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THE GREAT RUPTURE IN AMERICAN JEWISH LIFE  
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Peter Beinart
March 22, 2024
New York Times
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_ For the last decade or so, an ideological tremor has been
unsettling American Jewish life. Since Oct. 7, it has become an
earthquake. It concerns the relationship between liberalism and
Zionism.... _

Illustration: Daniel Benneworth-Gray / New York Times,

 

For the last decade or so, an ideological tremor has been unsettling
American Jewish life. Since Oct. 7, it has become an earthquake. It
concerns the relationship between liberalism and Zionism, two creeds
that for more than half a century have defined American Jewish
identity. In the years to come, American Jews will face growing
pressure to choose between them.

They will face that pressure because Israel’s war in Gaza has
supercharged a transformation on the American left. Solidarity with
Palestinians is becoming as essential to leftist politics as support
for abortion rights or opposition to fossil fuels. And as happened
during the Vietnam War and the struggle against South African
apartheid, leftist fervor is reshaping the liberal mainstream. In
December, the United Automobile Workers demanded a cease-fire
[[link removed]] and formed a
divestment working group to consider the union’s “economic ties to
the conflict.” In January, the National L.G.B.T.Q. Task
Force called for
[[link removed]] a
cease-fire as well. In February, the leadership of the African
Methodist Episcopal Church, the nation’s oldest Black Protestant
denomination, called on the United States
[[link removed]] to
halt aid to the Jewish state. Across blue America, many liberals who
once supported Israel or avoided the subject are making the
Palestinian cause their own.

This transformation remains in its early stages. In many prominent
liberal institutions — most significantly, the Democratic Party —
supporters of Israel remain not only welcome but also dominant. But
the leaders of those institutions no longer represent much of their
base. The Democratic majority leader, Senator Chuck Schumer,
acknowledged this divide in a speech on Israel
[[link removed]] on
the Senate floor last week. He reiterated his longstanding commitment
to the Jewish state, though not its prime minister. But he also
conceded, in the speech’s most remarkable line, that he “can
understand the idealism that inspires so many young people in
particular to support a one-state solution” — a solution that does
not involve a Jewish state. Those are the words of a politician who
understands that his party is undergoing profound change.

The American Jews most committed to Zionism, the ones who run
establishment institutions, understand that liberal America is
becoming less ideologically hospitable. And they are responding by
forging common cause with the American right. It’s no surprise that
the Anti-Defamation League, which only a few years ago harshly
criticized
[[link removed]] Donald
Trump’s immigration policies, recently honored
[[link removed]] his
son-in-law and former senior adviser, Jared Kushner.

Mr. Trump himself recognizes the emerging political split. “Any
Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion,” he
said in an interview
[[link removed]] published
on Monday. “They hate everything about Israel, and they should be
ashamed of themselves because Israel will be destroyed.” It’s
typical Trumpian indecency and hyperbole, but it’s rooted in a
political reality. For American Jews who want to preserve their
country’s unconditional support for Israel for another generation,
there is only one reliable political partner: a Republican Party that
views standing for Palestinian rights as part of the “woke”
agenda.

The American Jews who are making a different choice — jettisoning
Zionism because they can’t reconcile it with the liberal principle
of equality under the law — garner less attention because they
remain further from power. But their numbers are larger than many
recognize, especially among millennials and Gen Z. And they face their
own dilemmas. They are joining a Palestine solidarity movement that is
growing larger, but also more radical, in response to Israel’s
destruction of Gaza. That growing radicalism has produced a paradox: A
movement that welcomes more and more American Jews finds it harder to
explain where Israeli Jews fit into its vision of Palestinian
liberation.

The emerging rupture between American liberalism and American Zionism
constitutes the greatest transformation in American Jewish politics in
half a century. It will redefine American Jewish life for decades to
come.

 

“American Jews,” writes Marc Dollinger in his book “Quest for
Inclusion: Jews and Liberalism in Modern America,” have long
depicted themselves as “guardians of liberal America.” Since they
came to the United States in large numbers around the turn of the 20th
century, Jews have been wildly overrepresented in movements for civil,
women’s, labor and gay rights. Since the 1930s, despite their rising
prosperity, they have voted
[[link removed]] overwhelmingly
for Democrats. For generations of American Jews, the icons of American
liberalism — Eleanor Roosevelt, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King
Jr., Gloria Steinem — have been secular saints..

The American Jewish love affair with Zionism dates from the early 20th
century as well. But it came to dominate communal life only after
Israel’s dramatic victory in the 1967 war exhilarated American Jews
eager for an antidote to Jewish powerlessness during the Holocaust.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which was nearly
bankrupt on the eve of the 1967 war, had become American Jewry’s
most powerful institution by the 1980s. American Jews, wrote
[[link removed]] Albert
Vorspan, a leader of Reform Judaism, in 1988, “have made of Israel
an icon — a surrogate faith, surrogate synagogue, surrogate God.”

Given the depth of these twin commitments, it’s no surprise that
American Jews have long sought to fuse them by describing Zionism as a
liberal cause. It has always been a strange pairing. American liberals
generally consider themselves advocates of equal citizenship
irrespective of ethnicity, religion and race. Zionism — or at the
least the version that has guided Israel since its founding —
requires Jewish dominance. From 1948 to 1966, Israel held most of its
Palestinian citizens under military law; since 1967 it has ruled
millions of Palestinians who hold no citizenship at all. Even so,
American Jews could until recently assert their Zionism without having
their liberal credentials challenged.

The primary reason was the absence from American public discourse of
Palestinians, the people whose testimony would cast those credentials
into greatest doubt. In 1984, the Palestinian American literary critic
Edward Said argued
[[link removed]] that
in the West, Palestinians lack “permission to narrate” their own
experience. For decades after he wrote those words, they remained
true. A study [[link removed]] by the
University of Arizona’s Maha Nassar found that of the opinion
articles about Palestinians published in The New York Times and The
Washington Post between 2000 and 2009, Palestinians themselves wrote
roughly 1 percent.

But in recent years, Palestinian voices, while still embattled and
even censored
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have begun to carry. Palestinians have turned to social media to
combat their exclusion from the press. In an era of youth-led
activism, they have joined intersectional movements forged by parallel
experiences of discrimination and injustice. Meanwhile, Israel —
under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu for most of the past two
decades — has lurched to the right, producing politicians so openly
racist that their behavior cannot be defended in liberal terms.

Many Palestine solidarity activists identify as leftists, not
liberals. But like the activists of the Occupy Wall Street and Black
Lives Matter movements, they have helped change liberal opinion with
their radical critiques. In 2002, according to Gallup
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Democrats sympathized with Israel over the Palestinians by a margin of
34 points. By early 2023, they favored the Palestinians by 11 points.
And because opinion about Israel cleaves along generational lines,
that pro-Palestinian skew is much greater among the young. According
to a Quinnipiac University poll
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November, Democrats under the age of 35 sympathize more with
Palestinians than with Israelis by 58 points.

Given this generational gulf, universities offer a preview of the way
many liberals — or “progressives,” a term that straddles
liberalism and leftism and enjoys more currency among young Americans
— may view Zionism in the years to come. Supporting Palestine has
become a core feature of progressive politics on many campuses. At
Columbia, for example, 94 campus organizations — including the
Vietnamese Students Association, the Reproductive Justice Collective
and Poetry Slam, Columbia’s “only recreational spoken word club”
— announced in November
[[link removed]] that
they “see Palestine as the vanguard for our collective
liberation.” As a result, Zionist Jewish students find themselves at
odds with most of their politically active peers.

Accompanying this shift, on campus and beyond, has been a rise in
Israel-related antisemitism. It follows a pattern in American history.
From the hostility toward German Americans
[[link removed]] during
World War I to violence against American Muslims after Sept. 11 and
assaults on Asian Americans during the Covid pandemic, Americans have
a long and ugly tradition of expressing their hostility toward foreign
governments or movements by targeting compatriots who share a
religion, ethnicity or nationality with those overseas adversaries.
Today, tragically, some Americans who loathe Israel are taking it out
on American Jews. (Palestinian Americans, who have endured multiple
[[link removed]] violent
[[link removed]] hate
crimes
[[link removed]] since
Oct. 7, are experiencing their own version of this phenomenon.) The
spike in antisemitism since Oct. 7 follows a pattern. Five years
ago, the political scientist
[[link removed]] Ayal
Feinberg, using data from 2001 and 2014, found that reported
antisemitic incidents in the United States spike when the Israeli
military conducts a substantial military operation.

Attributing the growing discomfort of pro-Israel Jewish students
entirely to antisemitism, however, misses something fundamental.
Unlike establishment Jewish organizations, Jewish students often
distinguish between bigotry and ideological antagonism.In a 2022
study
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the political scientist Eitan Hersh found that more than 50 percent of
Jewish college students felt “they pay a social cost for supporting
the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.” And yet, in general, Dr.
Hersh reported, “the students do not fear antisemitism.”

Surveys since Oct. 7 find something similar. Asked in November in a
Hillel International poll
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describe the climate on campus since the start of the war, 20 percent
of Jewish students answered “unsafe” and 23 percent answered
“scary.” By contrast, 45 percent answered “uncomfortable” and
53 percent answered “tense.” A survey that same month
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the Jewish Electorate Institute found that only 37 percent of American
Jewish voters ages 18 to 35 consider campus antisemitism a “very
serious problem,” compared with nearly 80 percent of American Jewish
voters over the age of 35.

While some young pro-Israel American Jews experience antisemitism,
they more frequently report ideological exclusion. As Zionism becomes
associated with the political right, their experiences on progressive
campuses are coming to resemble the experiences of young Republicans.
The difference is that unlike young Republicans, most young American
Zionists were raised to believe that theirs was a liberal creed. When
their parents attended college, that assertion was rarely challenged.
On the same campuses where their parents felt at home, Jewish students
who view Zionism as central to their identity now often feel like
outsiders.

In 1979, Mr. Said observed
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in the West, “to be a Palestinian is in political terms to be an
outlaw.” In much of America — including Washington — that
remains true. But within progressive institutions one can glimpse the
beginning of a historic inversion. Often, it’s now the Zionists who
feel like outlaws.

Given the organized American Jewish community’s professed devotion
to liberal principles, which include free speech, one might imagine
that Jewish institutions would greet this ideological shift by urging
pro-Israel students to tolerate and even learn from their
pro-Palestinian peers. Such a stance would flow naturally from the
statements establishment Jewish groups have made in the past. A few
years ago, the Anti-Defamation League declared
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“our country’s universities serve as laboratories for the exchange
of differing viewpoints and beliefs. Offensive, hateful speech is
protected by the Constitution’s First Amendment.”

But as pro-Palestinian sentiment has grown in progressive America,
pro-Israel Jewish leaders have apparently made an exception for
anti-Zionism. While still claiming to support free speech on campus,
the ADL last October asked
[[link removed]] college
presidents to investigate local chapters of Students for Justice in
Palestine to determine whether they violated university regulations or
state or federal laws, a demand that the American Civil Liberties
Union warned
[[link removed]] could
“chill speech” and “betray the spirit of free inquiry.” After
the University of Pennsylvania hosted a Palestinian literature
festival last fall, Marc Rowan, chair
[[link removed]] of
the United Jewish Appeal-Federation of New York and chair of the board
of advisers of Penn’s Wharton business school, condemned
[[link removed]] the
university’s president for giving the festival Penn’s
“imprimatur.” In December, he encouraged
[[link removed]] trustees
to alter university policies in ways that Penn’s branch of the
American Association of University Professors warn
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could “silence and punish speech with which trustees disagree.”

In this effort to limit pro-Palestinian speech, establishment Jewish
leaders are finding their strongest allies on the authoritarian right.
Pro-Trump Republicans have their own censorship agenda: They want to
stop schools and universities from emphasizing America’s history of
racial and other oppression. Calling that pedagogy antisemitic makes
it easier to ban or defund. At a much discussed congressional hearing
in December featuring the presidents of Harvard, Penn and M.I.T., the
Republican representative Virginia Foxx noted
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Harvard teaches courses like “Race and Racism in the Making of the
United States as a Global Power” and hosts seminars such as
“Scientific Racism and Anti-Racism: History and Recent
Perspectives” before declaring that “Harvard also, not
coincidentally but causally, was ground zero for antisemitism
following Oct. 7.”

Ms. Foxx’s view is typical. While some Democrats also equate
anti-Zionism and antisemitism, the politicians and business leaders
most eager to suppress pro-Palestinian speech are conservatives who
link such speech to the diversity, equity and inclusion agenda they
despise. Elise Stefanik, a Trump acolyte who has accused
[[link removed]] Harvard
of “caving to the woke left,” became the star of that
congressional hearing by demanding that Harvard’s president
[[link removed]],
Claudine Gay, punish students who chant slogans like “From the river
to the sea, Palestine will be free.” (Ms. Gay was subsequently
forced to resign following charges of plagiarism.) Elon Musk, who in
November said that the phrase
[[link removed]] “from
the river to the sea” was banned from his social media platform X
(formerly Twitter), the following month declared
[[link removed]],
“D.E.I. must die.” The first governor to ban Students for Justice
in Palestine chapters
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his state’s public universities was Florida’s Ron DeSantis, who
has also signed legislation
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limits what those universities can teach about race and gender.

This alignment between the American Jewish organizational
establishment and the Trumpist right is not limited to universities.
If the ADL has aligned with Republicans who want to silence “woke”
activists on campus, AIPAC has joined forces with Republicans who want
to disenfranchise “woke” voters. In the 2022 midterm elections,
AIPAC endorsed
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least 109 Republicans who opposed certifying the 2020 election. For an
organization single-mindedly focused on sustaining unconditional U.S.
support for Israel, that constituted a rational decision. Since
Republican members of Congress don’t have to mollify pro-Palestinian
voters, they’re AIPAC’s most dependable allies. And if many of
those Republicans used specious claims of Black voter fraud to oppose
the democratic transfer of power in 2020 — and may do so again —
that’s a price AIPAC seems to be prepared to pay.

 
Image credit: Leah Millis/Reuters  //  New York Times
For the many American Jews who still consider themselves both
progressives and Zionists, this growing alliance between leading
Zionist institutions and a Trumpist Republican Party is uncomfortable.
But in the short term, they have an answer: politicians like President
Biden, whose views about both Israel and American democracy roughly
reflect their own. In his speech last week, Mr. Schumer called
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liberal Zionists American Jewry’s “silent majority.”

For the moment he may be right. In the years to come, however, as
generational currents pull the Democratic Party in a more
pro-Palestinian direction and push America’s pro-Israel
establishment to the right, liberal Zionists will likely find it
harder to reconcile their two faiths. Young American Jews offer a
glimpse into that future, in which a sizable wing of American Jewry
decides that to hold fast to its progressive principles it must
jettison Zionism and embrace equal citizenship in Israel and
Palestine, as well as in the United States.

For an American Jewish establishment that equates anti-Zionism with
antisemitism, these anti-Zionist Jews are inconvenient. Sometimes,
pro-Israel Jewish organizations pretend they don’t exist. In
November, after Columbia suspended two anti-Zionist campus groups, the
ADL thanked
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leaders for acting “to protect Jewish students” — even though
one of the suspended groups was Jewish Voice for Peace. At other
times, pro-Israel leaders describe anti-Zionist Jews as a negligible
fringe. If American Jews are divided over the war in Gaza, Andrés
Spokoiny, the president and chief executive of the Jewish Funders
Network, an organization for Jewish philanthropists, declared
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December, “the split is 98 percent/2 percent.”

Among older American Jews, this assertion of a Zionist consensus
contains some truth. But among younger American Jews, it’s false. In
2021, even before Israel’s current far-right government took power,
the Jewish Electorate Institute found
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38 percent of American Jewish voters under the age of 40 viewed Israel
as an apartheid state, compared with 47 percent who said it’s not.
In November, it revealed
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49 percent of American Jewish voters ages 18 to 35 opposed Mr.
Biden’s request for additional military aid to Israel. On many
campuses, Jewish students are at the forefront of protests for a
cease-fire and divestment from Israel. They don’t speak for all —
and maybe not even most — of their Jewish peers. But they represent
far more than 2 percent.

These progressive Jews are, as the U.S. editor of The London Review of
Books, Adam Shatz, noted to me, a double minority. Their anti-Zionism
makes them a minority among American Jews, while their Jewishness
makes them a minority in the Palestine solidarity movement. Fifteen
years ago, when the liberal Zionist group J Street was intent on being
the “blocking back
[[link removed]]” for
President Barack Obama’s push for a two-state solution, some liberal
Jews imagined themselves leading the push to end Israel’s occupation
of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Today, the prospect of partition
has diminished, and Palestinians increasingly set the terms of
activist criticism of Israel. That discourse, which is peppered with
terms like “apartheid” and “decolonization," is generally
hostile to a Jewish state within any borders.

There’s nothing antisemitic about envisioning a future in which
Palestinians and Jews coexist on the basis of legal equality rather
than Jewish supremacy. But in pro-Palestine activist circles in the
United States, coexistence has receded as a theme. In 1999, Mr.
Said argued
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“a binational Israeli-Palestinian state” that offered
“self-determination for both peoples.” In his 2007 book, “One
Country,” Ali Abunimah, a co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, an
influential source of pro-Palestine news and opinion, imagined one
state whose name reflected the identities of both major communities
that inhabit it. The terms “‘Israel’ and ‘Palestine’ are
dear to those who use them and they should not be abandoned,” he
argued. “The country could be called Yisrael-Falastin in Hebrew and
Filastin-Isra’il in Arabic.”

In recent years, however, as Israel has moved to the right,
pro-Palestinian discourse in the United States has hardened. The
phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which
dates from the 1960s but has gained new prominence since Oct. 7, does
not acknowledge Palestine and Israel’s binational character. To many
American Jews, in fact, the phrase suggests a Palestine free of Jews.
It sounds expulsionist, if not genocidal. It’s an ironic charge,
given that it is Israel that today controls the land between the river
and the sea, whose leaders openly advocate
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mass exodus of Palestinians and that the International Court of
Justice says [[link removed]] could plausibly be
committing genocide in Gaza.

Palestinian scholars like Maha Nassar
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Khalidi
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that “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” does not
imply the subjugation of Jews. It instead reflects the longstanding
Palestinian belief that Palestine should have become an independent
country when released from European colonial control, a vision that
does not preclude Jews from living freely alongside their Muslim and
Christian neighbors. The Jewish groups closest to the Palestine
solidarity movement agree: Jewish Voice for Peace’s Los Angeles
chapter has argued
[[link removed]] that
the slogan is no more anti-Jewish than the phrase “Black lives
matter” is anti-white. And if the Palestine solidarity movement in
the United States calls for the genocide of Jews, it’s hard to
explain why so many Jews have joined its ranks. Rabbi Alissa Wise, an
organizer of Rabbis for Cease-Fire, estimates that other than
Palestinians, no other group has been as prominent in the protests
against the war as Jews.

Still, imagining a “free Palestine” from the river to the sea
requires imagining that Israeli Jews will become Palestinians, which
erases their collective identity. That’s a departure from the more
inclusive vision that Mr. Said and Mr. Abunimah outlined years ago.
It’s harder for Palestinian activists to offer that more inclusive
vision when they are watching Israel bomb and starve Gaza. But the
rise of Hamas makes it even more essential.

Jews who identify with the Palestinian struggle may find it difficult
to offer this critique. Many have defected from the Zionist milieu in
which they were raised. Having made that painful transition, which can
rupture relations with friends and family, they may be disinclined to
question their new ideological home. It’s frightening to risk
alienating one community when you’ve already alienated another.
Questioning the Palestine solidarity movement also violates the
notion, prevalent in some quarters of the American left, that members
of an oppressor group should not second-guess representatives of the
oppressed.

But these identity hierarchies suppress critical thought. Palestinians
aren’t a monolith, and progressive Jews aren’t merely allies. They
are members of a small and long-persecuted people who have not only
the right but also the obligation to care about Jews in Israel, and to
push the Palestine solidarity movement to more explicitly include them
in its vision of liberation, in the spirit of the Freedom Charter
adopted during apartheid by the African National Congress and its
allies, which declared
[[link removed]] in
its second sentence that “South Africa belongs to all who live in
it, Black and white.”

For many American Jews, it is painful to watch their children’s or
grandchildren’s generation question Zionism. It is infuriating to
watch students at liberal institutions with which they once felt
aligned treat Zionism as a racist creed. It is tempting to attribute
all this to antisemitism, even if that requires defining many young
American Jews as antisemites themselves.

But the American Jews who insist that Zionism and liberalism remain
compatible should ask themselves why Israel now attracts the fervent
support of Representative Stefanik but repels the African Methodist
Episcopal Church and the United Automobile Workers. Why it enjoys the
admiration of Elon Musk
[[link removed]] and Viktor
Orban [[link removed]] but is labeled
[[link removed]] a
perpetrator of apartheid by Human Rights Watch and likened to the Jim
Crow South
[[link removed]] by
Ta-Nehisi Coates. Why it is more likely to retain unconditional
American support if Mr. Trump succeeds in turning the United States
into a white Christian supremacist state than if he fails.

For many decades, American Jews have built our political identity on a
contradiction: Pursue equal citizenship here; defend group supremacy
there. Now here and there are converging. In the years to come, we
will have to choose.

_[PETER BEINART (@PeterBeinart [[link removed]]) is
a professor of journalism and political science at the Newmark School
of Journalism [[link removed]] at the City
University of New York. He is also the editor at large of Jewish
Currents [[link removed]] and writes The Beinart
Notebook [[link removed]], a weekly newsletter.]_

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