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What American Jews fight about when they fight about Israel
(JTA) — Eric Alterman, born in 1960, says the view of Israel he absorbed growing up in a Jewish family in suburban Scarsdale, New York, was decidedly one-sided.
“I went on this nerdy presidential classroom thing when I was in high school,” he recalls, “and some Christian kid from the South raised his hand and said to the rabbi, ‘I don’t get it, if the Jews could have a state, why can’t the Palestinians?’ And I was like, ‘How dare you?’”
Alterman would go on to attend Cornell University, where he wrote his honors thesis on Israel, Vietnam and neoconservatism; spend a semester abroad at Tel Aviv University; study Israeli military history while earning his master’s degree in international relations at Yale, and research a dissertation on American liberalism and the founding of Israel as a doctoral student at Stanford.
Although he frequently writes about Israel as a contributing writer at the Nation and the American Prospect, Alterman is best known for his liberal analysis of the media and U.S. politics. He’s written 11 previous books, including one on Bruce Springsteen.
Yet he never stopped thinking about the widening gap between the idealized Israel of his youth and the reality of its relations with the Palestinians, its Arab neighbors and the West. Even when Israel’s revisionist historians were uncovering evidence of massacres and forced expulsions of Palestinians during the War of Independence, and Israeli politicians and intellectuals began asking why, indeed, the Palestinians didn’t deserve a state of their own, he saw that such discussions were considered blasphemous in most American Jewish circles.
Alterman, now a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College, explores that gap in his latest book, “We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel.” The book surveys U.S.-Israel relations, but with a focus on the ways defending Israel have shaped public discourse. It’s a book about arguments: within the administrations of 14 presidents, between Washington and Jerusalem, and mostly among Jews themselves.
Earlier this month we spoke about how the pro-Isael lobby became a powerful political force, the Jewish organizations and pundits who fight to limit the range of debate over Israel, and what he thinks is the high price American Jews have paid for tying their identities so closely to Israel.
“I try to take on shibboleths that in the past have shut down conversation and take them apart and sympathetically show the complexity of the actual situation that lies beneath — so that [criticism and disagreement] over Israel can be understood rather than whisked away by changing the subject, or what-aboutism, or by demonizing the person who is raising them,” said Alterman.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Let me start by congratulating you: It’s the first book about U.S.-Israel relations with a chapter named after a Bruce Springsteen album: “Working on a Dream.”
Eric Alterman: Nobody else has caught that. But it’s not about U.S.-Israel relations. It’s the first book about the debate over Israel in the United States. There’s a million books on U.S.-Israel relations.
So let’s define that more narrowly. The title reminds me of the United Jewish Appeal slogan over the years, “We Are One,” which was about American Jewish solidarity. So who is the “we” in your title, “We Are Not One”?
There are three or four different meanings. The “we” in this book are obviously the United States and Israel. An awful lot of people argue that the United States and Israel have identical interests in the world and that’s crazy, because Israel is this tiny little country in the Middle East and we’re a global superpower thousands of miles away. So obviously, we’re going to have differences. Number two, American Jews and Israeli Jews are very different people. They have very different life experiences. And they see things quite differently as evidenced by the political split between them. The title also refers specifically just to Americans, because we can’t even discuss most things anymore. The pro-Israel community, such as it ever was, is enormously split and it’s split in angry ways.
Much of your book is about what happens to American Jews when the idealized portrait of Israel’s founding and its presumed blamelessness in its actions toward the Palestinians comes up against reality. In that context, tell me a little about your choice to devote a chapter to the Leon Uris novel “Exodus,” an extremely sanitized version of Israel’s founding, and the 1960 movie based on it.
The influence of “Exodus” is something I didn’t understand until I wrote the book. It’s crazy, because Leon Uris was this egomaniac who wrote kind of a shitty book and said that he wanted to add a new chapter to the Bible, and he kind of succeeded. I was born in 1960. When I was growing up in suburban New York, every single family had “Exodus” on their shelves. When the movie came out Israelis understood this. They said, “We can just shut down our public relations office now.” And from the standpoint of reality the movie is worse than the book because it has Nazis — the Arabs in the book are working with Nazism. Uris didn’t have the nerve to do that. So the book created this idealized Israel and this idea of [Palestinians as] evil, subhuman Nazis.
What most Americans don’t understand, or choose not to understand, is that before the 1940s most Jews were anti-Zionist, or non-Zionist. This changed in the 1940s, when, as a result in part of the Holocaust, and the reaction to that, and the triumph of Zionists, they became intensely pro-Zionist, leading up to the creation of Israel. But after that, they kind of forgot about Israel. One might have given their children JNF boxes to carry on Halloween instead of UNICEF boxes, or maybe they paid to plant trees. But Israel doesn’t show up in the American Jewish Committee’s 1966 annual report until page 35 or 36, and Nathan Glazer’s 1957 book “American Judaism” says that the creation of the Jewish state has had “remarkably slight effects on the inner life of American Jewry.”
With the events of 1967, Uris’ idealized notion of Israel came together with this terrible fear of a second Holocaust, and the terror and shame and frightening nature of that combined to transform American Judaism overnight to an enormous degree.
You are referring to Israel’s lightning victory in the Six-Day War, which even non-religious Jews saw as a kind of miracle, and redemption two decades after the Holocaust. And that transformation, you argue, put defense of Israel, combined with Holocaust consciousness, at the center of Jewish identity.
More than just the center: It basically comprised almost all of it, for many secular Jews. I quote the neoconservative Irving Kristol in the book saying in 1976 that “the Holocaust and the founding of the state of Israel” was 100% of what Judaism means.
Which in turn led to a the tremendous pro-Israel lobbying efforts, political activism and punditry.
The budgets of American Jewish organizations overnight went from social services and liberal social justice causes to defense of Israel. And rabbis were replaced at the center of public discourse by the heads of these organizations — most of whom had no religious training or knowledge of history or Judaism.
Joe Biden, then vice president, speaks at the AIPAC 2016 Policy Conference in Washington, DC, March 20, 2016.
(Molly Riley/AFP via Getty Images)
One distinction you repeatedly make is between what most Jews believe compared to the Jewish organizations that claim to represent them. Surveys show the rank and file is consistently more liberal on Israel and less hawkish than the big organizations — a gap that showed up markedly around the Iraq War and the Iran nuclear deal.
Right. The big mistake that so many in the media make is that they go to the heads of these organizations who pretend to speak for American Jews when they don’t speak for American Jews. They speak for their boards and their donors.
The shift to Jewish lobbying on behalf of Israel coincides with an era in which there is seldom daylight between what Israel wants and what the United States wants or agrees to — often to the frustration of presidents. You are critical of those who exaggerate the pro-Israel lobby’s influence — folks like Stephen Walt and John J. Mearsheimer, authors of the 2007 book “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” — but, at the same time, you write, referring to the Israel debate in America, about “the continued stranglehold that money, power, organizational structure, and clearly defined paths to personal career advancement continue to hold over the shape of foreign policy.” How will you respond to critics who will say your book is trafficking in the myth of Jewish power and its conspiracy-minded hold over American policy?
The short answer is, that’s why I wrote a 500-page book — basically, for two reasons: One, everything is incredibly complicated. And some of those complications are consistent with antisemitic myths, and therefore they have to be teased out and broken down in such a way that you’re telling the truth rather than portraying the myth.
If you say things without context, they sound antisemitic. I say that yes, Jews are very powerful in the media and many use that power on or about Israel. But I think if you lay out the examples that I use, if you look at them and examine them, I don’t see how you can conclude otherwise. The people I describe often say that about themselves — how much power and influence they yield.
Secondly, I’ve always found it just about impossible to discuss Israel with anyone, because you have to share exactly the same assumptions with that person. And if you don’t, then they take it personally, or you’re an antisemite, or, at best, you’re insufficiently sensitive to how important antisemitism is. And if you describe ways in which American Jews act in ways that are consistent with antisemitic myth, it has a way of shutting down the conversation.
Undoubtedly there’s some criticism of Israel that is motivated by antisemitism, but there’s an awful lot of reasons to be critical of Israel, particularly if you are a Palestinian or care about Palestinians. This accusation [antisemitism] has shut down the discourse and part of my hopes in demonstrating the complexities of this history is to open this up.
So let me ask about your own stake in this. Your educational background and relationship to Israel are similar in many ways to the writers and thinkers in your book who tolerate no criticism of Israel. I don’t know if you call yourself a Zionist, but you have some connection to Israel, and you’re also willing to tolerate critiques of Israel. What’s the difference between you and some of the other people who went on the same journey?
For the longest time I was comfortable with the words “liberal Zionist,” but I don’t think they have any meaning anymore. I don’t think it’s possible to be a liberal Zionist — you have to choose. Israel is the only putatively democratic country that prefers Trump to either Obama or Biden, and it’s not even close. And young Israelis are moving further in that direction and young American Jews are moving further in the opposite direction.
So you ask me if I am a liberal Zionist. I don’t think the word “Zionist” is useful at all anymore, because Israel is a country and it’s not going anywhere. I sometimes call myself an anti-anti-Zionist, because anti-Zionism is dumb. I’m very anti-BDS. If I thought [the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement] could end occupation, I would support it, even though the idea of boycotting Jews puts a bad taste in my mouth. But the theory behind BDS apparently, and I’ve spent a lot of time on this, is that the world will force Israel to give up its identity and turn the country over to its enemies. It’s inconceivable that Israel would do that and inconceivable the United States would pressure them to do that. So BDS is entirely performative. It’s more of a political fashion statement than anything else.
And to me, it speaks to the failure of Palestinian politics throughout history. I have a great deal of sympathy for the Palestinians and their bad politics because it’s based on two problems. One is that they have never been able to see the future very well. So they should have agreed in 1921 and 1937, or whenever they would have had the majority and they were being given a country by the British. They should have taken the lousy offer from Ehud Barak and Bill Clinton in 2000. I kind of get it because they have so many competing constituencies, and it’s impossible to satisfy all of them at the same time. I understand that. It’s hard to imagine a Palestinian politician who could say yes, and if you look at Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, in both cases, it’s hard to imagine making peace with them.
I read that in your book, and my first thought was, well, isn’t that basically just confirming what the pro-Israel right has always said — that Israel has no partner for peace? So maybe the best it can do is maintain a status quo that assures some security for Israel and a workable something for the Palestinians.
Well, number one I hold Israel significantly responsible for the conditions under which that has developed and that they can change those. And number two, that’s no excuse for the way Palestinians are treated, either in the occupation or in Israel. So yes, I agree. There’s no one to make peace with today, but there are many steps Israel could take that could vastly improve the lives of the Palestinians, both in the occupied territories and inside Israel. And there are a lot of steps they could take that could build confidence for a future that could weaken Hamas, that could strengthen the Palestinian Authority, so that one day peace would be possible. But they do the opposite.
An Israel supporter at a New York rally to tell the United Nations “no more anti-Israel documents or resolutions,” Jan. 12, 2017. (Don Emmert/AFP via Getty Images)
You talk about funding of Israel studies and Jewish studies departments as a reaction against fears of a pro-Palestinian takeover of academia. At the same time, you write how Palestinian supporters “succeeded in colonizing Middle East studies departments, student faculty organizations, and far-left political organizations.” Why does that matter in the long run if, as you also write, nothing’s really going to change American policy on Israel?
I gave a talk before the book came out at Tel Aviv University and someone asked me that question. I said, You care about these transformations for two reasons. One, you really will be all alone in the world. You’ll have the support of conservative [Evangelical] Christians who are in many respects antisemitic and are using you for their own purposes. So if you lose American Jews, you will be existentially alone in a way you’re not now and that strikes me as very unpleasant.
I do think that the quote-unquote pro-Israel community has a stranglehold on American politics that I can’t see changing anytime soon, and I think the change in the Democratic Party [that it will turn more pro-Palestinian] is very much exaggerated by both sides for their own reasons.
That being said, the people who are being trained now to be in the State Department and the National Security Council and the Defense Department and the think tanks and the places where the intellectual foundation of U.S. policy is made are learning something very different from what you and I learned in college. Right now, there’s no such thing as an influential Palestinian lobby in this country. There’s no pushing back. There’s no percentage for anyone opposing Israel who has a career interest in the future. That will change, and the whole shaping of the discourse will change and that will change the relationship between the United States and Israel. It’s not going to happen anytime soon, but it’s definitely going to happen.
As Jews in this country have remained largely liberal, Israel appears to be getting more illiberal, as we’ve seen with a new government that is more right-wing than any previously. And Israel has become more of a divisive element among Jews than a unifying force. As this gap appears to be widening, do you have any real hope for changing the discourse?
No, I don’t have any hopes for that. I don’t have anything optimistic to say about Israel. I think, politically speaking, from the standpoint of American Jews, everything is going in the wrong direction. But by demonstrating just how different Israeli Jews are than American Jews, and how little Israeli Jews care what American Jews think, I do think that it presents an opportunity for American Jews to think about what it means to be an American Jew in the Diaspora. Roughly half of the Jews in the world live in the United States. And since 1967 American Jews have defined themselves vicariously through Israeli Jews and taking pride in Israel. They expressed their identities by defending Israel and attacking the media when the media didn’t defend Israel.
Meanwhile, American Jews hardly ever go to synagogue. According to Pew, 20% of American Jews regularly attend synagogue and half of them are Orthodox, who are 10% of the community. What brought me back into Judaism was studying Torah. And hardly any American Jews are ever exposed to that.
So I think there’s an opportunity to reimagine Diaspora Jewry now that the Israel story doesn’t work, and it’s clear that it doesn’t work. Young American Jews are leaving or voting with their feet. They’re walking away. Israel-centric Judaism is in part responsible, although it’s not the whole story. Intermarriage is a big part of the story. The de-religionization of all groups is part of the story. But personally, I don’t see what a liberal American Jew would see in a Judaism that defines itself as it has for the past 50 years as defending Israel and remembering the Holocaust.
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U.S. ambassador calls settlers who sieged Palestinian homes in Qusra ‘terrorists’
(JTA) — TEL AVIV – The West Bank settlement movement’s leadership joined with one of its most prominent defenders, U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee, in condemning an Israeli settler outpost set up in a Palestinian family’s yard.
Huckabee’s remarks are a signal of the degree to which a group of radicals is rattling Israeli politics and the U.S.-Israel relationship.
Israelis affiliated with the West Bank’s Tel Talpiot outpost, which is illegal under Israeli law, set up temporary structures at the entrances to Palestinian homes on the outskirts of the village of Qusra on Sunday.
Earlier this week, cables connecting the homes to the electricity grid and to solar panels were cut, and water pipes were damaged, leaving the Palestinian families unable to leave or bring in food. Israeli activists in the area who monitor settler attacks on Palestinians confirmed the account to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Huckabee wrote on X on Thursday that Israeli forces had gone to Qusra at the U.S. Embassy’s request and described the people who set up the outpost as “Israeli terrorists.” He posted that “the IDF & Israel Police have gone at our request to remove the Israeli terrorists doing this.”
The language was a departure for the ambassador, who told Israel’s Channel 14 last September that the United States “respects Israel as a sovereign state and will not tell Israel what to do” regarding sovereignty in the West Bank. Huckabee has also consistently described the territory by its biblical names Judea and Samaria. He routinely takes to social media to dismantle what he says are lies depicting Israelis as unfairly treating Palestinians.
He has condemned settler violence before, but has rarely done so in language as blunt as what he used on Thursday. In July 2025, he visited the Christian village of Taybeh in the West Bank after an arson attack at its fifth-century church and called it an “act of terror and crime.”
The actions of Israeli settler extremists have been a major concern to Democrats in the U.S. Congress in recent months, adding fodder to their calls to condition aid to Israel on its behavior. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insists the reports are overblown, and that Palestinian violence is much more serious. President Donald Trump, who has often supported Netanyahu, has called on the prime minister to crack down on the violence, seeing it as an impediment to his hopes for a broader Middle East peace. Huckabee’s intervention suggests that the Trump administration is increasingly concerned about ending the violence.
Yisrael Ganz, who chairs the Yesha Council and governs the Binyamin Regional Council, condemned the outpost.
“The events in Qusra are serious and do not reflect our values or our way of conducting ourselves,” Ganz said. “There is no place for individuals to take matters into their own hands and establish an outpost in someone’s backyard, even when dealing with an illegal home or an attempt to seize control of the land. There is no justification whatsoever for violence against uninvolved civilians or security forces.”
He added that some were “exploiting these events as part of a campaign against the Jewish communities,” but that this “must not obscure the simple truth: What happened in Qusra was wrong and is unacceptable to us.”
Huckabee amplified Ganz’s statement later on Thursday, writing on X, “’Settlers’ are not the problem in Judea/Samaria. ‘Unsettlers’ are,” he wrote, describing them as “very small minority who do great damage to Palestinian families & to Israel.”
The village is located in Area B, territory that is under the civil jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority and security control of the Israeli military and where Israeli settlement is not permitted. The Israel Defense Forces called such takeovers illegal and reprehensible on Tuesday. Overnight Wednesday, Israeli security forces said they demolished the structures at Qusra and detained one Israeli.
Marmar Odeh, a village representative, told JTA that the Israeli military remained inside Qusra, and footage circulating on social media showed Israeli soldiers stationed inside the homes of evacuated residents.
“I won’t be going anywhere. I am staying in my house and on my land,” Odeh said. “I may not be scared, but the children are all the time.”
In a voice memo recorded on August 12 and obtained by JTA, Aisha Abu Rida, a Qusra resident, spoke from inside one of the besieged homes.
“We are surrounded by settlers, but we are steadfast,” she said. “Despite the water and electricity being cut off, we will remain steadfast … and stay in our homes.”
By Thursday, the structures were gone, but settlers remained on the hillsides above the homes, Odeh said, an account supported by footage he provided to JTA. Soldiers had left most of the homes they had entered, residents said Friday, but were informed the military operation could last until Sunday.
One of the affected homes belongs to Loui Ridi, a Toledo, Ohio, business owner who was born in Qusra and has followed the standoff through security cameras installed at the property. JTA attempted to reach Ridi through several channels and was unsuccessful.
Asked whether the State Department shared Huckabee’s characterization and whether the Embassy had requested the Israeli operation, a State Department spokesperson did not directly reply. “We are in regular dialogue with partners about improving stability and security in the West Bank,” the spokesperson said. “We condemn criminal violence by any party in the West Bank. A stable West Bank keeps Israel secure and is in line with this administration’s goal to achieve peace in the region.”
In a statement to JTA, the Israeli military said soldiers had been deployed in Qusra since Thursday morning “to protect the residents and maintain security in the area” and that they had been instructed that “the Qusra residents will remain in their homes.”
It added that troops would not operate inside the Palestinian family’s home near the site “where the tent that was evacuated and dismantled had been erected” and said Civil Administration liaison officers were in contact with Qusra’s local leadership and “working to avoid disruption to the daily lives of the residents in the area.”
Footage circulating earlier in the week appeared to show Israeli soldiers praying alongside the settlers at the outpost. The military said that the incident is under review and that soldiers found to have taken part in illegal activity would be disciplined.
The designation of Area B is the source of the ambiguity, according to Hanan Greenwood, head of the spokesperson and public diplomacy unit at the Binyamin Regional Council.
The council’s jurisdiction covers the settlements themselves, Greenwood said, not Area B land, meaning Qusra sits inside the council’s footprint but outside its authority. Its residents fall under Palestinian Authority civil jurisdiction and pay the council no arnona, the Israeli municipal tax.
“Geographically, Qusra is very much in our area,” Greenwood said. “But in real life, it’s not that we could go there, and it’s not that the residents of Qusra pay us.”
He described the result as a governance vacuum. “It’s ours, it isn’t ours,” he said. “It’s a whole mess, and the reason is that there’s no sovereignty.”
Israeli rights groups reject that framing, arguing that the military has the authority to remove outposts and does not use it.
The Israeli rights group B’Tselem said the events reflect a broader pattern.
“What is happening in Qusra is not an isolated incident,” said Yuli Novak, the organization’s executive director. “Settler militias, backed by the Israeli military, are expanding their attacks into Palestinian villages and towns, seizing land, attacking homes and forcing families out. Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the West Bank is accelerating and expanding in plain sight.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post U.S. ambassador calls settlers who sieged Palestinian homes in Qusra ‘terrorists’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Some young Jews are pulling back from Jewish life over Israel discourse, study finds
(JTA) — Nearly four in 10 Jewish young adults say events affecting Jews in recent years have led them to pull back from Jewish spaces or become more selective about where they participate, with disagreements over how Israel and the Palestinians are discussed as a leading reason, according to a new survey.
The survey, which was conducted by Sense Worldwide and commissioned by the Jim Joseph Foundation, found that 39% of respondents have engaged less, engaged more selectively or disengaged entirely from Jewish spaces due to “events affecting Jewish people in the last few years.”
Among those nearly 40% of respondents, 42% of them said that it was because their “views don’t align with how Israel/Palestine is discussed, and I don’t feel there’s room for nuance,” and 40% said they engaged less because they did not want to “experience biased, one-sided messaging.” Forty-eight percent said it was because “conversations often feel hostile, toxic, or unproductive.”
And among all respondents, when asked what would make Jewish experiences more appealing to them, 30% said that they would be attracted to experiences that were more cultural and less religious, and 26% said “spaces where non-Zionist and anti-Zionist views can be expressed without being labelled antisemitic.”
At the same time, the study found that young Jews have hardly abandoned Jewish life. Three-quarters of Jewish young adults in the United States say they regularly do something Jewish, though most are finding their connections outside of synagogues and traditional Jewish institutions, according to the study.
A small group of participants, 4%, also offered an explanation of the lasting impact that Jewish experiences had had on them. The study found that the clearest negative theme among those respondents was disillusionment around Israel and Zionism and the way it was presented in Jewish education or community spaces.
“A negative legacy I have been reflecting on is what I now understand to be a biased education/perspective on Israel,” one respondent wrote.
The study surveyed 2,071 Jewish adults aged 22 to 40 from December 2025 through April 2026. Respondents were sampled from panels created by NORC and GenLabs, and the margin of error was +/- 3.4%.
The survey found that 75% of Jewish young adults say they regularly do something Jewish in their lives, with 45% saying their only form of participation was informally, often at home with family or friends.
Just 30% said they regularly participate formally in Jewish life, including through institutions or organizations.
That divide was also reflected in where respondents said they most often feel a sense of Jewish connection. Fifty-five percent cited family and 44% cited Jewish friends, compared with 19% who cited Jewish community organizations or groups.
Sixteen percent said they found connection through social or political causes connected to Jewish identity, and 13% said they felt most connected through experiences related to Israel.
“The research gives us a much fuller and accurate understanding of where, how, and why Jewish young adults seek out and experience Jewish life,” said Stacie Cherner, the director of research and learning at the Jim Joseph Foundation, in a statement. “Now, importantly, we can begin to translate these insights to action.”
Another study of Jewish engagement across generations by the Jewish Federations of North America in March found that 40% of Jewish American adults describe themselves as engaged with their local Jewish community, while 60% were unengaged.
When asked how often they take part in “anything that feels Jewish,” 20% of respondents said very often or often, while 24% said sometimes, 33% said rarely and 22% said never, the new survey found. Those without earlier Jewish experiences were much less likely to participate at all.
Among those who rarely or never participate in Jewish life, 52% said it was because they “don’t feel a strong connection to Jewish life,” while 38% said it “feels too religious” and 36% said it “doesn’t feel relevant to my life right now,” the survey found.
Among the 11% who have engaged more with Jewish spaces in recent years, the most common reason was wanting to feel a stronger sense of solidarity with the Jewish community, cited by 71%.
And of that 11%, 61% said they wanted to “be around people who understand what I’m feeling,” and 54% said Jewish spaces felt safer or more supportive than other spaces. Eight percent said they sought spaces where non-Zionist and anti-Zionist views can be expressed without being labelled antisemitic.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Some young Jews are pulling back from Jewish life over Israel discourse, study finds appeared first on The Forward.
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There’s a new Judaism in town — or maybe it’s very, very old
In a townhouse in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a gathering for Tu B’Av was underway. There was chanting and breathwork, singing and ceremony. Several Brooklyn-based Jewish communities, including Temple of the Stranger and Lab/Shul, had come together for the experience.
These vibes are usually associated with Eastern traditions, paganism or indigenous American practices; most Westerners who want that form of spirituality go looking for it at Buddhist meditation centers or ayahuasca retreats, forms of engagement more often associated with the 1960s or ’70s counterculture movement than with a synagogue.
But a group of rabbis, leaders and spiritual seekers believe drum circles, chanting, meditation and mysticism are, in fact, just as core to Judaism as any rabbinic text — a sort of lost magic that has impeded vibrant, direct spiritual experience.
“I get this sense that my family believed God is dead, God died 2000 years ago when the Temple burned. Everything could only be archaeology,” said Rav Jericho Vincent, who grew up Haredi and now leads Temple of the Stranger, a Brooklyn based Ivri community. “I don’t accept God’s death.”
Instead, Vincent wants to teach a Judaism that is more alive, and more connected to the divine — one that can offer wisdom to Jews and non-Jews alike. To that end, at the Tu B’Av event, Becca Goldstein, a 34-year-old cultural entrepreneur and spiritual practitioner who is helping to build the new movement, announced a new name for what they were doing to those gathered for the ceremony: Ivri.
For some of the attendees, this was a word they’d already been using to describe their spiritual identity, and the announcement was met with celebrations. For others, it was confusing. Ivri is one the oldest words in the Torah for the ancestors of the Jewish people; it’s the Hebrew word for Hebrew. Weren’t they already Ivri?
Defining the term is complicated, not least because the burgeoning movement is more of a loose web of teachers and spiritual seekers than a clearly defined organization with official values or tenets; every single person I spoke to for this story used the word “mycelial” to describe it. (A mycelium is the underground network of thread-like connections between mushrooms.)
“There’s been something happening, certainly in American Judaism for a while now,” said Vincent, who has a book on Ivri Judaism coming out next year. “This mycelial network of a different way of doing and being Jewish that’s embodied and mystical.”
Because of this diffuse nature, it can be hard to pinpoint exactly what Ivri is; there are commonalities — a desire to cultivate a more spiritual and mystical Judaism, an emphasis on the feminine aspect of the divine, a tendency toward participatory rituals, and a strong sense that they are reaching back to ancient or lost Jewish practices. But there’s no central structure meting out decisions or defined set of tenets, and each group operates independently.
There is Vincent, and their Brooklyn-based community, Temple of the Stranger, and Amichai Lau-Lavie and Shira Kline of fellow Brooklyn-based Lab/Shul; their organizations lean into queerness and often incorporate theater into their services. There is Rabbi Zvika Klein in Berkeley, the spiritual leader of the congregation Chochmat HaLev in Berkeley, and Adena Phillips, founder of a group called Kimu that serves “Jewish spiritual seekers” — both also lead Shabbat at the Burning Man festival as part of a camp called “Milk and Honey.” There is Rabbi Jill Hammer, who co-founded the Kohenet Institute, which ordained Jewish priestesses from 2005 until it closed in 2024 due to leadership changes and the pandemic; she now leads Beit Kohenet, an organization offering classes and retreats on Jewish witchcraft and the divine feminine. There is Shefa, an organization that cultivates psychedelic use and exploration for Jews.
But whatever the throughline is, it’s magnetic, powerful and popular.
Chochmat HaLev’s membership has tripled in the past three years, regularly maxing out their sanctuary’s 300 person capacity on Friday nights. Their yearlong intensive Jewish learning course, “Go Deeper,” planned for 30 participants, had to cap its first cohort at 90.
The Big Jewish Gathering, a sort of coming-out event for the Ivri movement in Brooklyn, organized by Goldstein, sold out with a waiting list of well over 100 people. The Burning Man Shabbat draws at least a thousand festivalgoers each year to pray in the dust. Vincent has nearly 20,000 followers on Instagram.
Yet Ivri offerings are also controversial. The rituals are so unrecognizable to what people expect Judaism to be that several people I spoke to wondered whether the Ivri movement was really Jewish at all — or whether they wanted to be.
“It’s a totally post-halachic model,” said Shaul Magid, professor of modern Jewish studies at the Harvard Divinity School. (He attended, spoke at and wrote about the Big Jewish Gathering.) “If you write something about this, people will be scratching their heads like, ‘This is crazy.’”
Roots and branches
At the Big Jewish Gathering in January, dozens of Jewish thought leaders and groups came together for a weekend event in Brooklyn. Though the event didn’t advertise the term Ivri, in practice, it was a kind of coming out party for the movement.
The event had some more familiar forms of engagement, such as panel discussions. But there was also drumming and breathwork. Hammer led “Heelooleem,” a vineyard ritual based on biblical descriptions of ancient Jewish celebrations; participants sang and danced as they stomped grapes in a wooden basin.
These rituals may sound New Age-y, but Ivri practitioners argue they are in fact callbacks to Jewish practice that was lost.
“We can read about the libations in the temple. They’re like, ‘OK, why don’t we just do them — if they’re so powerful and so important, then why don’t we just do them?’” said Magid by way of example.
It’s clear that Jewish practice has changed over time. Women’s rituals and folk rituals were rarely recorded, meaning they were lost over the years. Centuries of persecution forced Jews to gather more quietly. And, after the Temple’s destruction, rabbis had to form a new tradition that could survive without being anchored to a particular land; in creating a new, portable religion, they shaped Jews into the people of the book.
Those in the Ivri movement feel that something important was lost in that process, including the wisdom of women, an ecstatic joy in prayer and Judaism’s connection to the earth. And, to critics who believe they are departing too far from tradition, they say that Judaism has always changed; they’re simply participating in that custom.
“When I hear those kinds of questions, I imagine them being asked of the rabbis who were forming what became rabbinic Judaism. How can you not have animal slaughter? How can you not have priests?” said Vincent. “I imagine the rabbis must have gotten that pushback, because they remade Judaism more than anything.”
The Ivri movement doesn’t want to get rid of existing wisdom — “I’m always trying to balance like, give me that quote from Rabbi Akiva, and also give me the wisdom of the mothers and aunties,” said Vincent. But they do want to add to it.
That said, many of the teachers I spoke to voiced a deep suspicion of preserving what was done purely for the sake of preservation, a tendency toward nostalgia-driven practice that they believe has reified.
“Too many people say, ‘I come to prayer services not because the prayer services are meaningful in any way but because it reminds me of the prayer services of my youth — even though I was bored out of my mind as a kid, and remain bored out of my mind,’” Krieger said. “I’m saying no, spiritual practice should be meaningful! It’s not just preserving tradition for the sake of preserving tradition.”
Hammer voiced a similar stance. “Ultimately rituals survived to support people. They exist to help people live in meaningful ways. And what can happen if you hold the rituals too tightly is that they become a kind of museum, like we’re going to do this thing to remember what our ancestors did,” she said. “And we forget what that was meant to do. We forget that the ritual was meant to transform.”
Making the old new again
Some of the boldness these leaders feel in designing rituals that are so different from what most Jews might expect may spring from the fact that many of them grew up more religious than the average American Jew. Krieger grew up Orthodox, as did Adena Phillips, who leads the Burning Man Shabbat with him. Goldstein went to a Conservative day school and an Orthodox synagogue. Vincent grew up Haredi.
Each felt unsatisfied with the Judaism they were raised with — restrictions around gender norms and limitations, a culture of social conservatism. And they felt the Judaism they were given was too cerebral, focused on studying texts instead of practicing them.
As Goldstein put it, “My experience is that it’s very hard to have a direct experience of the divine from your mind.”
Yet they also didn’t feel as though established progressive movements, like Reform Judaism, had the depth they were seeking.
“Their way of being progressive is watering down Judaism and making it as thin and vanilla as possible,” said Krieger. “There’s this myth that if you want to make Judaism accessible to people, lower the bar of what you’re asking of them.”
But, he pointed out, plenty of Jews and non-Jews alike are seeking a demanding spiritual practice, turning to rigorous practices like meditation or yoga that require specific diets and strict observance but also offer a deep experience of the divine. The issue isn’t that kashrut or Shabbat are too difficult; the issue, Krieger said, is that these people aren’t finding the transcendent experiences they crave in Judaism. But they want to.
“The folks I think of as being involved in this movement are folks who really don’t want the weak tea Judaism, the bagels and lox Judaism, or summoning in Native American teachers because we don’t have our own wisdom,” said Vincent. Instead, those drawn to the Ivri movement want to find that kind of spirituality within Judaism, without having to be an outsider appropriating or visiting another practice.
This has emboldened Ivri thinkers to look to the past, mining from folk tales, Kabbalah and biblical descriptions of celebrations to find what they seek within Judaism. On Shavuot, Krieger led a grief ritual based on the Shalosh Regalim, part of ancient Temple pilgrimage rituals in which pilgrims circled those grieving and ostracized. It was deeply based on real practices, but innovated to fit the modern moment; participants chanted the words to an ancient mourning song, stopping to share their stories and embrace. For Rosh Hashanah last year, Vincent designed a ceremony around the story of the binding of Isaac in which participants put Abraham on trial to interface with the tale’s traumatic themes.
And Magid pointed out that however woo-woo these rituals — often full of theater, witchiness and connection to the spirit world — might seem, they could arguably be seen as part of a Hasidic ultra-Orthodox tradition. To most people, an image of the black-hatted Orthodox Jew symbolizes the most Jewish kind of Jew, the most religious form of practice. But, the professor pointed out, the Judaism practiced in Hasidic sects is full of spirits and magic.
“If you grow up in a modern Orthodox world or a Conservative world, it’s very different. It doesn’t have that very aesthetic, mythical flavor to it,” he said. “The ultra-Orthodox world is a very magical world — all of these mythic stories about demons floating around.”
But Vincent, for their part, rejects a framework of comparison; they don’t want to cede an automatic legitimacy to the Judaism of the Haredi world.
“There is this pandemic of a spiritual inferiority complex. Even rabbis will tell me: ‘I don’t know enough, I’m not a good Jew,’” said Vincent. “We’re letting it be defined by ultra-Orthodoxy. Those of us who have seen the wizard behind the curtain understand that actually ultra-Orthodoxy is a post-Holocaust version of Judaism. We understand the ways in which it is different than the Judaism of a hundred years ago.”
The birth of a name
The Ivri movement is far from the first to try to build a new, more spiritual, more embodied, more radically open practice of Judaism. Many of the hallmarks of what the Ivri teachers point to in their spiritual practice might be familiar from both the Renewal movement, the Kohenet movement and even the neo-Hasidut of Martin Buber or Abraham Joshua Heschel.
Indeed, many of the Jewish communities and teachers in the greater Ivri movement identify, or previously identified at least loosely, with Renewal Judaism; Krieger and Vincent were both ordained through ALEPH and Vincent has studied with Hammer, of Beit Kohenet. So why the need for a new name?
To Hammer, the difference between Ivri and what came before is a cultural one. Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, the founder of the Renewal movement, died over a decade ago and his work grew out of 1960s counterculture. The Kohenet movement, too, was born decades ago now. Ivri feels like the product of a new generation.
“I also identify as a Kohenet, and I also identify as part of the Jewish Renewal movement. It’s not that Ivri would define me as a person or practitioner, but I’m finding it helpful,” she said. “Maybe if you think of a movement more as pieces of music that go together, but one comes after the other.”
Goldstein, who organized the Big Jewish Gathering, said meeting the cultural moment is a big focus of the movement — and one that draws funders.
“My bubbie’s voice comes to mind, she always says: ‘Why does your generation think so much and ask so many questions? Why can’t you just be and live and let live?’” she said. “We’re forced to right now because of identity. The Jewish identity signifiers that held up in our parents generation and grandparents generation aren’t working right now.”
Hammer echoed the sentiment, saying that many American Jews are too focused on “replicating the spiritual practice exactly,” becoming so rigid about both identity and prayer that they have forgotten that religion is supposed to be a living vehicle to create meaning and transformation.
Goldstein wants to find a Judaism that can speak not only to Jews, but show the rest of the world that Judaism has more to offer than the highly politicized identity that dominates today, an identity which is breaking down as Jews debate what their relationship to Israel, to the Holocaust and to persecution really should be. She believes the growing Ivri movement — which she is working to find funding and create new events and avenues to develop — can offer Jews a new way to relate to their Judaism that they feel joyous and proud to participate in.
Showcasing Jewish practices that have a spiritual appeal, and speak to today’s concerns — like climate change, a non-dual understanding of gender and a need for meaning — could make Judaism more accessible and appealing to Jews and non-Jews alike. (Most Ivri spaces welcome non-Jews to participate.) And it could give Jews a new way to relate to their Jewish identity, one that isn’t rooted in a Judaism these teachers see as rooted in a closely-held trauma that is doing damage.
Of course, the emerging school of Ivri Judaism won’t speak to everyone; however well-grounded in ancient traditions and practices it may be to stomp on grapes or chant in a circle, it just feels too woo-woo for some.
“Ideally we want people to follow a practice because it is transformative, and we can only find out what’s transformative if we experiment,” Hammer said. Even the changes that don’t end up sticking or stay on the fringes, she believes, get shape Judaism over time.
Of course, every Ivri leader acknowledged, not everyone wants to experiment. But that’s fine — there are already plenty of people who do. Their biggest problem is finding a space to fit them all in one room.
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