Reflection: Tell me more
by Stefanie Brendler, August 2025
At a Yiddish music festival one day, while wearing a pin that said “Free Palestine,” a stranger approached me: “So you support Hamas?” he asked. I paused, considering the variety of ways in which I could respond.
It was December 2024, fourteen months since the violence of October 7, which took the lives of roughly 1,200 civilians in southern Israel, including Hayim Katsman, someone I knew personally. Hayim was an American-Israeli peace activist who I met when he lived in Seattle to get his PhD at the University of Washington. He studied current trends in Religious-Zionism and its relationship to radicalism, and we played music together for our shul’s kabolas shabes. It had been over a year since his murder, as well as more than a year of a retaliatory collective punishment by the Israeli state upon the people of Gaza. Tens of thousands of Gazans had been murdered, and hundreds of thousands were displaced and struggling to survive. At the time of this writing, the genocide continues.
“Tell me more about your question,” I replied, with both caution and curiosity.
He told me the pin made him wonder whether I supported terrorists and the destruction of Israel.
“Tell me more about that,” I replied, not answering his initial question.
He continued on. He speculated about how I felt and what I believed, continuing to wonder, but never asking me a direct, open-ended question.
I eventually named what I noticed: that I felt skeptical about responding because his initial question felt antagonistic, like he was trying to pick a fight. I didn’t trust that he was genuinely curious about what I thought or how I felt, and that I would be happy to have a conversation with him if I could trust he wanted the same. He got defensive, not about his beliefs, but about his curiosity and ability to be trusted. He insisted he did not want to pick a fight and was genuinely curious about my beliefs.
So I asked him if he would reconsider the way in which he approached me: perhaps start with, “Hi, my name is ___, what’s your name?” followed by, “I’m interested to learn what the pin you’re wearing means to you, would you mind telling me about it?”
He apologized, introduced himself, asked me my name, and asked if I would be open to having a do-over, which we did.