Cain and Abel by Albrecht Dürer, woodcut, 1511.

I began publicly invoking the word “genocide” in July 2025 to describe the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza in response to the horrific Hamas terrorist attacks of October 7, 2023, and the incomprehensible ongoing hostage crisis. Since that time, despite increasing agreement among liberal Jewish organizations over the use of this term, I cannot help but feel like I wear the mark of Cain in the Jewish community. Many colleagues, friends, and loved ones have gone from praising my recent award as a “Rabbinic Human Rights Hero” for my efforts to mobilize the Jewish community against the death penalty, to vilifying me for what they claim is parroting anti-Semitic canards. Others have dismissed me as “insane,” a “psychopath,” or attempted to shame me for what they feel is my abandonment of my fellow descendants of Holocaust survivors, and the Jewish people as a whole.

I thought I knew of vitriol and recrimination; I was wrong. For years, proponents of the death penalty have lodged heinous verbal attacks against me for my public activism as the co-founder of “L’chaim! Jews Against the Death Penalty.” Even that could not have prepared me, however, for the deluge of hate and ridicule I have received throughout the Jewish world this past month. Now, I feel like a persona non grata when I enter many congregations and communities that previously embraced me as an ordained cantor. Decades-long friends and colleagues have started to treat me like a social pariah. Acquaintances who know me less well are more direct. “Kapo,” some of them have called me, adding: “You’d sell us out to the Nazis any day just to keep yourself lookin’ good to your antisemite friends.”

Critics may ask why I subject myself to the kangaroo court of public opinion. The truth is that it is not for my sake,........

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