Demanding support for Israel’s war imperils the future of Jewish communal life
Leftist Jews yearn for communal connection, and were horrified by Oct. 7. But we know supporting a pointless, brutal war won’t fix things
Jewish activists carrying a sign reading “Jewish Elders to Biden: Stop the Genocide, Cease-fire Now,” chained themselves to the fence of the White House in December 2023. Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images
I was speaking with a friend who is studying at Hebrew University a few weeks ago about what has become a frequent topic among left-leaning Jews over the last two months: our shared frustration with so much of left discourse regarding the attacks of Oct. 7. I asked her why she hasn’t been as outspoken with her concerns as some of our mutual friends.
“Earlier today I walked to the train station here in Jerusalem,” she told me, “and outside someone was selling T-shirts that read ‘If One Gazan is Left in Gaza, We’ve Lost.’ That’s what demands our attention, not what some students are saying at Vassar.”
I came back to that conversation when reading Yehuda Kurtzer’s recent essay in the Forward on what he called the “realignment” of the American Jewish political map.
Kurtzer is an astute observer of American Jewish life, and he is undoubtedly correct that the events of the last two months are reshaping the Jewish world in ways that will remain with us for years to come. But in describing the event that sparked that reshaping solely as the horrors of Oct. 7 and not the horrors of the ongoing mass killing in Gaza, he fails to understand the dynamics — particularly on the left — he attempts to diagnose.
It is undoubtedly true that, as Kurtzer describes, for many American Jews, the atrocities of Oct. 7 awakened a sense of Jewish identification that had been dormant. I have friends who previously had little relationship to Israel or the Jewish community and are now declaring solidarity with both. Like Kurtzer, I know others who have long been active in Jewish left politics but now feel alienated by a community they see as unable to recognize Jewish trauma.
Those dynamics are real. And within American Jewish institutional life they will likely prompt a definitive shift toward what Kurtzer called “the particular” — which also will likely mean “to the right.”
But for all of his discussion of a newly revitalized “big tent” for American Jews, Kurtzer does not pay enough attention to where the boundaries of that tent have been drawn. Walk into any synagogue, federation, school or other Jewish institution in the U.S. these days and it is clear what solidarity means right now, and it is not just shared grief or outrage over the killing of innocent civilians on Oct. 7. It is support for Israel, and by extension, support for Israel’s war.
As Kurtzer celebrates those that remain committed to what he calls “the community” and chastises those that stand outside of it, he is in both effect and intent applauding those who support the war and condemning those that oppose it.
This may be how he and others want to define the parameters of Jewish “peoplehood.” But when they do, they should not be surprised when so many reject it.
Let’s be clear about what it is that we reject: a war that many experts have concluded has been waged in grave violation of human rights law. It was a war crime when Israel cut off electricity and water on Oct. 8, denying Gaza’s 2.2 million residents the basic necessities of life. And it is a war crime to collectively punish a civilian population, as Israel’s bombardment has done, displacing nearly 2 million people and killing an estimated 17,000-plus. Most, by the Israel Defense Forces’ own admission, have been women, children and other civilians.
All this for a goal of “eradicating Hamas” that many experts have argued is plainly unachievable. The war seems motivated less by strategic assessment than by revenge and an effort to reassert a status quo in which the occupation could be “managed” through sufficient violence and control.
It is Kurtzer’s avoidance of the moral monstrosity, humanitarian calamity and cruel idiocy of the war that leads to his misdescription of the Jewish left. To Kurtzer, words like “colonialism” and “genocide” are evidence of a groupthink that sets organizations like IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace outside the bounds of “communal respectability.” But it is telling that those terms upset him so much more than the awful violence that leads so many to use them.
Anyone who has spent time in Jewish leftist spaces over the last two months knows there is deep division, tension and even polarization around all manner of ideological and strategic questions.
Where there is unity, however, is around opposition to a war that is destroying the lives of millions — a war waged on behalf of the delusion that violent and even horrific resistance to occupation and dispossession can be deterred by making that occupation sufficiently brutal and that dispossession sufficiently thorough.
Oct. 7 should have discredited this idea. Instead, in Kurtzer’s “big tent,” it seems to have fueled it. It is this political reality that leaves leftist Jews so alienated from legacy Jewish institutions.
In his critique, Kurtzer suggests that through such distancing the left has abandoned a strategy of “immense power.” I wish that he were right, but it’s difficult to see the evidence of that power.
In the decade since I helped found IfNotNow, I cannot name a single major Jewish institution that has curtailed its support for Israel’s occupation in any substantive or material way. That is why so many who once argued that the institutions of the Jewish world could be moved to genuinely support an end to Jewish supremacy in Israel/Palestine have given up on that strategy. The unanimity of support for the war within those institutions only confirms that judgment.
At Jewish Currents, the magazine where I am publisher, we have done our best to engage the violence of this moment in ways that reflect our horror at the events of Oct. 7, the discomfort many of us felt with the reaction to those same events by some committed to Palestinian solidarity, and our ongoing outrage at the war crimes unfolding in Gaza.
Kurtzer’s essay ignored that nuanced work to dismiss our publication based on tweets from people affiliated with it: one from a Palestinian and Jewish writer with family in Gaza who, on the morning of Oct. 7 — before anyone knew anything of the extent of the killing — wrote that he was proud of his people; the other from a reporter noting that when the initial reports of sexual violence began circulating they were not yet sufficiently verified, a point noted by many diligent journalists, including at the Forward.
Those tweets, for Kurtzer, signal a centering by the Jewish left of “the Palestinian struggle” as its “core identity” and betray a denial of the most basic sense of Jewish solidarity. But at Jewish Currents, Arielle Angel, our editor-in-chief, and I have clearly rejected such binaries.
Articulating a frustration felt by many on the Jewish left, Arielle wrote on Oct. 12 that there “is no formidable political formation that can hold the political subjectivity of both Jews and Palestinians in this moment without simply attempting to assimilate one into the other,” and called for claiming and creating political identities that cannot be reduced to “Jewish” or “Palestinian” alone.
On Oct. 19, I described what I saw as a growing gulf on the left between those who worried that foregrounding Jewish grief obscured the root of the violence and those who insisted that any reaction that did not fully and forcefully condemn Hamas’ violence betrayed a lack of concern for Jewish lives. I called for a movement bound together not by ethnic solidarity but in commitment to ending a regime of domination.
To Kurtzer, however, our words do not count as “moderating voices.” Instead, he embraces the Manichean politics between “Jewish” and “Palestinian” that we have tried to question. To him, this is when you are “with us” or not. Either one supports Israel’s war or one is outside the boundaries of Jewish community. For someone ostensibly committed to pluralism and Jewish connection, this is a troubling way to draw the boundaries of belonging.
Troubling, but not surprising. The liberal Zionist position that shapes American Jewish politics — which the Shalom Hartman Institute that Kurtzer leads (and where I am a fellow) has done so much to promote — essentially expresses moral concern with Israel’s ongoing occupation alongside insistence that the occupation is necessary for Israel’s survival. This camp welcomes criticism of Israeli policy only so long as it remains in the register of moral rhetoric, while interpreting demands that material pressure be brought to bear to change those policies (such as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, or conditioning of U.S. aid) as a threat to Jewish survival.
Liberal Zionists often describe their position as holding onto a tension between the particular and the universal — or, more practically, between security and morality. The clear implication is that a commitment to one’s own necessarily demands a compromise to one’s morality. This is how liberal Zionists can remain defenders of Israel despite the country’s manifest failure to guarantee equal rights to those under its rule. It is also how they can so easily support a war that ought to assault the conscience.
Such a framework may prove helpful for maintaining support for Israel among Jewish liberals disturbed by Israel’s actions. But it is disastrous for those who live with the terrible consequences of the mistaken view that the conflict can be “managed” in perpetuity.
It also will prove damaging for the “big tent” that Kurtzer hopes to strengthen. Last week, the educational director of a major Reform congregation in New York City told me that he saw half of his teachers at a recent cease-fire rally. This is only surprising if one is only talking to Jewish professionals disturbed by what they are seeing on Twitter.
About half of American adults under 30 say Hamas has a lot of responsibility for the war. But polling data indicates that most Americans support a cease-fire, and half of American Jews under the age of 35 oppose military aid to Israel.
Kurtzer describes Jews that take such positions as “self-ostracizing.” But he and other mainstream leaders are the ones insisting on boundaries that exclude them.
It’s hard not to conclude that the split that Kurtzer is diagnosing is in fact one he hopes to solidify. For those of us opposed to this war and committed to Jewish institutional life, however, the divide is hardly one to celebrate.
Today, left-leaning affiliated Jews send our kids to Jewish day schools and participate in congregations in which support for Israel’s war is a condition for belonging and where opposition to that war is taken as traitorous. Kurtzer is right that this is untenable, that the alienation such a condition provokes is intolerable, and that those caught in it will, in time, simply build their own institutions or, if that is made impossible, cease living Jewish lives.
It is both disturbing and revealing that those publicly committed to pluralist Jewish community are drawing lines that make such alienation and distancing inevitable.
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