Earlier this week, I joined 125 rabbis at a conference entitled Zionism: A New Conversation. I filled a notebook with information and ideas. Here are my top 12.
1. Antisemitism is a shape-shifter. Right now its form is anti-Zionism. It was the Soviet propaganda machine that first swapped the word Zionist for Jew. The blood libel, the accusation of dual loyalty, the myth of secret power? The Soviets made it all about Zionists instead of using the J-word. In a post-Holocaust world in which saying things about Jews was no longer in good taste, the rebrand stuck.
2. It is easier to retain moral purity when you hold no power. Powerlessness has become romanticized, because when you hold power you have to make hard ethical decisions.
3. Gaza is excruciatingly tragic. In Gaza, Haviv Reteg Gur argued, Israel’s victory is total and will be complete, and it is tragic. Some wars, he noted, are won and it feels morally wonderful. This war may be won, or not, but if this is victory it feels awful. It is awful. The worst part? Because Israel is fighting an enemy who vows over and over again to destroying Israel (to be clear: that sentence was about Hamas, not innocent or peaceful Palestinian people caught up in this), there is no choice. That is tragic, too. We should rend our clothes and sit in ashes and mourn the tragedy for what it is. (That last point is mine, not Gur’s. I think we can hold both responsibility and mourning in this very complex geopolitical situation. The midrash about the Egyptians drowning in the sea has God scolding the Israelites for celebrating when their enemies suffered.)
4. The younger you go, the less people know what Zionism or anti-Semitism are. Prof Rachel Fish’s work has shown that among 18–34-year-olds asked to rank forms of hate, hatred of Jewish people is not cool… but hatred of the state of Israel, and the belief that the state of Israel shouldn’t exist, rank as super cool. This is true across all religious lines including evangelical Christians… and Jews. For Jews under age 40, the majority believe that Israel complicates their lives and embarrasses them.
5. Particularism v. Universalism. Part of what’s going on with that is that in order to be part of the universal, you have to check your particularism, if you’re a Jew. For example: in order to be part of the LGBTQ+ club at college, or the climate club or whatever, you have to disavow Zionism. You can’t be a Zionist and part of those clubs at most places these days. That includes SOMA, by the way, where it is increasingly hard to participate in the progressive activist community and also a committed Zionist. The pressure is on to eschew the Jewish and/or Zionist part. At UCLA, a student had to drop out of the race for student government last year because she’d been on a Birthright trip to Israel. Anti-Zionism has become a litmus test for progressivism. Zioness is doing great work here.
6. No more outsourcing the education of our children on these issues. Statistically parents of kids and teens do not have the knowledge they need to feel competent on Israel history and Zionism. Advocacy, it was powerfully noted, is not education, and our kids watching us advocate is not the same as our kids absorbing our knowledge. I’m putting together a class on Parenting in an Anti-Zionist World to help us here. Register here [make up a link please] to express interest for when I’m ready to get it going.
7. What we need on university campuses: a) bridge-builders. Our kids can be that, but only if they know who they are and are solid in their knowledge and values. B) Faculty appointments need to be diversified so that the lens of settler-colonialism (currently the only approach in most humanities departments to the topic) is only one of many ways that professors have studied and look at Israel. C) most of all, we need to keep sending our kids to these schools despite the ruckus. As Columbia Law School Professor David Schizer put it, in 30 years, we want our Secretary of State to be someone who has Jewish friends (or is Jewish themselves) – not someone who has never met a Jew.
8. It’s not conspiracy, it’s incompetence (on campuses), and ignorance (online). People aren’t trying to be anti-semitic. People aren’t doing the research and then deciding to say things that are repetitions of age-old myths about Jews. They just don’t know.
9. The strategy of ingratiating ourselves to our host communities, which has been the strategy of the American Jewish community, has become obsolete. Bret Stephens put it this way: we want to be Jonah Salk inventing world-saving medicine; or Julius Rosenwald, quietly funding historically black colleges; or Jerry Seinfeld, entertaining millions. None of them made being Jewish part of their public persona. Things are different now. We need to show up as proud Jews, as proud Zionists, as people who may criticize Israel or its government or policies…or not…but who are committed to the safety of the Jewish people in all the places we reside.
10. The ideology behind the protests has inspired people to give. All those tents on campus last spring were new, and identical. Someone donated and shipped them. Student Justice for Palestine’s social media went dark in May 2023, and turned back on again on…October 6. There’s a lot of money behind all of that. We have to match it. It’s good to give to world causes, but right now the Jewish people needs us.
11. We need to prioritize Jewish community over the other community circles in our lives. Not because those other circles are not important. But because right now we need each other. The way we stay strong individually as by showing up collectively. So… keep showing up. I’m being super specific here: show up at Oheb. If you’ve stopped coming, it’s time to come back. If you’ve stopped giving all you can, start. Pick the thing – minyan, First Friday, shabbat, a class, volunteering, an additional free will gift, all of the above. It’s the #1 thing you can do for the Jewish people right now because it’s the most local source of strength we have. Our bridge-building only works if the abutment is firmly rooted in place. First we ground then we build across the divide.
12. When God called to Moses from the burning bush and told him to go save the Jewish people, Moses resisted. Moses argues that the people will never listen to him, that he’s slow of speech, that it will never work. Which, as Rabbi J.J. Schachter taught us, is nuts, since the only reason Moses was out there in the desert tending Yitro’s sheep in the first place was because he himself saw the suffering of the Israelites, killed a man who was beating a Jew, and then fled the scene. So he knows the people are suffering. Dear God, he says, don’t send me! According to the Talmud, Moses spent a whole week arguing with God that God should send Elijah the Prophet to save the Jews instead. What about us? We (and at this point Rabbi Schachter was shouting so loudly that security actually came in to check in on things) we must argue for all eternity that God help us, that God should send Elijah, that God should redeem us, end this war, bring back the hostages, end the suffering, that God should to turn us into Moses to save the Jewish people. Moses got the message that it was up to him, and now it is our turn. It is up to us.