Oh look another self-hating jew all because they questioned the zionist terrorist organization !!
Quote:Shatzi Weisberger at a pro-Palestine demonstration in New York, June 26, 2022. (Gili Getz)
Shatzi Weisberger, a lesbian, Jewish anti-Zionist and lifelong organizer, and a source of inspiration and strength for thousands of people, died on Dec. 1, 2022, at the age of 92. She was, along with many queer Jews like herself, committed to Palestinian liberation; now, as our ancestor, her memory will fuel us until Palestine is free.
Shatzi was 89 years old when I met her through the New York City chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP-NYC), and her solidarity with the Palestinian struggle dated back decades. Her life’s work spanned the movements for queer liberation and racial justice, the women’s movement, and anti-nuclear activism. A nurse for 47 years, she joined the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) in the 1980s and cared for AIDS patients during the height of the epidemic. With the rise of mass incarceration, she handed out issues of abolitionist newsletter No More Cages on New York City sidewalks. And while she grew up a Zionist, after coming to terms with Israel’s oppression of Palestinians she consistently made herself visible as an anti-Zionist Jew. She brought anti-Zionism into every other movement she was part of, because for her, it naturally belonged.
What I found remarkable about Shatzi when I met her — besides her very existence as a self-proclaimed 89-year-old Jewish dyke for Palestinian liberation — was that she was still working to figure out what her role was in that political moment and at that stage in her life. She had recently trained to become a death educator, understanding that her years of caring for dying people, and her proximity to her own death, uniquely positioned her to talk to people about “the art of dying.”
Shatzi had been working those muscles — honing and adjusting her role in the world — her whole life. She was fueled by a legacy of people who dedicated their lives to their principles: her great-grandfather, Samuel Gompers, was the founder of the American Federation of Labor, and her mother, May, also a lesbian, served as grand marshal of Pride. Shatzi said she had “organizer’s blood,” and carried on that lineage by living her values. After completing a Master’s degree in psychiatric nursing, Shatzi found that the field was abhorrent to her and left it, organizing against the psychiatric practices of the time instead. As a young white woman on Long Island awakening to anti-Blackness, she began organizing against racist redlining practices. And when she ended an 18-year marriage and came out as a lesbian — adjustments of massive proportions — she threw herself into the feminist and queer struggles.
For many years, Shatzi’s commitment to social justice movements coexisted with Zionism, another inheritance from her family. Her politics changed because she never considered the process of getting into alignment with her values to be finished: she decided that if she was going to figure out her place in the women’s movement as a Jewish lesbian, she ought to “learn more about the Middle East.” In doing so, she arrived at the position that Israel, which purported to speak in the name of Jews, was enacting a slow genocide against Palestinians on Palestinian land. In a 2020 conversation with JVP-NYC, Shatzi said that this realization “just broke my heart.”
'Love in organizing': A tribute to a queer Jew for Palestine