‘Love in organizing’: A tribute to a queer Jew for Palestine by Theo Rehm

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”… Two of the now-iconic signs she carried with her to actions read “Jewish dyke standing with Palestinian queers,” and “This 90 year old Jew says Zionism is genocide,” and she went nowhere without her rainbow flag. She made it clear that the struggles to which she devoted her life were not only interconnected, but inseparable.