Jewish Anti-Zionism Considered
The proper analogy for contemporary Jewish anti-Zionism is classical German Reform
By Yonoson Rosenblum
Jewish anti-Zionism is currently the rage. JTA recently reported on the gathering of 100 Jews in a Brooklyn mansion to advance the creation of new Jewish institutions with no attachment to Zionism. The event was sponsored by the Jewish Diaspora Movement and billed as a skill-building bootcamp.
Esti, 27, who is one of the leaders of an anti-Zionist minyan in Brooklyn, related to the JTA that many of those who have attended the minyan told her that they were relieved to attend services in a space without an Israeli flag.
One of the event's main topics was the setting of boundaries. Brant Rosen, one of the founders of Tzedek Chicago, emphasized that they were creating a highly political community of like-minded anti-Zionists, one that is deliberately "not an inclusive community." Alissa Wise, the co-founder of the Jewish Diaspora Movement, which sponsored the event, previously founded Rabbis for Ceasefire, which called for an end to all military aid to Israel.
A plenary session, titled "Solidarity, Accountability, and Shared Fate in the Palestine Movement," featured Linda Sarsour, who, as head of the Women's March, called Zionism "incompatible with intersectional feminism." She adamantly defended her co-chair Tamika Mallory's long association with Louis Farrakhan, who refers to Jews as "Satan."
Meanwhile, Ira Stoll points out in the Washington Free Beacon that both of Harvard's new Jewish hires, whom it touts as examples of its "commitment to combatting antisemitism and anti-Israel bias," are scheduled to appear at a symposium and a book launch next month on "Jewish Anti-Zionism." The choice of the keynote speaker, Judith Butler, makes clear that the event is to promote anti-Zionism, not just study it academically. Butler, a Berkeley professor, is a radical Jewish hater of Israel who has backed an academic boycott of Israel for more than a decade, and described Hamas's October 7 massacre of Jews as neither "a terrorist attack [nor] an antisemitic attack," but rather an act of "armed resistance."
Jessica Marglin, Harvard's new Jacob E. Safra Professor of Jewish History and Sephardic Civilization, is slated to moderate a panel on "Jewish Anti-Zionism in History" and participate in a panel on "Jewish Anti-Semitism Now."
And the Harvard Divinity School's Professor of Modern Jewish Studies in Residence, Shaul Magid, will be promoting his book Jewish Anti-Zionism: A Historical Anthology. The introduction, written together with co-editor Zev Mishel, provides the flavor of Magid's intentions. Jewish schools have marginalized Palestinian voices, while pushing a one-sided narrative of Jewish identity and Middle Eastern history, according to them. They complain of spurious accusations of antisemitism against social justice activists, particularly pro-Palestine activists.
I would have thought by now that those activists have given sufficient proof of their own antisemitism. It's explicit in the Hamas charter, for one thing, and clear in the attacks on individual Jews and Jewish institutions worldwide.
NOW, THERE MAY BE those among Mishpacha readers whose first reaction to hearing about today's Jewish anti-Zionism is to imagine that it is a positive development. Wasn't the Satmar Rebbe an anti-Zionist? Didn't Rav Shamshon Raphael Hirsch reject the overtures of Rabbi Tzvi Hirsch Kalischer and the Chovevei Zion movement, with the comment, "What they view as a great mitzvah, I view as no small aveirah?"
That reaction, however, would be wrong. As Adam Louis-Klein pointed out in a recent edition of Sapir, there is a great difference between "anti-Zionism" before the creation of the State of Israel and what he calls "antizionism" after the creation of the state, which is now home to nearly half of the world's Jews, including a majority of Torah learners. The former raises theological and ideological issues; the latter seeks the death or expulsion of those living in Israel today.
Given the Palestinians' unbending refusal to consider territorial compromise, from pre-state days creation until the present, it is clear that their goal remains to kill or expel Israel's Jewish population through military conquest. Neither the Satmar Rebbe nor Rav Hirsch would ever have celebrated the murder of any Jew, much less millions. And Briskers, who neither vote in Israeli elections nor take money from the state, do not hope that the Palestinians will realize their dream of retaking the entirety of the Land.
The proper analogy for contemporary Jewish anti-Zionism is classical German Reform, which removed from the siddur all references to the ingathering of the exiles and the rebuilding of the Beis Hamikdash. Their goal was to assure their fellow German citizens that they entertained no national aspirations as Jews and were fully loyal Germans of "the Mosaic faith."
Today's Jewish anti-Zionists are playing to a different audience: their fellow progressives, a movement from which they seek to avoid expulsion. But in both the earlier case of German Reform and today, their primary audience is non-Jews.
MY FIRST PROBLEM with Jewish anti-Zionists is their disconnect from their fellow Jews living in Israel and inability to place themselves in our situation — as opposed to that of the Palestinians, at which they are very good. Last week, a law school classmate sent me a missive from one of our Jewish professors announcing that he was donating the entirety of a $1.25 million dollar prize to CARE on behalf of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, who, he claimed, are under attack by Israel in violation of international law.
I wrote praising him for his generosity, but critiquing his analysis of the current situation. I won't repeat my discussion of Israel's lack of responsibility for the greatly exaggerated food shortage in Gaza; Hamas's responsibility under international law for civilian casualties caused by its decision to turn all Gazans into human shields by locating its fighters and military assets within and underneath the civilian population; or the unprecedently low ratio of civilian to military casualties achieved by Israel and its similarly unprecedented efforts to limit the civilian casualties. Those discussions are already familiar to Mishpacha readers.
But in addition, I took him to task for his lack of fellow feeling for the Jews of Israel: "I note that your self-congratulatory announcement makes no mention of Hamas's October 7 massacre, which I find curious. Here is a headline from an Israeli paper yesterday: 'New research by Clalit and the Brookdale Institute finds that 20% of Israelis continue to experience severe difficulties in daily functioning due to mental health issues, with young women particularly affected.'
"Over 200,000 Jews had to evacuate their homes in the South and North after October 7 and Hezbollah's rocket barrages the following day. In the southern communities, many did not even have homes to return to. Should Israel have simply acquiesced to a dramatic contraction of its 1948 borders?"
I also shared what it was like to live in Israel in March 2002, during which month 139 Jews were killed in suicide bombings, and we had to listen to the terrorism alerts on the radio every morning and decide whether to allow our children to ride on a bus that day. And for good measure, I asked whether he had ever bestirred himself to protest real genocides, such as that in Rwanda or that carried out against black farmers in the Darfur region of Sudan by their Arab co-religionists, in both of which hundreds of thousands were killed. "Or is it only the opportunity to attack other Jews, and thereby prove, at least to yourself, your own righteousness that arouses your sympathies?" I asked.
MY SECOND PROBLEM with Jewish anti-Zionists is their disconnect from the centrality of Eretz Yisrael as an object of Jewish yearning over two millennia. Haters of Israel, including many of the Jewish anti-Zionists, invariably portray it as a colonialist enterprise that "stole" the land from the Palestinians. Former president Obama explicitly said so in Ireland two weeks ago.
That narrative depends on denying the Jews' 3,000-year connection to the Land, in which we are the indigenous people. Why is denying the Jews' historical connection to the Land so crucial to their cause?
I have quoted many times Catholic theologian Jacques Maritain's description of the Jews as the perpetual irritant to humanity: "Like an alien body, like an activating ferment injected into the mass, [Israel] gives the world no peace.... [A]s long as the world has not G-d, it stimulates the movement of history.... It is the vocation of Israel [i.e., to bring knowledge of G-d to the world] that the world hates."
Thus, any sign of G-d's Providence, especially His ongoing relationship to the Jewish People, provokes the nations. And what clearer manifestation of that relationship could there be than the return of a tiny people, after 2,000 years of dispersion, filled with expulsions, pogroms, and finally an attempt to exterminate us completely, to the same small sliver of land from which we were exiled and to which we always prayed to return. A vinkel min haShamayim, in the Brisker Rav's terminology. Must that not provoke the hatred of those who "have not G-d"?
And how much more tragic if His own people cannot appreciate the Divine Providence that brought us back to the Land and would deny our connection to it.