Three questions for Jews on the Left in the fierce face of rising anti-democracy movements and religious ethno-nationalism in Israel and the United States and resurgent anti-Semitism before and after October 7 and the re-election of Donald Trump: What defines the communal and social alignments of a distinctly Jewish left? At this moment when democratic norms, institutions, and societies are under assault in the world at large, how might a significant segment of the Jewish left position itself outside the anti-Zionist and anti-Israel camp prevalent throughout the mainstream left and radical edges of the progressive left? Between particularism and universalism, what critical and impactful role does the Jewish left play within broader Jewish communities and society in both the United States and Israel? Now that the Jewish left itself is dominated by anti-Zionism, what name is there for a non-anti-Zionist Jewish left, one that centers a global Jewish communal-collective and cultural matrix at the heart of its social and political worldview?
To put it polemically, a Jewish left worthy of the name is a social Jewish left. The Jewish left, organized as such, has historically aligned itself around the principle of Jewish social solidarity and humanist principles of equality and justice. Jews on the Jewish left have historically represented a critical commitment inside the larger klal or Jewish social body, in whose name it works to push to the left. Morally and politically, Jews today on the social Jewish left understand that to detach from the suffering and sorrow of the people violates a basic Jewish social norm. A social Jewish left worthy of the name commits to the doykot or hereness of wherever Jews are in the world, in the Diaspora and in Israel. It is a commitment that represents a terrible challenge at a moment in history when the klal has been politically consumed by the ethnonationalist right and religious ultra-right in Israel, and in the lead up to and now after October 7, the worst assault on Jewish life since the Holocaust. What are its founding principles? Against anti-Semitism, the social Jewish left is “liberal” insofar as it continues to draw from the liberal tradition of equality and human rights and individual autonomy. It is both “Jewish” and “leftist” and not merely liberal insofar as it centers itself in the political body of a social collective.
Aligned with the social-democratic left, the social Jewish left is a liberal-social hybrid. It sustains inclusive political culture grounded at the intractable tensions between personal autonomy and collective responsibility, political critique and social belonging. Jews on the social Jewish left reject “campism” on the global left supporting acts of violence and manifestations of terrorism against Jews in Israel under the rubric of decolonialism, and gaslighting anti-Semitism and justifying the exclusion of Jews from public life in the Diaspora on the basis of an anti-Zionist litmus test. Against the Jewish anti-Zionist left, a Jewish left worthy of the name is global. Jews on the social Jewish left stand in solidarity with all democratic forces in Israel and Palestine and commit to creating robust Jewish culture in the Diaspora. Against extremism and racism, especially the politics of occupation and annexation and anti-Palestinian racism on the Jewish right and religious right, the Jewish left fights for universal human dignity which it roots as an elemental form of contemporary Jewishness.
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For voices from the Jewish left that represent this core hybrid of universalism and particularism, I’m posting links to a set of think-pieces and statements from Jews and allies on the left which have appeared over the last year. Negotiating oppositional tensions, the form of political thought is dyadic, but non-binary. Opposed to the right and religious-right in Israel, voices on the social Jewish left respond to the horror of October 7, the war and the hostage crisis, death and destruction in Gaza, and anti-Semitism and anathematization of Jewish life in Israel and the Diaspora. On or aligned with the Jewish left in Israel, these are perspectives inextricably tied to this place and people at a moment of crisis and danger and extreme violence in Jewish life today. What I am posting appeared early after October 7 and after the first burst of anti-Israel animus immediately in its wake. I do not know where any of the individuals cited below stand politically after the long and terrible war with Hamas in Gaza, the catastrophic toll in Palestinian civilian lives, and the war in Lebanon with Hezbollah, and now possibly with Iran. What stands out is the coherence of a humanistic political vision situated on the Jewish left in the face of war and violence.
Universalism and Particularism: What it Means to Be Jewish Now
I’m starting with articles that appeared at The New Statesman in a series, “What It Means to Be Jewish Now.” They were among the first responses from the Jewish left to October 7 and to the abandonment of Jews on the progressive left. The authors are a disparate group of Israelis, Americans and Europeans. They include Fania Oz-Salzberger, Shlomo Sand, Yair Wallach, Celese Marcus, Howard Jacobson, Susan Neiman, Omer Bartov, and others. Almost all express shock at the intensity of violence of October 7 and the response to October 7 on the global left. With varied and conflicting perspectives relating to Israel, they mostly express themselves in the universal language of enlightenment humanism.
Instead of providing a complete digest, I invite the reader to read the pieces each on their own. For now, I want to identify the underlying tension between universalism and particularism. The primary challenge faced by a great many Jews on the left relates to peculiar alignments on the larger global left. “It was easy enough,” says Naiman, “for left-wing Jews to uphold the universalist tradition so long as the international left itself was firmly universalist. But what are we to do when what now calls itself the left has gone tribalist [sic], rejecting universalism – like other Enlightenment ideas – as Eurocentric hype designed to dominate the rest of the world?” Writing against the contemporary grain in leftist, decolonial political theory, Neiman asserts that the very critique of Eurocentrism was itself, originally, a hallmark of the Enlightenment, for all its warts and all.
The degree to which claims about the old Jewish left and about the European Enlightenment are true and/or not true is beside the point for now. Naiman, in her essay, catches the contradiction, which I would put this way. Once it was the commitment to Jewish particularism that isolated the Jewish left in relation to the humanist-universalism of the left. Today what isolates people on the social Jewish left is their own commitment to universal principles they had once thought were rock-solid, but which are no longer shared consistently on the progressive and radical left. Tout court, the hard core of the progressive decolonial left rejects western values such as reason and secularism. In the case of Israel, the values of peace and coexistence, human rights and women’s rights, etc. give way to open calls for violent armed struggle and “resistance by any means necessary.” Never mind the price paid by the people of Israel, Lebanon, and Palestine.
Letter from The Israeli Left to The International Left
Universalism and humanism have always been attacked in Israel from the stalwarts of occupation and annexation on the hard nationalistic right and nationalistic-religious right. Signatories from the Israeli left respond here with horror to find these attacks mirrored on the global left against Israel after October 7. Noteworthy is the larger complex of universalistic values driving this open appeal to the global left in relation to the confusion and pain of this particular moment. The signatories are mostly Jewish and include Arab-Palestinian Israelis, some of whom have since expressed reservations about the letter.
“At this moment,” the signatories write, “more than ever, we need support and solidarity from the global left, in the form of an unequivocal call against indiscriminate violence towards civilians on both sides…We never imagined that individuals on the left, advocates of equality, freedom, justice, and welfare, would reveal such extreme moral insensitivity and political recklessness…We call on our peers on the left to return to a politics based on humanistic and universal principles, to take a clear stance against human rights abuse of any form, and to assist us in the struggle to break the cycle of violence and destruction.”
The Israeli signatories are naïve perhaps, or out of touch with what the global left has become over the last twenty plus years. Their appeal only highlights how the mainstream of the international left, in total opposition to Israel and Zionism, is now captured by a hard core of pro-Palestine-anti-Israel activists who reject peace and coexistence in favor of resistance and war.
No Israel Litmus Test
Louis Fishman is a historian of Jewish communities and Muslim-Jewish relations in Ottoman Palestine. A professor at Brooklyn College, he splits his time between Istanbul, New York, and Tel Aviv. In this op-ed, Fishman explains his own aversion to “pro-Palestine” protests in the United States. He rejects an anti-Semitic litmus test for Jews in relation to Israel and Zionism; and he positions himself vis-à-vis universalistic values.
“The pro-Palestine bar of acceptance for Jews,” writes Fishman, “is not based on shared values of peace, equality, and human rights. It is based on one simple question: Are you willing to separate yourself not just from Israelis but from the Jewish people at large, who overwhelmingly sympathize with Zionism? If you are willing to do so, it does not matter who you are. You can range from the ultra-orthodox Neturei Karta to radical LGBTQ+ activists; you can support fascist politics or far-left politics, support violent decolonization, or be a fervent pacifist. All these types of self-identification are secondary to whether you reject Jewish self-determination in one form or another. Jews are welcome? Only if you declare vociferously that you’re anti-Zionist and renounce your support for any Jewish political presence in the territory of Israel-Palestine. This is where anti-Zionism morphs into to antisemitism.”
Against the posing of anti-Israel litmus tests by the anti-Zionist left, Fishman’s op-ed indicates the problematic position of Jewish belonging on the left today in relation to Israel.
Jewish History
Philosopher Seyla Benhabib writes in support of the Jewish and Israeli left, responding here at Medium to a letter written by colleagues in philosophy against Israel. “My objection to your letter is that it sees the conflict in Israel-Palestine through the lens of ‘settler-colonialism’ alone, and elevates Hamas’s atrocities of October 7, 2023 to an act of legitimate resistance against an occupying force. By construing the Israel-Palestine conflict through the lens of settler-colonialism, you elide the historical evolution of both peoples. Zionism is not a form of racism, though the actions and institutions of the State of Israel towards the Palestinian people of the occupied West Bank, the refugee camps and, of course, Gaza, are discriminatory on the basis of nationality, not color, and reflect the continuing state of emergency that exists between Israel and its neighbors.”
Pushing back on the settler-colonial paradigm, one the one hand, and fascism and ethno-supremacy in Israel, Benhabib’s letter signals the importance of history and historical memory as a core feature of Jewishness on the left, and the importance of Jewish historical memory in relation to Israel and Palestine. From philosophy, she demands clarity regarding principles of mutual recognition and coexistence.
Reconstructing the Social Contract
Israeli voices on the left are arguably the most interesting ones today by virtue of the fact that Israel is a Jewish majority country in which Jewish culture defines the dominant social fabric. Not beholden to the gentile gaze, that is the privilege of the Jewish center-left and radical left in Israel, as they are not preoccupied by anti-Semitism and know little about it. Jews and Arab-Palestinians in Israel do so as citizens of a state from positions of profound inequality. Jewish voices on the center-left in Israel commit to the well-being of a multi-cultural society in a prolonged state of democratic backsliding and political collapse. Analysis here by Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz connects the security collapse on October 7, 2023 and the Hamas-Israel war back to the government cobbled together by Prime Minster Netanyahu in November 2022 and its assault on the social contract and civil society in Israel.
On rebuilding the social contract in Israel, Illouz writes against Israeli state dysfunction under Netanyahu and his allies in the haredi camp and on the religious-national right. In the wake of October 7, she writes, “the gradual realization that the unfathomable collapse of the entire security apparatus isn’t a one-time accident but the outcome of a deep and widespread systemic failure. We now realize that our house has been built on quicksand that is slowly sucking us down…Most urgent will be the need to rethink the very foundations of the Israeli social contract. We now have the proof that Israel cannot ensure its security while assigning disproportionate resources to messianics and the ultra-Orthodox. Israel must now choose its path.”
Re-Thinking Zionism
Scholar and activist Hayim Katzman was murdered by Hamas terrorists at Kibbutz Holit in southern Israel on October 7. In this posthumously published essay here at Jacobin, Katzman reimagines Zionism and Jewish identity in Israel in terms of liberal democratic norms and Jewish-Arab citizenship. Against the model of an exclusivist Jewish ethno-nation state, Katzman points to classical Zionist thinkers. The fundamental demand is the creation and preservation of a Jewish national identity defined by language, culture, and, most importantly, a sense of a shared past, present, and future. Against the current grain, the vision aligns Zionism with human values and principles of democratic equality across lines of national, racial, religious, and ethnic difference.
Standing Together
Especially fraught is the position of Israeli Arab/Palestinians in their own complex and unequal alignments vis-à-vis a Jewish majority country. Comprising Jewish and Arab-Palestinian Israelis, Standing Together is a critical alternative to the ethno-national orientation and the ethos of separation that marked the Labor Zionist tradition and the Zionist left in Israel. Against extraordinary odds, Standing Together is bi-national in its social orientation without being anti-Zionist as such. The vision of equality and shared citizenship in a civil-society compact is predicated upon the principle of mutual recognition. “Change Together: Standing Together’s Theory of Change” speaks in broad, simple strokes about the movement’s vision of “socialism, democracy, solidarity, equality, justice, an end to the occupation, peace, and the establishment of a government that works for the good of all those who live here.”
The ethos of Standing Together is profoundly social, reflecting the views of Israeli Jews and Arab-Palestinians who actually live there. “We don’t speak in the name of just one nation, rather we sound the voice of all people who live here – Jewish and Arab alike. This is our society in its full diversity. We speak for it. We speak for the majority. Since the current regime doesn’t reflect the majority’s interests, we will. The rightwing regime seeks to split the majority and portrays our political reality as an eternal struggle between irreconcilable groups (Jews versus Arabs, Ashkenazi vs. Mizrachi, etc.). Our task is to dismantle this discourse of hatred and replace it with joint struggle and cooperation.”
Standing Together is a social left model that is fundamentally creative and generous in relation to people. The non-sectarian theory of change rests on belief in the goodness of people. “We strive to create profound change within Israeli society, the Israeli economy, and Israeli politics. This is not a simple task, but we are inspired by our faith in people: their open minds, their genuine intentions, and their hearts filled with compassion and empathy. We love the people who live here. We are a part of them and we insist on fighting with and for them. Through joint solidarity and struggle, we will succeed.”
Standing Together has since drawn the ire of activists working under the umbrella of BDS. Against “normalization,” the dead-end of the radical anti-Zionist left represented by PACBI, the main organizing body of BDS, is now targeting Standing Together. You can read that here. Activists on the self-styled radical left do not consider Standing Together radical in the first place because the group does not commit to anti-Zionism. At once locative and utopian, Standing Together has actual stakes in the struggle for a shared civil society agenda against the politics of social division separating Jews and Arab-Palestinians in Israel. Against the politics of rejection as mirrored on the Jewish right and the anti-Zionist decolonial left, the lived social reality and political vision of Jews and Arab-Palestinians standing together are what it means to be in solidarity on the social Jewish left.
Religion
Religion is a dominant conservative, rightwing, and ultra-rightwing force in society. It has been at the core of the assault on democracy and individual rights, both in Israel and the United States. A deep aspect of culture, religion remains something still poorly understood broadly across much and most of the entire left. A group of progressive American rabbis, T’ruah combines universalism and particularism, rooting both in Jewish texts and traditions. As cribbed from their website , Jewish values are universal values of human dignity, equality, and justice that advance democracy and human rights for all people in the United States, Israel, and the occupied Palestinian territories. Of great interest is this piece from +972 about a conference in Jerusalem of the “Faithful Left” spanning the gamut from traditionalist to Haredim. Yuval Abraham reports how, “speakers and participants dove deep into questions surrounding the occupation, feminism, religion and state, fighting poverty, and distributive justice. Of a piece with recent work by Michael Manekin, a major goal, according to the independent activists who organized it, was to help establish a wide-ranging, left-wing religious community that could lay the groundwork for political and social action on the ground.”
My own more sober belief rejects political theology as such and supports the separation of religion from politics. Religion and “the political” are incommensurable in their value structures. This was the position of Yeshayahu Leibowitz from many years back, and Moses Mendelssohn and Benedict Spinoza centuries before him. It is a basic presupposition of the humanist Enlightenment. Religion is social, not private but also not “political.” Freedom of and from religion depends upon the recognition that religion, society, and state are distinct but interlocking forces. As a zone of contest, the sacred has its own heterogenous place in society, but the larger surrounding space of society itself is secular, not sacred. I think it was Leibowitz’s argument somewhere that society must be protected from religion and religion from society.
Internationalism
In support of the left in Israel and the hundreds of thousands of Israeli liberals and leftists who demonstrated against the anti-democratic judicial coup, this piece here by Arash Azizi reminds us that Marxism upheld a historical dialectic that recognized the significance of self-determination of all nations. Azizi writes against the anti-Zionist online magazine Jewish Currents, which he accuses of betraying this tradition. With his eye on history, Azizi upholds the classical internationalism of the Communist Party as it once was manifest in the Arab world.
I want to quote him in full.
“Don’t misunderstand me,” he writes, “the communist movement did not model perfect fealty to this ideal. The litany of crimes committed by Stalin’s Soviet Union include targeted killings of Ukrainians, Poles and, in the last years of his rule, Jews. Even after Stalin was gone, antisemitism would surface again in the movement and certainly in the USSR itself. Like everything else in communist history, the heroic and the criminal tango messily. Nevertheless, and especially in the context of Middle Eastern politics, communism strained to honor the ‘fraternity of peoples.’ It was for this reason that the communist parties of the Arab world resisted the antisemitism rife in their societies, nor did they hector for the destruction of Israel. In fact, they often were at the forefront of the frail movement for Arab-Israeli reconciliation and friendship. In the early 1950s, the Tudeh Party of Iran called on Tehran to establish diplomatic ties with Israel and the Iraqi Communist Party advocated for “Arab-Israeli Friendship” in its agitations. Even after 1967, when the Soviet Union cut diplomatic ties with Israel following Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories, the communist parties agitated for a negotiated peace between Israel and the Palestinians. The communist logic was basic: Israeli Jews had the right to self-determination like all other national communities. And if workers of all countries are to unite, Israel was no exception.”
Representing another voice form the international left, the signatories to this statement here from December 2023, “For a consistently democratic and internationalist left” start with a critique of the decolonial left in the wake of October 7. Inclusive of Israel and critical of anti-Semitism, the statement is a commitment to universalist principles and human values on the left.
The signatories reject syncretic politics (dangerous alliances on the left with forces from the far right), campism (alignments with reactionary regimes in Syria, Iran, Russia against western imperialism), and anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists. According to view expressed here, “Much left politics of recent decades has been predicated not so much on a struggle against capitalism-as-social-relation, but on a rejection of “American hegemony,” “globalization,” “finance” — or sometimes, “Zionism”, seen as the vanguard of all these forces. This has led many people who think of themselves as leftists to sympathise with reactionary alternatives to current political and economic arrangements.”
The signatories maintain that “the renewal of the left as a movement for international solidarity…requires consistent anti-racism, consistent feminism, a renewal of class politics, a renewal of an analysis of global capitalism, and the rejection of the campist vision that divides the world into neat binaries of good and evil….[They] offer this analysis as a step towards left renewal on the basis of genuinely internationalist and consistently democratic politics…. Centering the voices and experiences of working-class, progressive, peace-building forces on both sides.”
Cognizant of links between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, the signatories understand that the attribution of “absolute power” to Jewish social bodies is itself a feature of anti-Semitism. Rejected is the view that Israel and Zionism constitute a unique center of political violence. “Understanding Israel in the world” is to see it in a “complex, liquid, “multipolar world.” Seen this way, “[r]efusing to demonise Israel or see it as entirely exceptional does not mean reconciling with its policies, but rather situating those policies within trends of which they are one expression, rather than the quintessence.”
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What should have surprised no one on the Jewish left, or anyone else for that matter, was the response from the progressive and radical left to October 7 and to the Hamas-Israel war. On those parts of the left now fully captured by anti-Zionism, this has included implicit support already present in October 2023 and then the out and out support for Hamas as revealed by October 2024. This was a long time in the make on the anti-American left. Tracing back to the end of the Cold War, the global left opposed NATO support for Bosnia during the civil war and genocide. They were silent about Russian, Iranian, and Hezbollah intervention in the civil wars in Syria and Yemen. They fault NATO for the Russian invasion of Ukraine and do not support Ukrainian independence. They find a place in the anti-imperialist camp for Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis.
These alignments are of a piece with anti-Jewish animus: the contextualization and celebration of violence against civilians in southern Israel, silence and denial regarding gender violence on October 7, calls to destroy a country, expressions of ghoulish anti-Semitism, toxic forms of social exclusion, indifference to Jewish lives and Jewish history. Strange is the radical-progressive left embracing national-sectarian-ethnic conceptions of indigeneity and race, namely the very same rubrics that have always worked to exclude Jews from the public sphere. Many Jews see in this a final betrayal of Jews undermining the political foundations upon which the democratic and social Jewish left once built its home.
In this respect, the commitments to universalism and particularism, the synthesis of Jewishness and humanism on the social Jewish left are out of step and out of time. Naïve and nostalgic, the social Jewish left uphold values dredged up from the distant past. They echo something of the spirit manifest in the old Port Huron statement of the New Left 1962. In the aftermath of World War II, this was a vision of the human person as “infinitely precious and possessed of unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom, and love.” The Port Huron statement countered “the dominant conceptions of man in the twentieth century.” It rejected the notion that a human being is a “thing to be manipulated,” opposing the “depersonalization that reduces human being to the status of things.” Unlike those today who justify violence and armed struggle, the Port Huron statement recognized that “the brutalities of the twentieth century teach that means and ends are intimately related, that vague appeals to ‘posterity’ cannot justify the mutilations of the present.”
In the 1970s, Democratic Socialism supported human rights and democracy, co-existence between Israel and Palestine, a 2ss. The Social Democrats of America (DSA) recognized in Zionism “the national liberation movement of a Jewish people asserting their right to self-determination.” This was a long time ago, and Israel then was a much different place than it is today. Yet for all that, prominent Jews on the old guard of the DSA left the organization because of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism after October 7. You can read about it here and here. (Without mentioning October 7 or Hamas, the DSA responds here.) (The 2017 DSA statement supporting BDS is here) (The first response from DSA to October 7 is here) (The July 2024 anti-Zionist resolution is here). They were gladly shown the door by the younger cadre of activists all out for Palestine against Zionism and Israel.
The DSA is further proof how the polarizing all-or-nothing politics of Israel and Palestine poisons everyone and everything with which it comes into contact, including cultural institutions like universities, museums, book and movie festivals, concert venues, arts journals, scholarly associations, medical programs (?!!), political organizations, and so on; and also Jewish cultural institutions including synagogues, programs in Jewish Studies, activist organizations, social media platforms. Refusing the logic of either/or, a social Jewish left would offer spaces from which to model less toxic expression of political analysis and engagement. I do not believe Jews on the left can do this apart from their own autonomous spaces.
It is fair to say that the liberal or social Jewish left is institutionally amorphous today and lacks a culture of protest. In the United States, groups like T’ruah or Americans for Peace Now do not manifest the same degree of organized intensity shown by anti-Zionist groups like Jewish Voice for Peace or Jewish Currents. Established on a foundation of antipathy, the psychic energy and vision of the Jewish anti-Zionist left draws from the expression of fundamental opposition to larger Jewish communal norms. If there is such a thing, a social Jewish left would have to be constructed from the inside out.
We are at a time described by critical-legal theorist Roberto Mangabeira Unger as a moment of darkening, a time in which the old sedimented and normalized institutional and ideological structures lose their pertinence and clarity. Overloaded with theory, such times are marked by the experience of disorientation and a willingness to take alternative paths, including roads once rejected in the past. Unger’s sense of all this is basically grim, noting that the result is more likely a waning of faith than the development of new faith. Unger leaves the task of transformation mostly to the imagination, offering no dogmatic blueprints (The Critical Legal Studies Movement, pp.19-21, 23)
Philosopher Judith Shklar called it a “liberalism of fear,” but nothing could be more vital in the Jewish world at this terrifying historical inflection point. After October 7 and with the re-election of Donald Trump, the reconstruction of democratic and social norms in both Israel and across the Diaspora requires basic orientations around principles of self-determination and mutual recognition. Abandoned by the radical-progressive and mainstream left and left for dead by the Jewish anti-Zionist left, what it means to be on the social Jewish left today is auto-emancipation. To maintain a moral and political compass at a moment of total crisis is to understand, fundamentally, that auto-emancipation and human dignity are interdependent.
If I am not entirely pessimistic about that mythic entity in the United States called “the Jewish community,” it is because I think the basic DNA of the community is liberal and skews left on social issues. On a personal note, I witnessed how the Oslo peace process broke up conceptual logjams about Israel and Palestine that once defined Jewish society and showed a path forward. After the collapse of Oslo, more people recognize now that the catastrophic violence of the Second Intifada cemented in Israel a repellent religious-ethno-nationalism that is now drowning the State of Israel. There is place to build a social Jewish left in the space made possible by the broad opposition in Israel to Netanyahu and his government of religious fanatics elected in November 2022, the ensuing democracy protests in Israel in 2023, the catastrophe of October 7, and the willingness of the Netanyahu and his allies in government to sacrifice the hostages for the sake of occupation and annexation in Gaza. More and more mainstream Jews in Israel and the United States are beginning to connect this meta-crisis in the Israeli social contract to the occupation-annexation of the West Bank.
The tissue between particularism and universalism has always been the beating heart of the modern Jewish predicament, impacting its culture, politics, and religion. On both the left and the right, self-consciously modern movements in Jewish society have always sought to grasp both horns at once as the very condition of their enlightenment, or commitment to reason, and emancipation, their participation in society at large in the world. Building a home after October 7 for the social Jewish left constitutes an act of self-assertion, an active commitment to new social contracts redefining and reimagining Jewish community from the inside out. At a moment of crisis and contest, an unapologetic social Jewish left critically situated in Jewish traditions and communal norms builds a home in the public space of democratic values and human dignity.
