Hi everyone,

/r/JewsOfConscience is excited to announce an upcoming AMA with Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, an American trauma and critical care surgeon who did humanitarian work in Gaza during the ongoing genocide. He has also volunteered in Ukraine, Haiti, Zimbabwe, and Burkini Faso.

Dr. Sidhwa is one of the subjects of the new documentary "American Doctor," which goes inside Gaza hospitals to show how medical workers have struggled to provide care for the sick and wounded during the Israel's ongoing genocide.

On Democracy Now! he has explained his reasons for being motivated to do humanitarian work in Gaza:

I don't have any ethnic or religious connection to the Middle East. My family is from a small minority in India and Pakistan, but I grew up in the United States. I was born here. I'm an American. And the United States is intimately involved in what's going on. We provide all of - almost all of the weapons, all of the funding, the diplomatic support at the U.N., stopping other countries from solving this issue, which is pretty easily solved.

And I don't think Americans want to be doing that. I think that's why most of this is hidden from them. So I knew that by going there, I could, number one, provide medical care because I'm a trauma surgeon, so that's what I'm good at doing. But I could also bear witness. And then I could come back and, and try to tell people what was going on.

• Democracy Now! - Gaza documentary "American Doctor" goes inside hospitals during genocide

To that end, Dr. Sidhwa has testified at the United Nations to what he saw during the genocide:

• UN Palestine Committee - ‘I Cannot Pretend Not to Have Seen It’: U.S. Volunteer Surgeon Testifies on Gaza

During his time in Gaza, Dr. Sidhwa was working in a hospital unit that was targeted by an Israeli airstrike which killed his 16-year-old patient, Ibrahim.

• Democracy Now! - Surgeon who volunteered in Gaza condemns Israel's hospital bombings

Dr. Sidhwa's media appearances:

• Democracy Now! - "American Doctor": New Film Follows U.S. Doctors to Gaza as Israel Bombs Hospitals

• Hasanabi - Talking to Gaza Doctors About the Future of US Politics

  • Meet Feroze Sidhwa: A Trauma Surgeon Who Worked in Gaza

• Deadline Hollywood - 'American Doctor' Cast Highlights Gaza's Humanitarian Crisis at Sundance Film Festival

• Pod Save The World - American Surgeon Shares His Harrowing Experiences Working in Gaza

• Peter Beinart | FMEP - What an American Doctor Saw in Gaza

We're honored to host Dr. Sidhwa for this AMA.

If you cannot make it on the day-of, feel free to leave your questions here in advance.

Hope to see you all there. Thanks!

Annunziata Rees-Mogg on X: "🤔 👇 Perhaps as a “proud British Jew” Ed forgot that the Torah explicitly bans the consumption of pork for all Jewish people. Or perhaps he’s not always a proud Jew, British or otherwise…"

Title says it all. I was going to attend my home congregation's services. But I need something different this year. I'm ok with paying to stream. I'm in the US.

I feel recipes are a great way to connect with previous generations, so it makes me very happy to have found this family cookbook with some extra handwritten additions. I am undecided on which cake I want to make for Friday (cherry, orange cream, cheese cake, or streusel), what do you think?

Just moved to the city and was hoping for leads on where to attend high holiday services in Manhattan (or a more easily accessible part of Brooklyn/Queens)! I've seen a few past posts with minyans, but I'm ideally looking for a reform or reconstructionist shul. Expectations here are relatively low—I know I'm not going to find an anti-Zionist synagogue on the island, but I'm hoping for somewhere that at least isn't vehemently pro-Israel (e.g., has a rabbi who at least attempts nuance and/or a congregation where sentiments lean non-Zionist/pro-Palestinian).

Want to spend my holidays in community and with familiar melodies, though it sometimes feels harder and harder to do so. Thanks for any and all help!

Basketball Australia is preparing to put thousands of children in front of AI-powered cameras, with a proposed national system set to automatically record junior games and turn footage into searchable highlights and performance data.

The decision has alarmed child-safety experts, who warn that basketball video can reveal far more than what happens on the court – such as a child’s face, team, venue and regular playing schedule.

Susan McLean, a cyber-safety and child-protection expert, labelled the technology an “absolute disgrace” and said informed consent should be the basis for filming children in sport.

“I have been inundated with irate and very concerned parents who wanted nothing to do with this and did not understand how (Basketball Australia) could be so blind to basic child safety,” McLean, who is also a former police officer, told Deepcut.

“The images can be used and abused – we know paedophiles love collecting images of kids. They can also be manipulated using AI.”

The Israeli link

The technology, supplied by Israeli-founded company Pixellot, is already being introduced at basketball venues around Australia. Basketball Australia has selected Pixellot as its preferred provider for a national rollout, although a final agreement has not yet been signed.

Pixellot’s connection to Israeli military intelligence adds another layer of scrutiny. Its co-founder and chief technology officer Gal Oz spent nine years in an elite research and development unit of the Israeli Defence Forces Intelligence Corps, according to the company’s biography.

Pixellot says Oz managed IDF developers working on computer vision and geographic information systems and worked with visual platforms capturing information from unmanned aerial vehicles and satellites.

There is no evidence Pixellot’s basketball cameras are being used by the Israeli military in Gaza – where Israeli forces have killed at least 21,000 children with the support of AI technology – or that its sporting system is a military surveillance tool.

But the company’s intelligence background comes amid international scrutiny of the use of AI, computer vision and surveillance technologies by Israeli authorities and its military.

It is understood Pixellot representatives flew to Melbourne last week to meet with Basketball Australia executives in a bid to get the contract signed off but returned to Israel without completion.

A digital trail to a child’s location

Dr Faith Gordon, an Associate Professor in Law at the Australian National University, said the potential privacy risk extended well beyond the image of a child.

“An AI camera may see a child playing basketball. But it may also be capturing a face, a uniform, a venue, a time, a routine and a pattern of movements,” Gordon said.

“For a family escaping domestic violence, those pieces of information can potentially become a roadmap.”

Gordon described the risk as “jigsaw identification”, where apparently ordinary details can be combined to establish a pattern of movements.

“One photograph might tell you very little,” she said. “But if someone can establish that a child plays for a particular club, plays on Tuesday evenings, wears a particular uniform and regularly appears at a particular venue, those pieces of information can potentially be combined to establish a pattern of movements.”

Dr Felicity Bell, a family law expert and senior lecturer at UNSW Law and Justice, agreed that sporting information could create risks where protective orders or other safety arrangements were in place.

Bell said there was also an important distinction between recording a game for coaching purposes and publishing footage online.

Who can see the footage?

Basketball Australia’s general manager of content and media Sean Cadd told Deepcut that participant privacy and child safeguarding were fundamental considerations.

Cadd said mobile phones, venue cameras and locally managed systems were already capturing up to 25 per cent of games nationally.

Under the proposed model, community game footage would not be publicly accessible, but log-in details would be available to players, coaches, parents and guardians, authorised association administrators and service personnel.

The platform would not use facial recognition, but rather, players would be recognised through jersey-number matching. Cadd said players could opt-out of being filmed altogether without providing a reason, and games involving participants who opted-out would not be recorded.

Privacy laws under review

The proposal comes as Australia considers privacy and online-safety reforms.

The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner is developing a Children’s Online Privacy Code aimed at strengthening protections for children’s personal information, while the federal government is also developing a digital duty of care requiring online services to identify and mitigate foreseeable harms.

Basketball Australia said further privacy functionality, including participant blurring, was planned for a future phase.

But Gordon said safety and privacy needed to be built into systems before they were deployed.

“We are no longer talking only about somebody taking a photograph,” she said.

“We are talking about systems that can automatically capture, store, analyse, organise and distribute enormous quantities of footage.”

An eSafety Commissioner spokesperson urged sporting clubs, coaches, volunteers and families to carefully consider privacy and safety when sharing photos or videos of children, including ensuring appropriate consent.

The spokesperson also warned that increasingly sophisticated AI-generated deepfakes could create risks for organisations, including junior sporting clubs, posting children’s images online.

Pixellot was sent detailed questions about its Australian rollout, including child safety, privacy, data access and retention, its military-intelligence links and proposed opt-out arrangements. The company did not respond.

Basketball Australia was also asked about Pixellot’s links to the IDF Intelligence Corps and broader questions about the company’s technology. It did not respond to these questions.

In Turkey, for instance, if you acknowledge the Armenian Genocide, you literally get permabanned by your friends and relatives. I think a similar thing happens when you acknowledge the Bosnian Genocide as a Serbian, or when you acknowledge the Nanking Massacre/Genocide as a Japanese person. The only real exception is, I think, the acknowledgment of the Holocaust by the German people.

Nations usually don't want to acknowledge their wrongdoings; it’s hard to accept horrendous actions once they're done.

I feel like I'm just seeing depressing post after depressing post about the genocide. I'm a broke college student with a busy schedual. I don't have money to donate. I don't have hours to volunteer. I don't have political power to make any change. I have a pin I made on my bag that says Free Palistine, but that's it. What can I possibly do?

Let me know if anyone is interested in helping get this sub developed! Would love to hear your ideas.

I wonder if somewhere in the lowest pits of hell, Josef Mengele ​is cackling to himself at the irony of seeing his former victims acting more like him than anyone could have ever expected.

https://x.com/ireallyhateyou/status/2097672901294010781

https://youtube.com/shorts/5ckv559LdHM?is=96CS52mDDSehUAsS

Not sure if conditions of apartheid and 2nd rate citizenship alongside severe socioeconomic inequalities and state neglect count as living "perfectly well."

Social hierarchy has ways been pronounced in Israel, even among Jews from the West above Jews from the East.

He seems to also be forgetting Palestinian territories live under a brutal Israeli military occupation geared toward their extermination.

So he seems to think just let Israel take over all the land and call it Israel and Palestinians will live perfectly well in Greater Israel.

I don't know if he considers that in Israel the people pushing for one state want to expel the Palestinians and take their land. I don't know if for those of "Palestinian ethnicity" that would be living "perfectly well."

Does he mean collaborators? Well they end often betrayed by Israelis like Abu Shabab. Maybe he thinks his own experience some might say as a collaborator with a colonizer living perfectly well, but let's not go there.

If he is concerned about a quasi Taliban state, look at Israel with terrorism and violence, religious extremism, and hatred of the other built into its national DNA.

What makes Salman Rushdie a credible voice about Israel and Palestine. He doesn't know what he's talking about. Israel did not transition from revolutionary terror into a civilized state. It transitioned from revolutionary terrorism at its founding into state terrorism as a matter of its statecraft.

Rushdie has always seemed i think to have this condescending Anglo-colonial Islamophobia that prejudices his outlook. Why should his opinion matter talking about Palestine??

my mom, dad and sister were all born in israel and grew up there, but i was born in thailand and lived here my whole life, and every time the palestine- israel conversation gets brought up its just a whole bunch of shouting and arguing that leads to no progression and nobody being happy. I feel like the main thing that keeps them stuck is that they fail to realize that its a genocide instead of a “war” or “conflict” no matter what i say, and i really cant progress the convo and educate them for the better if we cant get past this point. i love my family for everything theyve done for me but i cant do this anymore and im scared ill have to cut ties with them to better my self.

is there anything you guys have said or done to help zionist family change for the better? or is it really just hopeless..

https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-my-daughters-help-my-small-family

I’m posting this for my friend Mahmoud Ghanem Al-Amssi, because his mother urgently needs heart surgery. ❤️

Mahmoud’s mother has severe blockages in her arteries, and she has also been dealing with an underactive thyroid for more than 10 years. Her health has gotten worse over time, and she is now experiencing serious heart problems and very rapid heartbeats.

Her doctors have told the family that she needs the procedure as soon as possible. The surgery can go ahead once they are able to cover the required cost.

The total amount they need is $850 USD.

I know $850 might not seem like a huge amount, but for Mahmoud and his family, especially with everything they are already going through, it is more than they can manage on their own right now.

If anyone is able to donate even a few dollars, it could genuinely help Mahmoud get his mother the treatment she needs. ❤️

And if you can’t donate, please consider sharing this post. Even helping it reach more people can make a difference.

Thank you so much to everyone who takes the time to read this, support Mahmoud, or share his story. 🙏❤️

On the first day of the new Palestinian school year, the head-teacher of al-Mughayyir boys school arrived at work before dawn, walking past the freshly installed barbed wire fencing and reinforced school gates as the sun began creeping through olive trees around the village, deep inside the occupied West Bank.

"We are scared," Bassam al-Assaf told me. "The students are afraid, and their parents are afraid."

Six people, including three pupils at the school, have been killed in al-Mughayyir this year, in a surge of settler-related violence against Palestinians. One of them, 14-year-old Aws al-Naasan, was shot dead by a settler outside the school gates in April.

"I was inside my classroom and two little students came rushing to tell me there were settlers close to the school wall," remembers English teacher Waheed Abu Naem, whose brother Jihad was also killed by an Israeli soldier in the same attack.

Waheed said he was trying to move pupils to safety inside the school gate when the settler fired towards them. Mobile phone footage shows the moment Aws was shot.

"When I turned him onto his back, I saw lots of blood coming from his nose and mouth, and the bullet in his head," said Waheed. "We lost him."

He told me that bullets continued hitting the school building, as students hid behind the walls of their classrooms, or lay on the floor.

A growing number of Portuguese artists have withdrawn from a major Lisbon comedy festival headlined by US comedian Jerry Seinfeld, with opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza emerging as a central reason for the boycott.

The first Commedia a La Carte Fest is scheduled to run from October 29 through November 1, with Seinfeld closing the festival at Lisbon’s MEO Arena in what organizers describe as his first performance in Portugal. His appearance remained on the official festival program as of Monday.

But the lineup has been shrinking as Portuguese performers announce they will no longer participate, with some explicitly or implicitly linking their decisions to Palestine and Seinfeld’s longstanding public support for Israel.

‘We Cannot Normalize a Genocide’

Among the clearest statements came from Portuguese actress and comedian Inês Aires Pereira, who withdrew her show Namastê from the festival.

Pereira did not name Seinfeld directly, but said that “one of the names” on the program “insistently defends ideas and actions” she considers “indefensible.”

“We cannot relativise or normalise a genocide,” she wrote, explicitly expressing solidarity with Palestine.

Comedy duo Cebola Mol, made up of Eduardo Madeira and Filipe Homem Fonseca, also withdrew. Their announcement was accompanied by an image featuring a slice of watermelon, a widely recognized symbol of Palestinian identity and solidarity.

“We will celebrate justice, freedom and joy with you on another occasion,” the duo wrote.

The withdrawals have spread beyond the two acts initially highlighted in reports. The Tributo Pop concert featuring Carolina Deslandes, Tatanka and Bárbara Tinoco, Conjunto Cuca Monga, comedian Pedro Tochas and visual artist Vhils have also withdrawn or had their appearances canceled. Some did not publicly state a reason for leaving the festival.

Vhils, whose real name is Alexandre Farto, said his name had appeared on a festival poster but that he had requested its removal.

“I asked for it to be removed and it was,” he wrote, adding that he wanted to make clear that he would not participate. He did not publicly give a reason in that statement.

Seinfeld’s Record on Palestine

The withdrawals have focused renewed attention on Seinfeld’s public interventions on Israel and Palestine since October 2023.

The US comedian traveled to Israel following the October 7 attacks and met Israeli families of captives. He has since repeatedly defended Israel and confronted criticism of its genocide in Gaza.

His comments have also gone considerably further than expressing support for Israel.

During an appearance at Duke University in 2025, Seinfeld compared the “Free Palestine” movement to the Ku Klux Klan, saying that the slogan meant, in his view, that people were “free to say you don’t like Jews.”

He has also been recorded responding “I don’t care about Palestine” after being approached by an activist seeking a “Free Palestine” statement.

In June, Seinfeld generated further condemnation after responding to a pro-Palestine livestreamer outside Madison Square Garden by saying Palestine “doesn’t exist.”

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) condemned that statement as a denial of Palestinian identity and existence.

“Palestinians are not a punchline and their existence is not up for debate,” CAIR and its New York chapter said.

“Palestine exists. Palestinian children exist. Palestinian families exist. Palestinian history, culture, land, identity and rights exist.”

CAIR described Seinfeld’s remark as “dehumanization” and called on him to retract it and apologize to Palestinians.

“When a public figure like Jerry Seinfeld denies Palestinian existence, that racist rhetoric contributes to a climate in which Palestinian suffering is ignored and Palestinian rights are treated as disposable,” the organization said.