As if there wasn’t enough drama over the candidacy of Zohran Mamdani in New York City’s mayoral race, last week saw the release of “A Rabbinic Call to Action: Defending the Jewish Future,” a statement from an ad hoc group calling itself “The Jewish Majority,” condemning Mamdani for voicing political convictions that “delegitimize the Jewish community and encourage and exacerbate hostility toward Judaism and Jews.” By the end of the week, the call had garnered over 1,000 signatures from rabbis, cantors and rabbinical students from NYC and around the US.
Notably, the statement only mentions Mamdani once. The rest of the six-paragraph letter is devoted to defending the state of “Israel’s right to exist in peace and security” and promoting Zionism as central to Judaism and Jewish identity. It’s centerpiece is a long and pointed quote from a recent sermon by Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove of Park Avenue Synagogue, in which he warned that Mamdani “poses a danger to the New York Jewish community”:
Zionism, Israel, Jewish self-determination—these are not political preferences or partisan talking points. They are constituent building blocks and inseparable strands of my Jewish identity. To accept me as a Jew but to ask me to check my concern for the people and state of Israel at the door is a nonsensical proposition and an offensive one, no different than asking me to reject God, Torah, mitzvot, or any other pillar of my faith.
Given the timing of the letter, “The Jewish Majority” statement is clearly an effort to stem Mamdani’s surging lead – and his popularity with young leftist Jews in NYC. But on a deeper level, the fundamental goal of the letter is made all-too plain: it seeks to combat the growing “political normalization of anti-Zionism.”
From what I can tell, Mamdani has never explicitly referred to himself as an “anti-Zionist.” What he has said, over and over again in response to the incessant gotcha question “does Israel have the right to exist as a Jewish state?” is that he “believes Israel has the right to exist as a state with equal rights.” Of course, the words “a state with equal rights” is enough to make him an anti-Zionist – because the only way Israel can exist as a Jewish state is by denying equal rights to Palestinians.
For me, this is the real significance of this statement – it shines a hard light on the deep moral hypocrisy of a Jewish communal establishment that is threatened by anti-Zionism: a political position that is rooted in human rights and equal rights for all. Indeed, if you listen to Mamdani’s words carefully, he takes pains to point this out: he refers to Israel’s actions in Gaza as a genocide because he agrees with the opinions of international bodies such as ICJ as well as scores of otherhuman rightsobservers. He openly says he would not welcome Netanyahu in NYC because the ICC has put a warrant out for his arrest as a war criminal.
These are not hateful or inciteful positions. What is remarkable – and galling to the Jewish communal establishment – is that Mamdani is not paying a political price for expressing them. Quite the contrary: he is the one who comes off as eminently principled and reasonable, while apoplectic Jewish leaders are having an increasingly difficult time explaining why a genocidal, apartheid nation-state is a “building block” of their Jewish identity. True to form, this clergy group is simply trotting out familiar talking points, fully expecting their morality and veracity to be self-evident.
Contrary to the claims of the statement’s signers, the increasing normalization of anti-Zionism does not “delegitimize Jewish identity and community.” As the rabbi of an openly anti-Zionist Jewish congregation, I can attest that increasing numbers of Jews are identifying as such out of genuine Jewish conscience: from a deep attachment to Jewish ethical values that mandate the pursuit of justice and hold that all human beings are equally created in the divine image.
Recent surveys certainly bear this out: according to an October 2025 Washington Post poll, of American Jews, 61% believe Israel has committed war crimes and 4 out of 10 say the country is guilty of genocide against the Palestinians, views that would certainly track with an anti-Zionist identity. As Jewish Currents editor-in-chief Arielle Angel has observed, “the catastrophic failure of Zionist Judaism” has marked “an opening for anti-Zionist Jews to step into greater influence, (to) make our case for something new.” By all accounts, the time has come for a Judaism that rejects the fusion of toxic ethno-nationalism with Judaism.
I’m also struck by another note of desperation from this ad-hoc group of Jewish clergy: they purport to speak for the Jewish majority as if that alone confers legitimacy. They of all people should know dissent is a sacred, cherished aspect of Jewish tradition. They of all people should know that in Talmudic debate, both majority and minority views are given equal weight and consideration. They of all people should know of the Torah’s sacred injunction “Do not go after the majority to do evil” (Exodus 23:2). And any student of history, Jewish or not, should know that the majority is not always right, whether it be the majority of Southern Whites who supported slavery and Jim Crow in the US, apartheid in South Africa or the injustices of Zionism today.
The real moral question here, it seems to me, is not “who is in the majority?” but rather “who is on the right side of history?”
Over the past few weeks, we’ve witnessed a significant surge in Jewish protest over Israel’s starvation/genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. On July 28, two Israeli human rights organizations, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights – Israel, released a comprehensive report that reached the “unequivocal conclusion” that “Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.” A week earlier Omer Bartov, a noted Israeli professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, wrote a widely distributed op-ed for the New York Times entitled “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know it When I See It.” Even Jeremy Ben – Ami, the president of the liberal Israel advocacy organization J Street, waded ever-so-gently into the fray with this delicately worded statement: “(While) I am unlikely to use the term (genocide) myself…I cannot and will not argue against those using the term.”
There has also been an increase in rabbis (many of whom consider themselves to be “liberal Zionists”) publicly stepping up and speaking out against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. On July 28, eleven mainstream rabbis protested by blocking traffic in front of the Israeli consulate in midtown Manhattan, with eight taking arrest. One Jewish communal figure noted, “The protests we’ve typically seen at the Israeli Consulate in places like that are from the further left of the community.”
A day later, in Washington DC a group of 27 rabbis affiliated with the advocacy group Jews for Food Aid for People in Gaza entered Senate Majority leader John Thune’s office, displaying banners reading “Rabbis say: Protect Life!” and “Rabbis say: Stop the Blockade.” Then this past Monday, hundreds gathered (and more than 40 protesters took arrest) in front of the Trump International Hotel in New York City at a protest organized by IfNotNow under the banner “Stop Starving Gaza.” Among the speakers were Rabbi Jill Jacobs of T’ruah, Ruth Messinger, former head of American Jewish World Service and New York City Comptroller Brad Lander. Needless to say, none of them were previously known for taking a stand against Israel in such a dramatic and public manner.
I must admit I have a great deal of cognitive dissonance over these developments. First and foremost, I will say that it is a welcome development that ranks of Jewish leaders in the movement to end the genocide against Palestinians is broadening. In the end, when otherwise mainstream American Jewish leaders are willing to call out this genocidal behavior for what it is, it only further isolates Israel. When lives are literally being taken by Israel in massive numbers on the daily, this is truly an “all hands on deck” moment. Those of us who have been on the front lines of the movement since 2023 can ill afford to cynically dismiss their participation.
At the same time however, I can’t help but feel cynical over the kudos given to these leaders (many of whom have been silent or equivocal on the genocide until now) for their “bravery” while scores of Palestinians have been organizing, leading protests and crying out in a myriad of different ways for years. Palestinian witness has been insidiously discounted during this genocide just as the Palestinian people have been denied the “permission to narrate” their oppression for over 70 years. I can’t help but grieve the sad irony that any strategic success resulting from this new resurgence will come from the further decentering – and dehumanizing – of Palestinian voices.
Moreover in this moment, when the images of starving Palestinian children are spurring so many Jewish leaders into action, it’s worth asking whether this protest movement can be sustained and transformed into one that brings true justice and lasting for Palestinians.
I’m not convinced. I couldn’t help but note that in their speeches, many of these liberal Zionist rabbis and Jewish leaders lay the blame for this genocide firmly on the policies of Netanyahu and the current government. A recent op-ed in the Forward by Rabbi Jill Jacobs summed up this attitude perfectly:
(Our) own fear must not distract us from the reality that the biggest threat to Israel, and indeed to Judaism itself, is coming from Israel’s governing coalition. Israel is increasingly becoming an autocratic and theocratic state. This is the moment for American Jews — including both leaders and ordinary Jewish community members — to raise their voice.
It has become a common trope in the “liberal Zionist” world to personalize this genocide as “Netanyahu’s war.” In fact, the biggest threat to Israel and Judaism is not Israel’s current governing coalition – it comes from a Jewish ethno-national nation state that was established and is maintained through the dispossession of Palestinians for the sole reason that they are not Jewish. Indeed, Israel is not “becoming” an autocratic and theocratic state – it has long been one.
I was also struck by Jacob’s misleading claim that “the vast majority of Israelis want the war to end.” While this is true, it is overwhelmingly due to Jewish Israelis desire for the return of the hostages – not their concern for Palestinian human rights. A more telling poll, which was released this past Tuesday, found that a vast majority of Israeli Jews – 79 percent – say they are “not so troubled” or “not troubled at all” by the reports of famine and suffering among the Palestinian population. And according to a poll from last May, 82 percent of Jewish Israeli respondents supported the expulsion of Gaza’s residents, while 56 percent favored expelling Palestinian citizens of Israel.
These polls indicate that this is not a problem of the current government. It is not Netanyahu. It is not an issue of bad policy. It is, in fact, Zionism itself. The real problem is that the entire enterprise of Zionist Judaism has infected Jewish life, as Jewish Currents editor Arielle Angel recently and powerfully wrote, “with a voracious rot.”
So yes, it is welcome that increasing numbers of liberal Jewish leaders are finally speaking out against Israel’s carnage in Gaza – but I feel compelled to ask: what will it take to get them to finally break with the Zionist enterprise? When the ethnic cleansing of Gaza is complete? When Israel annexes the West Bank (which the Knesset approved 71-13 in a recent symbolic vote)? When an even more extremist government is elected into power by an increasingly extremist Israeli populace?
If ever there was a moment for Jewish anti-Zionists to proudly show up and be counted, this is it. There could be no more terrifying demonstration of the end game of Zionism than the genocidal violence Israel has been unleashing on Gaza.
It grieves me to my soul that these words are still relevant in August 2025. May the Jewish people and their leaders find the courage of their convictions to call out a genocidal ideology that has caused – and continues to cause – such untold suffering to the Palestinian people in the name of Jewish supremacy. And may this day come soon.
I’m sure I’m not the only anti-Zionist Jew who experiences cognitive dissonance when we get to the line that ends every Passover seder, “Next year in Jerusalem!” In the age of Zionism, what do these words really mean: when a Jewish person can fly to Jerusalem not next year, but tomorrow, and become an instant citizen upon arrival? How can we joyfully shout these words knowing that Israel ethnically cleansed half of Jerusalem in 1948 and militarily conquered and occupied the other half in 1967? What do they mean while scores of Palestinians who have deep generational ties to the land are forbidden from even setting foot in that city?
Over the years, I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way I can say this line with moral integrity is to understand the word “Jerusalem” not as referring to a physical city but to a spiritual ideal. This ideal, in fact, is central to Jewish tradition. After the destruction of the Temple and the ruination of Jerusalem by the Romans, the rabbis posited the existence of two Jerusalems: Yerushalayim Shel Mata (“Jerusalem Below”) and Yerushalayim Shel Mala (“Jerusalem Above”). Earthly Jerusalem is the physical city we know while the Heavenly Jerusalem is the messianic Jerusalem: a mirror reflection of the city on high: the Jerusalem of our highest aspirations.
In other words, while a small number of Jews always lived in the city after the destruction of the Temple, for the majority of Jews who lived throughout the diaspora, the concept of Jerusalem became a spiritualized symbol. I’ve often been struck that diaspora cities that were centers of robust Jewish life have typically been referred to as “Jerusalems.” In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, for instance, Amsterdam was referred to as the “Jerusalem of the West” following the immigration of Sephardic Jews from Spain and Portugal. Likewise, Vilna was known as the “Jerusalem of Lithuania” and Tlemcen, Algeria was called “Jerusalem of the Maghreb.”
When the ideology of Zionism emerged, and this spiritual ideal was subsumed into a physical place, the words “Next Year in Jerusalem” became a literal battle cry. But when we limit our understanding of Jerusalem to one specific city, we do damage to the very idea of Jerusalem itself. It’s tragically ironic that while the Hebrew word Yerushalayim literally means “City of Peace,” it has rarely known a moment’s peace in its history. It certainly hasn’t since the establishment of the state of Israel.
While the metaphor of Jerusalem still has a prominent place in Jewish tradition and liturgy – the words “Next Year in Jerusalem” mark the end of Yom Kippur as well as the Pesach seder – this ideal can be deeply meaningful even for those of us who do not ascribe to the messianic aspects of Jewish tradition. They can continue to be deeply aspirational, indicating our hope for a future of justice, equity, and peace throughout the world – and our commitment to the work it will take to make that future real.
For anti-Zionist Jews, these words are not only a statement, but an affirmation of our opposition to the violence and dispossession that continues to be wrought in the name of the Jewish people in that city and throughout the land. “Next Year in Jerusalem” can mean “Next Year, a Jerusalem for all its inhabitants.” It means “Next Year in Jerusalem without Jewish Supremacy.” It can mean “Next Year, may there be a return for all who have been dispossessed from their homes.” When we affirm that Jerusalem is not only an earthly location, we affirm the true Jerusalem cannot be destroyed, conquered or reconquered: it continues to live in our hearts and motivate our actions.
May it be so this and every Passover: “Next Year in Jerusalem!”
With Passover starting Saturday evening, April 12, Tzedek Chicago is honored to present our annual seder supplement, “Passover as Collective Liberation.”
As we witness fascism growing in the US and around the world, Passover arrives this year with a special urgency – and a sacred opportunity. As our supplement notes:
Merely telling the story is not enough. The seder requires us to interrogate this sacred narrative: to contemplate its meaning and to examine the questions it raises for us in our own day. Most critically, Passover demands that we connect the lessons of the Exodus story to Pharaohs that arise “in every generation.”
To that end, we encourage you to use the Passover narrative as a template to understand – and respond – to the stakes of the current political moment. First and foremost, we encourage you to universalize the Exodus narrative; to view our sacred liberation story in the context of collective liberation; to understand that the Jewish struggle and liberation is ultimately inseparable from so many other liberation struggles, past and present.
I believe it is more critical than ever to make these connections. As the Columbia grad student Mahmoud Khalil wrote in his “Letter from a Palestinian Political Prisoner in Louisiana.” (which we include in our supplement):
The Trump administration is targeting me as part of a broader strategy to suppress dissent. Visa-holders, green-card carriers, and citizens alike will all be targeted for their political beliefs. In the weeks ahead, students, advocates, and elected officials must unite to defend the right to protest for Palestine. At stake are not just our voices, but the fundamental civil liberties of all.
As another Palestinian American, Noura Erakat has noted (in an article that we quote in our supplement as well):
But resisting fascism is our collective goal. We just know that in order to resist it, we have to fight it on two fronts of U.S. state violence: at home and abroad. Because if the United States, together with Israel, manages to disembowel the ICJ, the ICC, the UN, and a broader global order built after the Holocaust and World War II, no one is safe… As Colombian President Gustavo Petro warned back in December 2023, ‘“What we are seeing in Gaza is a rehearsal of the future.’”
Yes, resisting fascism must be our collective goal. Those of us who have been advocating for Palestinian liberation must understand that their liberation is irrevocably connected to the liberation of all who are targeted by state violence. At this moment, the stakes could not be higher. Under the current regime, we are witnessing a terrifying state backlash about those who have publicly voiced their support for the Palestinian people. At the moment, activists of color with student visa are the primary targets. But as Mahmoud Khalil rightly noted in his letter, soon “visa-holders, green-card carriers, and citizens alike will all be targeted for their political beliefs.”
As Jews, we have a unique role in the current political moment. Indeed, we must fail to note that this state violence is being cynically carried out in our name, justified by concern for “Jewish security,” More than ever, we must to refuse to let our safety be used as a pretense to strengthen fascist state power. We must insist that this pretense will only endanger Jewish security all the more. We must affirm in no uncertain terms that Jewish safety and security is inseparable from the safety and security of all.
This Passover, let us insist that the Exodus story must be about the liberation of all who are oppressed by the contemporary Pharaohs of our day. This Passover, may we discover the true meaning of collective liberation – and find the inspiration to make it real in our world.
The ambitious intentions of Peter Beinart’s new book are evident from the title: Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning. Responding to the current moment, Beinart has written nothing short of a spiritual manifesto for the future of Judaism.
It’s a tall-order for such a slim volume, but it’s one that Beinart is uniquely positioned to take on. As a well-known journalist, thought leader, and editor-at-large for the journal Jewish Currents, Beinart’s ideas carry a great deal of weight among large swaths of the Jewish establishment. His 2010 article in The New York Review of Books, “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment” and his subsequent book, The Crisis of Zionism were widely read and debated in the American Jewish community. Since then, he’s continued to push the envelope in the discourse on Israel/Palestine. His 2020 New York Times op-ed, “I No Longer Believe in a Jewish State” and his 2021 Guardian essay, “A Jewish Case for Palestinian Refugee Return” were likewise considered game-changers in the Jewish communal discussion on Israel-Palestine.
Being Jewish, which attempts to reframe the Jewish spiritual narrative itself, is arguably his most dramatic attempt at game-changing. Following October 7 and Israel’s devastating military onslaught on Gaza, Beinart suggests that Judaism and Jewish identity have now reached a critical turning point. As he writes in the Prologue:
Jews have told new stories to answer the horrors we endured. We must now tell a new story to answer the horrors that a Jewish country has perpetrated, with the support of many Jews around the world… [This new Jewish story must be] based on equality rather than supremacy—because the current one doesn’t endanger only Palestinians. It endangers us.
As if this isn’t ambitious enough, Beinart also hopes his book will help heal the widening fractures over Israel/Palestine in the Jewish community. To drive this point home, he begins with a letter to a friend with whom he’s become estranged over the issue of Israel/Palestine. “I know,” he writes, “you believe that my public opposition to this war…constitutes a betrayal of our people…[and] I consider your single-minded focus on Israeli security to be immoral and self-defeating.” He ends his letter with the words: “I hope the rupture is not final, that our journey together is not done.”
While Being Jewish was published by a mass-market publisher and is being promoted to a wide readership, Beinart states at the outset that he’s suggesting a new Jewish narrative to bring the Jewish “family” together; to mend the deep familial rifts that have widened over Israel’s destruction of Gaza. “This book,” he writes, “is for the Jews who are still sitting at that Shabbat table, and for the Jews—sometimes their own children—who have left in disgust. I yearn for us to sit together.”
Beinart thus begins his book with a formidable—perhaps unbridgeable—tension. While he’s clear about his intention to bring Jews together, he also suggests that Israel’s oppression of Palestinians is rooted in a narrative of Jewish supremacy—a view which surely won’t endear him to millions of Jews in Israel and throughout the diaspora who identify deeply with Israel and Zionism. In many ways, this tension is characteristic of Beinart’s pedagogy: he seeks to influence Jewish communal discourse even as he pushes hard on the ideological envelope. It’s a balancing act that’s become increasingly precarious with his writings over the past several years. Given the stakes of the current moment, he sets a profoundly daunting goal for himself with his latest book.
For most of Being Jewish, Beinart does what he does best, expertly dismantling Israel’s hasbara—the propagandistic talking points used to justify Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people. In chapter one, “They Tried to Kill Us We Survived, Let’s Eat,” for example, he interrogates the ways that Israel and Israel’s Jewish communal advocates, conveniently ignore Zionism’s colonial origins and reframe Israel’s founding to fit a Jewish narrative of victimhood:
The plot goes like this. We have finally achieved what every other people takes for granted: a state of our own. Yet in the case of Jews, and Jews alone, that right is contested. So even with a state, we remain victims.
His repeated willingness to frame political Zionism in a colonial context is a powerful, ongoing theme for Beinart. In another chapter “To Whom Evil is Done,” he considers the ways the violence committed by Hamas and other Palestinian resistance groups on October 7 was compared to the Holocaust by Israelis and Jews around the world. He goes on to assert that such a framing “transforms Palestinians from a subjugated people into the reincarnation of monsters of the Jewish past.” Again, Beinart doesn’t hesitate to reject this comparison in favor of a settler colonial framework. A better analogy, he suggests, would be the violent attacks of colonized Haitians, Creek Indians, or Mau Mau rebels against their colonial oppressors.
In “Ways of Not Seeing,” Beinart systemically eviscerates many other familiar claims wielded by Israeli leaders and Israel advocates: from their rejections of death estimates by the Gazan Health Ministry to the canard of Hamas’ human shields. He also devotes a chapter to the issue of antisemitism, using convincing argumentation along with hard survey data to demonstrate how Israel cynically uses the claim of antisemitism—which is much more prevalent on the Right than the Left—to cudgel Palestinians and their supporters. Taking the claim that anti-Zionism equals antisemitism head on, he writes astutely:
The whole point of conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism is to depict Palestinians and their supporters as bigots, thus turning a conversation about the oppression of Palestinians into a conversation about the oppression of Jews.
Beinart’s book is strongest when he makes these kinds of expert political arguments. Yet, as critical as they are, as I read Being Jewish I found myself increasingly wishing he would drill deeper into the themes suggested by the title. Beyond promoting a Judaism of equality over conquest, how should Jews respond to the devastating moral reality of this moment? In his final chapter, “Korach’s Children,” he attempts to do precisely this, suggesting that Jewish political nationalism has become a form of Jewish “idolatry,” arguing that the only way toward an equitable future in Israel/Palestine is a single state in Israel that guarantees full citizenship for all.
While it’s a compelling vision, there’s little in his final chapter that he hasn’t already argued for more extensively in his 2020 and 2021 articles, which were written well before Israel’s destruction of Gaza. In this book, as with his earlier articles, Beinart offers examples from Ireland and South Africa to demonstrate how colonizers and colonized have found the political wherewithal—however imperfect—to dismantle systems of oppression and engage in processes of reconciliation.
In the midst of his argument, however, there’s little reckoning with the possibility that anything has fundamentally changed with Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Instead, Beinart simply repeats his talking points, continuing to hold out hope for a better future for Israeli Jews and Palestinians:
Although it won’t look the same, this kind of liberation is possible for us. We can lift the weight that oppressing Palestinians imposes on Jewish Israelis, and indirectly, on Jews around the world.
But who is the “we” in this statement? It’s certainly not in the power (nor is it currently the desire) of American or Diaspora Jews to leverage a socio-political transformation of such a magnitude in Israel/Palestine. The majority of Israelis have, for their part, long rejected a one-state solution—and by all accounts, they’re farther away than ever from embracing such a vision.
Indeed, Israelis post-October 7 are a thoroughly traumatized nation, inured to the carnage their nation is inflicting on Palestinians and according to polls, overwhelmingly supportive of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. As for Palestinians, many, if not most, are undoubtedly less inclined to imagine the realistic possibility of living side by side with Israeli Jews in a single state given the horrific reality of the past 16 months.
It’s notable that, even as Beinart doesn’t flinch from describing Israel’s onslaught in Gaza—often in terrifying detail—he largely avoids using the word “genocide” to describe it. This is more than merely a semantic issue. If we are to truly reckon with what it means to be Jewish after the destruction of Gaza, we must face this central question: what does it mean for the Jewish people that a Jewish state, founded in the wake of the Holocaust, is actively committing a genocide against another people?
Though Beinart writes that he “yearns for us to sit together,” it’s well worth asking: can we truly create Jewish community within such a reality? Can Jews who believe Israel is committing genocide coexist in community with those who are actively supporting it—or rationalizing it away? Is it possible for Jews to pray and study and make Shabbat and celebrate holidays together under such circumstances? If Jewish ethical values are the bedrock of our spiritual life, how do we truly bridge such a massive moral divide?
Although he doesn’t answer this question in his book, Beinart did give a clue to a potential response during a recent appearance at Duke University. Admitting that Israel was no longer a “unifying force” among Jews, he responded:
What I would like people to do is to bring Jews together across the ideological, political and religious spectrum, to study Torah, to study our texts. This is what ultimately unifies us, and I think that it can be a foundation for other kinds of conversations.
This kind of response might make sense to Beinart, an Orthodox Jew who cherishes traditional Jewish study, but it’s doubtful such an approach will bring together Jews in the way he envisions. It’s optimistic, to put it mildly, to assume that Jews will be able to put aside their differences on Israel and find a foundation for fruitful conversation through the study of Torah and Jewish text. It may be time for us to admit that being Jewish after the destruction of Gaza means our community isn’t simply fractured, but separated by a deep moral abyss that may well be unbridgeable.
As I read Beinart’s new book, I couldn’t help but be struck by the significant debt it owes to the landmark work of Jewish scholar and theologian Marc Ellis, who asserted as far back as the 1980s and 90s that post-Holocaust, the fusion of Judaism and Jewish state power had created a conquest-focused “Constantinian Judaism,” even as Israel maintained a collective myth of innocence.
The central question is how to move Jews in Israel and around the world to see that Jews can only be free if Palestinians are free as well. During the Gaza war, we could not be further from this goal. This makes it even more imperative that we begin now.
But while Beinart’s and Ellis’ analyses of the crisis may have been similar, their prescriptions for going forward were dramatically different. As Ellis put it in a 2018 interview, Israel’s state oppression of the Palestinian people represented the “end of ethical Jewish history”:
We Jews, all of us, no matter our various political positions, are responsible for what Israel has done and is doing to the Palestinian people. That is why I believe that we, as Jews, dwell in the abyss of injustice. The injustice we have perpetrated upon Palestinians has brought us to the end of ethical Jewish history. The question for Jews, the only question, is what are we to do at this end?
Marc Ellis died in July 2024, while Israel’s genocide in Gaza was raging in full force. His question, however, offers an important counterpoint to Beinart’s. While Beinart asks how we will come together to write a new Jewish story, Ellis asks how Jews will dwell in the abyss of injustice. In the end, Beinart’s book, for all of its courage, is ultimately unwilling to take this step: to truly reckon with how Jews of conscience should respond to the ongoing moral devastation that is Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
A photograph shows soldiers posing with an orange banner that reads: “Only settlement would be considered victory!” The color orange was used by the settler movement in 2004 and 2005 to protest Israel’s disengagement from Gaza.
It’s becoming ominously clear that the end game of Israel’s genocide in Gaza is the end of game of Zionism itself: namely, settlement. The writing has been on the wall for some time now. As I mentioned on Rosh Hashanah, we now know the existence of the so-called “General’s Plan,” in which:
Israel will control the northern Gaza Strip and drive out the 300,000 Palestinians still there. Major General Giora Eiland, the war’s ideologue, proposes starving them to death, or exiling them, as a lever with which to defeat Hamas. The Israeli right envisions a Jewish settlement of the area, with vast real estate potential of convenient topography, a sea view, and proximity to central Israel…
News accounts bear out that the General’s Plan is well underway. The vast majority of residents of Northern Gaza have now been ethnically cleansed from their homes and Israel has said it has no intentions to let them return. At a recent two-day conference, “Preparing to Resettle Gaza,” Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir told the hundreds who gathered, “If we want it, we can renew settlements in Gaza.”
With Trump now poised to take power, there will very likely be new wind behind these plans. Last March, Jared Kushner was quoted as saying: “Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable … It’s a little bit of an unfortunate situation there, but from Israel’s perspective I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up.” With Kushner widely expected to be “pivotal” to Trump’s Middle East policy, his words now take on a terrifying new resonance of possibility.
Even more ominously, there is every reason to expect these plans will be aided and abetted by the American Jewish communal establishment. One week after Donald Trump’s reelection, Karen Paikin Barall, the Jewish Federation’s VP of government relations, remarked to a group of local Jewish community relations councils, “We should all look forward to the day we can hope to buy townhouses in the West Bank and Gaza.”
As a settler colonial movement, Zionism was always focused on the maintenance of a majority Jewish presence in historic Palestine. However, the seizing and control of resources has been no less integral to this project. The settler colonial reality of the 21st century is driven in no small part by the corporate interest of weapons manufacturers as well as the billionaire and oligarch class that seek to profit off the spoils of war and genocide. In the current moment, it should come as no surprise that there is also unabashed talk about the annexation of the West Bank and even parts of South Lebanon.
Such is the natural result of a movement and ideology that prizes real estate over the well-being of the actual people who happen to live on the land. I’m particularly mindful of this as I contemplate this week’s Torah portion, Chayei Sarah, which begins with the famous episode in which Abraham negotiates with the Hittites to purchase the Cave of Machpelah as a burial site for his recently deceased wife Sarah. This story is often wielded by many Zionists as a deed of sale to this sacred site – and contemporary land acquisition in Palestine as the “inalienable possession of the Jewish people.”
There is, of course, another way to understand the spiritual meaning of this story: it is not about land acquisition but love and loyalty. Abraham is not motivated to purchase this land in order to claim exclusive entitlement to it: he is driven by his desire to honor his beloved wife Sarah, and to ensure that she and his extended family will have a permanent resting place. To read this episode only about entitlement to land is limited at best – and to judge by the apartheid and violence by which Israel maintains its control of this site today – a moral sacrilege at worst.
At the end of the portion, following the death of Abraham, we read that his sons Ishmael and Isaac buried their father together in the Cave of Machpelah. I can think of no better image to underscore the critical importance of pursuing a Judaism that prizes love over land. This Shabbat Chayei Sarah, may we rededicate our commitment to this sacred vision.
(photo: Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
Guest sermon at Tzedek Chicago’s Erev Yom Kippur service by Tzedek staff member Aviva Stein on October 11, 2024:
Good Yuntif.
I am honored to have the opportunity to speak to you all tonight. I began working at Tzedek Chicago as our Family Program Coordinator in early 2019. In July of this year I became Tzedek Chicago’s second full-time staff person, serving as the community and organizational director for this inspiring congregation.
I am speaking to you now at Kol Nidre of Yom Kippur in the year 5785, as a genocide is being carried out against the Palestinian people.
For the past many months, and particularly on this day of reflection, as the gates of heaven open wide for our most intimate and vulnerable supplication, my mind keeps coming back to the question–how could we let this happen?
One answer I keep returning to is that this tragedy is in part a product of the decades-long campaign by American Jewish institutions to build nationalist, dogmatic support for the state of Israel within our communities, and particularly in our children. When reflecting on my own upbringing, the clarity with which I can see the indoctrination of my Jewish education as a young person is chilling.
From my summer camp’s obligatory High School Israel trip, where we dressed up in IDF uniforms and took pictures for instagram, to “Israeli club,” the only Jewish affinity space at my public high school, which I later learned was funded by an Orthodox “youth education” organization, to the march for Israel being an annual youth group event to singing the Israeli national anthem in Hebrew school. When I look back, I see the many ways nationalist fervor a created an ersatz version of Jewish identity for me as a child. I had been taught that being Jewish was loving Israel, and I believed it. By the time I was in college, I had become a successful product of what all that institutional Zionist funding had set out to do.
I got my first job after college in 2014 as a teacher’s aide at the local Jewish day school. It was sitting in on the daily “Jewish Studies” class, where I for the first time was able to clearly see the ideological manipulation of the Israel education machine. At that point, I did not identify as a Zionist – I didn’t feel I had enough political knowledge to know what that meant. I know now that internalized sense of ignorance is a tool well-used by the zionist establishment – telling us that it was “too complicated” and that “we didn’t understand” was a reliable way to suppress dissent among their targets. At that time I did, though, feel an obligation to the state of Israel as a Jewish person.
Watching those children create maps of Israel that highlighted popular tourist destinations, making pita on Israel day, and hanging pictures of Jewish men praying at the Western Wall, I had the perspective I needed to question the establishment in which I was raised and in which I was watching these children grow up. Wasn’t Israel a country, just like the US, and wasn’t it a country at war? My family openly objected to the war in Iraq – why not in Israel? I had questions that I as a young adult knew were too taboo to ask. But I had a new perspective in my position as a teacher of experiential and inquiry-based education: wasn’t being afraid to ask questions an indicator that something was very, very wrong?
That same year, #IfNotNow held its first public action, when a small group of young Jewish activists read the Mourner’s Kaddish in New York City in recognition of the Palestinian lives lost in the assault on Gaza that summer. And, also in 2014, my childhood rabbi, Brant Rosen, left the synagogue in which I had grown up in the wake of his increased outspokenness about human rights violations in Palestine that were being committed in our names as Jews. My questioning came at a moment in US history when objection to the occupation of Palestine in the Jewish community was more visible than ever. Without looking very hard, I was able to find community that ultimately carried me through the process of unlearning Zionism. I recognize that opportunity of being guided in loving, joyful Jewish community towards a Judaism of solidarity as a real gift for my generation, one that was not afforded to so many Jews of conscience in the decades before me.
My heart breaks when I see the same cycle of propaganda and silencing posing as pedagogy continue in Jewish education today. Six years ago I took a job at a religious school where I felt it was special that I was allowed to teach there while being open with leadership about my politics. It was challenging to work somewhere where I was not politically aligned, but it was a job, and I could manage. In October of last year, something broke in that community. Donors who had made their contributions with strings attached started pulling those strings, and leadership, which had prided itself on a liberal and open perspective on Palestine, quickly adopted the right-wing politics of their biggest donors. This spring, after months of censorship posing as policy, when my coworker was told that they could not wear a keffiyeh for explicitly Islamophobic reasons, we quit.
I am ashamed of the choice that synagogue made to uphold racism to shield its community from critical engagement with the devastation of Palestine. But my coworker and I were not alone – since March, eleven full and part time staff people at that “progressive” organization have left their jobs. In the past year, Adam and Leah, Tzedek Chicago’s cantorial team, both have left Jewish education jobs in solidarity with Palestine. Around the country, I know of a dozen more people who have left their jobs this past year, by being fired or quitting. There is an epidemic in the Jewish community –young people are losing and leaving their jobs, and the Jewish community is losing the passion, critical thinking, and vitality that their best and brightest brought to their work. So many Jewish organizations are breaking this way – the big tent, so to speak, has collapsed, and Jews of conscience, Jews who say no to genocide and no to Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism and war mongering, find ourselves on the outside.
But outside does not mean alone. Over the past 10 years at Tzedek Chicago, our membership has seen tremendous growth to nearly 400 member households. Our family program community has grown from four families to seven to more than twenty, and for the past six years, we’ve seen our children build joyful Jewish space rooted in solidarity with Palestine. Our membership has grown as a blended community across generations and our most active members range from movement elders to very young children, all of whom are committed to this new Jewish future we are building together.
These past 10 years have experienced a blossoming in Jewish communal life beyond zionism not just at Tzedek Chicago but around the world. Making Mensches in New York, Tirdof in Denver, and Makom in North Carolina are all explicitly anti zionist Jewish ritual communities. Organizing spaces #IfNotNow and JVP have become household names. The Jewish Liberation Fund has successfully challenged the status quo in philanthropy and offers grants for proudly anti-Zionist Jewish work (of which Tzedek Chicago has been a beneficiary). Tzedek UK/Ireland is a thriving community. In Chicago, we are now home to two prayer communities beyond Zionism, Tzedek Chicago and Higaleh Nah. There are of course many more chavurot, friend groups, and organizing communities around the country making meaningful Jewish life that reject Zionism.
So much has changed in the last ten years. And I believe it with all my heart when I say that we have entered a paradigm shift, where the politicized young, queer, disabled and neurodivergent people we have relied on to staff our Hebrew schools and summer camps will no longer accept propaganda and nationalism as normal. We don’t have to. We can choose to work in Jewish organizations that are actually values aligned rather than those that just “allow” us our politics. Of course these opportunities are few relative to Zionist institutions, but I believe we are moving towards a Jewish future where the social norm of Zionism will become increasingly rare, and where communities like ours are not an anomaly but a standard of Jewish communities around the country.
It has been truly meaningful to see what had felt like such a lonely landscape become so varied and rich. And, as heartening as this change is, it feels essential that we acknowledge that this is nowhere near enough. It breaks my heart that this is considered such a radical concept: a joyful community of people who are committed to a world beyond colonialism and oppression, and who say so, full stop. It breaks my heart that the victories we have to celebrate are about staffing and organizational capacity as we watch the devastation of Palestine in real time.
Twelve years ago I was pursuing a degree in environmental studies, and I remember very clearly a class where we discussed the mounting science pointing to the inevitability of climate collapse, just a couple years after it had become remotely socially acceptable to even use the term “global warming.”
“Something really big is going to happen,” we said, “and people will realize, something will change, something has to give.” This was seven years after Hurricane Katrina, and two years after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Still, we found ourselves saying, “something really big is going to happen, and then, and then…”
This memory haunts me as we consider the fight for Palestinian liberation. Climate collapse is here – I don’t need to list the many ways we experience its consequence. We know it’s here. We are right now seeing the extent of the destruction brought by Hurricanes Helene and Milton, record breaking storms inarguably exacerbated by rapidly warming seas. The consequence of our inaction is here.
The Nakba happened. The ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes, creating the largest refugee population in the world, happened. The occupation of millions of Palestinians happened. This year, at least 40,000 people, (though we know in truth many, many more) have been murdered. Entire family lines are gone from this earth and we suffer for the loss of each one of those lives. There is nothing bigger, nothing greater that will awaken our collective consciousness. The consequence of our inaction is here. The unthinkable has happened, and it’s happening right now as we sit here, gathered on this holiest day, the gates of heaven open wide.
We will never get back the biodiversity that once blanketed the earth, nor the beauty, and freedom and abundance that it provided. And, the earth is not lost. Song birds migrate, leaves change their color, networks of fungus communicate through untold billions of channels under our feet.
I mourn for the world we might have lived in had those tens of thousands of lives not been lost. The world and our souls are irrevocably damaged by this unthinkable loss of life.
And, in the face of this unimaginable loss we, as Jewish people, as Americans, as living beings on this earth, owe Palestine our radical imagination. We owe our steadfast belief that Palestine will be free. Palestine will be free, nation states will fall, families will flourish, and we will live in a world where everyone is fed, and everyone is housed, and children will play in river beds and groves of olive trees.
We are painfully far from that dream. Our small successes in the face of unspeakable evil are just that: small.
Kabbalah teaches that every time a person performs a mitzvah, they bring us that tiniest step closer to Olam Haba, the world to come. I do not believe that a Messiah will come and save us from the world we have created for ourselves. I do believe that when we make visible our refusal to participate in the Judaism of violence and supremacy that is normative in our institutions, we become that small bit more visible to the people who are looking for us. To the young people first entering a critical perspective of Israel, to the people who need to leave their job but don’t know where they can go, to the people who love being Jewish and don’t believe that it makes their safety more important than anyone else’s, they can find us. We’re here.
And no, the visibility of Jews who reject Zionism will not free Palestine. But our communities are growing. And as we grow, and our voices become louder, and as we send our money and march in the streets and dedicate our prayer and build our power, we bring more and more people into the sacred responsibility of radical imagination. As Aurora Levins Morales writes in “V’ahavta:”
When you inhale and when you exhale breathe the possibility of another world into the 37.2 trillion cells of your body until it shines with hope. Then imagine more.
We are here tonight, on the eve of Yom Kippur, to release all vows we have not fulfilled and to recommit ourselves to the holy work of teshuvah, of imagining more. Thank you for being here. We will be here. And Palestine will be free, soon and in our days.
Here are my remarks from, “Gaza: Religion, Politics and Solidarity,” a program sponsored by Bright Stars of Bethlehem on May 5, held at the First Presbyterian Church in Evanston. It was my honor to speak in conversation with Palestinian liberation theologian Rev. Dr. Mitri Raheb (founder and President of Dar al-Kalima University College of Arts and Culture in Bethlehem), Dr, Rami Nashashibi, (founder and Executive Director of the Inner-City Muslim Action Network) and Dr. Iva E. Carruthers, (General Secretary of the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference).
Last week, the board of my congregation, Tzedek Chicago released this statement in repsonse to Israel’s ongoing military assault in Gaza. Although it is addressed to all people of conscience, it contains a specific challenge to the Jewish community at large.I’m immensely proud of the statement, which I hope will be considered seriously even (especially) by those members of the community aren’t ready to heed its words.
Our statement is not so much an academic argument as it is a call to moral action. As we say in our statement, “We are witnessing the continuation of the Nakba in real time…Now more than ever, it is time for Jews of conscience to call out the essential injustice at the heart of Zionism in no uncertain terms.“
The full statement follows below:
The unspeakable violence currently unfolding in Gaza is confronting the Jewish community with the most critical moral challenge of our lifetime.
As of this writing, over 21,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military, almost half of them children. According to the UN, nearly two million people have been internally displaced, confining them to less than one-third of the Gaza Strip’s territory. Disease and starvation are rampant, subjecting one in four households into “catastrophic conditions.” As the Secretary General of the UN recently described, “(Gaza) is at a breaking point. There is a high risk of a total collapse of the humanitarian system.”
Together with Jews and allies around the world, we grieve the massive loss of life that occurred as a result of Hamas’ heinous violence in Israel on October 7. We join with those around the world who are demanding the safe return of the remaining hostages currently being held in Gaza. We unreservedly condemn Hamas’ actions on that terrible day – there can be no justification for this brutal attack on civilian life.
We also know there was a crucial, underlying context to this horrible violence. We assert without reservation that to contextualize is not to condone. On the contrary, we must contextualize these events if we are to truly understand them – and find a better way forward.
The violence of October 7 did not occur in a vacuum. It was a brutal response to a regime of structural violence that has oppressed Palestinians for decades. At the root of this oppression is Zionism: a colonial movement that seeks to establish and maintain a Jewish majority nation-state in historic Palestine.
While Israel was founded in the traumatic wake of the Holocaust to create safety and security for the Jewish people, it was a state founded on the backs of another people, ultimately endangering the safety and security of Jews and Palestinians alike. Israel was established through what Palestinians refer to as the Nakba: the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes in 1948. And since that time, Israel has subjected Palestinians to a regime of Jewish supremacy in order to maintain its demographic majority in the land.
This ongoing Nakba is the essential context for understanding the horrifying violence of the past three months. Indeed, since October 7, Israeli politicians have been terrifyingly open about their intentions, making it clear that the ultimate end goal of their military assault is to ethnically cleanse Gaza of its 2.2 million Palestinian residents. One prominent member of the Israeli government put it quite plainly: “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba. Gaza Nakba 2023. That’s how it’ll end.” More recently, Prime Minister Netanyahu was reported as saying that he is actively working to transfer Palestinians out of Gaza. The problem, he said, “is which countries will take them.”
Israeli leaders are being true to their word: we are witnessing the continuation of the Nakba in real time. As in 1948, Palestinians are being driven from their homes through force of arms. As in 1948, families are being forced to march long distances with hastily-collected possessions on their backs. As in 1948, entire regions are being razed to the ground, ensuring that they will have no homes to return to. As in 1948, Israel is actively engineering the wholesale transfer of an entire population of people.
In a statement last week, the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced persons warned:
As evacuation orders and military operations continue to expand and civilians are subjected to relentless attacks on a daily basis, the only logical conclusion is that Israel’s military operation in Gaza aims to deport the majority of the civilian population en masse.
In short: Israel’s military onslaught on Gaza is revealing the true face of Zionism.
From its founding, Tzedek Chicago has openly rejected the conflation of Judaism with Zionism. As expressed in our congregation’s core values statement: We are anti-Zionist, openly acknowledging that the creation of an ethnic Jewish nation state in historic Palestine resulted in an injustice against the Palestinian people – an injustice that continues to this day.
Since Israel’s most recent military assault on Gaza began, Tzedek Chicago has been a proud and active participant in the cease-fire movement, which has been steadily growing in the Jewish community. This movement is collectively motivated by the Jewish mitzvah of pikuach nefesh – the sacred imperative to save life. At the same time, however, it is critical to assert the Jewish value of “tzedek, tzedek tirdof” – “justice, justice shall you pursue.” Beyond ceasefire, we must acknowledge and call out the human dispossession that is at the root of Israel’s latest assault on Gaza.
Now more than ever, it is time for Jews of conscience to call out the essential injustice at the heart of Zionism in no uncertain terms. This is a critical moment for our Jewish communal organizations as well. We know it is not easy for Jewish institutions to reject Zionism, but we believe it’s critical that they do. In particular, we ask synagogues that are proudly “standing with Israel” to morally reckon with whom they are choosing to stand and consider the real human costs of their position.
There are some Jewish congregations that maintain an inclusive “wide tent” that makes room for both Zionists and anti-Zionists alike. While this may seem like a welcome development, we encourage these synagogues to consider how this inherently contradictory position nonetheless enables the violence Israel is perpetrating against Palestinians. We also invite congregations that publicly support “Palestinian liberation” to be clear about what this liberation will ultimately look like. Will it be a liberation in name only or will it include the dismantling and transformation of the colonial Zionist project once and for all?
The moral challenge of the moment is clear. We invite other Jews of conscience to join us in the creation of a thriving movement of Judaism beyond Zionism. A Judaism that lifts up a diasporic consciousness that doesn’t express entitlement over land. A Judaism that rejects ethno-nationalism, militarism and dispossession and celebrates our spiritual tradition of justice, liberation and solidarity with all who are oppressed.
Let our call for ceasefire be but the first step toward a greater liberation: one that extends true justice and equality for all who live between the river and the sea.
Here are the remarks, below, that I delivered at Chicago City Hall yesterday at a meeting of the Committee on Health and Human Relations as it considered an endorsement of UN Resolution 377, which calls for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. I was among a panel of community members – which included historian Dr. Barbara Ransby and State Rep. Abdulnasser Rashid – who offered statements at the meeting. In the end, the committee voted unanimously to approve the resolution, which will now go before the entire city council in January.
As has been the case with many local legislative bodies around the county, the politics around the issue of ceasefire has been marked by deep cowardice and toxicity. In October, the city council passed a strongly worded resolution in support for Israel that only glancingly referred to Palestinians – or to Israel’s rapidly escalating military onslaught on Gaza. As it became clear that the very word “ceasefire” was a political non-starter, Alder Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez of the 33rd Ward decided to build supportfor the UN resolution as chair of the Committee on Health and Human Services. Such is the politics of ceasefire in this horrid moment: it takes these kinds of torturous procedural efforts just to get a city council to call for an end to genocidal violence that has killed 20,000 people, almost half of whom are children.
Due to time constraints, I didn’t read my entire statement. Here are my remarks, in full:
I’m honored to be able to offer these remarks here today in support of this resolution. I agree with so much of the powerful testimony that was given during public comment and I want to thank the speakers for those remarks. I don’t want to go over much of what has been said other than to say I lift up the sentiment of outrage over the genocidal violence that Israel is committing in Gaza even as we speak.
But I would like to speak in particular, as a leader in the Jewish community, to many of the disingenuous and frankly false claims about Jews, about Judaism, about Zionism, about antisemitism that are being lifted up over the past two plus months during this terrible, tragic time. I hope it will at least provide a little bit of context as we start to consider the importance of calling for a ceasefire and our support of this resolution here in the city of Chicago.
We are living, at this very moment, through an extraordinary moment of reckoning. It’s not an understatement to say that the ongoing, unspeakable violence in Israel-Palestine is confronting us with the most critical moral challenge of our lifetimes. I can personally attest that this is most certainly the case in the Jewish community. Hamas’ violent attack on October 7 has deeply traumatized Israelis and many Jews throughout the world. This trauma, however, is not being manifest in one particular way. There are many Jews, myself included, who are deeply grieving these losses, who pray for the safe return of Israeli hostages – but who are also anguished and appalled at the massive violence and trauma Israel has been unleashing on the people of Gaza.
The Jewish community has never been monolithic – and it certainly has never been lockstep on the issue of Israel. And right now, the divisions within our community are becoming manifest in unprecedented ways. For the past two months, day after day, thousands of Jews have been organizing and taking to the streets throughout the country, engaging in relentless acts of civil disobedience to demand an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
The events of the past two months reflect an important trend that has long been growing in the American Jewish community. The traditional legacy Jewish organizations, who have typically purported to speak for the Jewish community have become increasingly out of touch on the issue of Israel-Palestine. Over the past two decades, every Jewish communal survey has shown support for the state of Israel steadily eroding in the American Jewish community.
Moreover, the percentage of Jews – particularly young Jews – who identify as anti-Zionist is growing. We are pushing back strongly on the fallacy that Judaism = Zionism – and the deeply disingenuous accusation that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. We hear this claim being made repeatedly by the state of Israel and its advocates in the American Jewish establishment. Here’s but one example: Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, who has been repeating this accusation over and over again in recently said this in an interview with the New Yorker:
Zionism, a desire to go back to Jerusalem, the longing for Zion, isn’t something that David Ben-Gurion came up with. It isn’t something that Theodor Herzl came up with. It has been embedded in the faith and the traditions of Judaism for thousands of years. You can’t open a Torah on a Saturday morning for your daily prayer, you can’t go through a holiday, without seeing these references.
I’d like to address this claim head on because it a deeply inaccurate statement – and in its way, even dangerous. Greenblatt is of course correct that there is an important connection in Judaism to the Land of Israel. And yes, this connection is quite clear throughout the Torah, liturgy and Jewish tradition in general. However – and this is a big however – the notion of creating a political Jewish nation state was never part of Jewish tradition until the rise of the Zionist movement in the 19th century.
Judaism is a centuries-old Jewish peoplehood. Zionism is a political movement of modernity that arose in Europe that sought to radically change Jewish identity and Jewish life. For most of Jewish history, the yearning to return to Zion was expressed as an idealized messianic vision. Some Jews made pilgrimage to the land. And a small minority of indigenous Jews consistently lived in historic Palestine throughout the centuries. But the rabbis fervently opposed the establishment of a 3rd Jewish commonwealth in historic Palestine. They actually considered it to be blasphemous – a “forcing of God’s hand” to create something that could and should only occur in the messianic age.
From the very beginning, there has always been principled Jewish opposition to Zionism. Many Jews have embraced anti-Zionism not as a matter of traditional messianic belief, but as a matter of Jewish moral and political conscience. We recognize that there is a fundamental injustice at the core of Zionism, namely, the creation of a Jewish majority state through the dispossession and oppression of another people.
It is important to note that political Zionism is a form of ethno-nationalism. In other words, the Jewish identity of the state of Israel is predicted on the maintenance of a majority of one particular group of people in the land. Up until 1948, Jews were a minority in Palestine – and this necessarily posed a problem for the Zionist movement. In the end, the state of Israel could only be created one way: through what Palestinians refer to as the Nakba. Today, even many Israeli historians agree: the state of Israel was founded through the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs from their homes and Israel’s refusal to let them return. This is what happened in 1948 – and this dispossession of Palestinians to make way for a Jewish state has been happening every day for the past 75 years.
In 2021, B’Tselem, a respected Israeli human rights organization released a 300-page report in which it concluded, “The Israeli regime, which controls all the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, seeks to advance and cement Jewish supremacy throughout the entire are.” I want to make this clear: a prominent Israeli human rights organization has said that Israel has created a regime of Jewish supremacy between the river and the sea. This is not an antisemitic claim – it is a claim rooted international law and human rights. This is what it means when Palestinians and solidarity activists call for Palestine to be free “from the river to the sea” – they are expressing basic human rights that we all take for granted – or should. And it is not antisemitic to say so.
Are there some individual anti-Zionists who antisemitic? Undoubtedly. But it is disingenuous and wrong to claim that anti-Zionism is fundamentally antisemitic. As I said earlier, there are increasing numbers of Jews, myself included, whose are anti-Zionist as a deep expression of our Jewish values. Torah teaches that all human beings are created in the divine image, that we must seek justice and liberation for all. It teaches that love for Zion is not divine entitlement to a piece of land, but an expression of a Zion consciousness. That the land – like the entire earth itself – does not belong to us but to God, and we are but strangers upon it.
Another central precept of Judaism is the prophetic injunction, “Not by might and not by power, but by my spirit, says the Lord of Hosts.” This sacred imperative is what compels us to reject Israel’s militarism or to affirm in any way that Jewish state power will keep Jews safe. If there was ever any doubt, the events of the last two months should make this abundantly clear. It makes us all less safe – Jewish and Palestinians alike. And make no mistake: if this nightmarish war should spread through the region, it will endanger the safety and security of us all.
This why so many of us in the Jewish community are literally taking to the streets, calling for an immediate ceasefire and return of all hostages. This is why we welcome and support resolutions like UN Resolution 377. And this is why we are urging our political leaders, on every level, to join the call for ceasefire. This is moment of deep moral reckoning for us – and for the world. History will judge us by our action or our inaction in this critical moment. And that is why I urge us all to support the cause of justice and peace for all who live between the river and the sea – and for all who dwell and earth.
Again, I thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak to you today.
Shalom Rav 