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A scholar sees a common root for antisemitism and racism: ‘Christian supremacy’
(JTA) — Magda Teter’s new book, “Christian Supremacy,” begins in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Aug. 11, 2017. Hundreds of white nationalist neo-Nazis who ostensibly gathered to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee from a local park broke into a chant: “Jews will not replace us.”
Other writers and scholars would note how antisemitism shaped white nationalism. But Teter, professor of history and the Shvidler Chair of Judaic Studies at Fordham University, saw something else: how centuries of Christian thought and practice fed the twin evils of antisemitism and racism.
“The ideology espoused by white supremacists in the US and in Europe is rooted in Christian ideas of social and religious hierarchy,” she writes. “These ideas developed, gradually, first in the Mediterranean and Europe in respect to Jews and then in respect to people of color in European colonies and in the US, before returning transformed back to Europe.”
In the book, subtitled “Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism,” she traces this idea from the writings of the early church fathers like Paul the Apostle, though centuries of Catholic and Protestant debates over the status of Jews in Europe, to the hardening of racist attitudes with the rise of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Antisemitic laws and theology, she argues, developed within Christianity a “mental habit” of exclusion and dominance that would eventually be applied to people of color up to and including modern times.
Teter is careful to acknowledge the different forms antisemitism and racism have taken, distinguishing between the Jews’ experience of social and legal exclusion and near annihilation, and the enslavement, displacement and ongoing persecution of Black people. And yet, she writes, “that story began with Christianity’s theological relation with Jews and Judaism.”
Teter is previously the author of “Blood Libel: On The Trail of an Antisemitic Myth,” winner of the 2020 National Jewish Book Award. At Fordham, the Catholic university in the Bronx, she is helping assemble what may be the largest repository of artifacts and literature dedicated to the Jewish history of the borough.
We spoke Thursday about how groups like the Proud Boys embrace centuries-old notions of Christian superiority, how “whiteness” became a thing and how she, as a non-Jew raised in Poland, became a Jewish studies scholar.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Your book was conceived and written during the COVID lockdown. Where did the idea for the book come from?
It’s an accidental project. I’ve been teaching the history of antisemitism for years, and I live in Harlem so questions of race and racism are very stark in my daily life. And since I grew up in Poland, and American history was not something we were taught or studied, I’ve never been satisfied with the various explanations for the strength of antisemitism and history of racism. And as I mentioned in my prologue, I watched the Raoul Peck documentary, “I Am Not Your Negro,” which has a clip with James Baldwin saying that white people have to figure out why they invented the idea of the N-word and must “embrace this stranger that they have maligned so long.” You could also say that the European Christians created the idea of “the Jew” and that sort of caricature had absolutely nothing to do with flesh and blood Jews. I kept noticing these parallels, as an outsider, reading American and African-American history.
I was also thinking about this idea of servitude that was attached to Jews in Christian theology, and then in law.
You write in your book that “Over time, white European Christians branded both Jews and people of color with ‘badges of servitude’ and inferiority.” What do you mean by servitude in this context?
In Christian theology, from the earliest Christian texts, the idea of servitude and slavery is attached to the concept of Jews and Judaism. Paul does it in his Epistles. He uses this quote from the book of Genesis that “the elder shall serve the younger,” which becomes really embedded in Christian theology. It is the Jews, the elder people, who should serve the Christians, the younger people. Later on in medieval theology and canon law, Jews are in a servile position, consigned for their sin of rejecting Jesus to perpetual servitude. So even though Jews were free people and could live mostly where they wanted to live, marry whoever they wanted to marry — nobody was sold and some even had slaves — that idea of Jews as confined to perpetual servitude to Christians created a habit of thinking of Jews as having an inferior social status.
That language became secularized in modern times, and we see the development of the [antisemitic] trope of Jewish power: that they are in places where they shouldn’t be. I worked on fleshing out the parallels between the idea and then legal status of Jewish servitude and the conceptual perception of Black people in servile and inferior positions.
Magda Teter’s new book explores how “white European Christians branded both Jews and people of color with ‘badges of servitude’ and inferiority.” (Chuck Fishman)
What other kinds of parallels did you find between racism and antisemitism?
In the Christian theology, Black people, like Jews, will be seen as cursed by God. Jews were [portrayed as] lazy because they didn’t work physically — they made money and exploited Christians. Black people were [portrayed as] lazy because they were trying to avoid physical labor at the expense of white men. Both people were seen as carnal, both as sexually dangerous, and so on.
I was struck by the fact that the racist turn of Christian supremacy — justifying the enslavement of Black people on theological grounds — is a fairly late development, taking hold in the early modern period when Europeans established slaveholding empires.
That’s right. In the summer of 2020, the summer of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter, we were all thinking about these issues of race and racism and America. And as I was in the middle of writing the article that became the book, I felt that there was a deeper history that needed to be told, and that slavery is not bound by color until the enslavement of Black Africans by Europeans during the colonial expansion of Europe.
After the French Revolution, when Jews were offered “emancipation” in much of Europe, there were deep debates about whether they could be citizens and be entitled to the same rights and protections as Christian citizens of France and England and other countries. How was that debate informed by Christianity?
In pre-modern Europe, there was obviously both a religious and legal framework under which Jews existed. They had their place in a social hierarchy. After the French Revolution, people are creating a new political reality. The idea of equality obviously challenged the social hierarchies that existed, including the idea that Christians were the superior religion. And that begins to play a role on two levels. One is the level of, well, “how can you be equal and be our judges and make decisions about us?” It’s fear of power — political power and political equality. That challenges the habit of thinking that sees Jews as inferior, in servitude and otherwise insolent and arrogant.
The other level comes from Enlightenment scholars who begin to place Jews in the Middle East and in the Holy Land, in Palestine. Jews are no longer seen as European. They are seen as “Oriental,” and they are compared to the non-European religions and practices that these Enlightenment scholars have been studying. Their differences are now also racialized. “They are not like us, they can’t assimilate. They can never be Frenchmen, they can never be Germans.”
And I guess it’s a short step from that to regarding people with dark skin as inferior and subordinate.
That’s right. Enlightenment scholars are also trying to to understand why it is justified to enslave Black Africans and they do it through “scientific” and other means. They classify Africans as inferior intellectually and they create this idea of race.
I began to think about these European politicians and intellectuals in terms of creating their identities, and what I ended up arguing is what we saw in Charlottesville, what we’re seeing in Europe. It’s not necessarily just about hate, but it’s about exclusion and rejection of Jews and people of color from equality, from citizenship.
And the common thread here is that whiteness and Christianity become inseparable. You write that “freedom and liberty now came to be linked not only to Christianity, but to whiteness, and servitude and enslavement to blackness.”
That’s right. White Christian “liberty” becomes embedded and embodied in law.
Did you see any pitfalls in drawing parallels between the Black and Jewish experiences? I am thinking of those in either community who might say, “How dare you compare our suffering to theirs!”
Yes, I was tempered. I think what some call “comparative victimhood” has paralyzed conversations about this subject, and I kept it in my mind all the time. What I hope comes through is that there’s incredible value in a comparative approach. Coming from Jewish studies as my primary field, the comparison with the Black experience gave me clarity on the nature of antisemitism as well as on the nature of the Jewish experience, and vice versa: The Jewish experience can also give clarity to some of the aspects of anti-Black racism.
What’s an example?
So, for instance, questions like, “Are Jews white? Are they not white? When did they become white?” That’s a whole genre of scholarship. And when you look at it through the lens of law and ideology, you begin to see that from a legal perspective, Jews were considered white in the United States because they could immigrate and they could be naturalized according to law. They did not have to go to court to become American. Their rights to vote were not challenged. There was discrimination, they couldn’t stay in hotels and in some places they couldn’t find employment, but by law, they were considered citizens. The debate about the whiteness of Jews is creating a fog of misunderstanding.
Black Americans were targeted by specific legal statutes from the very beginning in the Constitution and then in naturalization law and so on. And then there was the backlash even after the Civil War to the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments [aimed at establishing political equality for Americans of all races].
Statues at the Strasbourg Cathedral depict Ecclesia and Synagoga, representing the triumph of the church, at left, and the servitude of Judaism, which is represented by a blindfolded figure, drooping and carrying a broken lance. (Edelseider/Wikimedia Commons)
How much do modern-day white supremacists, like the Oath Keepers or the Proud Boys, see themselves as Christian? Or is this a kind of white supremacy that doesn’t name itself Christian but doesn’t even realize how many of its ideas are based in theology?
I think they might not be conscious of this legacy, but neo-Nazis take from the legacy of the Nazis who themselves were not thinking of themselves as Christian necessarily. But what I argue in the book is that white Christian supremacy becomes white supremacy. It never discards the Christian sense of domination and superiority that emerges from its early relationship with Jews and Judaism.
In the United States, Black people serve as contrast figures to whiteness, in the law and in the culture. You cannot have whiteness without Blackness. For Christians, Jews serve as that contrast figure. Consciously or unconsciously, the Proud Boys are embracing that. They talk of “God-given” freedoms for white people. That is the Christian legacy.
You said that the Nazis didn’t necessarily see themselves as a Christian movement. But I must ask, even though it is not the scope of your book, was the Holocaust a culmination of white Christian supremacy? Because I think many Christian theologians would want to say that Nazism was godless, and a perversion of the true faith.
I’ll say that when exclusionary ideology is coupled with the power of the state, that’s where it can lead.
In the years since the Holocaust especially, there have been many efforts by Christian leaders to address the ideological failings of the past. You write about Nostra Aetate, the 1965 declaration by the Catholic Church absolving Jews of collective guilt in the death of Jesus and some Protestant documents of contrition. But I got the feeling you were disappointed that many denominations haven’t gone far enough in reckoning with the past.
There was a sort of a moral sense that something needs to be addressed after the Holocaust. But then it is not fully addressed. I don’t think anybody has addressed the issue of power — the roots of hate, yes, but not the dynamics of power. We’ll see where the book goes, but maybe theologians will begin to grapple with this legacy of superiority and domination, and the way hierarchical habits of thinking have been developed through theology and through religious culture.
What other impact do you hope the book may have?
White supremacy is very much in the air. We need to speak up against it, and make connections and allyships. I hope that maybe because the book deals with law and power, it may create bridges among people who care about “We the People” as a vision of people who are diverse, respectful and equal, and not the exclusionary vision offered by white and Christian supremacy.
A cross burns at a Ku Klux Klan rally on Aug. 8, 1925. (National Photo Company Collection)
I’d love to talk about your background. You’re not Jewish but you are chair of Jewish Studies at Fordham, a Catholic university. What drew you to the study of Judaism and the Jews?
I grew up in Poland with a father who from the time I was a little girl would point out to me that there had been Jews in Poland. We would drive through the countryside, and he’d say, “This used to be a Jewish town and there used to be a synagogue and there was the Jewish cemetery.” I grew up being very conscious of the past’s presence and this kind of stark absence of Jews in Poland, where in the 1970s when I grew up Jewish history was taboo.
As soon as Jewish books on Jewish subjects began to be published, including those that dealt with antisemitism, we would read it together. We would talk about it. He wouldn’t just shift the destruction and murder of Jews in Poland on to the Nazis.
There was no Jewish studies program in Poland when I was applying to universities, so I studied Hebrew in Israel, and then studied Yiddish in New York at YIVO. I came to Columbia University to get my PhD in Jewish history and my career went in the direction it did. I was a professor of history and director of the Jewish and Israel studies program at Wesleyan University. I came to Fordham eight years ago and created a program in Jewish studies.
Your previous book was about the blood libel, the historic canard that Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood. This one’s about antisemitism. I don’t want to presume, but is your interest in these subjects in any way an act of contrition?
I grew up in a very secular household. I did not grow up Catholic. But I think growing up in Poland made me very, very aware of antisemitism and the history of antisemitism. I got my PhD from Columbia University in Jewish history, which did not emphasize Jewish suffering, but Jewish life, and I have studied Jewish life and teach about Jewish life — not just about Jewish suffering.
However, in the last few years, antisemitism has certainly been on the minds of many of us. I also am committed to the idea of shared history, and therefore all my scholarship, as much as it is about Jews, it is also about the church and Poland and the law. Jews are an integral part of that history and culture. And, as such, I’m committed to that, to teaching about the vibrancy of Jewish life as much as the dynamics of what made that life difficult over the centuries.
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The post A scholar sees a common root for antisemitism and racism: ‘Christian supremacy’ appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Young Jews aren’t disengaging, they’re finding Jewish meaning in different ways than their parents and grandparents did
The Jewish community for years has worried about young adults drifting away. It’s true that people in their 20s and 30s are less likely to go to synagogue regularly or belong to a congregation or other Jewish communal institutions, which can make it look like young adults are disengaging from Jewish life.
But new research suggests that many of them aren’t abandoning Jewish life at all. They’re practicing it at home with friends and family, often through food, culture, and meaningful conversation. This development speaks to a broader evolution that will shape the Jewish future. While young adults still crave Jewish meaning, identity, and belonging, they increasingly expect to find them in ways and places different from their parents and grandparents.
The Jim Joseph Foundation recently commissioned Project Prism, a study of more than 2,000 Jewish Americans ages 22 to 40 in 49 states over 40 weeks, conducted in partnership with Sense Worldwide, and with NORC at the University of Chicago. The research included a nationally representative survey alongside qualitative and cultural research, and included many people whose lives rarely, if ever, intersect with Jewish institutions.
What we found complicates the conventional story about religious disengagement. Three out of four Jewish young adults say they do something Jewish regularly. But 45% of all respondents say their Jewish participation occurs exclusively in informal settings. That includes celebrating Jewish holidays with friends and family, engaging in Jewish cooking and food traditions, and discussing Jewish topics or current events with people close to them. Others express their Jewish identity through music, books, humor, and media, or by observing Jewish rituals and traditions at home.
In other words, a young adult who rarely sets foot in a synagogue or other Jewish institution may still consider Judaism a meaningful part of their life. They aren’t abandoning Judaism; they’re simply engaging in it in places and ways that are comfortable for them, reflect the home-based component of Jewish ritual, and bring them meaning.
What communities can do
The research is the starting point for understanding how young adults navigate life. For example, many Jewish young adults feel that they have a strong sense of purpose or direction in their lives, but a much smaller percentage say that being Jewish plays a strong role in creating that sense of purpose. Instead, they draw meaning from helping others, personal growth, their careers, and family. So rather than wondering why young adults are not going to existing Jewish spaces, families and community leaders might ask how Jewish tradition can deepen the things they already find meaningful. Helping a neighbor, caring for family, sharing a meal, and contributing to one’s community are deeply embedded in our teachings and rituals. Thankfully, our community has many existing organizations committed to these experiences. There is more work to do to help young adults find and connect with these existing offerings, and our community should also strive to design new, innovative offerings that don’t yet exist.
At the same time, the research shows that participation alone isn’t enough to create positive outcomes. When a young adult feels a sense of belonging, an experience is much more likely to have a lasting positive impact. Immersive and socially intensive experiences are especially effective. As people are increasingly worried about loneliness and social isolation, it’s important to recognize that simply getting people through the door cannot be the end goal. We need to think about how we help them build relationships and feel a part of something bigger once they arrive.
We also need to remember that these immersive experiences, as powerful as they are, attract only a minority of Jewish young adults. The vast majority are engaging on their own or in smaller groups. For Jewish families and organizations seeking to reach them, the research offers some practical guidance.
Young adults say Jewish experiences would be more appealing if they were more cultural and less religious, offered low-pressure opportunities to participate without a major commitment, fit their schedules, and allowed them to engage alongside people they already know. That could mean a casual Shabbat dinner, a Jewish cultural event that welcomes friends and family, or a gathering where participants can explore Jewish identity without feeling judged or pressured to participate in a particular way. These approaches recognize that young adults are navigating busy schedules, competing demands, and a polarized environment, while still seeking connection and meaning.
At their best, Jewish communities and institutions can provide exactly what these young adults are looking for — relationships, opportunities for meaning, and places where they feel part of something larger than themselves. But doing so may require thinking differently about how and where Jewish life happens. A generation that celebrates a holiday around a friend’s dinner table, talks about Jewish identity with family, and seeks community outside traditional institutions is constructing Jewish life differently than previous generations did, and can still create a meaningful Jewish life.
Rather than expecting young adults to come to them, Jewish organizations can help support the experiences young adults are already creating, whether by providing resources for home-based celebrations, partnering with informal groups, or making existing programs more flexible and welcoming.
Our community can continue offering the powerful immersive experiences that resonate with some while also embracing the more informal expressions of Jewish life that resonate with many others. In doing so, we can help more young adults experience Judaism as a meaningful part of their lives — wherever and however they choose to engage.
The post Young Jews aren’t disengaging, they’re finding Jewish meaning in different ways than their parents and grandparents did appeared first on The Forward.
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Kristallnacht survivor calls on German police to stand firm against hate
(JTA) — One of the last surviving Jewish witnesses of Kristallnacht told German police leaders they have an “enormous responsibility” to learn the lessons of the past.
George Shefi, 94, this week returned to the city of his birth to share his story with senior law enforcement representatives from Germany, the United States, and other European countries at the city’s New Synagogue, a target of the Nazi-spurred mobs on Kristallnacht. The event held Thursday, titled “Not on Our Watch: Operationalizing Never Again,” marked the 88th anniversary of the pogrom.
“I have come here at this time to say that Germany’s responsibility to preserve the memory of the Holocaust is eternal,” Shefi told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in an interview before the event. He does not believe today’s generations of Germans are “guilty of what happened,” but nonetheless said they “have an enormous responsibility and a duty to learn from the past to ensure that it never happens again.”
Shefi was almost seven when the Nazis unleashed violent pogroms across Germany on the night of Nov. 9, 1938, in which the Berlin synagogue that housed his school was burned to the ground.
Months later, his mother sent him alone to safety in Britain on the Kindertransport. He would never see her or her sister again. They were murdered at Auschwitz.
The New Synagogue, like many others across Germany, was set on fire that night, but it was not completely destroyed thanks to the bravery of Wilhelm Krützfeld, the head of the local police precinct, who called the fire brigade. One of the few Germans to stand up to the violent antisemitism on Kristallnacht, his memory was honored at the event on Thursday night.
The event was an initiative of the International March of the Living, in collaboration with several other partners including Germany’s largest police trade union. It is part of a wider international educational program which sends senior police representatives on the annual march in Poland to deepen their understanding of the Holocaust and protect global Jewish communities.
Shefi, who immigrated to Israel in 1949, has shared his personal story with more than 12,000 German students over the past two decades and also spent years volunteering with the Israeli police. Last year he received Germany’s Federal Order of Merit for his commitment to Holocaust education.
“There is special significance in giving my testimony before them [the police] in the very synagogue that was saved from burning on Kristallnacht thanks to a police officer who did the right thing. He was a human being. He did not stand by, and he did not allow the flames of hatred to spread,” Shefi told JTA.
“I call on police officers in Germany to learn from him and draw inspiration from his courageous act,” he said. “If he could act that way under Nazi rule, police officers today must also act and refuse to stand by in the face of hatred.”
Shefi recalled the immediate aftermath of Kristallnacht in an onstage interview with Revital Yakin Krakovksy, the March of the Living Israel CEO. He said that when he woke up the following day, his mother told him there was no school but gave no explanation.
It was only three days later that he saw the result of the carnage. He recalled seeing the remains of a vandalized hat shop close to his house.
“The windows were broken,” he said. “Glass was everywhere. Hats were thrown around, and half of them were probably stolen. That’s one picture I’ll never forget.”
He also recalled antisemitic graffiti daubed on the side of a store belonging to a Jewish man and his Christian wife. “The Nazis didn’t break their store, but on the sidewalk they wrote in big letters: ‘This store belongs to a Jewish pig who is married to a German swine.’” He said that while someone tried to clean up the abuse, dozens of people stood around “yelling and screaming.”
A day before the event, Shefi returned to the area where he was brought up to see the stolpersteine, memorial stones, laid for his mother and aunt. Last month a town in Germany voted to ban the stones, something which Shefi said had to be “fought tooth and nail.”
“That’s the way things start,” he said. “You start out with a law which looks very mild and very quickly grows, and people have to wake up to it. If you want to keep this country democratic, you have to start immediately to fight against such situations.”
Stressing the importance of the stones, which have become a feature of remembrance in Germany and other countries that had been occupied by the Nazis, he said: “That’s the only symbol we have that there was a Jewish community here, and they always will be if the police protect that right.”
The event came at a time of heightened antisemitism globally. According to a new report published by Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Fighting Antisemitism, 244 incidents targeting synagogues, Chabad centers and worshipers in their vicinity were documented across 34 countries between Oct. 7, 2023, and Oct. 21, 2026.
Phyllis Greenberg Heideman, the president of the International March of the Living, told JTA that remembering Kristallnacht is important because it was a “critical warning sign of what was to come”.
“Had the world acted to stop the violence and persecution at that time, the devastating consequences might have been different. We do not see Kristallnacht merely as a lesson in history, but as a reminder and a warning about antisemitism today,” she said.
“This year, we chose to hold the event in Berlin, where the pogrom took place, in a synagogue that survived thanks to the courage and humanity of one police officer, Wilhelm Krützfeld, who prevented the mob from setting it on fire,” Heideman said. “Our message to the senior police officials attending this event is clear: learn from his example. Do not stand by in the face of antisemitism and hatred. Do what is right, and protect those who need your protection.”
Jochen Kopelke, the federal chairman of the German Police Union (GdP) and president of the European Federation of Police Unions, lit a torch dedicated to combating antisemitism at this year’s march in April.
“The Federal Republic of Germany bears immense guilt,” he said. “It cannot absolve itself of that guilt, now or ever. Our enduring obligation is to remember the unimaginable atrocities of the Holocaust.
“In view of the alarming increase in antisemitic acts in Germany, I feel compelled, as a citizen, as a democrat, as a trade unionist, as a police officer and, above all, as a human being, to use every means at my disposal to confront the terrible, deeply troubling and unmistakable rise of homegrown German antisemitism,” Kopelke said
Paul Goldenberg, who served as a police officer in New Jersey for more than 25 years, heads up the “Operationalizing Never Again” initiative.
He said its lessons apply not just to German police but also to their colleagues worldwide. Livestreaming of the event was made available to a majority of major police associations across North America.
“It would be a serious mistake for police leaders elsewhere to regard these lessons as Germany’s responsibility alone,” he told JTA. “No country is immune from the politicization of policing, prejudice, or an institutional culture in which people stop questioning improper decisions. As an American police leader and chair of this international delegation, I believe we must bring the same scrutiny to our own institutions that we ask of others.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Kristallnacht survivor calls on German police to stand firm against hate appeared first on The Forward.
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Thousands of students, many Jewish, are joining the Young DSA on campuses across the country. Here’s why.
As early results streamed in on Election Day, many democrats felt hope and excitement, but the night was more complicated for Maria Franzblau, the Jewish 24-year-old co-chair of the Miami chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, who began her foray into socialist politics in the DSA’s youth movement.
In Florida’s Senate race, former state Rep. Angie Nixon, a DSA member, lost narrowly to Republican incumbent Ashley Moody. The state’s voters also approved Amendment 3, a property tax cut that DSA members opposed.
“It was a bit of an emotional roller coaster at first with the Florida results, that quickly gave way to a lot of exuberance and excitement as we saw how the rest of the country had gone,” Franzblau told the Forward.
DSA backed candidates won at least six seats in the House, wins that are expected to grow the organization’s influence within the Democratic Party’s progressive wing.
Franzblau took an interest in socialist politics at an early age, during Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 run for president. When she enrolled in Florida International University in 2020, she knew she wanted to join a political student club; the question was which one. A few months into her first year, she found the Young Democratic Socialists of America.
YDSA is the youth and student wing of the DSA. The organization has grown rapidly in recent months from 1,800 members last year to 5,200 dues-paying members now across 169 chapters, according to YDSA co-chair James Hernández. The largest chapters are based at University of Maryland at College Park, which has one of the largest Jewish student populations; Georgia State University; University of California, Berkeley; University of Oregon; University of Cincinnati and Binghamton University.
Hernández, who uses all pronouns, leads YDSA with their co-chair Mae Bracelin. They credit the increased interest to the “Zohran moment,” the rise of DSA-backed New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
What is the YDSA?
YDSA is based primarily on high school and college campuses, though it also has citywide chapters, and you don’t have to be a student to join. It started in the early ‘80s with a small presence at private schools, then interest spiked during Sanders’s first run for the presidency, and by 2020, the organization had grown to more than 130 chapters across the country.
Membership requires paying dues to the DSA, with a “pay what you can” model. The DSA directly funds YDSA, providing chapters with support for flags, buttons, and pamphlets, and the parent group pays the youth organization’s national leaders.
The DSA is a staunchly anti-Zionist organization, and YDSA members who spoke to the Forward said that Palestinian rights issues are core to the movement.
“It’s been so central to us because of how it’s played out on our universities,” Franzblau said. “Questions of safety on campus, questions of academic freedom and free expression, questions of how our universities use our money, all can get viewed or analyzed through this lens of Israel and Palestine.”
Current and former members of YDSA said that affordability, LGBTQ+, labor organizing and reproductive rights issues initially spurred their interest in the organization. Today, YDSA campaigns range from pushing universities to provide free laundry services to forming sanctuary campuses to protect undocumented students from Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
But current and former members of YDSA who spoke with the Forward said they were also all active in their schools’ pro-Palestinian encampments and campaigns. And that was complicated — because many of them are Jewish.
Jewish involvement in YDSA
The co-chairs said young Jews are active in the movement, and many participated in the pro-Palestinian encampments following Oct. 7 and the ensuing war in Gaza. Bracelin, who attended the University of Oregon and spearheaded the university’s YDSA chapter there, said there is often overlap in its membership and involvement with Jewish Voice for Peace.
“YDSA chapters have become sort of like homes for anti-Zionist Jews on campus who are seeking a community,” Bracelin said.
Franzblau noted that at first, she didn’t feel inclined to involve her Jewish identity in her political activism, but that changed after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack and the war in Gaza, when YDSA’s central organizing became focused on the Palestinian cause.
At one point, a Jewish community leader at FIU told Franzblau that the pro-Palestinian groups were using her as a “token Jew.” She was also doxxed after Oct. 7, when someone found out she helped draft a campus ceasefire resolution. These reactions led her to start sharing that she is Jewish when speaking on Palestinian issues, in an effort to show that Jews are not a monolith.
Former YDSA member Gabe Karsh, who has continued as a DSA member since graduating, was also active in Macalester College’s Mac for Palestine and IfNotNow chapters in 2023.
After Oct. 7, Karsh found themselves in the position of mediating between YDSA members and other pro-Palestinian groups on one side, and the school’s Jewish community on the other.
Karsh, who has family in Israel, would talk with pro-Palestinian groups about how “de-emphasization of the hostages” was “problematic.” Talking with those in the Jewish community, Karsh would share why they thought Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza was a genocide that needed to be protested. Though some were “unhappy” with Karsh during this time, they said, the conversations often proved productive.
“Rather than being the ideological bulwark of my side, I found myself much more inclined to try to find a workable solution for everybody,” Karsh said. “I think I still needed that outlet to express my politics and my rage and grief and fear about what was happening in Gaza, and that’s when YDSA and Mac for Palestine became an outlet for that, when doing that work inside of the Jewish community became much more fraught and less appealing.”
Jewish YDSA member Roxy Satowitz, who serves on the organization’s National Coordinating Committee, worked alongside Karsh at Macalester. She pointed to the history of Jewish socialists in the Labor movement, particularly the General Jewish Labour Bund, as something that inspires her work.
Being Jewish, she said, grounds her approach.
“I think knowing your story and knowing your family history is really important as an organizer, because I think the way that human beings communicate is in a narrative, and the way that we learn, like the way that we talk to ourselves, is in a narrative,” she said.
How big is the tent?
Members often describe YDSA as a “big tent organization,” noting that ideological dissension is allowed in the organization, to a point. Hernández noted expulsions from the organization do happen if members drift too far from the core tenets of the movement, but declined to list examples.
Recently, internal disagreements took center stage in New York. Two days before the third anniversary of Oct. 7, multiple New York City YDSA chapters shared a social media post promoting a protest against Mamdani for, in their view, failing the Palestinian cause.
The New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America told the student groups to take down the posts and threatened to cut their funding, according to the student groups. The posts disappeared, but multiple chapters later reposted the protest flyer.
The protest, which included numerous other organizations, began outside City Hall and culminated with a march to Union Square, where demonstrators crashed a vigil held by the progressive organization Israelis for Peace, recognizing the victims of both Oct. 7 and the war in Gaza. Mamdani attended the vigil and stood silently as protesters called him a traitor and chanted, “Mamdani, you can’t hide. We charge you with genocide.”
The next day, five YDSA chapters shared an online statement accusing the NYC-DSA of trying to stifle their participation in the protest.
“Our commitment is to Palestine, not any elected official,” the statement read. It concluded with the words “Long live the intifada.”
The organization United Jewish Teachers was outraged over the use of the word “intifada,” and took issue with it being shared by a YDSA chapter at New York City’s prestigious Stuyvesant High School. The post has since been deleted by Stuyvesant’s YDSA but remains up on the pages of chapters at Hunter College, Lehman College, City College of New York and The New School.
Hernández said there had been a misunderstanding between NYC-DSA and the YDSA chapters that has since been resolved.
“I don’t necessarily politically agree with the aims of that protest,” Hernández said. “I think that’s a political decision the chapter had the right to make, even if I disagree with it. There’s room for people who are more to the right of even me, and there’s room for people who are more to the left of me.”
For Hernández, the disagreements are part of the give-and-take of fostering a diverse movement, but the divisions are something the DSA at large will have to contend with, especially as it gains power while growing a pipeline from the YDSA. What concessions and compromises — especially on Israel — will it be asked to make by younger, newer members? Will it continue to hold standards that even Mamdani, some believe, can’t reach?
For now, they’re united in celebration.
“In a time when many were losing hope, these victories are a brilliant light,” Hernández said of the midterm elections. “Our task now is to build a movement capable of confronting the institution to deliver on our working-class agenda.”
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