The Jewish establishment is cracking! It’s time to stop shunning anti-Zionist Jews, says a prominent rabbi who is associated with J Street, the liberal Zionist Israel lobby group.
Rabbi Amy Bardack writes at eJewish Philanthropy that the “donor bases” of traditional Jewish organizations are “shrinking” — hard-core Zionists are dying off — and this at the very moment that more and more young Jews believe Israel is an apartheid state. So it’s time for the Jewish establishment to include Jews who “do not support” Israel.
Our institutions have to wrestle with the reality that increasing numbers of passionate Jews do not support the State of Israel. Is it in our best long-term interest to be welcoming to everyone but them? I propose that we spend less time labeling all anti-Zionist Jews as antisemitic, and more time figuring out how to be truly inclusive.
Bardack is a longtime Jewish educator and a member in good standing of the Pittsburgh Jewish establishment and is in the rabbinical “cabinet” of J Street, which supports full funding to Israel.
Bardack says shunning anti-Zionists is hypocritical.
Many of our communal organizations welcome with open arms a full spectrum of people with various racial or gender identities, sexual orientations, religious practices or beliefs. Many of these organizations proport but one acceptable form of ostracism, and that is toward those who express anti-Zionist viewpoints.
Bardack is moved by the case of Jessie Sander, a teacher who is suing the “flagship” temple Westchester Reform Temple, which allegedly fired her last July after rabbis discovered her article about her transformative “anti-Zionist journey” that she posted during Israel’s May onslaught on Gaza.
Bardack acknowledges that Sander is the future.
The number of Jews who think like Sander is not insignificant. A June 2021 poll by the Jewish Electoral Institute found that 34% of American Jews agreed that “Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is similar to racism in the United States,” 25% agreed that “Israel is an apartheid state” and 22% agreed that “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians.” The percentages are even higher when you isolate adults under age 40.
The above data should give us pause. Across our communal landscape, donor bases of legacy institutions are shrinking. Synagogue membership is dwindling. Is it wise to shun Jews like Sander, at a time when Jewish affiliation and literacy are at an all-time low?
But as Bardack indicates, this is now the faultline inside the Jewish community. All Jewish establishment organizations are dedicated to Israel, and the young people are flooding the exits. And the donor base is dying off– which explains AIPAC’s recent collapse into a paper tiger with lame social media messaging.
Naftali Bennett’s new government was supposed to put a finger in the dyke, but they’re as committed to anti-Palestinianism and as opposed to a Palestinian state as the Netanyahu mob. And how long can liberal Zionists continue to hold the bag for giving money to the “thug nation”? When the liberal Zionists’ children are angry?
I think it was Shrewd of the Jewish establishment to shun anti-Zionist Jews because as soon as you include anti-Zionists, they win the argument. That’s why we have been excluded– the ideas are too powerful. “Equality” is a much more appealing principle than “We were exiled from the land 2000 years ago so we need a Jewish majority state that privileges Jews over Palestinians.” So anti-Zionism has to be smeared as antisemitism for the lobby to keep the shop doors open.
Bardack describes anti-Zionist Jews as “excommunicated,” but says that according to Jewish tradition, the community can still learn from them.
Even though they are shunned in several ways for their wrongdoing, they are nevertheless permitted to teach Torah to others, and we are permitted to learn from them.
It will be fascinating to see how many anti-Zionist Jews are included at J Street’s conference this April. My bet– 2 or 3, on panels about the Jewish “conversation about Israel.”
To be continued…
The problem with Zionism, a problem created entirely by the Israel and its most ardent supporters, is that the very definition and ideal of Zionism has evolved, metastasized, and keeps moving the goal posts at each new milestone.
In the beginning, Zionism was a call to establish a Homeland for Jews and the Jewish diaspora, anywhere in the world possible for Jews to live in peace, safely securely, and without the constant threat of persecution. Once this was within sight, Zionism morphed into establishing a Jewish State in the historic homeland of Judaism. Once a Jewish State was formed in Palestine and enough Palestinians ethnically cleansed for said state to have enough Jews in the majority, Zionism became an endeavor to establish and maintain a Jewish State for Jews only. As this new form of Zionism and newfound nationalism swept the land, Zionism yet again evolved into a cause for establishing a Jewish Only State that speaks for and represents ALL the Jews of the world. Effectively hijacking the identity of all Jews to include Israel and Zionism to the point that Zionism, Israel, and Judaism are indistinguishable from one another and a de facto monolith. This was done so that any criticism of this new reality and Apartheid State that now represents ALL Jews can be equated with anti-Jewish sentiment and therefore anti-semitism.
This modern interpretation of Zionism, distorted, warped, and fashioned by Israel and so-called Zionists is so far removed from the original plan and ambitions for Jews, that it is barely recognizable. It is also so inextricably interlinked with the so-called “Jewish character” of modern day Israel and the existential need to maintain this “Jewish character” via demographic manipulation, discrimination, dispossession, violence, occupation, and ethnic cleansing, that any attempts to stop or reverse the clearly illegal human rights violations required to maintain Jewish dominance over the lives of millions of Palestinians, is in of itself a threat to Zionism and thus the very same warped identity that Israel has fashioned for itself since its founding.
It’s time to start arresting criminals.
It will be interesting to see how J Street’s support for Israel fares at the upcoming meeting. It will probably not be challenged. They are “liberal Zionists,” an oxymoron if there ever was one.
“Rabbi”
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“Here also were the greatest centres of Jewish intellectual life. The most important single work of Jewish cultural creativity in over 3,000 years, apart from the Bible itself – the Talmud – came into being in Babylon. The struggle between Persia & Byzantium, in our period, led increasingly to a separation between Jews under Byzantine, Christian rule & Jews under Persian rule. Beyond all this, the Jews who lived under Christian rule seemed to have lost the knowledge of their own culturally specific languages – Hebrew & Aramaic – and to have taken on the use of Latin or Greek or other non-Jewish, local, languages. This in turn must have meant that they also lost access to the central literary works of Jewish culture – the Torah, Mishnah, poetry, midrash, even liturgy.”