Arielle Klagsbrun calls on the Jewish community to ‘love and honor’ those who refuse to support Israel

This is an incredible speech about Jewish excommunication and the code of silence on criticizing Israel. On August 6, Arielle Klagsbrun went on to the dais at the St. Louis Central Reform Congregation with a delegation from the non-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace. She was introduced by Rabbi Susan Talve with generosity: “She really represents the next generation… that generation of young Jewish Americans who feel passionately about social justice.”

“I don’t think I’ve been on  a bimah for a very long time,” Klagsbrun began. Then she spoke of the turbulent discussions the Gaza massacres have fostered in the Jewish community:

There’s a lot of important conversations going on within the Jewish community right now at this really important time. And I think this is one of the first spaces that I’ve heard of that is doing this in a synagogue. So I’m really thankful and honored to be part of that….

I’m just going to talk about my experience, and I might get a little emotional, so excuse me.

Klagsbrun grew up going to a conservative synagogue in the Boston area. Her father is a Holocaust survivor. Her grandparents are Holocaust survivors. It was a Zionist household, with a Jewish National Fund blue box– dump your change to buy up the forests in Israel for Jews. Her aunt moved to Israel, along with two of her first cousins. They raised their families there.

In 4th or 5th grade Hebrew school, Klagsbrun’s friend Jeff Goldstein asked an Israeli teacher, “Well what about the Palestinians who were there?”

The teacher freaked out at him..And I think there was something that was so visceral in her response where she refused to have that conversation and she just kind of shut the door, that I remember making a mental note, and saying something is not right here.

Later on as an organizer in an environmental/social justice group in St. Louis, she met people who were active in Palestinian rights.

Still in my head, you know, probably even until four years ago I couldn’t engage in  their fight totally. And I had big questions about it and it felt really tense and every time people were talking about rights for Palestinians, talking about Israel, I felt so  complex about it, which I’m sure a lot of other young people in this room have felt.

When Peter Beinart wrote a piece about young Jews who work on social justice issues feeling hypocritical when it came to Israel:

I felt that really strongly and I didn’t know what to do with  that, because I didn’t grow up in a household where you could  talk about that, because my cousin was on the front lines fighting for the IDF [the Israeli army].

So in her junior year in college, she went to Israel. She’d been there many times as a girl but she had to see it as an adult. She went out on an environmental studies program.

I was pretty deeply transformed from that experience and came away thinking, I could no longer support the state of Israel, I could no longer look at their actions and think they were OK . That was mostly because of who I met there. That was because the experience of my friend Tamar in East Jerusalem who was shot in the throat for going to the Dome of the Rock at age 5.

It was because of Tamar’s family who had faced eviction multiple times. It was because of Besan’s family– her grandmother was beat up by the IDF last week.

Klagsburn can hold the complexities in her head. She can fear for her relatives in the bomb shelter. Those terror-filled emails from her aunt–

I know how scary that must be. But I also know that what the Israeli government is doing is totally wrong and it’s killing people and it’s killing people in a massive amount, and we just can’t cling to that anymore and we can’t… not acknowledge that.

She’d always examined why she was a social justice activist. She found:

Ultimately for me, after a lot of time and tears, it came back to my family, and it came back to the oppression that my family felt in having to leave Europe and being chased out by the Nazis.

The same concerns pushed her to speak out against Israel. But she feared excommunication, she honored the code of silence for years:

Even though the members of my family potentially don’t agree with me, I think that these values… of people that always stand up to oppression… that’s what I’m most proud of being part of this community. And I feel like for years, I lost that because of how I felt about Israel and because I couldn’t find a group of people that agreed with me. And because if I broke my– the code of silence of saying anything, I would be kicked out of my community. And I feel really lucky that I found people that are Jewish that have the same social justice values, but also we can talk openly about these things.

She needed a community to speak out, and she found one. But this is the big-souled part: at the end Klagsbrun addressed the mainstream Jewish community as her own:

For people that have grown up in this community of people that really fight passionately for a better world: We have to stop! We have to stop not saying anything about this! We have to be OK with feeling the internal turmoil that it will be for a lot of us. Because in the end I think We’ll come out a way more just community….I really hope this is a watershed moment for a lot of us. I’ve been really inspired to see how many people have been speaking out. Friends of mine, all on social media, who have said, I’m an American Jew, I’ve never said anything on this issue because I didn’t want to alienate the people around me. And: This is too much! We have to say something. I have to say that I don’t agree with that.

I hope that people in this audience join that group of people that are willing to speak up.

And I hope if you’re not ready to speak out, that you support the people in your family that do. And that you don’t push them away. That you love them and honor them, and realize that it’s those values that made that person.

Klagsbrun is a Jew making a spectacular transit against the night sky. She shows us that such a transformation is impossible without examining the roots of one’s adherence to Israel. There are Jews in the media I know with far higher status than Klagsbrun who have similar emotional investments who have never been open about them, let alone interrogated them as she is doing. What a leader. And I must say that I had far fewer attachments than she did; my family was not Zionist, but at 50 I was afraid of my mother’s best friend in Jerusalem, which is kind of pitiful. Klagsbrun’s cousin is in the Israeli army. She’s a lot braver than I was.

And notice what an effect meeting Tamar had on Arielle. She didn’t need any more information than that family’s experience. I think that’s called bearing witness.

Thanks to Jacob Ari Labendz and Michael Berg.