Artwork by Bob Barancik is the catalyst for this podcast’s conversation. It focuses on the ongoing trauma to both Israelis and Diaspora Jews from the 10.7.2023 attack, massacre, and kidnappings in southern Israel by Hamas terrorists from Gaza.
View October 7th artwork on CreativeShare
The imagery was created over a roughly 15-month period from that most tragic day in Jewish history since the Holocaust during WWII.
The art speaks without words and shows the tragedy from the point of view of an artist’s mind’s eye rather than just from the lens of a cell phone camera or video cam.
Bob has been creatively wrestling with Holocaust and Post-Holocaust themes for over 45 years.
His mixed-media paintings, digital prints, and handmade books have been exhibited nationally, and his videos have been screened at major film and media festivals in the U.S. and internationally. Much of his artwork is permanently archived at Florida Holocaust Museum.
Although the podcast was created on December 29th, 2025, and much has transpired over the last month with “saber rattling” between President Trump and the mullahs in Tehran, the basic underlying antagonism between radical Islam and the Western democratic world remains unchanged…and will most likely remain unchanged well into the future.
The big questions for the worldwide Jewish community revolve around how the internal imagery of 10.7.2023 is processed both collectively and by each individual Jew.
Global Jew-hatred has reached unprecedented levels, stoked by both malicious social media and biased mainstream news coverage. It is not really safe to identify as Jewish anywhere on our increasingly interconnected planet.
Which leaves only a few real options:
- Convert to some other religion or simply become a religious “none” and keep your head down and mouth shut.
- Openly confront and fight antisemitism.
- Become an observant Jew and draw solace and strength from our sacred texts.
- Move to Israel and accept the yoke of citizenship of the Jewish state including military service.
- Continue to respectfully share ideas and feelings with fellow Jews and receptive Gentiles.
Those are what Bob believes to be the hard realities of the Jewish situation.