Creating solidarity after October 7
Transplanted from Essex County to L.A., two women work to Bring Them Home
In the hours after the October 7 massacre in Israel, Jessica Lipman was hoping to find some solidarity and understanding from people she knew.
“My grandparents and great-grandparents had told me the Jewish people are the only ones you can count on to be there for you, but I was like, no way,” she said. “We have had the civil rights movement, affirmative action, Black Lives Matter. I’ve been a part of them. my parents were a part of them.
“But it’s true. They are right.
“I took part in a learning series about Black Lives Matter, like a fireside race chat. I spent hours and hours.” Yet when October 7 happened, Ms. Lipman, 32, discovered that the person leading the workshops “was one of the most anti-Zionist people I have ever met.
“On October 8, I had to block him.
“I felt the world went from no one being mad at the Jewish people, to everyone being mad at us. I felt like they had taken away what Zionism means and made it into this bad thing. This is how I’ve felt since October 7, and I feel the Jewish community might be the only one that has my back.”
Ms. Lipman lives in Los Angeles now, but she grew up in Livingston, surrounded by other Jews. She became bat mitzvah at Temple Sharey Tefilo-Israel in South Orange. “I still remember the tunes we learned in Hebrew school,” she said.
Despite her strong identification as a Jew, she didn’t pursue a role in the Jewish community when she moved to Los Angeles, where she works in the entertainment industry as a producer. But as the months after October 7 began to pile up and dozens and dozens of hostages remained missing, she decided she had to take action. “I was screaming into my echo chamber for months and months, and I needed something to do with my Jewish energy,” she said.
A social-media post from the organization Bring Them Home caught her attention.
“It said hostages first or nothing, and I really appreciated that because that’s the way you can connect with people who aren’t Zionist or educated on the topic,” Ms. Lipman said. “But most people with a pulse would agree that there shouldn’t be any innocent hostages or any innocent people dying on either side. I thought if I would make a difference in any community, it would be to get people to talk about the issue of the hostages.”
Ms. Lipman, who has several cousins living in Israel, sent an email to the group and asked if they wanted some help.
The answer was a definite yes, and Ms. Lipman began to work on building a chapter of the organization in the area. She posted online and asked for volunteers to join her to help raise awareness of the hostages’ plight.
One of the first to respond was Debbie Paperman.
Like Ms. Lipman, Ms. Paperman is an Essex County native — she grew up in West Orange, and her parents only recently moved out of town — and like Ms. Lipman she attended Temple Sharey Tefilo-Israel in South Orange. Though the two are not the same age and didn’t overlap in Hebrew school, Ms. Lipman says the whole thing “was bashert.”
The two women bonded over their shared history and their desire to advocate for Israel and the hostages. Joined by some 15 other volunteers, they have hosted several rallies, including an early September event held on the grounds of Beverly Hills City Hall. The event was co-sponsored by some 20 organizations, including StandWithUs. Several hundred people turned out for the program, including the city’s mayor, Lester Friedman, whose parents survived the Holocaust.
“We are heartbroken, but we have to stay active,” Ms. Lipman told the crowd. “The families still need our support. Tonight is not political. Tonight is about finding our community in our community.”
Ms. Lipman said that when you come to Hollywood, you hear all the Jewish last names, which was invigorating. After October 7, though, “Judaism is way more a part of my identity than I think I realized and certainly than other people realized,” she said.
Which makes what she does a bit tricky, as the entertainment industry hasn’t exactly been supporting Israel in the war that Hamas started and that Iran and its proxies have continued to foment.
“I worry that my Zionism is going to get in the way of me getting work,” she said candidly. “Are people going to think I’m a genocidal murderer? I hope not.
“But some of these people talk blatantly and flagrantly against Israel. Does me hosting rallies put a target on my back? I don’t care. I would rather find work elsewhere than work with people who don’t want to see my family safe in Israel.”
For Ms. Paperman, who considers herself “a very political person,” getting involved with Bring Them Home transcended those beliefs. “This is a bipartisan issue about people and their families,” she said. “There is so much divisiveness going on, but I know this is not political, and want other people to see that.”
A former Birthright Israel staffer and Hebrew-school educator, and an active member of the Jewish community, on October 7 Ms. Paperman messaged friends in Israel to check in on them. One lost a family member that day. “Even though it’s been a year, it’s hard to know what to say to him,” she said. “I want to be able to say that I am doing something. Even if it’s just a tiny difference, I want to make that difference.”
While other Jewish groups were doing letter-writing campaigns and making phone calls on behalf of Israel, Ms. Paperman said she hoped to do something more concrete.
Joining with Ms. Lipman to organize Bring Them Home Los Angeles “gave me a sanity of sorts to say I’m doing something. A lot of things are done at the organizational level, and they don’t feel organic. This is just women wanting to get things done, and that meant something to me.”
Being involved Jewishly has always been a strong part of Ms. Paperman’s life. As a teen, she was very active in NIFTY, the Reform movement’s youth group. “It shaped my identity,” she said, adding that “I keep in touch with more of my NIFTY friends than my high school friends.
“I was lucky enough to live in a community where Judaism was important. Hebrew school was important. It’s part of who I am and why I am.
“If you want to hide it, that’s you, but that’s not who I am, and in my mind, we can’t do that. I teach Hebrew school now. because I want kids to know that being Jewish is not all terrible. There’s a lot of beauty in it.”
“I want the Jewish community to remember that we have to be united,” Ms. Paperman concluded. “If we’re not united, we have nothing.”
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