Chicago Jewish Activists Embark on Indefinite Hunger Strike Over Gaza
Source: In These Times
Hunger strikes have deep roots in Chicago—and across the country—as escalations in campaigns for justice.
Shane Burley June 16, 2025
The risk of famine increases in Gaza as the Israeli government’s blockade of all aid to Gaza approaches its third month.
“I felt this almost sense of panic as every day went by without food let in,” Ash Bohrer, a Chicago-based Jewish activist in the Palestinian solidarity movement, told me as she outlined exactly what the stakes are as the genocide continues in Gaza. “When I first heard it, my initial thought was … if there is some way I can use my body … I am ready and willing to do it, and I think about it as a personal, moral and religious obligation to do so.”
Bohrer is joining five other members of Jewish Voice for Peace, Chicago — Becca Lubow, Avey Rips, Seph Mozes, Audrey Gladson and Benjamin Teller — in a hunger strike to demand an end to the genocide in Gaza, unconditional military aid for Israel and the blockade of food and medical aid to the 2.3 million Palestinians now living amongst the rubble.
Bohrer, who’s also a scholar of social movements at Notre Dame, says she felt the moral and strategic call to use whatever resources or privileges she had to raise the stakes of the Palestinian freedom struggle in the United States as “our Palestinian comrades watch their friends and their family and their community members suffer a genocide in real time — starvation of truly epic proportions that comes [after] 19 months of bombing, 20 years of blockade and 78 years of occupation and ethnic cleansing.”
Read more: https://inthesetimes.com/article/jewish-leaders-chicago-hunger-strike-gaza
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