There is a more local dynamic of Jewish life on the edge of the broader global undoing of political norms and institutional guardrails since the election of Trump in 2016. Beset by deep strains of ethno-nationalism and violent religious supremacy, Israel becomes a politically and symbolically supercharged object in Diaspora Jewish life after October 7, the war against Hamas in Gaza, and spikes in anti-Semitism across the globe. A mirror in larger social reckonings at a moment of technological disruption and political crisis is the curious unhinging across dominant segments of the Jewish Anti-Zionist Left. With each passing year, discourse on the radical flank of the Jewish community has become harshly polarized, increasingly “weird,” and intentionally “decentered” in relation to Jewish social norms.

Historically, Zionism advanced a radical solution to the “Jewish problem,” i.e. the problem of Jewish life as a minority formation in a larger majority society. Zionism refers to two things; first, a territorial and temporal orientation of Jewish life there, here, and now in the Land of Israel; and, secondly, auto-emancipation, a political and cultural project designed to reconstitute Jewish society in the Land of Israel as autonomous or sovereign. Anti-Zionism would be opposition to Zionism. Jewish Anti-Zionism refers to a broad grouping of positions from inside Jewish community against the territorial orientation of Jewish life in the land of Israel, rejecting in toto the projects of auto-emancipation and self-determination in Palestine. After the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Jewish Anti-Zionism is located more narrowly on the radical left of Jewish political life.

Before 1948, opposition to Zionism was broadly aligned across the near entirety of Jewish society. Zionism, not anti-Zionism, was the weird ex-centric outlier in Jewish politics and culture. The modern Jewish settlement in Palestine was faraway and precarious, a minuscule dot on the margins of the Jewish map. Liberal and ultra-orthodox rejected Zionism on grounds relating to religion and civic identity. On the Jewish left, it was widely assumed that the Yishuv, i.e. the tiny Jewish settlement in Palestine, had no capacity to absorb the political, economic, and social distress facing the millions of Jews living in eastern Europe. Jews immigrated to the United States, where Zionism was, at first, largely ignored although not universally so. With immigration to the United States cut off, this begins to change in the 1920s and 1930s when we begin to see the impact of mass Jewish immigration. The Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel shift the demographic centers of Jewish life. Today, Israel is an internationally recognized nation state + a self-constituted global ingathering of the Jewish people. By virtue of demographic mass alone, Israel is a sun-like center of social gravity bending contemporary Jewish life around it, a social fact, an object of fascination for both normie-Jews and anti-Zionist Jews. Arguably, the entangled dynamics specific to globalization and information technologies make it difficult if not impossible to separate Israel and the Diaspora.

With the passage of time, Diaspora solidarity with Israel sedimented into a base Jewish communal norm: ahavat Yisrael, fidelity to the klal, etc. Hedged in by taboo and symbolism, the “essence of Judaism” would be the bare social bond or “moral community,” i.e. the compelling power of shared collective existence. Against the grain, contemporary Jewish Anti-Zionism in the Diaspora takes shape in opposition to this social mass. In the twenty-first century, Jewish Anti-Zionism assumes a place between the virtual world and real life. After the election of Donald Trump in 2016, it does so under conditions of intense polarization. Related to social and political crisis and upheaval across the Middle East and Israel, North America and Europe, Jews and Jewish objects assume phantasmagoric digital dimension in the anti-Semitic imaginary on the far left and far right.

Largely reactive in structure, the primary energy of Jewish Anti-Zionism is powered and magnified in the mirror-image of the ascendant Jewish racist and religious right in Israel, i.e. the institutional and public face of Zionism as represented by the state-system since Netanyahu rose to power in 2009.

The Israel that Jews under 40 years old know has been overdetermined by 50 years of occupation and some 20 years of ultra rightwing and religious right Zionism in power. This more than explains the growth of harsh anti-Zionism on the part of American Jews with no lived memory of anything else; what everyone no matter their age knows about Israel today is represented by rightwing and religious rightwing reactionaries radicalizing the country under their control. And yet, for all that, it is not always easy to recognize Israel as a real place, the people, a country, and history in the symbolic architectures and affective registers that dominate the expression of Jewish Anti-Zionism. The discourse is entirely dependent upon rightwing and religious-right forces in Israel, those weird and violent mutations in contemporary Jewish life against which the discourse of anti-Zionism reacts in a negative feedback loop.

Polls consistently indicate a Jewish community in the United States that continues to identify deeply with Israel. Normie Jews are, for the most part, pro-Israel and pro-peace, while intensely reactive to criticism of Israel and anti-Semitism in society at large. On the main, the U.S. Jewish community is deeply confused by positive sentimental attachments to Israel which impede critical engagement with the actual politics of the place. Inside this larger current, Jewish Anti-Zionism is a compact and oppositional counterpoint riddled by negative sentiment.

My own tendentious remarks in this post are anti-anti-Zionist. But in the interest of getting it right, I did not want to say things about Jewish Anti-Zionism that activists on the radical Jewish left do not themselves say. To that purpose, I pay close attention to works by Atalia Omar and Ben Lober and Shane Burley, and essays by Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief and writer at the online Jewish Currents. I turn to them for the candid and critical light they shed on the affective realignments that animate what is a sectarian impulse in Jewish society. At a global and local moment of political and moral crisis, the direction reflects the structure of an antipathetic in-group-out-group that deliberately seeks to decenter Jewishness in the name of “safety” and “solidarity.” At the affective register, Jewish anti-Zionism combines the performance of moral outrage and the expression of self-love in binary opposition to Israel and the Jewish social mainstream.

[I]

What makes AtaliaOmer’s Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians (2019) such an accomplished piece of ethnography about this interesting and even curious social formation in American Jewish life is how the author allows a critical reader to draw opposite conclusions than she herself would draw, but on the basis of the very data she herself collected about her subjects –self-described as American Jewish Palestine solidarity activists.  Days of Awe explores alternative community and elective affinities between diaspora Jewish activists in fundamental (strategic, not tactical) opposition to the Zionist idea and Jewish mainstream community. Responsive to contemporary digital technologies and new subject-positions made possible online, the strand on the Jewish Anti-Zionist Left is maintained as a binary site of charged affect for expressive moral performance.

SELF-LOVE & AFFECTIVE AFFINITIES: A familiar claim is that Jewish anti-Zionists are self-hating Jews when, in fact, the evidence points to the exact opposite. Omer’s primary thesis is that anti-Zionism strengthens the Jewish identity of American Jewish Palestine solidarity activists. Claiming to represent “the voice of morality,” American Jewish Palestine solidarity activists set out to reclaim and retrieve their Jewishness (p.129). The expression of ethical culture is not unrecognizable as such to students of modern Judaism and American Jewish history. What’s different are the affective loops. Identified by Omer, what stands out as noteworthy is the expression of “self-love” on the Jewish anti-Zionist left (pp.21, 93, 150). “By their own accounts,” Omer writes, “the Jewish activists I encountered certainly project and experience an enhanced sense of self-approval and self-love as they prefigure their alternative communal spaces through their activist engagements” (p.246). Alert to how strange this might sound to an outsider, Omer explains, “Indeed, their self-approval conveys self-love, but not of the idolatrous kind Hannah Arendt worried about in her embrace of her lack of ahavat yisrael” (p.246). Reading against the grain of her analysis, what Omer documents is the “shift in affective loyalties” from Zion to Palestine, and the perhaps strange self-regard and myopic narcissism in U.S. political culture (pp.246-7).

PERFORMATIVE MORAL OUTRAGE: Unique and strange in the history of the Jewish left is the turn to the religion. In Omer’s own words, what I would call the religious shift in affective affinities torques around the public performance of moral outrage and rituals of ethical cleansing. Anti-Zionist activism offers a site of transformation and possibility for grappling with communal sins, reflecting, repentance, and communal rewriting (pp.1-2). We see this inthe public expression of shame in front of American Jewish institutions (p.4). “[E]thical outrage, solidarity with Palestinians, and struggles for social justice in other areas motivate activists to reimagine Jewishness through liturgical and hermeneutical innovation and social protest.” Per Omer, “The ‘ethical outrage’ or ‘cognitive dissonance’ many activists express does not arise automatically; my interviews and other methods of investigation show how processes of prior politicization— especially on questions of gender, feminism, militarization, and race— generate ethical outrage, spur unlearning, and refashion identity” (p.7). The “complex retrieval” of Jewishness is in the prophetic mode defined in terms of exilic consciousness, standing with the other and emotional and ethical indignation, relentless atoning for the sins of one’s community (pp.119-125). To the extent that the affective complexity of social emotion is itself always intensely mediated as self-performance, it is constructed, not arbitrary, but artificial.

DECENTERING JEWISHNESS In what is commonly called the “unlearning” of the modern Jewish story, Jewishness is redefined not in relation to self, not merely in relation to others, but, more radically, determined by and for others. Judaism, Antisemitism, Zionism, Holocaust, and Israel are meant to be read through Palestinian and American anti-racist perspectives that “decenter monopoly and dispel the myopias of Jewish suffering” (pp.138-39). As told by Omer, American Jewish Palestine solidarity activists submerge the Jewish story under rubrics determined in relationto“enduring legacies” of imperialism and settler-colonialism, “the suffering caused by Zionism,” whiteness, etc. In the process, the Jewish story has been radically decentered. In terms of religion, Jewish anti-Zionist activism “consciously attempts to reread the tradition by innovating its liturgy through a relational engagement with Palestinians and other victims of injustice” before which, I would argue, the tradition gives way. The production of Judaism is recognizably anti-militarist, spiritual, ethical, un-chosen, post-ethnic, diasporic, multiracial, post-nationalist, universalistic and humanistic, supersessionist (pp.129, 138, 222). Above all, these are “ethical commitments on behalf or under the directives of others” (p.17).

SUPERSESSIONISM TheJudaism created in Jewish Palestine Solidarity circles recreate a logic that Omer herself calls “intra-Jewish supersessionist” (p.11). About this peculiar strain in American Jewish Palestine solidarity movements, Omer writes critically in her own voice. Echoing Christian supersessionism, what she calls the derision of “ethnic and particularistic threads of Jewishness” allows for “creeping antisemitism on the Left” (p.218). In this view, “[v]alorizing the diasporic as most authentically Jewish further diminishes the capacity to reimagine the meanings of the relations between Jews and the land in a non-hegemonic manner” (p.266).

[WEIRD] The dynamics tracked by Omer in 2019 were at work during the main anti-Israel demonstrations, especially on campus during the academic year 2023-2024. At a moment of Jewish collective trauma, Jewish anti-Zionist activists repurposed Judaism and replaced Jewish symbols with Palestinian iconography “under the directives of others.” Leaving a strange visual impression, the performance of Jewish ritual inside the intimate circle of the encampment was intended to create new community by sacralizing Palestinian suffering and the struggle against Zionism. Writing here at the Times of Israel about campus “liberation sukkahs,” journalist Andrew Lappin describes sukkot and other ritual objects decorated with Palestinian insignia and slogans along with Palestinian flags and the watermelon insignia popularized during the anti-Israel protests. If religion and ritual work by way of magnification, the distortion of Jewish percepts and affects is by way of intensification. Contributing to the overall defamiliarization were the masked participants, the expressions of exaggeration, distortion, and emotional ambiguity intended to impact on the transformation of identity and social roles. The visual impact central to the genre of agitprop is unusual and unsettling, intended to draw the group deeper into the imaginary world of play staged by the ritual actors.

[II]

The old Jewish left of yesterday sought to revolutionize Jewish collective life as an autonomous force from inside the worldview of the communal concern or klal. About this I wrote here. In contrast is the untested theory at the heart of Jewish Anti-Zionism that “solidarity is safety” (i.e. extra-Jewish solidarity against Israel on the radical leftwing of the political spectrum) is the stance best positioned to secure Jewish life in the Diaspora. But ultimately, anti-Zionism reconfigures Jewish subjectivity by submerging it in relation to others.

A case in point was formulated by the Jewish caucus of the Democratic Socialists of America (formally an anti-Zionist political movement since 2024): “We seek to renew the Jewish socialist tradition, to combat antisemitism, and to forge solidarity between Jews and other oppressed people. Jews have complex individual and communal identities and backgrounds, and it is clear that Jewish liberation is bound to that of all oppressed people.”

For a critical reader, the phrasing at the DSA will invite skeptical questions. What exactly is this alignment between Jewish liberation and the oppression of others? Is the alliance one-way or two-way? What power dynamics and whose values center this relation? Passing over that which individuates Jewish collective identity, the short statement pivots quickly to a seamless subsumption bounding and binding the Jewish collective body vis-à-vis positional points outside itself. Even as it recalls the tradition of Jewish socialism, the anti-Zionist Jewish caucus at the DSA calls attention to what is a unique social and political realignment in the history of the Jewish left.

Explored in depth by Shane Burley and Ben Lorber in Safety through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism (2023), the authors position the Jewish political interest against the threat of violence of rightwing Christian nationalism, also against the police and the Jewish communal establishment. Jewish safety, according to this theory, is best realized in solidarity with other oppressed groups. Left more or less unsaid is these would be the collectives represented on the vanguard of the radical left by organizations like the DSA, BLM and other anti- activist collectives, and Palestine solidarity movements, today led by groups like PACBI (The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel) NSJP (National Students for Justice in Palestine) and JVP (Jewish Voice for Peace).

In this fraught realignment, “Safety Through Solidarity” is an organizing strategy that pivots radical Jewishness. It does so in relation to putative allies on the non-Jewish left whom the authors themselves describe as being in constant need of reminding about the perils of anti-Semitism in these self-same activist movements. A negative possible takeaway, the very opposite to the one drawn by Burley and Lorber, is that the radical left on the whole is deeply ambivalent about Jews, but not in solidarity with them. Unexplained is why the radical left is drawn to conspiracy theories and destructive campist alliances in the first place. “Safety through Solidarity” depends upon allies who, by the authors’ own admission, conflate Jewishness and whiteness, don’t recognize the problem of anti-Semitism neither in their own movement nor in society at large, demand lockstep allegiance to movement priorities, and resent it when Jewish issues are brought up in activist circles.

After more than half a century of red-hot hostility against Israel and Zionism, the radical left has always “missed the mark” about Jews, not “unfortunately,” but inevitably (p.206). Burley and Lorber make no mention of Marx “On The Jewish Question” and very little about the history of anti-Semitism on the left. Where there is, in the book, a quick mention to any part of this history, the discussion quickly pivots back to the problem of rightwing anti-Semitism, which is what, in fact, preoccupies the authors, politically and professionally (pp.99-100). Burley and Lorber want to separate Jews from Zionism, opposed to “the assumption that every Jew is a Zionist until proven otherwise” (p.202). At the same time, they implore the left to welcome the Jewish community in “our big-tent coalition of belonging, co-resistance, and care.” In the service of others, they commit the Jewish left to “building the movement for Palestinian rights” (p.205). Burley and Lorber put the onus on the Left to prove that solidarity is a better bet than nationalism, but the authors’ own effort linking classical Zionism and anti-Semitism is sketchy at best (chapter 10). While “Safety Through Solidarity” resists assimilation, the organizing strategy remains beholden to others, folding Jewishness into the movement for Palestinian liberation (p.288).

“Safety Through Solidarity” is probably a chimera. At the time of writing, the only manifestation of actual solidarity on the radical left with Jewish communities to which Burley and Lorber can point was immediately in the wake of the initial resistance to Trump’s first election in 2016. This included the shock of the deadly “Unite the Right” march in Charlottesville, VA in 2017 and the Tree of Life massacre in 2018 (pp.310-17). This was, indeed, a moment of alarm that caught everyone up short. Non-Jews on the left rallied in support of synagogues; progressive Zionist Jews marched with the left; there were no anti-Israel litmus tests. But the solidarity never took root. The potential for broad-based, non-sectarian liberal-left-radical-Jewish coalitions curdled into anti-Zionist activism during the BLM protests in 2020 in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. The idea today that members of the DSA would be the ones guarding synagogue services is itself a bitter joke (p.314). “Safety Through Solidarity” was already receding into history by the time Safety through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism went to press in late 2023. A year later, Burley and Lorber would have pointed to the warm embrace of Jewish activists in the anti-Israel protests after October 7, especially on campus; but there again, the pattern of conditional acceptance repeats itself on the same terms.  

Modulating the open hostility to “Zionism,” the ambivalence about “Israel” that pops up in Safety Through Solidarity may be particular to Burley and Lorber and not shared across the Anti-Zionist Left. Burley and Lorber criticize their allies on left for the blind spot that keeps them from seeing the central position occupied by Zionism and Israel in contemporary Jewish society. Ambivalence is evidenced by their critique of Zionism, presumably in its political-statist manifestation, coupled with a vision of the flourishing of Jewish, Palestinian, and “other minorities” in pluralistic societies across the Middle East free from persecution (pp.205-6). October 7 elicits more of the same ambivalence, bouncing as it does between three position-points. First, Burley and Lorber describe October 7 as part of a “decades-long struggle by Palestinians against their dispossession.” Second, the authors acknowledge that activists in the Palestine Solidarity Movement (such as NSJP) minimized civilian massacres by Hamas while praising the assault as part of that very struggle to which Burley and Lorber themselves want to commit Jews on the left. Third, they recognize what they call “a few problematic responses” among pro-Palestine activists on the anti-Zionist left as they excoriate what they consider to be the overreaction from the organized Jewish community (pp.319-2, 206).

Burley and Lorber’s analysis captures the broad range of emotion at this moment experienced by Jews on the Anti-Zionist Left in the years before and after October 7.  Safety Through Solidarity is fraught by putative “ancestral trauma,” and also by stigma, described by Burley and Lorber, the “deeper discomfort” carried by Jews as they struggle to overcome the palpable feeling felt on the left that “Jews are disgusting” (p.239). Jewish trauma and stigma on the radical left are met by bold statements of self-assertion, celebration, and joyful self-manifestation. A careful reader will track the first-person plural throughout the book. “We radical Jews” (p.119). “Our grief connects us to others’ grief” (p.234).  “[W]e look toward a horizon of collective liberation and justice for all” (p.221). “Jews are fiery radicals” (p.304). These are dramatic declaratives shadowed by the “special fury” suffered on the Anti-Zionist Left from the organized community for breaking ranks at a collective moment of radical crisis after October 7.

[III]

The shock of October 7, the Hamas-Israel war, and the destruction of Gaza inevitably hardened the disaffection with Jewish community and the realignment around Palestine already at work on the far extremes of the Jewish Anti-Zionist left. Note again the predominance of emotion. As if predetermined, the instantaneous response to October 7 at Jewish Currents was expressed primarily in terms of tears, hope, and rage. Supporting Omer’s analysis, these were the feelings that foregrounded political analysis and marshaled activism on the Jewish Anti-Zionist Left. But the emotions were guided and pre-structured. We can best understand the dissemination of these feelings as the sectarian expression of emotional states organized by a hard binary logic.

At its most extreme edge, the binary logic of Jewish anti-Zionism mirrors the Kahanist right in Israel. In the form of either/or, the binary logic leaves Jewishness with no room for middle ground between two oppositions: democracy and Zionism. The choice forced upon Jewishness is to break the very social bonds that constitute the essence of Jewish communal life. The act of disaffiliation-disaffection against the klal or collective is a conscious choice. One could have otherwise stood with democratic forces in Israeli society, the Zionist left, Standing Together (boycotted by PACBI, the steering committee of the BDS movement); not to mention one’s own family in Israel. Committed to the radical excision of Zionism from public life, the deliberate choice is to make common cause on the anti-Zionist Palestinian national camp against Jews in Israel and against Jewish community in the Diaspora.

Showing her own keen ability to cut to the core of a problem, Angel reflected “On Loving Jews” in September 2021 during that earlier round of violence in Gaza between Hamas and Israel. About the leadership cadre at Jewish Currents, she writes, “We have debated amongst ourselves whether now is the time to engage Jews more deeply—especially as many seem to be displaying a greater willingness to listen than at any other point in recent memory—or to turn more completely to Palestine solidarity work outside of the Jewish sphere. We have also asked ourselves whether the Jewish establishment is still an important player worth fighting, or a hulking yet hollowed-out shell, best left to fossilize and decompose. It has not escaped us that these questions amount to an inverted version of our critics’ preoccupation with Jewish solidarity, and so we scrutinize our own attachments. Is our continued orientation toward Jews and Jewish institutions rooted in a clear-eyed assessment of the power they hold over Palestinian lives, or is it an irrational vestige of Jewish exceptionalism, betraying a desire—more conscious in some of us than in others—to save ‘our own’ from themselves?” 

Writing off intra-Jewish solidarity as a form of exceptionalism, Jewish Currents wrestles with the cutting ties not just with the Jewish Establishment and the State in Israel, but with people, including family and loved ones. In “On Loving Jews,” the author’s personal struggle with the political fallout focused acutely on her family ties in Israel during the violence. She wrote of having realized with shame that her public omission of concern for Israelis was mirrored by her private neglect of her own kin, including failing to check on her great-aunt and -uncle in their nineties and how they managed descending to a bomb shelter. This omission led her to question if she had too eagerly leaned into the distance between herself and her loved ones, potentially abandoning them to the state-people conflation held by her critics. She ultimately reframes this difficult, “stuck” relationship as the very condition of familial love, believing that this enduring bond—like the one that helped move her own mother toward recognizing, in her words, Zionism’s crimes—is essential for achieving communal transformation. No less than the Zionism rejected at Jewish Currents, Israel remains, after all, “the primary site” of struggle within contemporary Jewish life.

In “On Loving Jews,” the stuck emotion of family and collective attachments is met by confrontational logic built on a caricature of “Zionism.” For Jewish Currents to suggest that Jews are being tasked by Zionism merely to identify with “the state” or with the regime fails to capture the depth of affection Diaspora Jews hold for the country and its people and the broad disaffection with the current ultra-rightwing-religious government. Even when Angel concedes a point to “liberal Zionists,” the argument quickly pivots back to the accusation that liberal Zionists fail to adequately challenge “the ethnostate.” The term “ethnostate” is intended to draw a difference with democracy. The claim that liberal Zionists advocate for Jews to pledge allegiance to “the State” as “the primary site of Judaism” is a distortion. So is the implication that liberal Zionists are aligned with Kahanists. It reads a lot like agitprop. The purpose is to draw hard battlelines and exclude a middle path. It does little to explain the positional realignment on the Jewish Anti-Zionist left with resistance-pilled Palestine solidarity movements.

As the primary organ of the Jewish anti-Zionist-pro-Palestine left, Jewish Currents continues to be a fulcrum of radical and extreme response to October 7 and the Hamas-Israel war.  This was from day one. Even critics will appreciate the remarkable candor and self-awareness expressed, in particular, by Angel in this very early published response from October 12, “We Cannot Cross Until We Carry Each Other.” The essay positions Jewish Currents as “recommitting to our movements in this moment” in the midst of the havoc unleashed by Hamas. Writing in the first-person, Angel describes herself feeling excitement on October 7. She says the first images she saw were the images of the Palestinian bulldozer breaking through the security barrier separating Gaza and Israel. These were the first images she saw, not the images of murder and mayhem. (For my part, the first images I saw online late that night/early in the morning in the United States were Hamas terrorists in a white pickup gunning down civilians in Sederot who turned out to be senior citizens waiting at a bus stop).

Here we see ambivalence after October 7 resolved in a three-point structure. What Angel first calls “tears of hope” were immediately followed by a second moment of grief. But then, in the third moment, the editor-at-chief at Jewish Currents quickly pivots back, deciding that it is impossible to separate “liberatory metaphor” and violent reality. This was, indeed, an ideological decision determined in the service of others. Whatever grief the author/editor at Jewish Currents may have felt gives way to the point of view shared by a Palestinian friend who would not condemn “militants” or acts of murder because these signal sense of possibility for Palestinians. About her friend, Angel observes, “Her reaction appears common to so many of the Palestinians I know and trust that I must try to feel my way into it.” These reflections capture the realignment of sensibility that is, indeed, the epitome of the open sectarian spirit in Jewish Anti-Zionism.

Jewish Currents offered young Jewish anti-Zionist activists a platform participating in campus protests to articulate themselves. They did so within the binary logic of the Palestine solidarity movement positioned against a Jewish polity and community. Interviewed by Angel, students at Columbia University voiced anger at what they saw as a crackdown on free speech, frustration that protest movement demands went unmet, and defiance over the suspension of SJP and JVP. Many were searching for anti-Zionist religious spaces while learning about Zionism and anti-Zionism on the fly on social media. Centering Palestine, some described growing up in Hebrew schools without real understanding or connection to Jewish life, crying over family conversations, while others—like one modern orthodox student —struggled to disentangle Zionism from Judaism. Family tensions were painful, yet the alternate circle of the encampment was described as “beautiful.” The interview closed on emotion—tears, anger at Barnard’s administration and relatives—with the reminder from Angel that “these are just children.” The students and interviewer center Palestine and elevate those once cast as enemies, omitting any mention of Hamas, October 7, hostages, Israelis, and Jewish history. The framing is zero-sum: Israel or Palestine. Zionism and Israel—home to seven million Jews—are at once omnipresent and simply erased. The erasure signals what may be the first time in the history of the self-identifying Jewish left that a sectarian formation decenters itself so completely from the Jewish collective in the service of others while doing so in the name of the collective.

[IV]

It is too easy to complain from the putative center of a communal “tent” about Jewish Anti-Zionism. It is not as if the origin of this possibly protean movement in Jewish life comes from nowhere. At a time of crisis, these kinds of complaints from the Jewish right and center about the radical Jewish left are hypocritical. In contrast, my focus in this tendentious post on social structure and the autonomous collective, or klal, draws from the socialist tradition and the sociology of religion, and from my own personal and professional background. On one hand, the place of political struggle is within the contested space of communal norms, and this space is increasingly global in ways unique to this new century. On the other hand, this political location can only mean that any anti-anti-Zionist platform worthy of being taken seriously must begin and end with critique, namely a clear and consistent grasp of the broad forces undermining social and moral norms by the radical right and religious-right in the United States, Europe, and Israel.

Jewish Anti-Zionism in America is, for the most part, a weak force and a reactive formation in relation to larger social dynamics. Looked at in three parts, Jewish Anti-Zionism is, in this respect, a mirror.

–The radical unhinging –the revulsion and rage and weird alignments on the Jewish Anti-Zionist Left—is a mirror of the radical unhinging of Jewish society in Israel since the Second Intifada. Anti-Zionism is given fuel by the deep seated legal-moral-social-political turpitude that has marked the hardening of the occupation and galloping annexation of the West Bank and anti-Palestinian racism in Israeli society. The November 2022 elections that empowered the Netanyahu-Kahanist-Haredi government responsible for the anti-democracy coup in Israel and then October 7 and the Hamas-Israel war were more than a rupture. In Israel today, anti-Arab racism turns the country against the lowercase liberal and democratic traditions in which the country once took pride. Benjamin Netanyahu and the Religious-Haredi right are in the process of a full-scale assault on Israeli civil society and the human face of Jewish moral tradition. Jewish Anti-Zionism is responsive to this harsh dynamic and aligns it to the Zionist project and Jewish life in Israel in toto.

–The radical decentering on the Jewish Anti-Zionist left in North America and Europe mirrors the unremitting hostility on the left to Israel, Israelis, and supporters of Israel who represent the vast majority of Jews in the Diaspora. In large part or some part, the revulsion is mixed with anti-Semitism. From their Jewish “allies,” the so-called Palestine Solidarity movement will welcome only the most extreme anti-Zionist messaging. The hostility goes beyond criticism of Israel. As represented by leadership cadres and activists, the Palestine Solidarity movement rejects and does not recognize the principle of Jewish self-determination in Israel. Jews on the liberal and center-left (i.e. liberal Zionists as they are called in the United States) will find little reason to try to partner with progressive-regressive movements that offer neither safety to Jews nor solidarity with Jewish communities. Against self-determination and mutual recognition, the anti-Zionist progressive-radical left demands what many Jews will regard as abject submission of communal priorities, spiritual traditions, and political interests into  a binary worldview.

–The decentering of the Jewish Anti-Zionist left is itself the inverted mirror image of the organized Jewish establishment. The Jewish social sphere and bodies politic today have been badly battered by forces located both outside and inside the collective. Working against itself, simplistic pro-Israel messaging on the Jewish mainstream does not contribute to “Jewish resilience,” especially not on campus and, increasingly, in political life. The longstanding historical failure of the mainstream Jewish community to make critical sense of Israel has been exacerbated by massacres of 10/7 and spikes of anti-Semitism in North America and Europe. Saturated by sentiment and sentimentalism, mainstream Jewish institutions do everything except recognize Israel as an actual place riven by deep social and political divisions exacerbated by deep anti-democratic strains of ethnic and ethnoreligious supremacism and anti-Palestinian-anti-Arab-anti-Muslim racism. The mainstream liberal Jewish body politic is helpless at this current political moment without a clear communal reckoning about democracy and Zionism and Israel based on clear moral and political principles.

About the place of political power and about the emotions and dis-aligning at Jewish Currents, scholar and activist Arash Azizi has written critically from his own position outside the Jewish community in solidarity with the old socialist and Jewish socialist left. https://libertiesjournal.com/online-articles/jewish-feelings-vibes-and-currents/ “The end of politics is to elicit material change,” according to Azizi. “This requires wielding power. Wielding power cannot be done without developing a base within a community… The Old Left’s modus operandi was to achieve material change via community engagement, organizing, and political agitation. Karl Marx once quipped that communists must be “Fortier in re, suaviter in modo” (Bold in content, Mild in manner.) The best of the Old Left operated on this principle. Old leftists weren’t trying to be the most radical person in every room – radicalism wins popularity contests not political elections. Thus, they took on issues that could animate their base and offered workable solutions in a manner that could appeal to the ordinary people.”

Unequal and volatile, the State of Israel represents a large social body with a Jewish political majority and an Arab-Palestinian religious-ethnic-national minority. What stands out as “weird” and “unhinged” on the Jewish Anti-Zionist left is not “criticism of Israel.” Unhinged is the anti-social counter-positioning, the saturation of animus and other negative emotions, and the other-centric realignment of Jewish cultural politics. As affirmed by Omer, “[T]he other-centric mode of solidarity exposes the historically specific reparative and innovative grassroots meaning-making journey enacted through a social movement’s navigation of a complex semiotic topography, necessarily pushed beyond intra-Jewish resources and interrogative tools” (p.114, emphasis added).

The question is if this reorientation “pushed beyond” Jewish social norms is either “necessary” or a viable foundation for Jewish community and communal politics in the Diaspora.

Historically, the Jewish left, Zionist and anti-Zionist alike, represented vanguard movements whose critique of Jewish society had Jewish society as its primary locus of action and concern. In the face of political malevolence, I want to believe that Jews in Israel and the Diaspora can align intra-Jewish and extra-Jewish solidarity around principles of self-determination and mutual recognition. Jews and gentiles acting in good faith are more than capable of distinguishing sharp criticism of Israel from anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic animus. Working together for a common future for everyone everywhere, democratic change in Israel and the Diaspora will get no help from Palestine Solidarity Activists and their allies on the Jewish Anti-Zionist Left. Against binary models of opposition, the moment demands, instead, a steady inner compass to navigate global and local currents that are harsh, protean, and pivotal.