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Thoughtful debate elevates us all. Donniel Hartman, Yossi Klein Halevi, and Elana Stein Hain revive the Jewish art of constructive discussion on topics related to political and social trends in Israel, Israel-Diaspora relations, and the collective consciousness of being Jewish. 

The podcast draws its name from the concept of machloket l’shem shemayim, “disagreeing for the sake of heaven” and is part of the Institute’s iEngage Project.

Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism, and Anti-Zionist Jews Transcript

Louis: Hi, I’m M. Louis Gordon, producer of For Heaven’s Sake. Donniel and Yossi are away this week, so we’re bringing you a special extended episode.

In this recording from July 11th, Yossi does a deep dive into the nature of antisemitism, how it relates to Israel and to Jewish power in the modern era, and he addresses a phenomenon that has become acute during this war with Hamas, the growing contingent of Jews, mostly in North America, who go beyond a critique of Israel’s actions and policies and advocate for an end to the Jewish state. He gave this talk to an audience of rabbis at our Summer Rabbinic Torah Seminar, a 10-day learning program at Hartman’s campus in Jerusalem where rabbinic leaders of all denominations explore the contemporary issues facing the Jewish people. Here’s Yossi’s lecture on anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, and anti-Zionist Jews.

Yossi: Hi everyone, truly wonderful to be with all of you, and I always feel that it is something never to take for granted. the honor and opportunity to teach rabbis, especially these days, and especially on this topic, when all of you are on the front line and really with a certain amount of fear and trembling, I approach this topic with this particular audience.

I’m also very mindful of the fact that, again, this topic in particular looks different from where I’m sitting than it will to many of you from where you’re sitting. And what your needs are as congregational rabbis, Hillel rabbis, how you need to process these questions is not necessarily the way that I process them here. So I’m very mindful of that as well.

I’d like to begin with a definition of antisemitism. And this is my own definition. Everyone will have their own variation. Some people prefer to define antisemitism as conspiracy theory. That’s become a very popular way of explaining antisemitism. I think it’s something more basic, which is that antisemitism is the symbolization of the Jew, turning the Jew into a symbol for whatever a given society or civilization regards as its most objectionable qualities. And so, under Christianity, there was nothing more loathsome than to be Christ’s killer. Under Islam, we were popularly called the killers of prophets, and there is no greater calumny than to be a people that murders its own prophets.

Under Marxism, especially Soviet Marxism, but even going back to the founder, the Jew was the ultimate capitalist. Under Nazism, the Jew was the ultimate race polluter. And now, in the era of international human rights, where the most attestable qualities of this civilization are apartheid, colonialism, ethnic cleansing, genocide, lo and behold, the Jewish state becomes the most hated country in the world, by far.

And so there’s a pattern here. And what always strikes me as astonishing is how unselfconscious anti-Zionists are about repeating a pattern that goes back at least 2,000 years. And how, whether or not anti-Zionists are personally anti-Semitic, we’ll come to that, there’s a history here. And the fact that this moment can fit very comfortably into that pattern should at least be raising the question and to my mind places the onus not on those who are accusing anti-Zionism of being the most recent iteration of antisemitism but to be placing the onus on anti-Zionists to prove that they’re not part of an ancient pattern. How are you different? Why is this not the next stage of a very familiar story?

Now, sometimes anti-Zionists make it easy. Mélenchon, for example, the new head of the largest political faction in French Parliament, said in an interview a few years ago, as a kind of a throwaway line, something like, well, this is the people that put their Messiah on the cross. So that makes it easy, and even many who are very hesitant to equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism would have a hard time with that particular statement.

But I don’t think that we need to have that explicit a familiar reference to see that there’s a problem here. Another way of looking at this from, let’s say, an internal Jewish self-understanding is that antisemites throughout history have tended to target that aspect of Jewish identity that most separates us from others, that defines us most uniquely.

So, for example, in pagan times, the scandal of Jewish particularism, and that’s a term that I want to underline, the scandal of Jewish particularism, was our faith in one God. That is what separated the Jewish people from other peoples. And so the struggle of the Jewish people in pagan times from the story of Hanukkah through the Romans was to resist the pluralism of paganism and to insist on the monotheistic intolerance of Judaism. No, we don’t put other gods in our temple. That’s being intolerant. And yes, compare Judaism to paganism, Judaism was intolerant. And many of the pagans would have had no problem, including the Jewish God in their Pantheon. Throw one more in, into the mix.

And so what Pagan antisemites, and antisemitism goes back to Pagan roots, Pagan antisemites noted this intolerance of monotheism. And again, the story of Hanukkah is the story of this scandal of monotheistic particularism. With the emergence of Christianity and then Islam, monotheism no longer uniquely defined us. And so the scandal of Jewish particularism shifted to Judaism, to Jewish observance, to Halakha, to Torah, to rabbinic Judaism. That became the scandal.

And what Christians were telling us was, what’s the problem here? We accept, it’s our Bible too. And you are stubbornly insisting on your particular identity based on an outmoded notion. You don’t have to hold on to your particularism anymore. And the way that this worked initially in Islam is that Muhammad was trying to present Islam as Jewish-friendly, and initially, at least, Muslims fasted on Yom Kippur, for example. And the Qibla, the direction of prayer was Jerusalem, before it became Mecca. And this was part of an attempt to convince, certainly the Jewish tribes of Arabia, that Islam is entirely compatible with Judaism and you no longer have to stubbornly maintain your separatism.

In our time, I would argue that one of the crucial defining elements for the Jewish people in terms of our distinctiveness is the Jewish state. It’s not monotheism anymore. Even Jewish religion, Jewish observance in the age of interfaith, that’s okay. There’s place. What makes the Jewish state so complicated is that there’s an irony here. Which is that Zionism envisioned a Jewish state as being distinct in the way that every other state is distinct, which is to say, we would have our own particular cultural national identity. But we wouldn’t really be that distinct. And the very fact that we would have a state, a nation like all others, the way that Zionism described it, meant that Zionism was sitting on the fault line between separate identity and blurring the separate identity.

So the fact that the Jewish state today is the main target of animus towards Jewish distinctiveness tells us how the Jewish state is perceived, certainly outside of classical Zionism. That is what has kept many Jews, at least in the previous generation, connected most deeply to their Jewishness. Soviet Jewry, for example, and I would argue most of the diaspora outside of American Jewry remains to this day, deeply Zionized.

Just as an aside, when we speak about a diaspora-Israel crisis, There is no diaspora-Israel crisis, it’s an America-Jewish Israel crisis. The rest of the Diaspora, more or less, is aligned with Israel. Maybe Canada is beginning to change a bit, but I think that it’s certainly true for Latin America, Europe, Australia, et cetera, but that really is an aside.

The anti-Zionist critique, leaving aside for a moment the question of whether or not it is intentionally antisemitic or not, seems to me to be in the long history of dumb critiques of the Jews. This one seems to me the dumbest. And the reason that I say that is to take a people and to take its story of the 1940s. This is a people at its most desperate and broken. The outcasts, the untouchables of Europe trying to have one last attempt to have a good story and turning that into the symbol of white, Western colonialism strikes me as particularly tone deaf, to say nothing of the fact that this country is half Mizrahi, just even leaving that out.

And I would say the same is true for turning American Jews into the symbol of white privilege. That this is a community which, in my lifetime, was struggling for its place in American society, and in the last two generations, actually turned out to be the poster child of the American success story. And to turn that story into everything that’s wrong with white America, again, strikes me as especially tone-deaf within the classical American context.

And so this notion of Israel Zionism, American Jewish privilege, as somehow representing the sins of the West and especially Europe, it’s, you know, this is in a way Europe’s parting gift to the Jewish people, is to stick us with the bill for Europe’s crimes. I couldn’t resist that line

Anti-Zionism, and I’m still on making the case for why this is a variation of antisemitism. Anti-Zionism is the latest variation of what was once called Christian supersessionism. Which, post-Holocaust, post-Vatican II, as we all know, has largely gone out of favor, certainly in the Catholic Church, parts of the Protestant world as well.

And the basic idea of supersessionism is that the Jews no longer deserve their own story. We have forfeited, we not only forfeited our land because of our sins, we even forfeited our story. It’s not our Bible anymore. It’s not our history. And that Christians become retroactively Israel. You read Christianity into what they used to call, many still do, the Old Testament.

And, you know, umipnei chata’enu gal’inu me’artzeinu, because of our sins we were exiled from our land. Umipnei chata’enu gal’inu misipureinu, because of our sins we were exiled from our story. We no longer deserved our story. It was given to us and then it was taken away because we didn’t deserve it anymore.

Now the rabbis agreed. At least they agreed about the exile, but they saw that as only a temporary judgment. For classical Christianity, this was a permanent, irrevocable judgment. We no longer deserve our story. If you look at how our contemporary story is playing out in secular terms, we are experiencing a progressive version of supersessionism. We do not deserve the story of this land. We are not part of this land. That is the message. From the river to the sea, the Jews do not belong in this history.

And now, post October 7th, we no longer belong in the story of the Holocaust either. We have forfeited that story, we’re no longer worthy of carrying that story, because we, if anything, we’ve abused that story. We hide behind that story to perpetuate another Holocaust.

And that brings me to the next version of classical Christian anti-Judaism, which is the notion of the Jew as Pharisee. Now in Jewish terminology, of course, Pharisee is good. The rabbis were Pharisees. In classical Christian terminology, Pharisees were hypocrites. And there is no greater hypocrite state in the world than Israel. We claim to be victims. October 7th, we’re the big victims, and look what we’ve done to Gaza. We hide behind the Holocaust again. We’re the victims of the Holocaust. And we use that, or misuse that, to try to deflect criticism and pretend to be victims. And so Israel, and I sense this in much of the critique that I follow on social media, there is this sense of, you hypocrites.

Now, what’s related to this idea of supersessionism is that Jews in the past were good. The Jews who were once were the good Jews. The biblical Jews were the good Jews for Christianity. The contemporary Jews are always those who betrayed the good Jews. And the Jews in the Holocaust, of course they were the good Jews. They were the victims. And we betrayed them by turning into victimizers.

And so again, there’s a pattern here that is uncomfortably familiar. The presence of Jews in the anti-Zionist ranks, and I’ll have more to say about this later, particularly compelling proof that anti Zionism is not antisemitism, because that too fits an old pattern. That’s the pattern of the good Jew. And what we’re seeing with the emergence of anti-Zionism is the return of the good Jew.

Now, Nazism was a deviation in the history of antisemitism. It was a deviation because it was, there was no exit from the death sentence. Just being born a Jew precluded the possibility, there was no such thing as a good Jew. And so anti-Zionism has really corrected the deviance, the Nazi deviance in the history of antisemitism. And antiwemitism now, one can make the argument, is back on track to what I would call the antisemitism of love. The antisemitism of love is that the Jew is the great enemy of the good.

Now, Nazism really didn’t care about the good. When you put a skull and crossbones as one of your symbols, you’re not speaking for the good. But in the history of antisemitism, antisemites always believed that they were advocating for the good, the good of humanity. And, again, the scandal of Jewish particularism is that it was a bone in the throat of universalism and of the universal good. If it wasn’t for the Jew, the world would be a much better place. And so the return of the good Jew, again, fits a very uncomfortable historical pattern.

There are two models in modern Jewish history, modern meaning, let’s say, mid 20th century till more or less today, two different models of how anti-Zionism and antisemitism strengthened each other, were entwined. The first was the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union, where the anti Zionism that we know today was actually born as an ideology. And there are people who are doing very good work on this. Izabella Tabarovsky is someone who’s really worth reading on the history of Soviet anti-Zionism. And what one clearly sees is that the Soviets adopted traditional Russian anti-Jewish motifs and applied them to anti Zionism. And this was really a Soviet realization after the Holocaust that you couldn’t simply adopt the old antisemitism. It needed a little bit of upgrading, adapting to recognizing the fact that the Holocaust happened. And so anti-Zionism as an anti racist ideology is born in the Soviet Union, and there you see it as anti-Zionism as a cover for classical antisemitism.

In England, under Corbyn, the Labour Party, this worked in reverse. Corbynism was not initially antisemitic. It brought in a strong, I would say obsessive, anti-Zionism, and under the cover of anti-Zionism, old antisemitic tropes began making their appearance. For example, this was one of the indictments against Corbyn, was that WhatsApp groups to which he belonged suddenly began to be filled with accusations about the Rothschilds and other familiar tropes, which had not been part of anti-Zionism generally, in England, and I think in much of the West either.

And yet, the single minded nature of the obsessiveness of the anti Zionists, the centrality of anti-Zionism in Labor. And if you look at, there’s a famous clip of a Labor convention under Corbyn where you see a sea of Palestinian flags. It’s a British Labor convention, just about the only flag you see is the Palestinian flag. So this obsession with the crimes of the Jewish state became fertile ground for opening the way for classical antisemitic motifs.

Now let’s turn to the complications of a total identification of antisemitism with anti-Zionism. Personally, I would like to stop here. But this is Hartman, we do both sides, so I’m making an effort. This is one for the team. And there is, there is, there are compelling arguments to be made for nuance, and against a blanket assertion that anti-Zionism is always antisemitism.

So the first and most obvious example is Jewish anti-Zionism. But, well, it’s certainly plausible that some Jewish anti-Zionists are self-hating Jews, but I don’t think that’s really what we’re looking at today.I think this notion of calling them un-Jews, which Sharansky and Gil Troy labeled a couple of years ago in a Tablet article, I think that’s missing the point of what we’re facing, and all of you know this better than I do, that in many cases we’re dealing with very committed young Jews. which deepens the problem.

And what they’re saying to people like me is you are the ones who are betraying Judaism. We are upholding the Jewish moral tradition. You have turned Judaism into a nationalist cult. I have an argument there, but it isn’t over whether you’re an antisemite or not. And to pull that card is not only counterproductive, but inaccurate.

So that’s one argument. The second argument, the second exception, big exception, are Palestinians. Palestinians are the principal victim of my return home. Now, without going into the question of who’s responsible primarily for their victimhood, whether that was our intention in coming home or not, I don’t believe that it was, nevertheless, that was the outcome. And so I certainly can’t fault Palestinians for wishing we never came back and for regarding Zionism as the great curse for their lives personally and collectively. Now there certainly is a strong stream of antisemitism in the Palestinian national movement, in Palestinian discourse, but I can’t attribute Palestinian anti-Zionism to antisemitism.

Those are the obvious exceptions. But I think there’s a deeper issue that we need to face. And that is the question of antisemitism in the age of Jewish power. Antisemitism in the age of Jewish power. We have agency in that.

In the past, when Jews were accused of ritually murdering Christian children, of being Christ killers, we all knew that was ludicrous. Today, there are dead Palestinian children whom we’ve killed. The other side doesn’t have to invent dead children. That’s there. Now again, without going into it because it’s not our topic, one can certainly make the argument, and I’ve spent the last nine months making precisely this argument, that while this is Israel’s most brutal war, ugliest war, it is also one of our most necessary and unavoidable, and whether everything that we’ve done in this war is justifiable or not, the war itself, to my mind, is completely justifiable.

But leaving that aside, we are not innocent. Power means that you have forfeited your innocence. The longing, and forgive me for using that word in this context, but I sense among many Jews, not only Diaspora Jews, but what’s surprising to me, also many Israelis, a longing for innocence, for victimhood, especially after October 7th.

On October 7th, we were victims, but not on October 8th. Starting October 8th, we here made a deliberate decision, all parts of Israeli Jewish society, from the left, leaving aside the farthest anti-Zionist left, which is minuscule in this country, the virtual entirety of Jewish Israel made a collective decision to go to war and not to allow the disastrous perception of Jewish victimhood to stand, to use our power. And we all knew what we were getting into. We all knew what this war was going to look like. Because many of us know Gaza. Many of us have been there, or our kids have fought in previous wars. We went in with eyes wide open.

One of the responsibilities of power is that you have to give up the identity of victim. You can’t have it both ways. In 1945, the Jewish people made a decision, and this was almost the entirety of the Jewish people at that time, to go for power. We decided that powerlessness had become untenable, literally untenable for Jews. And I regard that decision as one of the greatest moments in Jewish history, to have gone from the lowest point in our history to one of the peak moments in our history. And we are all living the flourishing Jewish lives and communal lives that we enjoy because the generation after the Shoah made the decision to go for power, soft power in America, hard power here.

And now we have to own the consequences, especially now in this war. We have to ask ourselves the question, were the Jews in 1945 right to go for power or not? George Steiner made what I consider to be the most interesting and compelling argument against Zionism. And he said it in an interview with the Forward shortly before he died. And what he said was, Israel has no choice but to be brutal. He said, you are living in the Middle East. You are surrounded by enemies who want to destroy you. You have no choice.

The question that I raise, George Steiner, is was it worth it? Should we have gone for power? Now that’s a very powerful argument. I think it’s a little late. We already made that decision, and we have to live with the consequences. And only, maybe, a philosopher at Oxford can allow himself to ask that question. I can’t. Nevertheless, in a way, he was defining the central question of this moment. Was it worth it?

This is what one consequence of power looks like. There are many other consequences. There’s the ability to make sure that October 7th doesn’t happen again. But one of the consequences is the ruins of Gaza. And so, was it worth it or not? Now that means that this is the moment where we have to own the full implications of power. That wonderful moment in the Khuzari when the king asks, you know, the rabbi says to the king, we’re the best religion because we’re the most moral religion. We don’t kill anybody, and of course the king says, you know, you can talk. What’ll happen once you have an army? Come back to me, let me know.

So this is the Khuzari moment. What happens when we have an army? And not only what happens when we have an army, but what happens when you have an army with October 7th? What happens when you’ve already gone through 2,000 years of Jewish history, you finally come home, and it doesn’t end? The war against Jewish legitimacy and Jewish existence continues. Those are the conditions in which we reclaimed power. Those are the conditions in which the morality of Jewish power are being tested, and I would argue that that is one of the ultimate tests that any people could confront.

But to get back to this question of victimhood, there’s a longing for a simpler time, when we were really innocent. And after October 7th, how could we not want to be totally innocent? How could we not be innocent? And there’s something in us that can’t quite figure out how to say, you know what, maybe I’m 70% right and have to live with that. 70% right is for a country under the circumstances we’re facing. I’m not happy with about the 30%. I can live with it or whatever your percentage is, however you play that out.

And when we equate hostility to Israel, even denying Israel’s right to exist with antisemitism, that is an expression of longing for innocence. Because if all my enemies are antisemites, they have no credibility. There’s no moral justification for your position. But what if you have 30% moral justification? I have 70%. Maybe I think I have more, but let’s say 51%. Okay. We have 51%. Then it’s not good enough to say that all my enemies are antisemitic. I have to deal with the consequences of my loss of innocence.

This is very hard. It’s very hard for Jews post-Holocaust, and it’s especially hard for Jews post-October 7th. Some Jews. The way in which we phrase October 7th, to my mind, is completely wrong. The largest number of Jews killed since the Holocaust.
So what? That is not the framework. That’s not the lens through which to understand October 7th. October 7th didn’t happen there. It happened here. The largest number of Israelis, and they weren’t all Jews, the largest number of Israelis to be killed in 120 years of the Arab-Israeli conflict. That’s enough. That’s more than enough. Much more than were killed in Hebron in 1929. That’s a scandal of epic proportions. Hebron 1929 happened when we didn’t have an army and we didn’t have a state. This happened in a sovereign Jewish state with the army wherever the army was. Camped outside of Kibbutz Be’eri as we’re learning. This was not a pogrom. It doesn’t matter if more Jews were killed on October 7th than were killed in Kishinev. Kishinev is not my framework. This is my framework. Power is my framework, and the scandalous abdication of power on October 7th.
You might have noticed that the slogan Am Yisrael Chai is all over the place here. You can drive on the highway, you’ll see it on the electronic boards. Be careful, here’s the number if you have an accident, and Am Yisrael Chai. And I hate that. I have to tell you, I hate when I hear Israelis say Am Yisrael Chai. Now I grew up chanting Am Yisrael Chai and singing Am Yisrael Chai at Soviet Jewry demonstrations, and it made perfect sense for post-Holocaust Jews in the diaspora to defiantly affirm that we still exist. The whole point of this place is Am Yisrael Chai. And really, Am Yisrael Chai? I’m just driving to Kfar Saba, and I have to really think about Am Yisrael Chai?

And so there’s something to my mind that betrays a fundamental lack of security, even in the Israeli psyche: We have not yet fully owned power. And this is a big problem because if you feel powerless on the one hand and you have a great deal of power, it can lead to all kinds of dangerous places. And Ben Gvir is one example of that because the far right here sees itself as victims. That’s the core of their identity.

We are caught in a pathological loop between the self pity, forgive me for that expression, especially after October 7th, for the self pity of victimhood, while much of the world perceives us as victimizers. And I don’t believe that either category is a useful way of understanding Israel today. We’re not victimizers because I think any country in our place would do at least what we did. At least. And we’re not victims because we’re not victims. You can’t look at Gaza today and say, poor us. It doesn’t work. We will never out-victimize the Palestinians. We don’t want to. We don’t want to be in that competition. And they will always win.

My question is, does it matter? Does it matter if anti Zionism is or is not anti Semitic? To put it another way, does it matter if the outcome envisioned by “From the River to the Sea” is intentionally anti Semitic, benign, ignorant, whatever it is, if the result would be the most devastating blow that the Jewish people received may be greater than the Holocaust? Because this was how we recovered from the Holocaust.

This was, you know, the two flags on the bimah of, I hope, still, most American synagogues. Those are the two flags that represent the, to me, the Jewish recovery from the Holocaust. It happened because of American Jewry and Israel and the alliance between them. And I’m including the Canadian flag on that, Carrie, it’s, and forgive me, Brazil, I’m really, yes, I am North America centric.

And the death blow to Jewish vitality. The Jews would continue to exist after, God forbid, the destruction of Israel. But that vision, to risk, first of all, go back to your question, the first death blow would be the destruction of the structure that enabled the Jewish people’s recovery and that allowed us to return to being an optimistic people. That allowed Jews to pray again. I believe that Jews would have even a harder time than we have today praying if there was no Israel. Certain things that we take for granted, my parents generation instinctively understood, which is why they were almost all Zionists.

The further existential threat is that I deeply believe that the destruction of the Jewish state, the end of a Jewish army, would leave seven million Jews vulnerable to a constant condition of October 7th. That would be the norm. We saw what happens when there is no Israeli army. And so I don’t care if anti-Zionism is technically antisemitic or not. I understand why the argument is important. It’s a very potent weapon for the Jewish community to push back against the anti Zionists. And the other side is using every ugly weapon, half truths, outright lies against us.

And this is protection. But in our internal conversation, do we really need an existential threat to the Jewish people to be defined as antisemitic? And this goes back to the question of what is antisemitism in the era of Jewish power. To destroy Jewish power, it doesn’t matter if it’s antisemitic or not.

Judea Pearl, the father of Daniel, has a very strong argument. where he says that, he calls it, it’s not a term that’s going to catch on, Zionophobia. And his argument is that anti-Zionism is actually worse than antisemitism in our generation. Antisemitism is not an existential threat to Jews. It’s sometimes an existential threat to individual Jews. In Pittsburgh, elsewhere, antisemitism can be lethal. It’s not a threat to the Jewish people.

Anti-Zionism is a threat to the Jewish people. It is a threat, finally, to the credibility of the Jewish story in history. We are a story. That’s who the Jews are. That’s why Pesach, that’s why we were born in an event of storytelling. That’s who we are. The Torah is a story. It’s not just a collection. It’s not just, thank god, Sefer Vayikra. It’s a story. And it’s a sacred story. If you undermine the credibility of that story, you’re cutting the heart out of Judaism. And the heart of the Jewish story is of a people struggling with God and moving through history. That’s the heart of Judaism. That’s my understanding. To have a people that hung on to a ludicrous fantasy of one day gathering all of the dispersed from around the world, the most powerless people, was somehow going to figure out how to gather Jews from Afghanistan to Poland and bring them back here. And that was our sustaining vision, hope.

And then we fulfill it under circumstances that are frankly even more ludicrous. Literally unbelievable circumstances. And then it turns out that this whole thing was a mistake. Was a disaster. Catastrophe. How do you recover your self confidence? How do you recover your faith that our history, our story has meaning? How do you go back to the Seder after that?

I don’t think we can. We did it once before. We did it after Chorban Bayit Sheni, but we were a very different people then. We were a people that was more or less united by faith and sustained by faith. There’s not going to be a rabbinic Judaism to come along and give the whole Jewish people coherent to make this destruction religiously coherent. That’s not going to happen. That’s not the Jewish people. That’s not who we are anymore.

And if, God forbid, this place goes, then for all practical purposes, the Jewish people as a coherent people of history is over. And that’s before we even get into really the fate, as I mentioned a moment ago, of the seven million Jews here.

Anti-Zionism, in its current form, is not an existential threat to Israel. It’s more than a nuisance. I would have once described it as a nuisance. It’s becoming more, it’s potentially an economic threat to Israel, but we’ll figure out how to live with this. We have lived with boycotts before, going back to the founding of the state, but I see this as a very great threat to the diaspora. And here again, does it matter if the slogan “globalize the intifada” is antisemitic or not? What they’re saying is violence against any groups, any targets, in the diaspora, that are in any way connected to Israel. Whether it’s a synagogue having an Israeli real estate sale, whatever it is.

But there’s an even deeper threat, and that’s psychological. And that is that progressive antisemitism, anti-Zionism has reintroduced the conditionality of American acceptance of the Jews. And I’ll unpack that.

When I was growing up in the, in a 1960s America, I remember my parents and their friends, if they would say the word Jew in public, they would lower their voices. Didn’t matter what the context was. I used to call it the American Jewish whisper. And the American Jewish whisper gradually disappeared. One of the great achievements of American Jewry in the 70s, 80s, and on, was the gradual disappearance of the whisper. And that was achieved because America began to rescind its conditional acceptance of the Jews.

Conditional acceptance in America meant, you’re safe here, you have a place here, but it would be good if you weren’t so Jewish. Maybe change your name. Don’t talk with your hands. And look, America made that same pact with all the immigrant groups. Everyone had to tone down, maybe the Jews a little more, and certainly the Jews accepted that as the best deal we were offered in 2000 years.

And the end of conditionality was an extraordinary moment. When we talk about the end of the golden age of American jewelry, we’re talking about the return of conditionality. Because what anti-Zionism is saying to the Jews is, again, you know, we have no problem with Jews. You can wear a kippah and a keffiyeh at our tent camps. We’ll accept you on condition that you give this up.

Once you insert the idea that there’s something in Jewishness that’s a problem, that needs fixing, the message that you’re conveying to young Jews is profound insecurity. A community that is insecure is not a community that’s going to be creative and vital. The American Jewish renewal that really began in the 60s and 70s began in a community that was learning to be confident. Confident Jews, confident Americans. That’s what anti-Zionism is going to take, is taking away from you. And that’s a greater threat, it seems to me, to your kids than to my kids.

A defensive community is not a creative community. Look at American Jewry before the 1970s. The community that I grew up in was very defensive, very insecure. You know, one of the things that struck me about the Pew poll in 2016, I believe, was that 90-plus percent of American Jews said they’re proud to be Jewish. If you had asked Jews of my generation, you would not have gotten 90%. And that sense of pride, it’s okay to be Jewish. It’s more than okay. Jews are, are the most beloved minority in America, the most admired. This is what’s now at risk for your community.

And finally, eight minutes left to unpack Jewish anti-Zionism. What troubles me about Jewish anti-Zionists is the following. First of all, they are enabling the return of conditionality. They are the cover for the return of conditionality. They’re saying, yeah, that’s a good deal. That’s a reasonable trade off that Jews should make. We should give up this racist ideology and then we’ll be fully accepted in our environment.

Another profound sin of Jewish anti-Zionism, is dumbing down the discourse of the American Jewish community. Dumbing down the discourse. The Jewish anti-Zionists are proposing, as a legitimate topic for discourse, the disappearance of the Jewish state. Now, I can tell you with be’emunah shlema, that Israelis are not going to dismantle the Jewish state. We are not going to do that in the Middle East and it’s not going to happen.

And so what the Jewish anti-Zionists are doing is inserting a ludicrous theoretical argument and depriving the American Jewish community of arguing about what we really need to argue about, which is the nature of the Jewish state. First of all, they’re excluding themselves from that essential conversation. The job of our generation, I said this the other night after the podcast when we were having our conversation, is twofold. Defending the Jewish story, and defending the Jewish people. Democratic, pluralistic Israel, enhancing democratic Israel.

The moment you exclude yourself from the Jewish state, you’re not part of that conversation. No one here, no one cares. I’m not interested. You’re not part of my conversation and you may be sweet Jews, really. And I know anti-Zionist Jews and I have friends and yes, all of the rest of it. I can’t say some of my best friends, but, one of my former best friends.

And so, you’re doing two things. You’re depriving the Jewish people of your moral passion, because you’ve made yourself irrelevant to our conversation, and you are creating a discourse that’s sucking up more and more oxygen and diverting Jews from the substantive conversation about the future of Israel, the future of the American Jewish Israeli relationship. There will be no relationship between Israel and anti-Zionist Jews. None. That is a relationship that will not happen. But if we’re talking about a relationship between the two centers of Jewish life, then let’s have a serious conversation.

Anti-Zionism is not a serious conversation. And so one of my biggest complaints is that it is a dumb conversation. And we need smart conversations. I’ll open it up afterwards. The biggest threat that we face, I said this the other night, I really want to emphasize it, that we face as a people, and certainly the future of the American Jewish Israeli relationship, is the rise of fascism in Israel and anti-Zionism in American Jewry. There is no possible commonality.

If, God forbid, Israel goes fascist, we have no moral credibility with American Jews, with the diaspora. We have cut ourselves off from thousands of years of Jewish ethical seriousness. If, God forbid, more and more American Jews turn anti-Zionist, then I as an Israeli have no conversation with a community that doesn’t care if I live or die, because the only way I know that I will live in the Middle East is if I have a Jewish army. That’s it. And if you want to take that away from me, you are telling me that you don’t care if I live or die. Whether you admit that to yourself or not, that’s what I hear.

And what troubles me maybe most of all about Jewish anti-Zionists is how untroubled they are by potential consequences. And you know, and I have conversations in America with Jewish anti-Zionists, let’s say, okay, maybe you’re right. Maybe this is all going, maybe there’ll be a UN peacekeeping force here that’s going to protect Israeli Jews. Have you heard the sarcasm? Yes. But okay, maybe you’re right.

But what if you’re wrong? Does that thought give you any sleeplessness? Does it make you wonder, maybe I shouldn’t be so strident about my position? Maybe I really am going to endanger the lives of 7 million Jews, and that has real consequences in the real world. If you tell me Jewish anti-Zionism, what am I supposed to talk about? Whether I have the right to live or not? Where is our shared story? Where is our shared future? What’s the agenda? Doesn’t exist for me.

There are two groups in the Jewish people that crave innocence, that need an identity of victimhood. The first I mentioned earlier is the far right, and the second is the far left, the Jewish far left. And each of them for very different reasons, and it plays out differently.

The far right needs the identity of victimhood in order to be freed of moral constraints on the use of power. Because if I’m a victim, you can’t blame me for doing anything that I need to do in my defense. And democratic norms and restrictions are an impediment to a victim being able to defend myself.

And of course the way that plays out on the Jewish far left is exactly the opposite. It’s to be freed from the moral burden of power. But these are the two groups that come together and affirm an identity. The Jew must be the victim. That is the essence of our identity.

I will end, really, really one last point. What to do with Jewish anti-Zionists. Now, my red lines of who’s in the tent and who isn’t, I have a very simple red line. In the American Jewish community, any group that felt the need to be in Washington on November, whenever was, is part of the tent. And that includes groups that I’m in deep, profound disagreement with. It doesn’t matter. If you were there, you felt the need after October 7th to be with fellow Jews and affirm Israel in whatever way. I have to live with you. You’re in my tent. Somebody pointed out to me that Neturei Karta was there too, but never mind. And those who are not, those who are not in the tent, those who are not in the tent, are those who are trying to pull apart the identity of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. Either the Jewish state is not legitimate, or the democratic state is not legitimate. Those are my red lines.

I believe we need to make a clear distinction between anti-Zionists who are leaders, who have turned their professional lives into undermining the legitimacy of Israel, and rank and file young people who join JVP, you can’t quarantine them. As it has been pointed out to be many times, they are our children or our children’s friends. And that’s right. We don’t quarantine our kids, no matter what. The leaders? Absolutely, from my point of view, absolutely. And the organizations, it goes without saying.

There’s one more distinction that I’ll make, and that’s between Satmar and Neturei Karta. They both are rooted in the same theological principles, identical theological principles. They use the same religious texts. The same arguments against why Israel not only shouldn’t exist, but is an abomination and satanic. You have that language from the Satmar Rebbe in his books. Israel is satanic. It is Satan’s final temptation of the Jews before the Mashiach to give up Torah.

What does Neturei Karta to do with that? They take that literally, seriously. In fact, I just saw a clip, literally, the other day, of a Neturei Karta leader leading a march in New York, chanting “Zionism is Satanism.” That’s Neturei Karta. They will form an alliance with Iran. They will go to a Holocaust denial conference in Tehran. If Israel is satanic, you have to fight with any means necessary.

Satmar will never do that. Satmar, for me, is obnoxious and unpleasant, but I would daven in a Satmar minyan, and I would not daven in a Neturei Karta minyan, just as I wouldn’t daven in a JVP minyan, if there is such a thing. I wouldn’t go.

Anti-Zionism does not exclude you from the Jewish community. What excludes you is joining with the enemies of israel to undermine the legitimacy of our story. There you’re already taking a step out. And again, the further qualification I would emphasize is even among those who do that, it’s the leaders who are beyond the pale and not the rank and file. Let me end here. Thank you.

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