Uncategorized
What to do with anti-Zionist Jews? Try talking to them, some Jewish researchers say
(JTA) — A survey showing that only around one-third of American Jews identify as Zionists set off shockwaves in the Jewish world last week, triggering speculation about what could have caused so many Jews to spurn a label once thought as nearly synonymous with Jewish identity.
From his home in Israel, Robbie Gringras had a different reaction.
“I wasn’t surprised,” he said about the survey, conducted by Jewish Federations of North America. “I have a feeling many more of these pieces are now going to come out.”
Together with Abi Dauber Sterne, Gringras runs For The Sake of Argument, an organization that consults on how to hold “healthy arguments” focusing on Judaism and Israel. A few months ago the two embarked on a project few other Jewish groups would attempt: interviewing dozens of Jewish American anti-Zionists directly about what turned them away from Israel.
Avowed anti-Zionists make up a relatively small portion of American Jews, according to the JFNA study: 7% overall, and 14% among Jews ages 18-35. But they shared a consistent story, according to Gringras and Sterne’s findings, which they are releasing on Thursday.
“Throughout all the answers to this question we heard an unmistakable theme: These people report that they reached their rejection of Israel in response to the behavior of Jewish Israelis and Jewish Americans,” Gringras and Sterne write.
Gringras said he understands that the takeaways might be disconcerting to Jewish leaders, who might be drawn to the theory that Jewish anti-Zionists have taken that stance as a result of ignorance, or because of the influence of non-Jewish progressives with no attachment to Israel. But he said he believes the findings can have a positive impact on those who encounter them.
“I have a lot of faith in people who confront things and think about them,” Gringras told JTA. “So the moment that the leadership is thinking about this, is confronting it, then good things will happen.”
Gringras and Sterne are not alone in trying to more deeply understand how contemporary Jews think about Zionism — which the JFNA survey shows does not have an agreed-upon definition — and what Jewish anti-Zionists more specifically are thinking.
Brandeis University researcher Matt Boxer said he felt “vindicated” by JFNA’s survey. He’s embarked on his own, very similar, multi-year survey project asking American Jews to define Zionism, supported in part by the Anti-Defamation League, where Boxer is a former fellow.
When Boxer first distributed his own survey in 2022 with open-ended responses, he received negative feedback from all corners, even death threats, in a sign of just how sensitive even raising the subject can be.
“I’ve had people tell me I’m an antisemite just by asking the questions, by having people tell me what these things mean,” he said. “And I’ve had people telling me I’m committing genocide against Palestinians.”
Even so, turnout was strong. More than 1,800 American Jews, from all over the world, submitted usable responses on whether they describe themselves as a Zionist or anti-Zionist, and what they thought the terms meant. Some synagogues and similar Jewish spaces circulated the survey within their communities. The results, which Boxer first presented in 2024, largely mirrored JFNA’s own findings this week (a study which Boxer had also consulted on, and which was led by one of his former graduate students).
“It’s so much deeper than we’ve left room for in our discourse,” Boxer said. He described what he called “the ‘Rashomon’ effect,” a reference to the classic 1950 Japanese film in which the same event is retold from drastically different points of view. The same thing has happened with Zionism, he said: Every Jew has their own definition.
“We’ve made this out to be a binary: If you’re Zionist you’re good, if you’re anti-Zionist you’re bad,” he said. “But it’s so much more complicated than that.”
Boxer is currently polishing off a new paper based on the data, exploring the Jews — including many self-declared Zionists — who described Israel as an apartheid state.
In 2024 Boxer’s senior colleague, the social researcher Janet Aronson, surveyed 800 Jewish anti-Zionists. “It’s not a group that we just want to dismiss out of hand,” said Aronson, who heads Brandeis’ Jewish Studies center and has conducted population studies for local Jewish federations for years.
Referring to the combined number of declared anti- and non-Zionists found in the JFNA survey, she added, “I think 15% is a lot of people.”
The push for more and higher-quality dialogue with Jewish anti-Zionists comes as the larger Jewish world is grappling with the seeming collapse of the Zionist consensus, expressed in everything from reactions to Oct. 7 to the election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City. Some Jewish leaders are calling to extend olive branches to Jewish anti-Zionists, while others want to close the big tent to them.
Those who do engage with Jewish anti-Zionists, these researchers say, will likely encounter a group of people who are very knowledgeable about Judaism and often grew up in Zionist spaces. That stands in contrast to what they say is a common misconception of the population: that Jewish anti-Zionists don’t know or don’t care about Judaism and other Jews.
For example, the Movement Against Antizionism, a new advocacy group founded by the McGill University doctoral student Adam Louis Klein, defines Jewish anti-Zionists as “those who seek safety or acceptance by echoing the accusations leveled against their own people.” The group draws a historic line connecting the Hellenistic Jews of the Maccabee era, through Jewish Soviet Bundists, to the modern-day anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace — all Jews that it says identify not with their own people but with antisemites in their broader society.
The researchers studying Jewish anti-Zionism don’t see things quite the same way. While none of the studies claims to be representative of the Jewish anti-Zionist population, 40% of Aronson’s respondents either worked, or had previously worked, in Jewish organizations — echoing the profile of the day school and camp alums who founded the activist group IfNotNow a decade ago. Many of them became involved in anti-Zionist minyans or similar upstart Jewish spaces that reject Zionism — a growing rallying cry among left-wing Jews.
“Those are people who we would expect to be current and incoming leaders of the Jewish community,” Aronson said. “What does it mean for the Jewish community when they say, ‘We’re not going to be part of these Jewish institutions, we need to start our own’? What a loss to the Jewish community, this pipeline of leadership and energy.”
Most of Gringras and Stern’s interviewees, likewise, “talked of a childhood and Jewish education that embraced the centrality of Israel,” the report states. “Their Israel journeys did not begin with an ideological rejection of Zionism. Yet nearly all of them underwent a paradigm shift, and now see Israel through primarily anti-Zionist eyes.”
First-person accounts from the report describe painful breaks with the Jewish community. They shared stories of being cut off by family members for asking their opinions about Israel’s human rights record, or of being rebuked by rabbis for suggesting that post-Oct. 7 donations should be directed to Israeli healthcare services rather than the military.
“It is far, far easier to come out as gay than to come out as anti-Zionist,” one subject said.
Another interviewee, who grew up in a religious Zionist family that lived for a time in a settlement in the West Bank, stated, “I know that my parents are terribly sad that I am no longer a Zionist. I think they don’t realize how sad I am, too, that I am no longer a Zionist.”
“We weren’t meeting people who didn’t care,” Gringras summarized, describing their subjects as “sad, if not brokenhearted, about the way in which they not only find no expression for their Judaism, but also find the Judaism that they’re meeting very challenging.”
Gringras and Sterne are far from anti-Zionists themselves. Both are Jewish emigres to Israel; Sterne has held senior roles with the Jewish Agency and Hillel International, while Gringras is a former leader of the Jewish Agency’s Israel Education Laboratory. They founded For the Sake of Argument in 2022, with support from funders such as the Jim Joseph Foundation and the Natan Fund — realizing, in Gringras’s estimation, that “the way to learn about Israel, to be engaged in Israel, is to be engaged in its arguments.”
Talking to anti-Zionists wasn’t the project’s initial plan. At first, For The Sake of Argument sought out to explore what they’d theorized was a purely generational divide in Jewish views on Israel. But, the report’s authors say, they soon realized that age wasn’t the appropriate framing for the divide. Some younger subjects “expressed deep support for Israel,” the found, and some older ones “were deeply critical.”
The real divide, they determined, “is over Israel itself, between Zionists and anti-Zionists.” So they pivoted to interviewing anti-Zionists directly — with connections made via intermediaries, mostly on the East Coast, and the wording of questions carefully constructed in advance with “the assumption that no one is born Zionist or anti-Zionist.”
In fact some interview subjects said that, far from being born anti-Zionist, they only made the leap in the aftermath of Oct. 7 and the subsequent war in Gaza, out of distress over Israel’s behavior during the war. Some made asks of their Jewish leaders, such as to remove the Israeli flag from the bimah, that they had not previously considered.
All of it, the paper said, came from a place of deep identification with and concern for the Jewish community amid the anti-Zionists’ beliefs that it was aligning itself with an immoral cause.
The researchers all say Jewish leaders should conduct similar interviews within their own communities, to understand the real contours of sentiment about Israel.
For the Sake of Argument plans to offer programming to help facilitate such dialogue. Aronson emphasized that those conversations would ideally come from a place of mutual respect and vulnerability.
“I don’t think it will be effective if it comes from this position of, ‘We are mainstream Judaism, we are willing to have a conversation with you,’” she said. “It can only be done if it’s really from a willingness that all sides need to be open and listening to each other.”
Aronson noted that Zionist Jewish leaders, following one of JFNA’s own conclusions from its report, may see it as their job to try to convince their counterparts why Zionism matters. That approach could easily backfire, she said.
“For these highly engaged anti-Zionists who have gone through serious Jewish education and involvement, they actually have already heard all of the arguments that mainstream Judaism has to present,” she said. “I think that’s one of the reasons why they say, ‘We don’t need to hear your side.’ Because they’ll say, ‘We have learned it. You’ve taught it to us and we reject it.’”
Boxer noted that, in many of the Jewish population surveys he’s worked on, “community after community” has told him they struggle to broach conversations about Zionism. That makes them all the more essential, he said.
“I think it’s going to be painful, but we have to have these conversations,” Boxer said.
All the researchers agreed on something else: The divide between Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews is deep, and concerning.
“We don’t know what to do,” Gringras and Sterne admit in the report. Aronson concurred.
“I don’t know how we put the community back together. I don’t know that this is a bridgeable line, to be honest,” she said. “This is certainly not the first time in Jewish history when people have left and made their own tents.”
The post What to do with anti-Zionist Jews? Try talking to them, some Jewish researchers say appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Why I’m vibing with the pope’s first big statement
I have long been obsessed with the Vatican and the inner workings of the papacy. (I majored and did my Master’s in religious studies.) But usually other people are not as tickled as I am by analyzing the newest theological statements from the Holy See.
Not this week. Pope Leo XIV just put out his first encyclical — the term used to refer to official statements outlining the church’s stance on a topic — and it has gone viral. “Spitting fire right out the gate,” said one of many similar trending posts, as though the encyclical was a rap song.
The topic is buzzy: AI, which the pope casts as one of the greatest threats to human flourishing and morality. (The encyclical is titled “Magnifica Humanitas,” or “Magnificent Humanity” in English, if that gives you the gist.) “Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur,” it opens, “ is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.”
The document notes many of the concrete risks of AI — sexual abuse, distortion of facts, job loss — and calls for pragmatic solutions. But it is, at its heart, a testament to what makes humans human, written with palpable adoration for the people of the world: our creativity, our empathy, even our weaknesses. It’s a declaration that machines can never have the ineffable qualities of God’s children.
Structuring our world around technology, Leo writes, reduces “creation to an object of exploitation and human beings to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency.”
Later, in a paean to the importance of deep thought over easy answers, he goes on: “The speed and ease with which answers or summaries can be obtained risk extinguishing the desire to ask questions,” he writes, calling on the world “to protect our young people from the promise of the perfect machine” and warning against rendering “human thought seemingly superfluous precisely when it is most needed.”
“Magnificatus Humanitas” is a major statement, both in length — more than 43,000 words — and in symbolism. A pope’s first encyclical indicates the issues they believe are most important to the church, and signals the likely direction of their papacy.
That direction, for Pope Leo, is to be a voice for moral leadership, writ large. He addressed the encyclical not only to Catholics or even Christians, but “to all men and women of goodwill,” and cited thinkers like Hannah Arendt and J.R.R. Tolkien alongside the Bible.
It’s a declaration of a new — or, arguably, very old — relevance for religious leaders. As people rush through our increasingly fast-paced, frantic world, striving to keep up with the newest technology or geopolitical shift affecting markets and jobs, the slow-moving, zoomed-out perspective of religious leaders seems to be more and more important.
The Vatican held massive authority both moral and military for much of Western history. But its sway faded in the modern age. As democracy rose, Christianity broke into factions and religion’s prominence weakened, leaving the Church without the same ability to bestow a divine mandate on nations and rulers.
So many modern popes have kept their sights more narrowly focused on the theological. Even Pope Francis, who was a liberal, modernizing force for the church, and spoke out strongly on topics like the environment and immigration, focused three of his four encyclicals on Christian theological concepts like the Sacred Heart and Christianity as the world’s guiding light.
Pope Leo, however, seems to have found his way to modern, secular relevance by speaking out clearly on major issues of the day. He notes that he drew inspiration for “Magnificatus Humanitas” from Pope Leo XIII, an influential pope in the late 1800s and the inspiration for the modern Leo’s own papal moniker, whose 1891 encyclical “Rerum Novarum,” on the economy and conditions of the working class, was criticized for insufficient focus on the Gospel. The current pope’s own document is remarkably concrete and political.
Making political statements isn’t new for Leo, but the encyclical canonizes his boldness into an official form. In the past few months I’ve written about the ways in which Pope Leo has used sermons and statements to directly counter those made by U.S. leaders. After Pete Hegseth made a speech implying the U.S. military is doing God’s will, the pope gave a homily saying that prayers for war cannot be heard by God. He has made strongly worded comments about the rights of immigrants as Trump announced increased ICE raids, and made a point of appointing foreign bishops in American parishes. He has refused to visit the U.S. despite the fact that he is American and has been invited numerous times, including for the nation’s 250th birthday; he is instead planning to visit an island that serves as a refugee landing point in the Mediterranean.
It’s not all that surprising that Leo is making pronouncements on the justness of wars; popes have always given commentary on the world, albeit often less pointedly. Of course, Catholics have always looked to the pope for moral leadership — though that is increasingly under question, as renegade Catholics doubt the pope. (Even J.D. Vance, a Catholic convert with a book coming out about his conversion, has warned the pope to be “careful” with his theological interpretations — a near heretical statement. That’s how Protestantism came about.) The difference today is that everybody is listening.
I think the reason is that there is a certain ineffable quality that can’t be accounted for in so much of modern-day discourse in our metrics-focused world. Everything needs to be provable with a statistical analysis or some quantifiable indicator, or it needs to be as profitable as possible to extract value. But so much of what is most valuable in the human experience is intuitive — experiences and emotions like love, joy, transcendence. Connection with each other. Religious leaders have been honing the language to talk about these qualities for centuries, and they guard one of the only arenas in which the intangible remains central.
Of course, there are also plenty of issues with religious institutions, and the Vatican in particular is famous as a site where abuses of power were hidden and protected. But “Magnifica Humanitas,” and its virality, points toward a new relationship with religion, and a newly important role for it to play.
Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking, a hope for my own increased importance as a religion reporter.
The post Why I’m vibing with the pope’s first big statement appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
How can I live freely as a Jew in a world where strangers rip my mezuzah off my doorframe?
Twice, the mezuzah on my front door was ripped off.
The first time, I was shocked. The second time, I made a decision that still pains me. I did not put it back up.
This was before the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023.
That is the part I keep coming back to. The fear did not begin after the Hamas attacks. It was already there, intruding with the quiet calculation of whether a small Jewish symbol on my home made me less safe.
A mezuzah is not a political statement. It makes no argument about a government or a war. It is a sacred object, a marker of memory, a tiny declaration that says: Jews live here. I thought about that mezuzah again recently when the Anti-Defamation League released its annual audit showing that antisemitic physical assaults in the United States reached record highs in 2025. That increase reflects something many Jews already feel in daily life: the slow erosion of ease, the daily calculation of whether to speak up or stay quiet — things I have felt since the first time my mezuzah was violently torn off my doorframe.
Since then, the realm in which I feel safe as a visibly Jewish person has been shrinking from all directions.
After the Oct. 7 attack, the bulletin boards in my apartment building began filling with calls to boycott Israel. Campaign flyers for a Jewish political candidate who came to speak there were defaced with Hitler mustaches. I learned to scan the walls before I scanned my mail.
This was not happening on a campus quad or in some distant place. It was happening where I live.
Then, among my mother’s things, I found a Star of David necklace from the 1930s — marcasite set against black onyx, delicate and old. A boyfriend had given it to her when they were both 14.
I put it on in Florida, where I spend much of my time caring for my mother. I loved wearing it. It felt like more than jewelry. It felt like inheritance, memory, and a small way of carrying my family with me.
But when my mother knew I was going back to New York, she told me to take it off.
My mother is 102. She is not easily frightened. She has lived long enough to know when the temperature in the room has changed. She was not making a political argument. She was trying to protect her daughter.
I still wear that Star of David. But I admit I am selective. In New York, there are moments when I leave it visible and moments when I tuck it under my shirt. That calculation itself tells me something about the world I am moving through.
Recently, in a private Facebook group for women essayists, I shared a personal piece I had written for the United Kingdom-based Jewish Chronicle about how Oct. 7 changed life for my mother and me. It was not a political manifesto. It was a reflection on fear, Jewish identity, aging and visibility.
And still, I was attacked by other writers.“What about Gaza?” I was asked. The message was clear: even my personal Jewish pain had to pass a political test before it could be acknowledged.
That is the narrowing.
This ugliness is coming from more than one direction now. It stems from old conspiracy theories on the right and newer moral certainties in some of the progressive spaces where I once felt most at home. Different language brings about the same result: Jews become less human, less particular, less entitled to fear.
That collapse is what frightens me most: the definitional collapse between Jew and Israeli; Israeli and Israel’s government; Jewish symbol and political provocation; mezuzah and target.
As Jews like me reckon with that collapse, we must reckon with how much we’ll go along with it.
Right now, too often, Jews are being asked to choose between our own safety and our compassion for others. We should be able to prioritize both. I am a Zionist. I believe in the right of the Jewish people to a homeland. I also believe Palestinians are human beings who deserve freedom, dignity, and protection from suffering.
These beliefs should not cancel each other out. They should make us more careful, more humane, more committed to truth.
Yet now we must choose between speaking about antisemitism and being accused of indifference to other hatreds. That is no way to live.
Since Oct. 7, I have found myself going to synagogue on Shabbat, something I never did before. I was a High Holiday Jew. Now I seek out rooms where I do not have to explain why this moment feels frightening. I have learned where I feel seen. I have learned who can hold my fear without turning it into an argument.
The mezuzah I did not put back up is small. It fits in the palm of my hand.
But what it represents is not small: memory, faith, survival, home, and the right to be visibly Jewish without fear.
When I did not put it back up, I told myself I was being practical. But now — after Oct. 7, the bulletin boards, my mother’s warning, and the explosive allegations I’ve seen travel through respected media without sufficient care or verification — I understand it differently.
I was not just protecting a doorframe. I was learning to shrink.
The post How can I live freely as a Jew in a world where strangers rip my mezuzah off my doorframe? appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Podcast: A lively conversation in Yiddish with actress Lea Koenig
ס׳איז לעצטנס אַרויס אַ פּאָדקאַסט מיט דער באַליבטער אַקטריסע אין ישׂראל, ליאַ קעניג, וועלכע איז הײַנט צום בעסטן באַקאַנט ווי די ייִדיש־רעדנדיקע באָבע פֿונעם פּערסאָנאַזש שלום שטיסל אין דער ישׂראלדיקער טעלעוויזיע־סעריע „שטיסל“.
אינעם שמועס באַטייליקן זיך אויך יניבֿ גאָלדבערג — דער מחבר פֿון אַ נײַער ביאָגראַפֿיע וועגן איר אויף ענגליש; דער איבערזעצער און דראַמאַטורג מיכל יאַשינסקי, און דער ייִדישער זינגער און קולטור־טוער חיים וואָלף. דעם פּאָדקאַסט האָט טראַנסמיטירט די באָסטאָנער ראַדיאָ־פּראָגראַם „דאָס ייִדישע קול“.
ליאַ קעניג גיט איבער אירע זכרונות במשך פֿון איר לאַנגער קאַריערע אין ייִדישן טעאַטער, ווי אויך אינעם העברעיִשן טעאַטער, טעלעוויזיע און קינאָ. כּדי צו הערן דעם פּאָדקאַסט, גיט אַ קוועטש דאָ.
The post Podcast: A lively conversation in Yiddish with actress Lea Koenig appeared first on The Forward.