Maxxe Albert-Deitch is Americans for Peace Now's Strategic Communications Coordinator. Prior to joining APN, she worked as a historian, focusing on research and projects engaging in ethnohistory, archaeology, and conflict transformation in Israel and Palestine. She earned a Master’s degree in History from the College of William and Mary.

I took over PeaceCast, the APN podcast, back in April of this year. The conversations I’ve had with guests are as varied as the powerful work that they do– which is to say, very. But the common through-line that has popped up in nearly every interview is that authors and activists have never seen their work spotlit to this degree before. Books that were published 20 years ago are back on Middle Eastern Studies syllabi. Journalists anticipating quiet book releases or PhD dissertations find themselves rewriting chapters and adding afterwords, suddenly forced to be the first representatives of a whole generation on a global stage.

It’s bigger than PeaceCast, obviously. Israel and Palestine have been catapulted into social consciousness over the past 14 months. Words like “occupation” and “intifada” jumped into common parlance. Israel and Palestine stopped being a fringe issue, or a topic that only drifted into American politics every once in a while— it is now a central issue in Congress. College campuses are divided, leaving students and faculty and administrators in a many-sided standoff. Families are split– older generations who grew up with the fresh memory of the Holocaust and casual antisemitism and the narrative that Israel would forever be the only safe place for Jews in the world versus younger generations whose social media feeds are dominated by the news of bombs landing in Gaza City with little to no context of the years of conflict that set the stage for the violence that’s taken place over the past year.

In some ways, I’m glad to see the surge in presence, if not popularity, of Israel and Palestine in modern media. Like many American Jews, I grew up in an extremely progressive household– my family were (and remain) mainstays at the big virtue-signaling events. We spent weekends at Pride Parades, Mitzvah Days, protests for immigrant rights. But we didn’t talk about Palestine. We stayed aware of what was happening in Israel and on its borders, but we didn’t use words like “settlement” or “occupier.” I specialized in the topic academically as both an undergrad and grad student but struggled to explain my research to my friends and peers. The language to do so existed, but was so hyper-specific and rarefied that I had to provide a glossary every time I tried to talk about it.

I no longer have that problem– and neither do the students coming up through the same system that I did. The Occupation is front and center. Watermelon emojis and Palestinian flags and keffiyehs dot the lines of Instagram bios and protest flags alike. Maybe if this conversation had been so prevalent when I was younger, it wouldn’t have taken me so long to figure out my own feelings and politics around Israel as an American Jew. Maybe it wouldn’t have felt so taboo.

Or maybe it would have been worse.

When I speak with our college-aged interns, they talk about the despair they feel when they try to bring their peers together, to explain the nuance of the intricately complicated situations in the Middle East. Too often, people who are still in the process of figuring out where they stand are terrified to ask questions or speak up– scared that the response to ignorance is blame, shame, or vitriol. People who might be willing to listen are shoved aside in favor of the echo chamber. Speaking up in support of a two-state solution or a shared Jerusalem (or both, as we do here at APN) is enough to get one booted from pro-Palestine and pro-Israel groups alike.

And despite the Israel-Palestine coverage dominating modern media, it doesn’t seem to be much of a dialogue. It feels like a nightmare of a Thanksgiving table (you know, where various relatives with opposing views on politics, religion, or whatever else spend the night screaming at each other without once communicating anything other than that the other people at the table must all be wrong). Everyone is upset, and no one can hear reason over the din.

I’m not sure how we back ourselves out of this mess and return to productive conversation. Certainly, we can’t put the genie back in the bottle– I wished for a more accessible way to talk about Israel and Palestine, and I’ve gotten… well, the accessibility part, if not the rational discussion. But maybe the advice we need to hear is the same as what gets many families through their contentious holiday gatherings each year: Take a breath. Listen to what’s coming out of someone else’s mouth. You don’t have to agree with it, but you do have to listen– otherwise, there’s no way forward without all the dishes piling up and someone crying in the kitchen.