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Diaspora alarm over Israel: Your guide to what the critics are saying
(JTA) — I started reporting on North American Jews and Israel in the last century, and for years covered the debate over whether Jews in the Diaspora had a right to criticize the Israeli government in public. The debate sort of petered out in the early-1990s, when Israel itself began talking about a Palestinian state, and when right-wing groups then decided criticizing Israel was a mitzvah.
Nevertheless, while left-wing groups like J Street and T’ruah have long been comfortable criticizing the Israeli government or defending Palestinian rights, many in the centrist “mainstream” — pulpit clergy, leaders of federations and Hillels, average Jews nervous about spoiling a family get-together — have preferred to keep their concerns to themselves. Partly this is tactical: Few rabbis want to alienate any of their members over so divisive a topic, and in the face of an aggressive left, organizational leaders did not want to give fuel to Israel’s ideological enemies. (The glaring exception has been about Israeli policy toward non-Orthodox Judaism, which is seen as very much the Disapora’s business.)
In recent weeks, there has been an emerging literature of what I have come to think of as “reluctant dissent.” What these essays and sermons have in common, despite the different political persuasions of the authors, is a deep concern over Israel’s “democratic character.” They cite judicial reforms that would weaken checks and balances at the top, expansion of Jewish settlements that would make it impossible to separate from the Palestinians, and the Orthodox parties that want to strengthen their hold on religious affairs. As Abe Foxman, who as former director of the Anti-Defamation League rarely criticized Israel, told an interviewer, “If Israel ceases to be an open democracy, I won’t be able to support it.”
I read through the various ways Jewish leaders and writers here and in Israel are not just justifying Diaspora Jews who are protesting what is happening in Israel, but providing public permission for others to do the same. Here is what a few of them are saying (with a word from a defender of the government):
‘I didn’t sleep much last night’
Yehuda Kurtzer: Facebook, Feb. 8
Kurtzer is the president of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, the New York-based branch of the Israeli think tank that promotes a diverse, engaged relationship with Israel. In a recent blog post, he neatly describes the dilemma of Diaspora Zionists who aren’t sure what to do with their deep concerns about the direction of the Israel government, especially the concentration of power in a far-right legislative branch.
Centrist American Jews who care about Israel are caught between “those to our right who would see any expression of even uncertainty about Israel’s democratic character as disloyalty, [and] those on the other side who think that a conversation about Israeli democracy is already past its prime,” he writes. He is also concerned about the “widespread disengagement that we can expect among American Jews, what I fear will become the absent majority — those who decide that however the current crisis is resolved, all of this is just ‘not for them.’”
Kurtzer likens Israel to a palace, and Diaspora Jews as “passersby” who live beyond its walls. Nonetheless, he feels responsible for what happens there. “The palace is burning and the best we can do is to tell you,” he writes. “It is also how we will show you we love you, and how much we cherish the palace.”
An open letter to Israel’s friends in North America
Matti Friedman, Yossi Klein Halevi and Daniel Gordis: Times of Israel, Feb. 7
Three high-profile writers who moved to Israel from North America and who often defend Israel against its critics in the United States — Gordis, for one, has written a book arguing that American Jewish liberalism is incompatible with Israel’s “ethnic democracy” — now urge Diaspora Jews to speak out against the current Israeli government. They don’t mention the territories or religious pluralism. Instead, their trigger is the proposed effort to reform the Supreme Court, which they say will “eviscerate the independence of our judiciary and remake the country’s democratic identity.” Such a move will “threaten Israeli-American relations, and it will do grave damage to our relations with you, our sisters and brothers in the Diaspora,” concluding, “We need your voice to help us preserve Israel as a state both Jewish and democratic.”
All Israel Is Responsible for Each Other
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: Sermon, Jan. 27
Buchdahl, the senior rabbi of New York City’s Reform Central Synagogue, isn’t looking to Israeli writers for permission to weigh in on Israel’s political scene. In a sermon that takes its name from a rabbinic statement of Jewish interdependence, she asserts without question that Jews everywhere have a stake in the future of Israel and have a right to speak up for “civil society and democracy and religious pluralism and human rights” there. She focuses on the religious parties who are convinced that “Reform Jews are ruining Israel,” as you might expect, but ends the sermon with a call to recognize the rights of all Israeli citizens, Jewish and non-Jewish, “and also those living under Israel’s military control.” Of those Palestinians, she says, “We can’t feel comfortable sitting in the light of sovereignty next to a community living in darkness and expect to have peace.”
And like Kurtzer, she worries that concerned American Jews will simply turn away from Israel in despair or embarrassment, and urges congregants to support the Israeli and American organizations that share their pluralistic vision for Israel.
On That Distant Day
Hillel Halkin: Jewish Review of Books, Winter 2023
In his 1977 book “Letters to an American Jewish Friend: A Zionist Polemic,” the translator and author Hillel Halkin made a distinction similar to Kurtzer’s image of Israel as a palace and the Diaspora as passersby: Jews who don’t emigrate to Israel are dooming themselves to irrelevance, while immigrants like him are living on the stage where the Jewish future would play out. His mournful essay doesn’t address the Diaspora, per se, although it creates a permission structure for Zionists abroad to criticize the government. Halkin sees the new government as a coalition of two types of religious zealots: the haredi Orthodox who want to consolidate their control of religious life (and funding) in Israel, and a “knit-skullcap electorate [that] is hypernationalist and Jewish supremacist in its attitude toward Arabs.” (A knit skullcap is a symbol for what an American might call the “Modern Orthodox.”) Together, these growing and powerful constituents represent “the end of an Israeli consensus about what is and is not permissible in a democracy — and once the rules are no longer agreed on, political chaos is not far away. Israel has never been in such a place before.”
Halkin does talk about Israeli expansion in the West Bank, saying he long favored Jewish settlement in the territories, while believing that the “only feasible solution” would be a two-state solution with Arabs living in the Jewish state and Jews living in the Arab one. Instead, Israel has reached a point where there is “too much recrimination, too much distrust, too much hatred, too much blind conviction, too much disdain for the notion of a shared humanity, for such a solution to be possible… We’re over the cliff and falling, and no one knows how far down the ground is.”
Method to Our Madness: A Response to Hillel Halkin
Ze’ev Maghen: Jewish Review of Books, Jan. 10, 2023
Ze’ev Maghen, chair of the department of Middle East studies at Bar-Ilan University, is hardly a dissenter; instead, his response to Halkin helpfully represents the views of those who voted for the current government. Maghen says the new coalition represents a more honest expression of Zionism than those who support a “liberal, democratic, egalitarian, inclusive, individualist, environmentally conscious, economically prosperous, globally connected, etc., etc., society.” The new government he writes, will defend Israel’s “Jewish nationalist raison d’être, and keep at bay those universalist, Western-based notions that are geared by definition to undermine nationalism in all its forms.” As for the Palestinian issue, he writes, “I’d rather have a fierce, hawkish Zionist in the cockpit than a progressive, Westernized wimp for whom this land, and the people who have returned to it after two millennia of incomparable suffering, don’t mean all that much.”
The Tears of Zion
Rabbi Sharon Brous: Sermon, Feb. 4, 2023
Brous, rabbi of the liberal Ikar community in Los Angeles, doesn’t just defend the right of Diaspora Jews to speak out in defense of Israeli democracy and Palestinian rights, but castigates Jewish leaders and communities who have been reluctant to criticize Israel in the past. “No, this government is not an electoral accident, and it is not an anomaly,” she says. “This moment of extremism has been a long time in the making and our silence has made us complicit.”
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El-Sayed’s Senate election has divided Michigan Jews. What will bring them together?
(JTA) — DETROIT – The “Jews For Abdul” in the room at the Michigan Democratic Party’s election night watch party were beaming as vote tallies rolled in, pushing Abdul El-Sayed closer to his eventual victory in Michigan’s U.S. Senate race.
“It’s actually hard to put into words what this night, and this moment, means to our movement,” Eli Newell, the Midwest field organizer for left-wing Jewish group IfNotNow, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency shortly before El-Sayed’s victory speech.
Newell added, “We see our agenda of shared safety, equality, justice and a brighter future for all represented in Abdul’s candidacy.”
IfNotNow had mobilized heavily for El-Sayed, bringing a sizable Jewish cohort in from out of state to canvass in Jewish neighborhoods. Newell himself lives in Chicago.
But he and many of the other Jews at the watch party — who almost exclusively tacked left, particularly on Israel — offered a markedly different outlook from the state’s more traditionally pro-Israel Jewish institutions.
Many of the leaders from the latter camp had publicly mobilized against El-Sayed to various degrees during the campaign, objecting not just to his hard-line criticism of Israel, but also to his initial reaction to the state’s Temple Israel attack and his associations with Hasan Piker, the far-left streamer. For those Jews, the candidate’s victory was a more challenging story.
“Personally, I’m not sure I’m on his most favored list,” Rabbi Asher Lopatin, community relations director at the Jewish Federation of Greater Ann Arbor, told JTA the day after El-Sayed’s win.
Shortly after El-Sayed won the Democratic primary, Lopatin took a brief leave of absence from his job to campaign with the Republican nominee, former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers. He was one of the first Jewish figures in the state to do so publicly.
The week before the election, he also appeared at a Republican Jewish Coalition event boosting Rogers, where he and another rabbi in attendance received shout-outs from the stage.
Now Lopatin and other Michigan Jewish leaders who similarly backed Rogers face a new question: How can they build relationships with a senator they have gone on record as opposing on deeply personal grounds?
“I’m not taking anything back. But I think we have to work with what we have,” Lopatin said. “We have to build relationships with him. We have to build relationships with his supporters.”
Broadening the Jewish tent to include El-Sayed supporters was also on the mind of Decky Alexander, who chairs the Michigan Jewish Democratic Caucus. The caucus had refrained from endorsing the senator-elect during the campaign, and several members of its leadership had openly pledged to vote for Rogers.
Into that void, progressive Jews in the state organized Michigan Jews for Democracy, a grassroots movement to offer an alternative Jewish voice backing El-Sayed.
Now, Alexander said things were shifting. “We need to make sure that we are inclusive in our caucus,” she told JTA, naming Michigan Jews For Democracy as well as Bend the Arc, a progressive Jewish group that had endorsed El-Sayed, as potential new partners she’d like to work with. “I think we need to have those voices at the table.”
The senator-elect’s campaign, on Thursday, pointed to a progressive PAC analysis of voting by ZIP code to argue that El-Sayed had “virtually matched” the 2024 Jewish vote for Michigan’s Jewish senior senator, Democrat Elissa Slotkin. The PAC, Millions of Michiganians, claimed that El-Sayed lost only 1.3% of votes across 72 heavily Jewish precincts that had gone to Slotkin.
Yet uniting such disparate Jewish voices could be easier said than done. In one reliably Democratic, heavily Jewish Detroit suburb in the days leading up to the election, homes could be seen repurposing their old “Haley Stevens for U.S. Senate” yard signs after the pro-Israel congresswoman endorsed Rogers in the race’s final days. El-Sayed beat Stevens in the Democratic primary in August.
Those yard signs went back up after Stevens’ endorsement and were still up after El-Sayed’s victory on Tuesday. Some had new handwritten additions addressed to Stevens: “Proud of you! Stand tall!!”
Prior to Election Day, more than 560 Jews in the state had signed a petition, titled “Michigan Jews Against Extremism,” that pledged to vote for Rogers explicitly because of concerns over El-Sayed’s rhetoric.
While ultimately numbering slightly more than half of the total Jews to sign the open letter supporting El-Sayed, the signatories were influential. They included the president of Detroit’s Jewish federation; the head of the local flagship Holocaust center; and Mark Davidoff, who heads the Michigan-Israel Business Accelerator.
Post-election, Davidoff told JTA that his pro-Israel business group “is prepared to work with all newly elected and returning leaders across Michigan.”
A representative for the “Against Extremism” letter, Kalamazoo-based Troy Zukowski-Serlin, told JTA after the fact that the letter may have been too strongly worded.
“You could just as easily point a finger at the Mike Rogers campaign, with extremism,” Zukowski-Serlin, who had been listed as a Michigan Jewish Democratic Caucus board member until he declared his intent to vote for Rogers, reflected. “That probably got the group off to a bad start.”
Even as the Rogers campaign had courted Jews, it also employed messaging many outside observers pegged as Islamophobic. Some of El-Sayed’s campaign surrogates who liaised with the Jewish community, including Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, also pointed to Rogers’ associations with Christian nationalist donors.
Today, Zukowski-Serlin said, “I can understand why somebody would vote for El-Sayed.” His own daughter did, for one — and they were far from the only Jewish household in the state to have split their votes.
Echoing a line El-Sayed himself often employed when addressing Jews on the campaign trail, he suggested that, apart from Israel, they were likely aligned on most policy positions.
“There’s plenty of other issues that I think we can find common ground on,” he said. “I think we can get along.”
Other Jewish groups in the state didn’t mince words, even after the race was called and some early-voting exit polls suggested that a majority of Jews in the state may have voted for El-Sayed despite any reservations.
Michigan’s chapter of the Anti-Defamation League was among those to signal what it called “serious concerns” with El-Sayed’s “history of minimizing the fears of the Jewish community and demonizing Israel.”
The ADL’s statement included an olive branch of sorts.
“As we move forward, Senator-elect El-Sayed has an opportunity and a responsibility to demonstrate that he will hear Jewish Michiganders, reject efforts to blame or marginalize them because of their connection to Israel and confront antisemitism with the moral clarity this moment requires,” the organization noted.
Detroit’s chapter of the American Jewish Committee raised similar flags. While recognizing what it called the “historic significance” of El-Sayed becoming the first Muslim elected to the Senate, the AJC statement continued, “Unfortunately this historic moment has been tarnished by the Senator-elect’s continued anti-Israel rhetoric that alienates countless Jewish Michiganders and other supporters of the State of Israel, and endangers American Jews.”
Detroit’s Jewish federation, meanwhile, congratulated “all those elected to federal, state, and local office in Michigan” and offered a veiled plea for restraint without naming the senator-elect.
“Together, we look to those elected to act with wisdom, lead with compassion, and uphold the civic and social values that ensure the safety and inclusion of our community and of all Americans,” the nonpartisan organization’s communal relations arm said in a statement.
Gary Torgow, the Michigan-based chair of the Jewish Federations of North America, told Rogers during the campaign, “We need you to get elected.” On Thursday, Torgow released a post-election statement calling on the local Jewish community to “move forward with optimism, dignity, and pride in who we are.”
Now the work of mending fences begins — not just between El-Sayed and Jewish leaders, but between Michigan’s Jews themselves. Across the state, rabbis offered reassuring messages to their communities, and some were eager to put the divisiveness of the campaign season behind them.
“I think the election divided the Jewish community,” Lopatin said. “I’m excited to get back to uniting them.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Three lessons for American Jews from the failed GOP attacks on the trans community
There are many reasons for the majority of American Jews — proudly American, politically liberal or centrist, supportive of Israel but opposed to nationalist extremism — to celebrate this week’s election, or at least heave a sigh of relief.
But I want to focus on what might seem to be an unusual aspect of this historic moment: the failure of Republican attacks on transgender people. If you live in a deep blue state, you might not have noticed these attacks at all, but if you live in a battleground state, you were likely inundated by them: relentless television ads, millions of phony “Trans & LGBTQ+ Student Resource Guides” mailed to Texas voters from a fake organization, and puerile, false claims about Senator-elect James Talarico.
And what did the Republicans get from this multi-hundred-million-dollar campaign of misinformation?
Bupkis.
Now, this was an unusual election. It’s possible that nothing would have made a difference, given the terrible economy, the pointless Iran war, and the unprecedented corruption of Donald Trump. These were, polls tell us, the core issues motivating mainstream American voters, and they voted, as the saying goes, to throw the bastards out. As The New York Times reported, Republicans vastly outspent Democrats in every competitive Senate race, but still lost nearly all of them. So maybe, in a closer election, the anti-trans attacks might have worked.
But they didn’t, and as I see it, the failure of this massive campaign offers three encouraging lessons for the Jewish community.
First, anyone who knows Jewish history should be grateful for the failure of a vicious attempt to vilify and scapegoat a small, vulnerable minority. Obviously, Jewish people are often that minority — and we were again this year, targeted by both the Far Right and Far Left. Anti-trans activists lied relentlessly about science, Democratic policies, trans people’s lives, sports (and the alleged advantages trans women possess, which have been disproven countless times), and most devastatingly, about the nature of transgender care, which never involves surgery on minors.
All of this was harrowing for me to watch, especially as someone with several trans friends whose lives were being so brutally misrepresented — and directly impacted by rollbacks in healthcare access (including by hospital chains who caved to blackmail by the Trump administration). And as a scholar of Jewish history and theology, and as a queer person myself, it also felt eerily, darkly familiar. Perhaps it’s a cliché to say that when one group is attacked, we are all attacked, but in this case, I felt it viscerally. I am relieved it didn’t work.
Second, despite all the rhetoric and rage-baiting, fundamentally there is a core congruence between what LGBTQ advocates say and what ordinary Americans, including Jewish ones, believe: not the finer points of gender identity, but “live and let live.” Most Americans still do not understand transgender as a phenomenon (yet), and they still have significant concerns, particularly about kids (and sports). But Democrats have finally learned how to talk about this issue, and it’s by appealing to common sense, American values, and even ‘Judeo-Christian’ teachings like loving your neighbor.
For example, Senator-elect Dr. Abdul El-Sayed did a great job framing the issue as about private medical decisions that should be left between families and their doctors. Comedian and influencer Suzanne Lambert framed the issue around love and respect, even when we don’t understand ‘the other.’ James Talarico made light of his opponent’s pathetic attempts to impugn his masculinity, while also refusing to throw trans people under the bus.
No Democrat ran on trans rights as a signature issue. But the best Democrats didn’t run away from it either.
Which brings me to my third point: Moderate Americans can agree to disagree, and still unite on core concerns. The middle 40% of America is not made up of culture warriors or Christian Nationalists. And it seems (I would love to see exit polling data on this) that they saw the endless ads and attacks for what they were: an attempt to distract from the core issues. Despite Elon Musk’s massive investments in hysteria — perhaps motivated by his inability to accept his own trans daughter — most centrist Americans are more focused on stuff that actually impacts them. It’s not that they agree with, or even understand, transgender issues. It’s that they don’t need to agree on everything in order to vote for a political candidate.
The same is true, of course, for issues bitterly dividing the American Jewish community today. Both right and left seem to have adopted the worst aspects of so-called “cancel culture,” in which any deviation from ideological purity on a single issue is grounds for exclusion. Thus we have seen progressives like Scott Wiener be bullied by the Far Left and critical-of-Israel politicians like El-Sayed demonized by the Center and Right.
In the High-Intensity-Jewish bubble, it can seem as though Israel, Palestine, and the relationship between Anti-Zionism and antisemitism is all-consuming. I’ve felt that way myself. But outside the bubble, in fact most American Jews understand that there are more important issues. 62% of Jewish Michiganders voted for El-Sayed, for example. And in exit polls conducted over the last several elections, American Jews have not ranked Israel among their top concerns (we don’t yet know if that was true this year), despite what they hear from lobbyists and mainstream organizations.
Indeed, many leaders, particularly in the New York metro area, have alienated their own communities by insisting that some views are “beyond the pale,” or that Jews are physically unsafe, or that contact with this or that media figure renders one untouchable, as if a podcast interview is a contagious disease like the Biblical tzaraat.
Successful politics doesn’t work that way. As the cliches go, politics is the art of the possible, and it makes for strange bedfellows. We don’t agree on every issue with everyone we vote for, or are interviewed by. That is how we win — and, in this case, rescue the democracy that has made the American dream possible for generations of Jews.
I’m not suggesting that everything is now rosy for trans people in America. That is far from the case. Even as the nationwide anti-trans attacks failed, state level initiatives passed that seriously harm trans populations. Trans activists are regarded by our own government as domestic terrorists. And misinformation continues to run rampant. The work remains ahead to re-introduce actual trans people, lives, medicine, and science to middle America. And that will take a long time.
But that’s the long-term work. In the short term, elections are about making compromises, and I’m encouraged that this attempt to scapegoat a tiny and vulnerable minority, which happens to include several friends of mine, ended in failure. There is much that we in the Jewish community can learn from it.
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Liberal Jews hail wave of Democratic victories a day after the election
(JTA) — While liberal Jewish Americans reveled in a blue wave of victories after Tuesday’s pivotal midterm elections, centrist and conservative voices issued words of caution about the increasing fragility of the country’s relationship with Israel.
The pro-Israel liberal group J Street hailed the results as a “resounding victory for new politics on Israel and Palestine,” celebrating that 98% of J Street-backed candidates were projected to win their races.
“We are proud to have supported a record number of candidates who share our commitment to Israel’s future, democracy and a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of J Street, said in a statement that lists all the successful politicians that had the lobby’s support.
Voters, he argued, rejected the president’s policies and “made clear they want a different direction for America and a different approach in the Middle East.” He pointed to the losses of Republican stalwarts Susan Collins in Maine and Mike Lawler in New York, calling them “prominent champions of the old approach to Israel politics.”
The day before, J Street had said it “ran the largest super PAC investment in organizational history,” raising $10 million for more than 200 candidates. The lobby warned, however, that “AIPAC and its supporters will continue to influence American foreign policy, finding creative ways to override the will of voters with dark money.” AIPAC didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Halie Soifer, CEO of the liberal Jewish Democratic Council of America, likewise lauded the Democratic victories as a referendum on Trump, quipping that the president asked voters to “pretend he was on the ballot in the midterms, and Jewish Americans did just that.”
“Jewish voters are not a monolith, but they widely disapprove of Donald Trump,” she said in a statement, describing the administration’s agenda as “antithetical to core Jewish values.”
Soifer added, “Jewish Americans want leaders who will lower costs, defend our freedoms, stand against antisemitism, support Israel’s security, and hold the Trump administration accountable for its corruption, cruelty, and lawlessness.”
This cycle was JDCA’s largest-ever midterm Jewish voter engagement, involving a seven-figure investment in vast mobilization efforts, the group said in a statement.
JDCA noted that its political action committee ran many targeted ads, including in Ohio and Texas, where Democratic Senate candidates Sherrod Brown and James Talarico defeated their Republican rivals. The group also said its PAC funded ads for successful House candidates Cait Collins in New York, Piya Dandiya and Jared Moskowitz in Florida and Christina Hines in Michigan.
But not all Jewish Democrats were thrilled by the outcome.
Jeff Robbins, a Boston-based attorney and former Democratic Senate staffer, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, said the “obvious” bad news coming out of the election was the normalization of “a vitriolic, occasionally untethered, and all too often fact-less attack on Israel and its bona fides.”
A registered Democrat, Robins said, “it’s painful to hear the enemies of Israel celebrating as they have today, and claiming that this is their referendum on Israel.”
Robbins said that such habituation was already clear in last year’s election of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, an outspoken critic of Israel. This cycle’s shift, he added, was apparent in the success of Abdul El-Sayed in his Michigan Senate race and the primary loss of Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman to former city comptroller Brad Lander.
Robbins also expressed concern about “the push among anybody wanting a career in the Democratic Party” to distance themselves from Israel, which in many cases amounts to antisemitism, he said.
He particularly called out the House wins of Christopher Rabb in Philadelphia, Claire Valdez and Darializa Chevalier in New York City, Melat Kiros in Denver and Troy Jackson in Maine. Jackson, Robbins added, ended up repeating anti-Israel diatribes that have become popular among many members of the progressive left.
“The fact that he defeats somebody who was a stalwart and very knowledgeable friend of Israel, Susan Collins, is more bad news,” he said.
Robbins stressed that the Jewish community must take the results as a “warning sign” and stop assuming that “raising money and honoring people and dinners” is sufficient, without “making the case in the public square.” Members of the pro-Israel Jewish community cannot “just assume that people will realize that, of course, the victims of a genocidal attack are not the perpetrators of a genocide,” he added.
At the same time, Robbins, who also served in the United Nations Commission on Human Rights under former president Bill Clinton, pointed to other results he was happy with. “The good news is that the Democrats elected a number of people who are moderate and therefore sensible when it comes to the realities of the Middle East, and those people’s voices in Congress may be a blessing.”
He acknowledged that the voices of these moderates who support Israel could be consequential in the Democratic caucuses in both the House and the Senate.
Jonathan Greenberg, director for combatting antisemitism at Defending Education and a former AIPAC staffer, called the election as “a disastrous night for the Republican Party.”
“I really don’t think there’s any way for a conservative to look at what happened last night and say that there’s a silver lining,” added Greenberg, who ran for state office in Illinois as a Republican in 2012 but now is unaffiliated.
He called upon Republicans to seize the opportunity to rebuild a stronger foundation, after “years of bad rhetoric and a cycle full of bad candidates.” He slammed Democrats for failing “to police their own side,” while also recognizing that some moderate Israel supporters were successful in this election.
“If the the more blue dog-type Democrats who got elected last night are willing to stand up to the crazies in their party and say, ‘This isn’t us, and you’re not welcome to say things like that in our party,’ then, yeah, that would be great,” he said.
Greenberg credited Rep. Jared Moskowitz, a Florida Democrat, for his outspokenness on this issue, while stressing that “he can’t be the only one.” In Moskowitz’s primary race, he was a staunch defender of Israel against progressive challenger Oliver Larkin.
“You have to have a critical mass of passionate people – the ascendant far left has that right now,” Greenberg added. “If the center doesn’t organize itself and forcefully push back, then they’ll lose.”
For Robbins, this tumultuous period for American Jews has been a long time in the making and is hardly a surprise. He said he has warned Israelis for the past 10 to 15 years about an anti-Zionist shift in the Democratic Party, but he has repeatedly received the response, “Hakol b’seder,” the Hebrew phrase for “everything is OK.”
“I would say, ‘No, kol is not b’seder,’” Robbins concluded.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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