It’s Time to Wake from Woke
By Gil Troy.
Painfully divided and ideologically adrift, American Jewry has become a case study of weakness at a time when the Jewish people need to display strength and determination. Instead, the news is filled with items like these:
- In Michigan, an anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist Democratic senatorial candidate who cavorts with someone who blames America for being attacked on 9/11 has received messages from a Jewish organization proclaiming, “Mazal Tov Abdul El-Sayed.”
- In New York, whose new mayor can’t stop demonizing Israel, more than 230 rabbis declared that Zohran Mamdani’s “support for Palestinian self-determination stems not from hate, but from his deep moral convictions.”
- The pressure group J Street has released millions of its donors’ dollars to go “on offense against AIPAC-backed incumbents”—effectively setting themselves against politicians who are supportive of the Jewish state.
Indeed, as more and more American Jews have internalized the mass mania demonizing Benjamin Netanyahu, they have also seemed to sour on Zionism, implicitly joining those who place the onus on Israel for the burgeoning anti-Semitism worldwide.
What kinds of people keep siding with their sworn enemies? I believe the answer is that these people are so emotionally and politically invested in dated, outmoded, and discredited ideas and fantasies that they would rather believe the best of the enemies of the Jewish people and the worst of their fellow Jews.
Three years after October 7, Israelis continue to wonder how it was that their leaders so easily deluded themselves with the conceptzia—the term used to describe the consensus view that Israel had found an effective modus vivendi with Hamas that occasionally required the Jewish state to “mow the lawn” when the terrorist-gang government got too obstreperous but did not require an all-out war to defeat and extirpate Israel’s enemy.
With justification, many have accused Netanyahu and his government of refusing to revisit the conceptzia and explain what went wrong. But no one doubts that Netanyahu has moved on from the conceptzia itself. That cannot readily be said of many American Jewish organizations and prominent American Jewish individuals, who find it impossible to move on from their pre–October 7 hopes, dreams, and delusions. They remain frozen in their own versions of the conceptzia, mired in a set of dated and sentimental notions about coexistence, the pursuit of peace, and being liked, when the nation’s enemies have made it clear that they’re not interested in any of those lovely illusions.
I am not speaking of those who have joined the enemy camp, building careers and delighting the haters as anti-Zionist Jews, declaring that at least Nazi Germany had the decency to seek to hide its genocide; rather, I am referring to mainstream liberal Jews, whose constant invocations of phrases such as “two-state solution” and “doing the work” indicate the degree to which their opinions have calcified. Even as they recognize the threat from growing Jew-hatred, they cannot surrender their priors, among them the certitude that the people with whom they agree on matters as various as abortion and climate change remain their allies rather than participants in a bloodless backstab that has been going on since October 8.
It has indeed been a disillusioning period, since many of the institutions American Jews both shaped and venerated over the past century have been the choreographers of today’s anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist mania—from the universities to the media to the publishing houses to the art world to Hollywood and the Democratic Party. And yet they persist, as do the delusional Jews who refuse to see the truth about those whose love they have long sought and whose approval they apparently continue to need.
Two historical forces that long empowered American Jews have also sapped 21st-century American Jewry. The radical individualism unique to the United States and the sacralized liberalism first given full expression by John Stuart Mill and then expanded into FDR’s New Deal took a refugee people and helped to form a prosperous and innovative community more steeped in Americanism than Judaism—or Zionism. American individualism unleashed extraordinary creativity and allowed Jews in astonishing numbers to fulfill worldly ambitions that had been thwarted since the expulsion from Jerusalem in 70 C.E. Two millennia of constraints led Jews to burst free of the ropes that had tied them down like Gulliver. They were ready to stand out academically and professionally while learning to fit in socially and politically.
The problem was, and is, that Judaism’s communitarian ethos and binding web of social commitments are often at cross-purposes with American individualism. In 1985, the sociologist Robert Bellah noted that Americans of all faiths had increasingly been spurning institutionalized religion for what he called “Sheilaism,” in which they were being guided not by God’s will or divine order but “just my own little voice.” Today, most Jews echo the Atlanta social activist who insisted in 2018: “Judaism is very personal, and it means something different to everyone.” This is perhaps the least true thing ever said about Judaism, with its enveloping communalism and 613 laws designed to provide Jews with a way of going through the world in a morally sound manner from the moment they wake in the morning to the moment they close their eyes at night. But Sheilaism is as American as apple pie, and many American Jews have sold their birthright for it.
Similarly, American Jewry’s liberal fervor proved a mixed blessing over time. Their liberalism made many Jews exemplary citizens while making America a better country. Since the 1930s, most American Jews have deified the Democratic Party as an expression of their Judaism. One frustrated (and witty) member of New York’s Jewish Republican establishment sighed that “Jews have three Velten,” the word for “worlds” in Yiddish. “Die Velt—this world—Yene Velt—the world to come—and Roosevelt.”
Foisting an ever-evolving Democratic platform (or any evanescent political platform) onto the Torah’s eternal teachings is sloppy and sacrilegious. Activists cannibalize holy texts to justify today’s political fad—no nukes in the 1980s, DEI in the 2020s, who knows what next week. This bastardized hybrid injects partisan venom into what should be nonpartisan Jewish spaces. From “Rabbis for Obama” to sitting shiva in synagogues when Donald Trump won, what Norman Podhoretz called the “Torah of liberalism” has led those who have spent half a century criticizing Evangelicals for mixing church and state to violate those same boundaries with impunity.
It has also led to behavior that is alarmingly close to Judaism’s mortal foe, idolatry. For example, when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died before Rosh Hashanah in 2020, many rabbis beatified her as a “modern-day prophet.” One rabbi chanted some of her maxims using the Haftorah melody, thus rejecting the Book of Samuel text that Jews have read on that day for 1,700 years. More recently, the Jewish Democratic Council of America posted: “WE STAND WITH IMMIGRANT COMMUNITIES. JEWS ARE CALLED TO WELCOME THE STRANGER MORE THAN ANY OTHER COMMANDMENT IN THE TORAH.”
Jews are free to be liberal, of course, but reasoning from your liberalism to your Judaism makes Judaism ephemeral, conditional, and superficial.
American Jews excel at examinations, so perhaps they should take some post–October 7 tests assessing Jewish self-respect. Did they excuse the silence of their friends in the wake of the Hamas slaughter or remain silent in the face of the perverse anti-Zionism expressed by those false friends, mirroring the Philadelphia rabbi who apologized on Yom Kippur 2024 for his October 8 tweet reproaching “an imam, a friend and colleague” whose “post justified Hamas’s action as legitimate resistance”? Does their Trump Derangement Syndrome prevent them from appreciating the president’s role in freeing Israel’s hostages from the hellscape in Gaza and his willingness to fight Iran’s totalitarians and thwart the evil regime’s goal of eliminating Jews from the face of the earth? Do the leftist Jews in synagogue who offer up words of prayer for suffering Palestinians (the most notable constructed in 2017 by the anti-Zionist group IfNotNow) distinguish between the 30,000-plus terrorists killed and other Gazans? And why did it seem like many were praying more devoutly for Palestinians than for their co-religionists while hostages languished in Gaza? Most of those in the tunnels were “good Israelis” by the lights of leftist Jews—anti-Bibi, anti-settlers, living on kibbutzim that employed and befriended Arab workers coming from Gaza, the same Arab workers who then mapped out and joined the attacks of October 7 and the murder of those who had sought to befriend them.
This past Yom Kippur, as rabbis nationwide chose partisan posturing over sincere soul-searching to attack Trump or the radical minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, did they also stop to mourn Netanel Shukrun—the father of six who, after preparing for the holiday, was murdered by a Palestinian terrorist whose family will be well paid by the Palestinian Authority for his evil martyrdom? Do they couch every pro-Israel statement in a Bibi-bashing, settler-denouncing framework? Do they tolerate anti-Zionists while cancelling racists, homophobes, and sexists? Do their Jewish institutions wave flags of anti-Zionist movements, such as Black Lives Matter, without also displaying Israel’s flag—which represents Jewish peoplehood? Finally, can they denounce the anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism of Hasan Piker and Abdul El-Sayed, or are they as silent as American Jewry’s sham shomer, the self-appointed guardian of the Jewish state, Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer?
These aren’t political litmus tests. They’re not about left versus right. This is right versus wrong. American Jewry’s future—and not just Jewish dignity—is threatened. Obviously, Jewish pro-Trumpers have blind spots. But with two of three American Jews being anti-Trump, that minority doesn’t profess political ownership over American Judaism.
Most American Jews remain imprisoned in five cages of their conceptzia:
- They confuse Judaism with what could be called Tikkun Olamism.
- They are repeating the error of partisan hacks who insist we must endorse No Enemies to the Leftism.
- They still worship at the altar of Ivy League credentialism.
- They are raising their kids around the defeatist assumptions of Be Nice/Be Useful Model Minorityism.
- And even when they affirm Israel’s right to exist, they have nevertheless swallowed whole modern American culture’s Blame Israel Firstism.
Let’s take these one by one.
JUDAISM HIJACKED BY TIKKUN OLAMISM
On leading synagogue and day school websites, the phrase tikkun olam competes with—and often outranks—God, Israel, peoplehood, and tradition. Tikkun olam means “heal the world,” and the phrase appears nowhere in Judaism’s written law. Nonetheless, it has become maybe the signature value of the American Jewish community. Note how one prominent synagogue offers a list of its values in this order: “Meaning… Community… Inclusivity… Re-forming… Tikkun Olam… Israel.” The Union for Reform Judaism declares that “to be a Reform Jew is to hear the voice of the prophets in our head; to be engaged in the ongoing work of tikkun olam.”
Tikkun olam was originally a Talmudic legal notion about fairness within the Jewish community and later a mystical kabbalist vision of reglazing the shards of light shattered during God’s creation of the universe. Jonathan Krasner, of Brandeis University, explains that, in the wake of the 1960s, “this easily pronounced Hebrew phrase conveyed the American Jewish desire to be ‘a part of’ and ‘apart from’ at the same time.” Today it mostly means the pursuit of an ever-changing progressive vision of social justice with a Hebrew branding. This has led to an easy-listening American Judaism that demands little. It does not oblige us to stretch to fulfill the laws of our people, and it seems to minimize the need to prioritize loyalty toward one’s own people.
Zack Bodner, the CEO of the Oshman Family JCC in Palo Alto, notes the ease with which young Jewish students have allowed themselves to “stand shoulder to shoulder with protesters who call for the destruction of their own people.” He points out that “by teaching our children to take care of others but not their own family, we have failed them.”
In 2020, more than 600 Jewish organizations deemed Black Lives Matter “the current-day civil rights movement”—and pronounced this Marxist-led, obsessively anti-Zionist organization “our best chance at equity and justice.” It became fashionable in certain circles to declare that “Black Lives Matter is a Jewish value,” to reform curricula acknowledging “the Jewish Imperative for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” and to insist that “Our Jewish values, deeply rooted in our teachings, provide a solid foundation for embracing intersectionality”—even in 2024, when intersectional activists literally blocked Jews at intersections on campus.
More ominous, establishment Jewry sent out “antiracism toolkits” that demonized “whiteness” while presuming that all Jews enjoyed “white privilege” (a conceit belied by a simple stroll down Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv, where one’s eyes see more colors than can be found in a Benjamin Moore sample book). These manuals scorned the Jewish work and education ethic that helped build those organizations and the American Jewish community.
Even today, overzealous Tikkun Olamists have universalized and de-Zionized the fight against anti-Semitism, folding it into their agenda. They minimize progressive Jew-hatred by locating “anti-Semitism at the core of dangerous authoritarian thinking such as white nationalism.” Some even lobbied Congress not to subsidize synagogue security, preferring to fight “anti-Semitism and all forms of white supremacist violence through community-based, non-carceral approaches.” They assumed that their universalist dreamland would prohibit Jew-hatred—even as universities erupted against Jews.
The Jewish Council for Public Affairs’ Combating Hate and Bigotry Action Network similarly clumps together “Countering antisemitism” with LGBTQ+ rights, racial justice, immigrant rights, fighting Islamophobia and anti-Arab hate, criminal-justice reform, reproductive rights, and gun violence prevention. Fighting Jew-hatred by opposing ICE or endorsing abortion is like fishing on land. You might enjoy casting your line, but you’ll catch nothing.
NO ENEMIES TO THE LEFTISM
The question over which is worse, left-wing anti-Semitism or right-wing anti-Semitism, is the most inane debate of our time. Both are intolerable, like all intolerance. Since October 7, the Jew-whacking pandemic has required partisans on both sides to strain ever harder to discount their camp’s obsessive anti-Zionism. But the fury against Donald Trump has revived a Communist stance rooted in the French Revolution: No enemies to the left.
Milton Himmelfarb famously, if now inappropriately, quipped in 1968 that “Jews earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans.” This form of limousine liberalism was the ultimate American Jewish conceit: Jewish prosperity seasoned with social conscience. There are those for whom Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s marching in Selma, Alabama, with Martin Luther King Jr. was the pinnacle of American Jewish history. Many Jews celebrated America’s 250th anniversary by emphasizing what the University of Pennsylvania’s Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies called “the importance of progressive politics in American Jewish life in the twentieth century.”
When Donald Trump was elected in 2016, Haaretz observed Jews “openly weeping,” even at temple preschool drop-off. Mere months later, this liberal Jewish consensus shattered when it emerged that Linda Sarsour, the co-chair of the Women’s March that led the mass protests against Trump’s 2017 inauguration, had tweeted that “nothing is creepier than Zionism.” Another co-chair, Tamika Mallory, deified the Jew-hating demagogue Louis Farrakhan.
Many Jewish leaders dithered. Considering Trump the greater threat, they rejected “litmus tests” regarding anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, not those regarding Trump. In January 2019, progressive rabbis met Sarsour and Mallory for “three hours of intense conversation and mutual vulnerability.” One Brooklyn rabbi declared that the two “had not acted with intentional anti-Semitism.” He went on: “The tears that Tamika and Linda shed as they spoke were real and heartfelt.” Validating Sarsour’s need to “speak authentically from her own experience as a Palestinian-American,” the rabbi argued that the “way to address” Jewish “hurt, anguish, and anger” was “by showing up” and “affirming our place within the movement,” with “continued dialogue about anti-Semitism and white supremacy.”
This urge to ally with blacks, feminists, LGBTQ+ activists, and others in the anti-Trump coalition led many Jews to overlook left-wing anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. Blue America, where most Jews live, was at peak woke. It detested Trump and was uninterested in those Jews who were warning that Jews and Israelis had been cast by the Sarsours of the world as oppressors in an increasingly popular, and intellectually suffocating, Marxist binary.
That “intersectional allyship” was the prelude to the shock expressed after October 7 among progressive Jews who saw their relatives and landsmen slaughtered and kidnapped. The allies didn’t ally back. Two weeks after the massacre, a Southern reproductive-rights group blasted the “Zionist occupation” (of what? Israel had pulled out of Gaza 18 years earlier) rather than the Hamas attack, claiming that Israel had denied “Palestinians control over their bodies” and “there can be no justice, peace or reproductive freedom underneath colonial occupation.”
Many Jews were devastated by the silence—and the occasional expressions of bloodthirsty delight—of socialists, feminists, and Black Lives Matter. One Los Angeles progressive rabbi confessed her “existential loneliness” in this “upside-down world, when a retrograde, regressive, totalitarian, misogynistic, Messianic, terror regime became—for the time being—the hero of the left,” and she asked, “How could it be?” One is tempted to respond: How could a literate Jew ask such a question? Was she unaware of Stalin’s “Doctors’ Plot,” an anti-Jewish conspiracy set up in the Soviet Union in 1952 while millions of Americans still professed loyalty to the Communist Party?
Two years later, more mainstream Jewish organizations again prioritized leftist “allyship,” because, they said, “Trump’s Attack on Democracy Is as Deep a Jewish Concern as Antisemitism or Israel.” This was how they treated Trump’s initiatives to combat the rise of anti-Semitism in the United States. It is true that the most far-reaching initiative against Jew-hatred that this country has ever seen caused collateral damage by, for example, unnecessarily targeting some scientific research on university campuses. But with no nuance, organizations fighting Jew-hatred while trying to preserve progressive street cred declared that Trump’s “smokescreen antisemitism accusations” weren’t intended “to protect Jewish students, but to suppress pro-Palestinian advocacy and dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.” This campaign against Trump’s actions had its effect. An Ipsos poll conducted in 2025 found 72 percent of self-identified American Jews agreeing with the statement that “empowering an administration that encourages white nationalism and cracks down on civil society only harms that fight and, indeed, creates new dangers.”
THE SLAVISHNESS OF IVY LEAGUE CREDENTIALISM
In 1968, Rabbi Yitz Greenberg noted that “if college sneezes, the Jewish community catches pneumonia.” To grasp how American Jewry collaborated in its own self-destruction, we need to consider how Jewish professors, administrators, students, parents, and donors authored, championed, validated, bankrolled, and then ignored the poisoning of the Ivies.
The Jewish community’s veneration of education positioned the community perfectly for the coming of post–World War II America’s academic meritocracy. Going to college became a defining American Jewish value, as universities became the greatest stepping stones to individual and communal success in Jewish history. Borscht Belt comedians got a reliable laugh by declaring that a Jewish fetus wasn’t deemed viable until medical-school graduation. It was a cradle-to-matriculation process. One suburban synagogue was christened “Congregation Bnei Ivy—the people of the Ivy League.” Rabbi Josh Feigelson observes: “More than lighting Shabbat candles, celebrating Passover, or attending services on Yom Kippur, the single experience that American Jews share more than any other is sending our kids to college.”
In 2026, a decade-plus into what I’ve called the “academic intifada,” most American Jews still crave a fancy education. One admissions consultant from Potomac, Maryland, notes: students are “often willing to overlook [antisemitism] at schools like Harvard and Columbia, if they can get in… At slightly less selective schools, though, it’s more of a factor.”
There are noble rationales for not abandoning the poisoned Ivies. One sophomore wrote in 2024: “The Jewish people—and patriotic Americans—cannot afford to simply give up on the Ivies and their peers; we must not cede the credentials they offer to our antagonizers.” A Columbia activist insisted: “Stay and Engage…. Ideas, policies, and cultural conversations that will profoundly influence the character of our country and the world begin on college campuses,” and, by resisting, Jews build “resilience.”
Clearly, American Jews are not ready to abandon Ivy League credentialism. But the antagonism students have endured should trigger a communal reckoning about Jewish complicity in making the universities so hostile and about the mass negligence that grew until it raged uncontrollably. Recognizing the limitations of these institutions, and Jews’ devotion to them, might help reform academia while raising awareness of what propelled Jews to great achievements, yet led so many astray.
BE NICE/BE USEFUL MODEL MINORITYISM
As “resilience” became our post–October 7 buzzword, I met seven Columbia University Zionist activists. All had graduated from Jewish day schools. “Let’s talk resilience,” I said. “What did your parents tell you to do if someone hit you in elementary school?” Six Columbia lions chimed in: “Tell the teacher!” One shouted: “Hit ’em back… harder!” The latter was not the message most kids get—nor will it get them into Harvard. As blue-staters, many Jews embraced parenting trends of befriending their kids and avoiding confrontation. A popular Jewish parenting guide endorses “compassionate correction.” A “soft start and soft reply” will raise the ideal: a “mensch.”
Two months after October 7, I addressed young Jewish communal leaders. After I endorsed a proud, nonpartisan, peoplehood-based Identity Zionism, the first question was: “How do we engage anti-Zionist Jews and pro-Palestinians?”
“I got the memo October 8,” I responded. “These people celebrated the rape, abuse, kidnapping, and mass murder of Jews like you and me. What’s there to talk about? Don’t we Jews have any red lines?”
Yet so many rabbis, even on campus, still define their mission as cultivating “a culture of pluralism… through intentional, collaborative, and dignified engagement across difference.”
Another campus rabbi roots “our community in core Jewish values—compassion, learning, sacred disagreement, pluralism.” No solidarity, righteous indignation, moral clarity, or pride.
Similarly, in an effort to praise Jewish students who went from hostage vigils and mourning murdered Israeli friends to stopping a “conservative organization” from “doxing students,” a Talmud professor had to downgrade the anti-Zionist aggressions to democratically signing “pro-Palestine petitions.” She then cherry-picked “classical Jewish sources” to sanctify committing “to community with our ideological others.”
This is a betrayal of the deepest Jewish self-understanding. Two millennia ago, the sage Hillel said that I must be “for myself” before I understand I cannot be “only for myself.” And the Talmud teaches: If enemies “come to kill you, get up early in the morning to kill them first.”
American Jews, however, have been raised to be nice, to fit in, to be accepted, to get along—and never, ever, fight. As the October 7 war dragged on, many American Jews who have never been forced to fire a shot in self-defense or even considered the possibility that they might have to defend their country through force of arms became increasingly judgmental of their Israeli brethren. They deemed Israelis—raised to be fighting Jews and forced to fight for their lives—primitive Jews, not good Jews like them.
Being a model minority is fun when markets are booming and haters are marginalized. Judaism, even Zionism, worked for American Jews because there were few social costs to pay. But when bigots pounce, it becomes self-defeating: You’ve sacrificed the capacity for self-defense and can’t recognize your enemies because you crave their approval.
Too many rabbinic and Jewish communal statements say the answer to hate is “dialogue,” “inclusion,” and “allyship.” In New York, nearly 400 Orthodox Jews claimed that a student prayer vigil outside Mamdani’s offices “needlessly inflames tensions.” They proposed “conversation” with Mamdani “as a potential ally working for the shared safety of all New Yorkers.” Similarly, an activist feared that “divisive and overheated reactions” to Mamdani’s obsessive anti-Zionism “isolate us.” Dismissing Mamdani’s “efforts to connect with various Jewish communities,” he said, “weakens the very structures that sustain Jewish life in America—democracy, civil rights, and the alliances that have kept us safe.” This niceness was the message of the embarrassing $15 million 2026 Super Bowl ad opposing anti-Semitism. It depicted a tall black kid named Bilal saving a Jewish boy named David from goyische goliaths. Appalled, one community leader imagined an ad showing David winning by becoming a doctor who eventually saves his tormentor. Its tagline: “We refuse to be victims… we are builders.” In my ad, the kid would counterattack, illustrating the tagline “We’re tough, proud Americans and Jews: you hit us—we hit you back.”
Too many American Jews act like goody-two-Jews even under attack. Campus instruction manuals stress reporting anti-Semitic attacks and finding administrators kind enough to help. A Forward headline summarizes the synagogue strategy “RUN, HIDE, FIGHT.” Jewish leaders favor the first two verbs. They work at “hardening targets,” fortifying synagogues, and outsourcing Jewish defense to rent-a-SWATs rather than cultivating a culture of Jewish self-defense.
BLAME ISRAEL FIRSTISM
It’s tempting to dismiss these voices as marginal. But by February 2025, something broke in America’s relationship with Israel, and many American Jews meekly followed. Mainstream media and social media fueled a moral panic against Israel. Years of exalting tikkun olam, pooh-poohing progressive anti-Semitism, worshiping propagandizing professors, pining for popularity in intellectual circles, and revering the New York Times were the ideological lubricants that slid American Jews away from Israelis still fighting exterminationist enemies.
The biased coverage implied that while, yes, Hamas had acted violently, it had done so only on one day. Then Israelis spent months slaughtering innocent Gazans while brutalizing Palestinians in the territories. Orchestrating the butchery was the latest folk devil, Benjamin Netanyahu, who, Thomas Friedman proclaimed, kept “playing both President Trump and American Jews for fools.”
The lies surged in February 2025. Despite the World Food Program delivering “30,000 metric tons of food” to Gaza that month, Al Jazeera and anti-Zionist human rights groups claimed Israel was starving Gazans. By August, the “starvation” and “genocide” lies dominated the coverage—poisoning attitudes toward Israel.
The internal misconceptions and external pounding have convinced 56 percent of American Jewish voters that “Israel’s actions under Netanyahu” increased “antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment in the US.” More than half support restricting military aid to Israel—or eliminating it, with 39 percent buying the “genocide” libel. One in 3 Jewish voters compare “Israel’s treatment of Palestinians” to American “racism.”
To be fair, Jewish anti-Zionists remain rare. Rather, more and more Jews should be deemed “conditional Zionists” or “Marrano Zionists,” hiding their pro-Israelism from their neighbors and themselves. Over 80 percent of American Jews support a Jewish democratic state in Israel, the defining Zionist precept. Nevertheless, internalizing the bigot’s lies, only one-third identify as Zionists.
The groveling among certain sectors of American Jewry began almost immediately after the massacre. On October 20, 2023, only 13 days later, 750 North American rabbis and cantors expressed “solidarity with our Israeli family and friends”—not Israel, its government, or its soldiers—while devoting two-thirds of their letter to mourning the “suffering of Palestinian civilians,” rejecting “all antisemitic, Islamophobic, or anti-Arab bigotry and violence,” and vowing “not to lose sight of our vision for a shared society.”
A year later, with Gazans still abusing 97 hostages daily, one California rabbi raised “important self-reflection questions,” including: “Is Israel the country that represents the key Jewish values we dreamed of?” and “What does Israel owe its minority populations, in particular the Palestinians?” On October 1, 2024, Iran fired 181 ballistic missiles against Israel. A Pennsylvania rabbi composed a prayer: “As Rosh Hashanah approaches and news alerts flash, / We pray, we worry, we watch, and we hope.”
These recipes for impotent, self-flagellating anguish distort Jewish text, Jewish history, and Zionist ideas. This Jewish malpractice, reasoning backward, caused Michigan’s Attorney General Dana Nessel to invert Queen Esther’s heroic defiance of norms. Esther saved her people—while Nessel cowered in fear of Michigan’s Democrats and endorsed the anti-Semite running for senator. Nessel even had the nerve to cite the Purim story as her source for a “moral imperative to place the needs of the world above even our own self-interest and, yes, even our own survival.”
That Yom Kippur, L.A.’s “existentially lonely” progressive rabbi forgot her pain over being abandoned by those who were speaking well of Hamas and rejoined the cool kids. Sermonizing about politics on the Jews’ holiest day, she condemned Israel’s “manifest disregard for Palestinian lives.” Demonizing Netanyahu, she lamented “the perpetuation of a war now nakedly advanced to keep in power a craven prime minister.”
For years, many American Jews kept “centering” Palestinians along with Israelis, creating a false moral equivalence. This Palestinianism keeps American Jews chasing rainbows cost-free and without any updates. Most applauded the Oslo Accords of 1993 and the Gaza disengagement of 2005 and the left-to-right Israeli, American, Western, and Jewish delusion that Hamas was “pragmatic.” No matter how often Palestinian rejectionists exploited Israeli concessions in order to kill Jews, “pro-peace” American Jews kept demanding more Israeli cave-ins, repeating the two-state mantra but granting the ever-innocent Palestinians a perpetual free pass.
Is there any other community that embraces its enemy as ardently as many American Jews do, sending money, prayers, and guilt-offerings to Palestinians, most of whom cheered as Hamas lopped off women’s breasts and raped men with submachine guns, and almost all of whom yell the genocidal cry “from the river to the sea”—leaving no room for me or any other Jew by the Mediterranean? Do African Americans ever think, “Those good ole’ boys, their white robes suit them, and I like NASCAR racing, perhaps I should learn from the Reconstructionist Movement to ‘frame a discussion’ with racists by drawing ‘a triangle with curiosity, empathy, and justice on each point’”? Do feminists ever ally with misogynists, or gays with homophobes, because rabbis suggest that “maybe it’s OK to stay in a setting even when we are uncomfortable”?
In all this darkness, there are points of light. Some Conservative rabbis urge colleagues to eschew politicking from the pulpit. Some Reform rabbis wonder how their professedly Zionist movement can graduate anti-Zionist rabbis. Others vow to “rescue the word ‘Zionism’” or proclaim, “Hallelujah for the Liberal Soul of Zionism!” Some progressive rabbis have confronted progressive peers who “overemphasize public Jewish self-criticism, and undercall out antisemitism and extremism from allies,” delighting anti-Zionists. And while some voices keep challenging Jews to stop being nice without muting our Jewish joy, others blast the trend turning “synagogues into nightmarishly fortified bunkers, which teaches our children that Judaism is interchangeable with anxiety and fear” while encouraging more Jew-hunting.
A growing ecosystem of publishers and periodicals now platforms alternative viewpoints. Proud Zionist voices have emerged, celebrating Israel, shaming universities, confronting anti-Semites, blasting anti-Zionists—refusing to feel “orphaned” because this is a fight to save America and liberalism, too. Birthright has welcomed more than 33,000 volunteers since October 7 and another 37,000 participants in their identity-building journeys. Student heroes have resisted and flourished Jewishly, from campus to campus. From right to left, some intellectuals refuse to surrender.
Some organizations have changed. Starting in 1990, the American Jewish Committee became less committed to Model Minorityism and started defending Israel; that continues. The ADL pivoted from Obama worship to acknowledging anti-Zionism as central to modern anti-Semitism. And immediately after October 7, American Jews through federations and other organizations donated over a billion dollars to Israel while bombing Israel with love and cookies and Kevlar helmets and cookouts.
We need not negate, just recalibrate. Ending Tikkun Olamism means reordering priorities, not switching political parties. Imposing today’s partisan politics onto our 3,500-year-old tradition is lazy. Just as progressives tell settlers that the Bible isn’t a real-estate manual, liberals should stop treating the New York Times as their Bible. Judaism’s eternal triangle of God, people, and land should replace the Tikkun Olamists’ holy trinity of Karl Marx, Martin Luther King, and Abraham Joshua Heschel. Healthy Jews struggle, balancing tradition with modernity, universalism with particularism, Judaism with liberalism, Americanism with Zionism, fighting for their home rather than feeling “homeless,” here and there. Struggling with contradictions is more satisfying than reducing our rich heritage to woke pablum. It’s more lasting, too.
Similarly, freeing most Jews from No Enemies to the Leftism isn’t a push to the right. It’s a call for muscular allyship with red lines, as today’s Jewish jellyfish become tomorrow’s American Jewish eagles. Most American Jews already apply multiple litmus tests, shunning racists, sexists, pro-lifers, homophobes, even Trump supporters. Why not add anti-Zionists, Hamas and Hezbollah enablers, Iranian dupes, and those who celebrated October 7?
Tempering Ivy League credentialism is both easier and harder than the above. Given the high cost of being Jewish, many young Jews and their parents feel pressured for all the right reasons to succeed, and the Ivy diploma is one important path to success. Still, the high cost of the high cost of being Jewish generates new forms of idol worship: consumerism, materialism, and careerism.
The pressure to be nice and impress others starts long before a young Jew’s first PSAT. Rabbis, teachers, and, most important, parents and grandparents must revolutionize the educational messaging that now begins with playing Mozart to the baby in utero. Jewish illiteracy remains a mass scandal among one of history’s most formally educated Jewish communities. And most American Jews should add some Israeli cultural spice to their ideological and intellectual diets. Ultimately, we must raise Jews tough enough to survive as Jews, proud enough to want to—and still nimble enough to succeed on all fronts, materially, spiritually, communally, and emotionally.
Finally, if Zionism could transform the sniveling, spineless, perpetually victimized Eastern European Jew into the prickly and tough Sabra, a renewed Identity Zionism can transform accommodating, fey, woke wannabes. As Americans and as Jews, we must remember that patriots love their country because of its politicians, sometimes—and despite its politics, always.
And American Jews should free themselves from their occupation preoccupation. It was Yasir Arafat’s great conceit that every conversation about Israel should be about his people. Zionism is our grand peoplehood project. It welcomes Jews left and right, religious and secular, to transcend those binaries and work together to build and be rebuilt by connecting to the great modern Jewish adventure of restoring and forever perfecting the Jewish homeland. And, as we have seen since Zionism began, the spillover that results from creating a new Jew in our old-new homeland raises proud, strong, unapologetic, passionate, committed, thoughtful, and ethical Jews everywhere.