No one agrees on what ‘Jewish values’ are. That’s why they matter

In a June 13 piece for Mondoweiss, Anna Rajagopal argued against invoking “Jewish values” to justify the fight for Palestinian liberation. The trouble, she observes, is that Jewish values “aren’t concrete agreed upon concepts or guiding principles, and they change depending on who you ask.” Progressive social justice activists might believe that Judaism is fundamentally committed to justice and therefore incompatible with the mistreatment of Palestinians, but far-right Jewish supremacists are just as certain that Jewish values demand the defense of Jewish interests, even if it costs Palestinian lives and freedom. 

There is no universally accepted criterion for determining which version of Jewish values is correct, but many Jewish progressives take Jewish values to be inherently good, innocent of the violence that has been committed in their name, unaffected by the flood of modern history. In doing so, argues Rajagopal, well-meaning progressives end up valorizing Jews over other people, treating them as privileged bearers of the values that undergird other people’s (especially Palestinians’) fight for liberation.

Rajagopal has articulated questions that should be faced by anyone who invokes “Jewish values” in struggles for non-Jewish or universal emancipation. Do we have any business imposing Jewish values on the struggles of people oppressed by a state that claims to be Jewish? Can we claim that Jewish values are good, without suggesting that Jewish people are more valuable than other people? Can we talk about Jewish values at all, when there is so little agreement on what they are? 

The answer to the last question, in my view, is yes, and that fact provides the key to answering the others. Jewish values are worth talking about precisely because their meaning is contested. We can speak of emancipatory Jewish values, not because Jewish values are inherently more emancipatory than any others, but because those of us who care about this intellectual tradition have a responsibility to reinterpret it in order to make it relevant to contemporary struggles. In doing so, we can turn attention away from identities of people, which are so often invoked to justify oppression (the need for a Jewish state, the defense of the Jewish people, the superiority of one people to uncivilized others, and so on). We can draw attention instead to traditions of emancipation, which can be meaningful to anyone who cares about them. 

Of course, Palestinians don’t need anything Jewish to justify their struggle for freedom. Jews have no special ability or unique mission to liberate Palestinians. Jewish history should have taught enough about the dubious value of people who claim to be saviors. Why else, then, might Jews speak of their Jewishness when fighting for Palestinian freedom? Why might it matter at all?

For most people, the decision to engage politically “as Jews” is not the result of introspection or ethnic pride. More often, it’s a decision thrust upon us. Sometimes directly, by antisemitism that won’t allow us to cease being seen as Jews. Sometimes indirectly, by a supposed philosemitism that celebrates Jewish identity with anti-Palestinian violence, which compels us to respond in protest. And sometimes pressure comes from pro-Palestinian activists who rightly recognize that disproportionate authority is granted to Jewish voices on issues related to Palestine.

Jews are called upon to speak as Jews. We can refuse to speak, or we can respond. If we respond, we can we speak as people who interpret principles and ideas drawn from Jewish history—in other words, we can invoke “Jewish values.” Or we can ignore Jewish values and speak “as Jews,” that is, as people whose Jewishness is not grounded in any specific values, but remains in the realm of essential identity. We can give our positions weight by inscribing them in a specific history of emancipation, or we can add value to them simply by speaking “as Jews,” while saying the same things that anyone else might say.

It seems to me that if there is going to be a self-consciously “Jewish” contribution to the Palestinian cause, it is far better to invoke Jewish values—ideas drawn from Jewish history—than to rely on the unearned authority of Jewish identity. The contested character of Jewish values allows Jewishness to continue as a history of interpretation rather than becoming reduced to an identity that limits the freedom of Jews and Palestinians both. It allows Jewishness to be an identity for some, while for others (like me), it represents the principle of non-identity: the idea that one can resist complete integration into the hegemonic identities of today’s states, just as Jews through centuries of life in diaspora refused to conform to the imposed ideals of the realms where they lived.

The current configuration of power in Israel has reduced Jewish history to a single narrative, which makes Jewish identity incompatible with Palestinian freedom. By revisiting this history, engaging in the millennia-long debate over the meaning of Jewish tradition, we can question this anti-Palestinian narrative, holding up a different Jewishness, one that looks back to the repeated struggles of the oppressed, remembers having been so often strangers in strange lands, recalls ancient sympathies for the victims of occupation and forced exile, and stubbornly believes that all people could be free. 

A voice that reminds us of these ideas can carry weight because of what it says, not because of the identity of who says it. The values articulated shouldn’t be accepted because they’re Jewish, but because they’re values that should carry meaning for those struggling today for freedom.

In other words, Jewish values matter precisely because no one agrees on what they are. “They’re made up,” as Rajagopal writes, and it’s up to us to re-make them. Because if we don’t make them up our way, our opponents will make them up their way. Jewish history contains elements that can made into an anti-Palestinian narrative; it also contains the basis of a different narrative founded on solidarity. Jewish values aren’t inherently incompatible with genocide. But they can be made incompatible with genocide. They have to be, if we care about them surviving at all.

On Passover we are told that the story of the Israelites leaving Egypt is not only an ancient story. Every generation is called on to imagine that it is freed from slavery too. But what does this mean? Every generation also has to figure out anew what freedom from slavery means. What kind of slavery? Whose freedom?

Is it “self-serving” to mull over the meaning of Jewishness while Palestinians are killed in Gaza? Is it self-serving, as Rajagopal claims, to make the struggle for Palestinian freedom serve also the ends of Jewish self-understanding? Yes, it is self-serving, and it should be. This is exactly what can save Jewish activism from the dangers of saviorism. 

The activism of the savior suppresses the self in favor of a pure struggle for an absolute other. But the principle of solidarity sees the struggle for others as a struggle also for ourselves. The savior claims to sacrifice the self for others, negating their own social position and interests, making activism into an act of selflessness (or, just as often, of self-interest that is denied). But the solidarity activist begins in a concrete position in society and asks how the liberation of others can also make us free. Or as some have put it: instead of sacrificing ourselves for others, we can ensure our own safety through solidarity.

Pro-Palestinian statements are too easily ignored or written off when uttered by non-Jews. That unfortunate fact makes it tempting, and occasionally necessary, to simply reiterate those statements with the added authority that we stand behind them too, and we are Jews. But we can also move beyond this kind of activism, which relies on the authority of Jewish identity, and instead we can do the hard work of locating solidarity in Jewish tradition, adding our generation’s new layer of interpretation to the many layers that have come before us, as we decide how best to articulate the shared interests of Palestinians, Jews, and everyone else.