Ekko Astral unveil new single, "Holocaust Remembrance Day''

"Holocaust Remembrance Day''; an acoustic ballad about the genocide in Gaza that relates Jael's experiences as an American Jew and her personal reckoning with her people's involvement in mass suffering.

"This song reflects three experiences key to my life as an American Jew. The first verse is about a time I was asked by a police officer in the U.S. Capitol building if I was a Muslim because of my tichel. The third verse is about when Liam and I produced a podcast for our university’s Hillel about how Jewish students felt about Israel but were censored and disallowed from having any critical voices," Ekko explains. "The cover is the site of a 1994 massacre of Palestinians during Ramadan at a holy site to both Jews and Muslims, the Cave of the Patriarchs. I visited this site during a monthlong trip to Israel in high school with a Jewish youth group. That trip also included military humvees, attempts at recruiting me and my fellow high school-aged Jews to the IDF, and lectures about how the Dome of the Rock was a reason to hold hate in our hearts for Arab Muslim people."

"Criticizing the Israeli state for the violence it perpetrates against the Palestinian people is not antisemetic. I say that as someone whose family has stayed in kibbutzim just like those targeted on Oct. 7. The truth is there is more than one kind of Jew, and questioning what people tell you is a central Jewish moral. But the city I live in, Washington DC, definitely doesn’t talk about it that way very often," she continues. "I’ve been struck by the hypocrisy of some news outlets talking about detained reporters in Russia, but there has been no bleeding heart for all the journalists being carried out on stretchers dead in Gaza. Where was the Dana Bash CNN segment about the Al-Jazeera reporter who was shot dead by the IDF multiple years ago? We don’t see that anywhere."