Why are American Jews fighting each other?
A non-Jewish friend is confused by the new divide
A non-Jewish, secular friend of mine in New Jersey wanted to go to a gym class with a Jewish friend, but the Jewish friend wouldn’t go because another Jew would be there — and they were fighting. About Israel. They couldn’t even be in the same room.
“Why has it gotten so bad?” my friend asked me.
She’s a suburban mom, a successful businesswoman and a keen observer of humanity. As someone from a small midwestern town with few, if any, Jews around; living in metro New York has given her a lifelong interest and curiosity about us.
What I explained to her, and what I want to share now, is that we’re living in a historic moment of division for American Jews. It’s stark. I’m not sure it’s reparable.
There are now two camps — one small anti-Israel camp with massive backing in the media — and one much, much bigger “duh, Israel is important to Jews” camp that is almost entirely ignored by the media, academics and the left in general.
This split happened not because of the horrors of October 7th 2023, but because of the reaction in America starting October 8th. It’s the Jewish response to the response that now divides us. It’s a lopsided division, both in numbers and in amplification.
Why now all of a sudden?
There are constant wars in the Middle East and Israel. This war is bigger, sure, but ever since Hamas took over Gaza roughly 20 year ago, they’ve indiscriminately shot missiles into Israel and Israel responds in force, while being cautioned by left wing American politicians, who have never put on a uniform, not to respond in force. This has kept the warring parties going for decades. To this day, left wing American politicians (and Europeans and NGOs) call for a ceasefire, which, you guessed it, will keep the fighting going for many more decades to come.
The mainstream media has always been fixated on Israel versus any other country, as have American academics and progressive activists for decades. What’s different this time for Jews in America?
Never before have we seen such widespread, well-organized and institutionally-endorsed hate from the left against Jewish Americans of all stripes — be they college students, cultural consumers, synagogue goers or a few fans waving Israeli flags on a sidewalk.
We’ve never seen such a clear coalescing of the far left against Israel’s very existence. Myanmar, Syria, China, Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sudan — none of those countries are called out to be cancelled, but for some reason, in a world of trigger warnings, pronoun sharing and microaggressions, it’s acceptable to scream for the death of Jewish college kids by faculty and administrators, let alone fellow students.
You can even violently take over a college building at Columbia, destroy property and injure security guards, and the Manhattan DA will drop your charges. Sounds like open season to me.
This war feels different. The New York Times publishing Hamas-talking points and only posting articles critical of Israel feels different.
Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza elected Hamas in 2005. Thousands of civilian men joined Hamas terrorists on October 7th as they crossed the fence to commit genocidal atrocities. Civilian Gazans, men and women, imprison Israeli hostages to this very day. How are 100% of Gazans victims if they started a war that, uh oh, they’re now losing?
You will never read a story in the mainstream press about what Palestinians want. We are only shown their victimhood. This is weird. You would think that a truly objective journalist would ask people on both sides what their goals are. But they don’t because the answer — the majority Palestinian want to kill the six million Israeli Jews — is something you can only call for at a lecture hall in the Ivy Leagues, not in the New York Times or CNN.
Last point: despite the valorizing articles, there is no Palestinian peace movement. There is no peace movement in any Arab country. There is only secular tyranny, despotic monarchies or like in Syria, Libya and Yemen: Islamic warlords. This is never clarified in the press that writes tens of thousands of words about the Netanyahu administration, but almost zero about neighboring Arab leadership. Seems lopsided. My argument is that it’s on purpose.
Back to what’s different now. Trans people supporting a Free Palestine that will embrace their freedom to kill trans people feels different. The fact that some people now feel the need to lower their voice to talk about Israel, or worse, that other people who would never wear a Confederate Battle Flag feel it’s great to wear kaffiyehs, as if many people don’t see them as a symbol of rape and murder — that all feels different.
Scores of Democratic Representatives and Senators have voted to defund the Israeli military while it’s in the middle of a seven-front defensive war. That’s different too.
My critics would say that what’s different is Israel’s disproportionate use of violence against unarmed Palestinians. Progressives are merely pointing out this atrocity, which is validated by enablers in the news, academy, NGOs and cultural institutions. How do they know there’s an atrocity of genocidal proportions — even if Arabs elsewhere in Israel or the Palestinians Territories are untouched?
They trot out Hamas-provided, unverifiable disinformation that 45,000 civilians have been killed by Israel in Gaza yet oddly, none of them are Hamas, or even the age of fighting males. Asking Hamas for news is about as intelligent as asking Al Qaeda for airline safety protocols, but what do I know, I’m not smart enough to publish a newspaper or have a PhD from Harvard.
(The truth seems that whatever the total number is, about half seem to be fighting-age males, the other half seem to be innocent women, children and the elderly. This awful reality would be the lowest civilian to combatant death ratio in modern history, all while fought against Islamic fundamentalists who use human shields, worship suicide and don’t believe in surrender. You will see no articles in the mainstream press about this because it runs counter to the anti-Israel/Civil Rights Movement/Identity Politics narrative they have invested in for decades.)
I don’t defend war, war is bad. But the stats you read are false. As far as proportionality, remind me how to win a war without beating your enemy?
Proportionality is critical, it’s vital, it’s of the utmost importance when dividing candy among children. It’s unhelpful for understanding military conflicts.
Things are different now. The anti-Israel response, entirely by the left, has created division for Jews. This feels like one of those times you only read about, like when Martin Luther ushered in a new era of Christianity, or closer to home and less impactful globally, when Reform Judaism arose as a reaction to the Enlightenment in 19th century Germany — and created a permanent fissure in Judaism.
This is now one of those big moments. New lines are being drawn. The definition of what it means to be Jewish is being asked once again.
In truth, this question dates 76 years to the creation of Israel — almost all observant, educated or just highly-identified Jews everywhere in the world have re-crafted their Jewish identities in light of the state of Israel. These more observant/educated/identified Jews have been going to Israel for decades, but they’re a niche within a niche — Orthodox Jews and those adjacent to them are a minority in American Judaism.
Now that the left has made Israel a bogeyman who’s even scarier than the very scary Donald Trump, Jews who aren’t as identified or observant are forced to reckon with the charge: if Israel is evil, then what am I?
I think of these two camps as either “I’m an Anti-Israel Progressive who happens to be Jewish,” or “I’m Jewish, and Israel is inherent to how I understand being Jewish, this seems kind of obvious. Have you met an Italian American who doesn’t like Italy?”
The first camp seems to be heading towards a direction that is no longer primarily Jewish, the same way the first believers in John the Baptist eventually stopped being primarily Jewish. I don’t know if that will happen to progressive Jews, there will always be exceptions, but it seems possible.
Will Social Justice Jews eventually drop the Jewish part? I’ve seen this in Brooklyn and wonder if it will continue to unfold nationally. First, I’ve seen otherwise sincere Jews refuse to stand for the perfunctory Prayer for Israel that’s said immediately following the Prayer for the USA on Saturday morning Shabbat services. After a while, the people form new groups that don’t ask why they’re awkwardly sitting for the prayer for Israel, they’ve decided it’s best not to just not say it all.
They went from sitting against Israel to simply erasing Israel.
Why not keep going? Shouldn’t they remove the words “Jerusalem” and “Israel” from the prayers? Some prayers even talk about rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem. That doesn’t sound like that’s the architecture of inclusivity.
Why read the Hebrew Bible? Four of the five books detail a narrative of actual, physical slavery in the country of Egypt to redemption with sovereignty in the country of Israel. How can you read these chapters if you think ancient Hebrews had a morally corrupt GPS and should have gone to… a shopping mall? Hard to say what the progressive response is to oppression beyond attacking innocent college students.
In a generation I imagine this leaves the Social Justice Jews with a few favorite foods from their grandparents and re-imagined holidays like Passover, which will be about a Palestinian liberation with no responsibility for governance, and Chanukah, which will focus on candle worship and unwrapping presents (proportionally allocated), and not the meaning of the word Chanukah. The word means dedication, as in the, ancient Jews celebrated the dedication of the Jewish Temple after they defeated Greek colonizers and their many Jewish sympathizers.
Inconveniently, the Temple was in Jerusalem.
I don’t know how this social justice camp will evolve, but if we take them seriously, it’s hard to imagine it heads deeper into Judaism. Sure, there are exceptions in New York which is the most Jewish place in the world outside Israel, but even then, it’s hard to imagine increasing membership for anti-Israel congregations. Why bother schlepping to shul when there’s so much good stuff to stream?
The second camp is more deeply Jewish than ever before because they recognize that Israel as a nation-state is hugely definitional. Israel’s very existence changes the game of Jewish history. It means we now have a place to immigrate to or visit to strengthen our Jewish identity. This is big.
It took 2,000 years of dashed dreams and mass murder to get here. With Israel, finally, there’s a hedge against future holocausts. Think about it: Jews have been slaughtered by others, funnily enough, for exactly as long as they’ve lacked a nation state. Amazing how that works.
Are we still being slaughtered? Obviously yes, but in far, far lower numbers. And if you think America is safe and a huge exception to thousands of years of history, I invite you to walk through the Columbia University with a kippa on your head or a Star of David around your neck. Or to imagine doing the same in Charlottesville in 2017. See how far you get.
I’ve always been jealous of Italians or even better, Mexicans. It’s so easy for them to go back to the land of their grandparents, get a nice jolt of the Old Country anyway they like — with the food, architecture, history, culture, religion, flirting with locals, and then return home saying, “I’m sure as hell an American, and I really love my abuela too.” Not a lot of complexity here.
Remind me why this should be different for Jews?
Israel now stands as one pillar for Jewish identity, right along with the Hebrew Bible and cultural rituals, or whatever other pillars you choose. Since 1948, Israel has replaced the pillar of Diaspora, when Jews had no other options so we huddled together, enjoyed the richness of our culture, ideally made friends with non-Jews nearby and hoped for the best.
Israel is the fulcrum that now divides American Jews. In many ways it now makes us who we are — or aren’t.
When college professors chant for Israel’s destruction, when charismatic politicians tell us that they care about human rights for all yet they campaign against Israelis, when cultural institutions won’t accept Jewish artists, when major news organizations publish terrorist talking points and blame Israel for all the region’s problems, it means Israel can no longer be avoided. It’s at the heart of the conversation.
To many, Israel is a historic opportunity to strengthen the Jewish people with a sovereign nation that has a potent army, great food, innovative universities, amazing beaches and if I’m being honest, very attractive people sitting on those beaches.
To others, it’s a curse.
This is the conflict American Jews are agonizing over, especially when universities, cultural institutions and the press feeds us the false narrative that American racial traumas are relevant in the Middle East — or that any of this has to do with gender identity, or even with Christian European colonialism. To look at Israel this way is crazy, factually wrong, ahistorical and lets left wing folks fall down rabbit holes instead of come up with solutions.
Big picture: 450 million Arabs haven’t been able to create stable, liberal, industrialized nations after Ottoman and European empires gave up on the region over a hundred years ago. Even recently, after America took over Iraq to toss out a dictator, this region remains immune to basic human rights and the rule of law. Don’t even ask about Afghanistan. As objectively stupid as those 9/11 wars were, they also shed light on the region.
Only one nation rose from the end of the Age of Empires that was a democracy — and remains so to this day. You don’t need a PhD to understand this.
This is why Claudine Gay at Harvard, Minouche Shafik at Columbia and Liz Magill at Penn all resigned, and in part why the mainstream press couldn't predict that Kamala Harris would lose every single swing state along with the House and Senate. The lens progressives use is smeared beyond use. A few Jews touted in the press are willingly blinded by this, most have bought better glasses. And subscriptions.