This week, I landed in New York for a work trip that happened to coincide with NYC Pride Week. This wasn’t my first time experiencing Pride in the city, but my most vivid memory takes me back to 2020. I moved here just as COVID-19 hit the globe, arriving for a year-long fellowship in LGBTQ medicine.

If 2020 required us to constantly wear physical masks to protect ourselves from our environment, the aftermath of October 7 has forced a completely different kind of mask onto any Israeli walking the streets of New York. Especially those of us carrying overlapping, complex identities – LGBTQ , Jewish, Israeli, and liberal Zionist. These current masks might be physically more comfortable, but beneath the surface, they are far more suffocating, sorrowful, and alarming.

As a specialist in infectious diseases, my entire profession revolves around studying and understanding viruses. But no vaccine from Moderna or Pfizer can stop the epidemic of 2026. This is a social contagion that has festered beneath the surface for years, waiting for the........

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