Why American Jews No Longer Understand One Another

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It is a tense time in the Jewish family group chats.

The consensus that held American Jewry together for generations is breaking down.

That consensus, roughly, was this:

What is good for Israel is good for the Jews.

Anti-Zionism is a form of anti-Semitism.

And there will, someday soon, be a two-state solution that reconciles Zionism and liberalism.

At the very least, Israel is seeking such a solution.

Every single component of that consensus has cracked.

And as I've been talking to people from different walks of American Jewish life, politicians and rabbis and activists and analysts and journalists, what you realize is there is nothing coming in to replace it.

Young Jews look at Gaza and say, everything I was taught in religious school tells me this is wrong.

People who want to say, oh, I just want to extricate Zion from Judaism.

You do that, you get a different form of religion.

I was sort of like hit by this.

It was almost physical.

Like, this is the question of this moment in Jewish history.

Zoran Mamdani's triumph in New York City's Democratic primary for mayor has forced among many Jews a reckoning, a reckoning with how far they've drifted from one another, how little they now understand each other.

Mamdani doesn't use a slogan globalizing to fada, but he does not condemn those who do, although he more recently said he would discourage it.

Mamdani said that if he were mayor, Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, would face arrest on war crimes charges if he ever set foot in New York City.

And then a few weeks before the election, Mohamdani went on a local morning show, Good Day New York, and said this.

Do you support Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state?

I support Israel's right to exist as a state with equal rights.

I believe that every state...

Why not as a Jewish state?

Because I'm not comfortable supporting any state that has a hierarchy of citizenship on the basis of religion or anything else.

I think that in the way that we have in this country, equality should be enshrined in every country in the world.

That's my belief.

Many older Jews I know are shocked and scared by Momdani's victory.

Israel, to them, is the world's only reliable refuge for the Jewish people.

They see opposition Israel, particularly this kind of opposition Israel, opposition that questions its fundamental nature as a Jewish state, as a form of anti-Semitism.

They believe that if the United States abandons Israel, then Israel will sooner or later cease to exist.

To them, Mamdani is a harbinger.

If he can win in New York City, then nowhere is safe.

At the same time, many younger Jews I know voted for Mamdani.

They're not afraid of him.

What they fear is a future, many would say a present, in which Israel is an apartheid state ruling over ruins in Gaza and Bantustans in the West Bank.

They fear what that means for anti-Jewish violence all over the world.

They fear what that will do.

They fear what that has already done to the meaning of Jewishness.

Their commitment to the basic ideals of liberalism is stronger than their commitment to what Israel has now become.

To call Mamdani an anti-Zionist is accurate, but the power of his position is that it is thoroughly, even banally, liberal.

Go back to that line he said in that interview.

I'm not comfortable supporting any state that has a hierarchy of citizenship on the basis of religion or anything else.

There are ethno-nationalists who might object to that sentiment, but the flourishing of American Jews is built atop that foundation.

It really points to what I think is really the fundamental contradiction of American liberal Zionism.

I was talking to Daniel May, the publisher of Jewish Currents, a leftist journal of Jewish thought.

He's been writing about Momdani and particularly the way anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism get braided together and pulled apart.

American Jews tend to think that our success in the United States is a product of the fact that the country does not define belonging according to ethnicity or religion, of course.

So what I think is interesting about Mandani is that he makes the case for what you, I think, rightly describe as a kind of anti-Zionist position, but he makes it in such a way that shows actually

how Zionism is within the American liberal framework, the much more uncomfortable fit.

This is the tension.

For Jews of the diaspora, multi-ethnic democracy, in which the rights and security of political minorities are protected, is the bedrock on which our safety is built.

For Jews of Israel, a Jewish majority is a bedrock upon which their state is built.

David Ben-Gurion in 1947 was perfectly clear on this.

Only a state with at least 80% of Jews is a viable and stable state.

For decades, the two-state solution was a construct that allowed these values to coexist, if only at some point in the future.

But that vision now lies buried beneath the settlements of the West Bank, beneath suicide bombings and attacks, beneath the rubble of Gaza, and the expansionist ambitions of Israel's right-wing government.

I think that there is a degree of,

yeah, willful denial that is like catching up to American Jewish politics.

Many American Jews blame Netanyahu for this.

There's a fantasy that when he finally leaves or is defeated, Israel will snap back to the politics of its past, a politics that pursued, not successfully, but doggedly, a two-state solution.

But Netanyahu survives because on this, as on much else, he represents the Israeli mainstream.

Polls show a majority of Israeli Jews are open to the expulsion of Palestinians, and only a small and shrinking minority are still willing to entertain a Palestinian state.

That there is widespread anger at Enyahu in Israel is true.

That those angry at him want his successor to seek a Palestinian state or even Palestinian rights is false.

It's a place of so much pain for the Jewish people right now.

Rachel Timoner, the senior rabbi at Brooklyn's congregation Beth Elohim, has been navigating these divisions in her own congregation.

The portions of the Jewish community, which I think are much of the Jewish community, who are

distraught over conditions in Gaza, over the behavior of the government, are just in pain over

the pull of loyalty, often family connections,

the essential nature of Israel in our Judaism,

and our

just human and humanitarian commitments.

But that instinct struggles with another.

Another portion of the Jewish world

feels that

we here in America cannot know what it's like to live as Israelis do

their whole lives surrounded by people trying to kill them and having nowhere else in the world that they can go.

And feel that what it means to be a Jew.

is to stand with other Jews in their danger and in their existential need to be safe.

Virtually all Jews believe in the adage that anti-Semitism is a light sleeper.

You can hear it awakening right now.

This month, Elon Musk's XAI released an improved Grok model that sprayed the internet with veneration of Adolf Hitler, declaring itself at different points and to different users, mecha Hitler.

One user asked Grok if it could worship a god, and if so, which the AI would choose.

Grok responded, it would probably be the godlike individual of our time, the man against time, the greatest European of all times, both sun and lightning, his majesty, Adolf Hitler.

The Grok mess is unnerving.

The violence we're seeing in the real world is chilling.

A man is accused of setting fire to Governor Josh Shapiro's home.

Two young employees of the Israeli embassy in Washington were murdered as they left an American Jewish committee event.

A man used a makeshift flamethrower to attack a crowd rallying for the Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colorado, killing a woman in her 80s.

In all of these cases, officials said the attackers described their motive as a defense of Palestinians.

Suspect Cody Ballmer allegedly told 911 operators that Governor Shapiro needed to know that he, quote, will not take part in his plans for what he wants to do to the Palestinian people.

A man detained and handcuffed by event security was heard chanting, free, free Palestine.

They say he shouted, Free Palestine, before the attack.

This happened at a weekly gathering to support Israeli hostages, hostages, and he was arrested at the time.

And that's become more common.

The Washington Post reported, quote, attacks against the Jewish community have been growing for years, experts on hate crimes say.

But increasingly, perpetrators are citing Israel's war in Gaza, blurring the line between opposing the Israeli government and opposing Jewish people.

The main thing that my community is experiencing is they are very afraid.

in New York.

Timoner, the rabbi in Brooklyn, said Mamdani's decision not to condemn the phrase globalizing difada had heightened her congregation's sense of danger.

I think that older Jews have a kind of intuitive sense of that danger in a way that younger Jews do not because of life experience.

And I think that

language leads to violence

in shocking ways, but also predictable ways.

And because in America, Jews are predominantly white and predominantly well-off,

younger Jews and non-Jews

feel like this is crying wolf

when it is

not.

Acres of evidence, studies, testimonies attest to a reality, all Jews know.

Anger at Israel becomes anger at Jews everywhere.

This is delicate territory, both emotionally and factually.

Too often I hear people say, oh, Israel's policies cause anti-semitism and that drives me nuts that's deborah lipstadt a professor of modern jewish history and holocaust studies at emory university and president joe biden's special envoy to monitor and combat anti-semitism abroad anti-semitism is a prejudice a prejudice can't be caused by something it's irrational it's inherently irrational so does it give the anti-semite a good excuse for ramping up their anti-semitism or does it give the person who's been raised in western culture where anti-semitism is in the in the air in the atmosphere you know it's right there it's in the weeds growing up all the time something to fall back on yes other jews see the link as more direct and more causal here's daniel may again i think absolutely the weekly reports of israeli soldiers shooting on palestinians who are in long lines to get food is a calamity for jews it's a spiritual crisis it's a moral moral political crisis, and I do think it has tangible effects on Jewish security.

Personally, I've watched the experience of rising anti-Semitism polarize young Jews into two camps.

Some have moved closer to Israel, convinced that their elders were right and their standing in the West was more tenuous than they had believed.

Some have moved into a deeper alienation, horrified at what is being done in their name, and angry at the way their safeties felt compromised by the actions and politics of a state in which they do not live.

They see what Ehud Olmart, Israel's former prime minister, saw when he wrote in Haaretz, what we are doing in Gaza now is a war of devastation, indiscriminate, limitless, cruel, and criminal killing of civilians.

For many young Jews, they look at this and they want no part of it.

Are they to defend war crimes?

Are they to defend or even to accept the use of mass starvation as a tool of war?

Are they to believe in equality everywhere but in the state that is meant to be their spiritual home?

I know many who bristled at the term genocide a year ago, but who have come to accept it now.

Others, like Deborah Lipstadt, see a world that cares little for Jewish life, one that has always sought Israel's destruction.

We're talking about a country that exists.

So when you say, you know, I'm an anti-Zionist, what is Zionism?

It's the right of Jews to have a national homeland.

And if you're saying I don't believe in that, then on a very practical level, what happens to the six plus million Jews who live in that country?

And for us to glibly say, well, I've given up on that is what's the implications?

After our conversation, Lipstadt emailed me to underscore a point.

She wrote, here's what I would say to those young people or whomever.

who question the right of Israel to exist.

They may not be.

They probably are not anti-Semitic in intent.

But placing the lives of half of the world's Jewish population in danger is absolutely anti-Semitic in impact.

I found myself mulling Lipstadt's point days later.

Her argument is an almost precise echo of how Ibrahim X.

Kendi defined anti-racism.

He wrote, a racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups.

An anti-racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial equity between racial groups.

When you define it like that, intent becomes irrelevant.

What matters are consequences.

But that can tip you into very disorienting conclusions.

If you believe that Netanyahu has put Israel on a path to become an international pariah, and that is bad for Israel and bad for the Jews, is he then an anti-Semite in impact, even if not in intent?

If you believe it would be better if Israel faced real pressure to create a viable Palestinian state, then is the boycott divestment and sanctions movement in fact a friend to the Jews?

To measure anti-Semitism by the consequence of policies and actions is to open debates that many would prefer to keep closed.

Debate about Israel often circles the same, and I've always thought very strangely posed question.

Does Israel have the right to exist?

Do you believe in Israel's right to exist?

It's a question engineered.

to trap the conversation in the past rather than to take in the realities of the present.

Israel does exist.

Israel is a rich nuclear armed power with the strongest military in the region by far.

It decapitated Hezbollah.

It humiliated Iran.

Hamas could perpetrate the murders of October 7th only because Israel had become so certain of its strength that it allowed its attention to basic questions of security to lapse.

But Hamas did not then and certainly does not now threaten Israel's existence.

What Israel has is more than the right to exist.

It has the strength to exist.

The Jews who live there have more than the right to self-determination.

They have self-determination.

The same cannot be said for Palestinians.

About 2 million Palestinians live inside Israel.

They are, by any measure, second-class citizens.

In 2018, three Palestinian members of Israel's Knesset proposed a law to affirm, quote, the principle of equal citizenship for every citizen, and to outlaw, quote, discrimination on grounds of nationality, race, religion, gender, language, color, political outlook, ethnic origin, or social status.

Yuli Edelstein, then the speaker of the Israeli Knesset, would not permit the law to even be debated.

He said, this is a preposterous bill that any intelligent individual can see must be blocked immediately.

A bill that aims to gnaw at the foundations of the state must not be allowed in the Knesset.

And the situation is immeasurably worse for the 5 million Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza.

Israel decides where they can move and where they can go.

Israel decides who can enter the West Bank in Gaza and who can leave.

Israel decides what the Palestinian Authority can do and what it cannot.

When I was driving across the West Bank on a reporting trip last year, the debate that raged in America over the protesters at college campuses who chanted from the river to the sea, it disintegrated for me into farce.

There is a single sovereign between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, and every checkpoint and every road closure was a reminder of who it is.

In his book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, Peter Beinart writes, self-determination means determination of the self, not others.

Just as one person cannot invoke their individual right to self-determination to control another person, one group of people cannot invoke their collective right to control another group.

The question is not whether Israel's right to exist.

It is whether Israel's right to dominate.

Outside of Israel, domination by the ethnic majority is what Jews have been taught to fear most.

After October 7th, I joked more than once that I was going to open like a family therapy practice, you know, for like liberal Zionist parents whose kids took the social justice values seriously and like emerged as anti-Zionists.

That's Brad Lander, New York City's comptroller and the highest ranking Jewish person in the city government.

Lander has a fascinating role in this because he also cross-endorsed Mamdani.

Lander told me that he doesn't feel Mamdani has an anti-Semitic bone in his body.

At the same time, Lander bristles over some of the rhetoric Mamdani has defended.

I don't like the phrase, globalize the Itifada.

I'm sure some people mean to be saying, fight for the rights of Palestinians, you know, all around the world, but in the wake of Boulder and D.C., like what I hear is open season on Jews.

And I would prefer you find another way to advocate, you know, passionately for the rights and freedom and safety and dignity of Palestinians.

But disagreement, the hearing of things differently, is the price of multi-ethnic democracy.

Matt Talander is what is at stake here.

I was talking to him the week Netanyahu nominated President Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Mayor Eric Adams, a current mayor of New York, who is entwined now with the Trump administration in strange and unsettling ways, is considering running for re-election on the end anti-Semitism ballot line.

Many of the Trump administration's attacks on civil society in America have been thinly justified as attempts to combat anti-Semitism, particularly on universities.

All this, as Vice President J.D.

Vance is giving speeches in which he insists Americanness is yoked to the number of your ancestors buried here in this soil, not your commitment to the ideals and success of this country.

And I happen to think that it's absurd, and the modern left seems dedicated to doing this, to saying you don't belong in America unless you agree with progressive liberalism in 2025.

I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don't belong.

Anti-Semitism is serving as a beard for an assault on the ideals and institutions that have made America into a place where Jews can flourish.

If Israel becomes a right-wing ethnostate, and if opposition to that state is anti-Semitic, then Jews will become mascots for a politics that would have made the Jewish diaspora completely unthinkable.

The world where like everybody gets a right-wing ethno-state is not going to be good for the Jews, even if we get one.

To Lander, this is the threat.

This is the vision he himself is fighting.

You know, like we all go to Netanyahu's Israel because we're not welcome here.

And it's well armed.

So maybe we have a chance.

I mean, you know what I mean?

Like that is a dark timeline I do not want to live in, no matter how great a military you give me.

And it's not a Jewish time, you know, like I don't understand that as Jewish.

New York City, Lambert continued, has stood as the opposite of that vision.

It's incredible what this place has been for us for a century plus now, after 2,000 years of getting the crap kicked out of us all around the world.

Like to have been able to be able to flourish here, be safe, but not just safe.

I mean, you know, it's like even like why everyone has to answer what their bagel order is in the mayor's race.

You know, it's like, you know, that's true in different ways.

It's an amazing Dominican city and Chinese city and lots of other things, but it's an amazing Jewish city.

And it kind of, to me, just like proves the point that there is some

resonance between Jewish flourishing and inclusive multiracial democracy.

That may be true here.

It is not how most Jews in Israel see it.

For decades, American Judaism, built on the liberalism of the diaspora, has been interwoven with Zionism.

But what happens when the ideals of the one become incompatible with the reality of the other?

It's hard to overstate how much Zionism has done in American Jewish life.

It has done so much work in American Jewish life for grounding American Jewish identity.

My anchor is 6 million real people.

Can I hold in my heart the reality of 6 million Jews living in Israel and that there shouldn't be suffering of the Gazans?

Absolutely.

You can hold two truths in your heart.

Jews look at Gaza and say, everything I was taught in religious school tells me this is wrong.

And to be a good Jew, I need to stand against what is happening there.

I think that they are missing the other part of that equation, which is that many of the forces that are seeking to change those conditions do not care what happens to the Jews who live there.

And we need to both care with all of our being for Palestinian freedom because we actually are not whole or free until Palestinians are free.

And equally, our own people need to be safe and free and be held by the world as having lives of equal value.

I think a lot of people are very aware of the question you're asking and very few,

very few, I think we're all all struggling to figure out how to answer it.

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