold? These things simultaneously, if not, what is stopping you?

There's a, there's an interrogation process that I think has to happen before empathy can be built. I always ask the question of who benefits, who is benefiting from your fear? I've said this before, and I think it sticks with me every time I say it. So I'm going to say it again, but who is telling you that it's kill or be killed and is it the arms dealers?

Who is materially benefiting, economically benefiting in terms of their power over you staying afraid and you hating Palestine? Because it's not you. Fear isn't a positive thing to feel. It's incredibly uncomfortable. Hatred isn't a positive thing to feel. It violates so many people's values. It is not a Jewish value to have hate in your heart.

That doesn't make any sense. So being able to question, who benefits from me feeling this hate, because I know it cannot possibly be me, I think is a profound exercise. I want to come back and follow the thread back a little bit to our conversation about sexual violence. Because so much of this Is pattern recognition of who has benefited from the use of these tropes from engagement with this stereotyping.

I think about the news media after October 7th talking about the rape of Israeli women, not to ensure that these Israeli women received resources, that these Israeli women were given the capacity to heal where they still alive, not to ensure a new found respect for the justified the death. of Palestinians.

Those things should not be in concert with one another. I think about the history in the United States of the proliferation of the myth of the black rapist, especially during the civil rights movement, and how there was this fear of black men are going to rape white women. It would whip up a mob frenzy and Allow people to justify lynch mobs, allow people to justify violence against black men.

We're seeing this proliferation of the myth of the brown rapist now, or the myth of the Palestinian rapist to justify the death and the brutalization of Palestinian men, as opposed to funneling resources toward Trauma survivors and sexual trauma survivors, we've seen this before, this mythology to a political end to justify mass death, it's never to support the people who were sexually violated, it is usually to brutalize some other group that is vulnerable.

As you were talking, I was thinking about what is, what resources are being channeled right now in Israel towards healing rather than perpetuating this myth, perpetuating the violence and the way that we are responding to this right now. Whether it's the deniers, right, on one side, or it's the ones that are fueling the hatred, how all of that together is just re traumatizing to anybody.

We haven't heard yet from survivors of those events, unfortunately. Probably there aren't any, unfortunately, but there are many people who have experienced sexual crimes against them. And seeing this. and the way that people are handling it on both sides, how that is activating more trauma within them. We have a responsibility to handle these kind of issues with delicacy so that people that are witnessing these events are going to start contributing to us helping heal.

If anybody, just like you, if anybody should be at the forefront of healing, it's people who have experienced this atrocity. and can speak to their healing and can help others move that along. But unfortunately, the way that we're seeing it handled in the world is affecting those exact people in a way that's probably fueling more hatred, more violence.

Would the way that you phrased that differ for a Palestinian? That is experiencing sexual crimes, or would it be the same about what you said for Israelis? The only difference is the power dynamic, right? There are layers to this too, because gendered power dynamics do exist, and patriarchal power dynamics do exist.

We have to keep those in mind. But the Israeli occupation force being able to commit sexual violence chronically against vulnerable people, against women and boys and children for the last 75 years with no accountability. In fact, certain rabbis and faith leaders endorsing the use of sexual violence against Palestinian women in the context of wartime.

That is very different than. A handful of people in Hamas being opportunistic sexual perpetrators, which is horrible, which is a human evil and should never have happened. It's different than those people perpetrating sexual violence. And then that perpetration being used by this media to justify. Mass death of the people from whom the perpetrators came like this is very small subset.

Whereas Palestinians have no They have no possibility. They have no access to mass punishment of Israelis for sexual crimes, nor should they, frankly, because mass punishment, collective punishment is horrible. Israel does, the IOF does have access to all of the weapons, to all of the resources they would need to conduct collective punishment and mass punishment in response to sexual crimes.

So there's a power imbalance here that I think is very important. What we need to focus on is the prioritization of healing and full safe embodiment and of bodily agency, it is very hard to say we care about bodily agency. I'm thinking about the perspective of Israel right now, the state of Israel. It's very hard to claim, Oh yes, we absolutely care about bodily agency.

We're so worried about our women while you're committing collective punishment and facilitating mass death. Because do you care about bodily autonomy or only for your people? If it's only for your people, What is broken in you? What turned your empathy off? We know that. We know the legacy of the Holocaust.

We know. It's more of a, I guess, rhetorical question. But I really struggle with that. We care so much about bodily agency. We care so much about the integrity of women's bodies. Yet we are going to bury women and children and all people under rubble in Gaza. I struggle to square those things. Absolutely. I totally agree with that.

How can you value life on one side but not on another? Whatever, whatever that means, in the context of a sexual trauma survivor, that is even more important. How do you value the healing of this person and then not see that suffering that crime is happening on the other end by your own people and not treat that with the same dignity and the same sensitivity?

I love you keep talking about bodily agency. I know that's a really important part of healing when you are a sexual trauma survivor. How can one reclaim that bodily agency after an event like that? Well, I think so much of it is really going and getting evidence based treatment as it's available.

Cognitive processing therapy and prolonged exposure are life saving, and a big piece of prolonged exposure is staying in an environment or an experience that causes distress, that causes severe distress. for long enough that the distress can resolve. And normally that period is about 45 minutes. So if it's someone who has experienced sexual violence and they are terrified to go sit in a movie theater or be around a crowd of people, it's staying in that movie theater or staying around a crowd of people for 45 minutes until the distress resolves and you don't think, someone is going to assault me in this theater.

Or it's Going on a date and staying on a date for 45 minutes and obviously there are ways that people can maintain their safety in these contexts, but I think the logic of exposure is so valuable to sexual trauma survivors, particularly, and I'm going to pivot a little bit to my sexual functioning and pleasure oriented work, particularly for sexual healing.

Because when you've experienced an embodied sexual trauma, when violence has been done against your body, and you have had that agency and that autonomy removed, being able, being in a sexual context at all can be a trigger where people will experience fear and panic and they'll disassociate. One of the first things I recommend to sexual trauma survivors who feel alienated from their body, from their sexual joy, from their sense of pleasure is to masturbate.

That's the advice I give my clients is spend some time alone with your own body in a sexual context and see how long it takes you to feel safe again. Maybe when you start noticing your own arousal is a cue of fear because any sexual cue is interpreted as a threat. And the longer you stay there, the more that fear and stress response has the opportunity to resolve, and you can experience embodied pleasure and joy and reward again, we can extend that logic to all sorts of physical and touch oriented play, whether it's.

Brush your hair for 45 minutes and see what it's like to stay in your body, or do a really sensory oriented skincare routine, put lotion on your hands, put on face lotion, stand in a shower, hug someone that you trust, just really get back into your body in an intentional way, and see how long you have to stay there before the fear of interfacing with your own body Because I do so much sex research, a lot of my work is sexual functioning focused.

I tend to be like masturbate, have fun. That is so important. I totally agree with you. So much of what we know about trauma is about reconnecting to joy. And what is more joyful than being with your body in that way? That is a birthright. That is something that you are born to enjoy, that you should enjoy.

For some of our viewers that might be like, Oh my God, they're talking about masturbation. You and your partner, you and your husband, you and your wife, this is a right for you. This is, you should be enjoying this. When you go through crimes like that, it's taken away from you. And trauma in general is a joy stripped away from you.

These situations that are benign, that supposedly could be Healing and bonding become threatening. That is the crime in itself that is taken away from you. We, in our healing from trauma in so many ways, have to reconnect to joy. When it comes to our body, that can mean masturbation. That can mean brushing our hair.

That can mean doing yoga. Yoga, I think, is a really effective way of women reconnecting with their bodies, and is actually an evidence based way of healing what we're seeing now in some of the schools in Gaza. Unfortunately, the trauma is still happening. They cannot anchor to that safety in order to move on and start working on the trauma.

So the trauma is still happening. However, seeing videos of Adults playing with children in these schools, like singing and dancing and playing while we're hearing airstrikes around us in planes, that in itself is one way that joy is being used to help them cope with the environment they're in. Thank you so much for highlighting that reconnection to joy as integral and that embodiment as integral to healing from sexual trauma.

One thing that's come up for me in this experiment called Superhumanizer is I invite people that I feel are compassionate, that are understanding to both sides of the experience. And of course, in that exploration and inviting people, I've met Jewish people that want nothing to do with me just because I have Arab and Palestinian heritage.

And of course, I've met Palestinians that want nothing to do with me because I'm interviewing Jewish people. So From that moment, I've started asking my Jewish guests, what would you say to those people that are so polarized that they don't even want to come on the show because I'm interviewing Jewish people?

What would you say to them? I guess let's start with love. I love Palestine. I'm not trying to come in and rescue Palestine. I'm not saying that Palestinians are not resilient all on their own, that they don't have a beautiful ethic all on their own. I love Palestine because of the lessons It's teaching diaspora Jews about a maintenance of resilience in the face of threat.

Palestine and what is happening in Gaza right now is our clearest example in history and the most publicized and accessible example in history in terms of social media and really being able to see the boots on the ground narrative of what happened to our own ancestors. There is such a profound Compassion that can be built.

I love Palestine for saying we're actually going to survive this and for their legacy of resilience, because it ties to the legacy of resilience of my own people, there is a beautiful rooted connectedness between Jews and Arabs, Jews and Muslims, Jews and Palestinians who have survived. Waves and waves of oppression, minoritization, and dispossession over generations.

Anti Zionism is not the same as anti Semitism, and Jews are not the same as Zionists. So there are plenty of Jewish people who endorse Palestinian survival, who think, who will proudly say, from the river to the sea, who strongly feel that all Palestinians should have the right of return. That the state of Israel does not have the right to be an ethno nationalist state and exclude other people.

You will find some of your most ardent allies in Jewish people. If you will have us, I do approach that humbly of if you will have us, because I recognize that I look like the oppressor, that I was raised by your oppressor, that I've been socialized in the context of your oppressor. Sometimes I'm going to put my foot in my mouth and sometimes I'm going to say the wrong thing.

And that harm. Can be really challenging for Palestinian people to have to deal with from Jewish people. So I approach humbly of I would love to ally with you if you will have me because I love your people and what they are teaching me. If the answer is no, that's also okay. You build community however you need to build community.

As you were talking, I got a little emotional because it really is so beautiful when we come together as a community of people who have experienced suffering and people who want to see the world heal. To me, anybody that does that is my ally. Unfortunately, in this pursuit of peace, there's always going to be people that don't want peace.

For people that are in that perspective, whether it's on the Israeli or the Palestinian side, Israeli, I, I never, I can never see a partner in peace in Arabs. Palestinian, I can never see a partner in peace and Israelis. And in Jewish people, I think that voice needs to become quieter and the voices like us need to become louder because right now what's happening is that our voice is the quieter one.

In many ways, this is why I wanted to create this podcast. So thank you for saying that. I hope. that you've spoken to those people's hearts, just like you've spoken to all our hearts around the world, really. Um, I would like to ask you in our final question, Oh, no. Our final question is, would you share with us a notable post poem or a piece of writing that helped you navigate the conflict or a stress management practice that's been helpful to you?

Oh, that's such a great question. Yes, I have one that I think was written on October 10th. And this is just part of it. It's from I grant you refuge. It says I grant you refuge from hurt and suffering with words of sacred scripture. I shield the oranges from the sting of phosphorus and the shades of cloud from the smog.

I grant you refuge in knowing that the dust will clear. And those who fell in love and died together will one day laugh. I have one to share with you, too. You might recognize it. If we kill them, we will have peace as a fallacy, a farce, a trap, a lie. Peace for what? Not your soul. Peace for whom? Not your ancestors, not your progeny, not their elders.

not their children. Peace is not born of violence. Peace is not the result of murder. For what kind of peace do you search? For what kind of peace do you struggle? If you seek it with missiles, how can you ever hope to find it? If it leaves your hands bloody, how can you ever hope to build it? Who wrote that one?

I did. I'm very humbled by, by you reading my words to me in this context. That's a little heady. Thank you. Thank you. When I first read it, I thought it was so profound. As I learned about you today, I've understood the words. I've understood where it comes from. Thank you so much for those words. Thank you.

Wow. What a joy to get to talk to you and what an honor. I really appreciate it. Oh, me too, my dear. It's been just one of the biggest blessings to meet you, to connect with you, to see that your journey is just beginning in all of this advocacy. I'm so excited for you. With that, I'm going to end our time together with just a small prayer.

Thank you so much again for being here. May all beings everywhere thrive in peace and dignity and share in all our joys. And may we see true peace in the Middle East for all in our lifetime. Amen. Amen. Thank you.