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‘An American Tail’ musical adaptation hopes its Jewish immigration story will resonate in 2023
(JTA) — Itamar Moses was 10 years old when he watched “An American Tail” at his Jewish day school in California. He was struck by the 1986 film, an animated musical about a family of Russian-Jewish mice who immigrate to America. Even though he was surrounded by Jewish classmates and teachers, he had never seen a cartoon with Jewish protagonists.
“Watching this mainstream hit American animated movie where the central character and the central family were specifically Jewish — it was unusual,” Moses told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “I think there was something that felt inclusive to us about that.”
Now a Tony Award-winning playwright, Moses has adapted the children’s classic for the stage. “An American Tail the Musical” will premiere at the Children’s Theatre Company in Minneapolis on April 25 and run through June 18. Along with writing by Moses, who won his Tony for a Broadway adaptation of the Israeli film “The Band’s Visit,” the new production features familiar songs such as “Somewhere Out There” and new music and lyrics by Michael Mahler and Alan Schmuckler (“Diary of a Wimpy Kid the Musical”). The team hopes to tour the show if it has success in Minneapolis.
The original film created by Don Bluth and Steven Spielberg follows the journey of a young, tenacious mouse named Fievel Mousekewitz. Fievel’s family lives below the human Moskowitz family in Shostka, a city in the Russian Empire, in 1885. Spielberg, who had yet to make “Schindler’s List” or widely address his Jewish family history, named the character after his maternal grandfather — Phillip or “Fievel” Posner — an immigrant from Russia.
The movie begins with the Mousekewitzes and the Moskowitzes celebrating Hanukkah when Cossacks tear through Shostka in an antisemitic pogrom, together with their animal counterparts — a battery of evil cats. The Mouskewitzes flee Europe and board a ship to America, where Papa Mouskewitz (voiced by Nehemiah Persoff) promises “there are no cats” and “the streets are paved with cheese.” But a thunderstorm at sea washes Fievel overboard, leaving his devastated parents and sister to arrive in New York City without him. Although they believe he did not survive, Fievel floats to shore in a bottle and sets out to find his family.
Of course, he quickly learns there are cats in America — along with corruption and exploitation. Fievel is sold to a sweatshop by Warren T. Rat, a cat disguised as a rat. A crooked mouse politician called Honest John (a caricature of the real Tammany Hall boss John Kelly) wanders Irish wakes, scribbling dead mice’s names in his list of “ghost votes.” But Fievel finds camaraderie with other immigrant mice rallying for freedom from the cats’ attacks and Warren T. Rat’s extortion. He befriends Italian mouse Tony and Irish mouse Bridget, who join the quest to reunite his family.
The film’s metaphors will be presented similarly in the stage version, which is also set in the 1880s, although Moses has expanded its lens on the immigrant groups that populated New York at the time. The musical will incorporate more “mice” communities, such as Chinese, Caribbean and Scandinavian mice, along with African Americans and former slaves.
A scene from rehearsal. (Kaitlin Randolph)
“An American Tail” was part of a shift in mainstream media toward Jewish representation, said Jennifer Caplan, an assistant professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Cincinnati who has studied this cultural change.
“It came out in 1986, and then ‘Seinfeld’ premiered in 1989,” Caplan told the JTA. “People point to 1989 as this moment when representations of Jews changed. There was this feeling in the late ‘80s that people were looking for new, different, possibly even more explicit representations of Jews.”
Yet despite the movie’s resonance with children like Moses, some film critics complained that it wasn’t Jewish enough. Critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert gave the film “two thumbs down” on a 1986 episode of their program “At The Movies,” calling it “way too depressing” for children and arguing that it “chickened out” of an explicitly Jewish story. Ebert noted that while most adults would understand the Mousekewitzes were Jewish, the word “Jewish” never appears in the film, potentially leaving young audiences in the dark.
“This seems to be a Jewish parable that doesn’t want to declare itself,” he said at the time.
Unlike in Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel “Maus,” where Jews are mice and Nazis are cats, the cat-and-mouse metaphor of “An American Tail” is expansive. The cats represent a universal force of oppression — Cossacks in Russia or capitalists in America — while the mice encompass all persecuted immigrants, regardless of their religion, ethnicity or national origin.
Caplan admitted that some might not have seen it as a Jewish story at the time.
“In 1986, we’re right at the birth of the multicultural push in American schools,” said Caplan. “You’ve got kids who are learning about the melting pot. I think if you are not looking for the coded Jewishness and you’re not familiar with it, then this just seems like a movie about immigrants.”
But Moses, who said the movie held a “mystical place” in his imagination, did not view the story’s broad allegory as a shortcoming. Instead, he saw an opportunity to pull its continuous thread for a message he hopes will feel relevant today: that while immigrants discover inequality and abuse in America, the forces of injustice are changeable, and that people can overcome life’s harsh realities through “grit and hard work and coming together.”
“That message is always timely, but definitely coming out of the last few years and the conversations that America is having about immigration,” said Moses. “I wanted to tell this story that’s really a fable, so you can get at these ideas indirectly as opposed to in a dry, didactic way.”
Jodi Eichler-Levine, a Jewish studies professor at Lehigh University, argued the tale’s success lies in being a “story of Jewish immigration that appeals to non-Jews as well” and called the movie a “fairytale about America.” It premiered 100 years after the Statue of Liberty’s dedication in 1886, amid centennial celebrations of the country’s immigration history. In the film, the statue comes alive, winking at Fievel and his sister once they find each other and look west at the vast expanse of the United States.
Itamar Moses won acclaim for adapting “The Band’s Visit” for Broadway. (Courtesy of Moses)
Whether viewers still buy into the optimistic crescendo of “An American Tail” remains to be seen. Do Americans still believe, as Moses hopes, that immigrants and oppressed peoples can unite to overthrow the tyrants of unfettered capitalism? A Gallup poll from February showed that Americans’ satisfaction with the country’s level of immigration has dropped to 28%, the lowest point in a decade.
Moses is betting that children’s theater has a way of refreshing themes adults have exhausted with political discourse. Children want to grapple with the ideas at the core of the show, he said, such as “the needs of the individual and the needs of the collective, the need to go out on your own but still remain connected to your family and your background.”
“The most successful material for kids tends to engage with real things that they’re thinking about and worrying about,” he said.
Today, another wave of families has fled Fievel’s hometown: though Shostka was part of the Russian Empire in the 19th century, it is now in the Sumy region of northeastern Ukraine. The Sumy Oblast was among the first regions stormed by Russian forces in February 2022 and continues to suffer daily shelling. Eichler-Levine expects that global refugee crises will only continue to broaden the appeal of a migration story.
“The ideas [in An American Tail] are sadly relevant for most of the planet right now, given that climate change and devastation from war are leading to another tremendous wave of global migration,” said Eichler-Levine.
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Some Jewish Republicans say Tucker Carlson is no longer a threat. Others worry he’ll run for president.
(JTA) — At the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual gala last November, much of the discussion centered around right-wing antisemitism. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz warned that there was “an existential crisis in our party” as figures such as Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes built their online audiences, while right-wing firebrand Rep. Randy Fine of Florida slammed Carlson as an antisemite.
At the RJC’s “America 250” gala six months later, the mood was cheerier, and the cautionary words gave way to declarations that emerging antisemitism on the right was being dealt with properly.
Fine reminded the audience at the RJC event held in Manhattan on Sunday that in his speech to the RJC in November, he’d called Carlson “the most dangerous antisemite in America.” Now, he said, “I don’t know that that’s true anymore.”
Fine and other Republicans at the RJC gala told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that enough Republicans had spoken out against Carlson – most significantly, President Donald Trump – and his ilk to damage their image and dampen the threat they might pose. They also pointed to major GOP critics of Israel who had lost their seats in recent months.
But others have warned that it’s a mistake to celebrate too soon, or think Carlson’s star has really faded, especially amid speculation that he might launch a presidential run as a Republican.
Fine told JTA in a text that he now believes the country’s “most dangerous antisemite” is Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s anti-Zionist mayor. In contrast, he said, Carlson’s impact had only plummeted in the past half-year.
“I think that brand has been destroyed [in] the last six months,” he wrote, attributing the change to politicians like himself calling Carlson out, as well as “the damage he has done to himself.”
A number of speakers at the RJC who lauded Republicans’ response to antisemitism in the party also pointed to the recent primary defeat of outspoken Israel critic Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie. Brooks said to loud applause that the group spent $5 million in that race, and called the effort “a fight worth having and a victory worth celebrating.”
Speakers also recounted the resignation from Congress of Marjorie Taylor Greene in January, maintaining that the Republican Party is squashing its anti-Israel voices, while the Democratic Party is electing them.
“Being anti-Israel in today’s Republican Party is not — unlike the Democratic Party — a path to success,” said RJC CEO Matt Brooks during his remarks. Brooks later told JTA that Carlson, Owens and Fuentes’ “influence and credibility is less than it’s ever been” and that “they don’t represent” the mainstream of the MAGA movement.
But the Anti-Defamation League warned that it would be a mistake not to see the audience and impact of Carlson in particular as worthy of continued concern.
Oren Segal, the ADL’s vice president of counterextremism and intelligence, said in an interview with JTA that his organization’s biggest worry regarding Carlson is “not merely his relationship with any conservative or elected officials” but also the “normalization” of his views.
Segal pointed to the accusation that an Israeli attack on an American spy ship during the 1967 Six-Day War was intentional — used by conspiracy theorists as proof that the Jewish state cannot be trusted — despite U.S. investigations determining that it was a mistake.
“No one’s been a bigger boon to the USS Liberty Conspiracy of late than Tucker Carlson,” he said.
Segal added that it would be “absurd” to count out anyone as a potential presidential contender, while several political observers have speculated that Carlson may be weighing a run.
New York University professor Scott Galloway recently said on his New York Magazine podcast “Pivot” that the former Fox News host could be a serious contender. There is an “enormous lane,” he assessed, for a candidate who, like Carlson, has “very conservative values, an enormous media platform, an enormous army of acolytes that he could weaponize right away, and is anti-Trump and anti-the war on Iran.”
Some of Carlson’s allies are gunning for a campaign. Speaking Thursday on Russian state television during a trip to St. Petersburg, Owens said she personally did not plan to run for office but said Carlson would be a great candidate for president.
“I would love for him to run,” she said, adding, “I would gratefully get behind someone like Tucker Carlson.”
Back in March, TV host Piers Morgan asked Carlson whether he has White House ambitions. Carlson said that politics is “not what I do,” adding, “The whole idea of, ‘I’ve been a successful cable news host, I should be president!’ — that whole way of thinking is disgusting to me.”
Asked about the possibility of Carlson running for president, Brooks told JTA in a statement that the RJC would continue to push back against Carlson and similar anti-Israel figures.
“There is only one party where American Jews can be proudly pro-Israel, and it is the Republican Party — and those who imperil that will have to come through the RJC first,” Brooks said.
Others who attended Sunday’s RJC gathering felt the possibility of a Carlson candidacy was overblown. Shabbos Kestenbaum, a prominent Jewish conservative activist who sued Harvard University over alleged antisemitism, dismissed concerns that Carlson could be a serious presidential candidate.
In an interview, he pointed out that Carlson’s support of Massie and Ohio gubernatorial candidate Casey Putsch did not yield electoral success. Putsch, who has a history of dog whistling to neo-Nazis, received 17.5% of the vote in Ohio’s Republican gubernatorial primary. Unlike Massie, Carlson did not issue an endorsement for Putsch, but he did host Putsch on his podcast last year.
“His endorsements mean absolutely nothing, and outside of the ‘Podcastistan’ universe, his words carry very little weight,” Kestenbaum said of Carlson.
Brooks said in an interview with JTA that he feels “very pleased” with how the party has responded to voices like Carlson’s. President Donald Trump has publicly cast Carlson aside since his former ally sharpened his objections to the administration’s war in Iran.
“It’s been marginalized,” Brooks said of the party’s anti-Israel wing. “They tried to hijack the term MAGA. Groups like ours, but equally important, the president, has made it clear they are not MAGA.”
Asked about Vice President JD Vance, who has not offered a condemnation of Carlson to some Jewish Republicans’ chagrin, Brooks said, “When you have the president speaking, that’s the voice that matters right now.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Some Jewish Republicans say Tucker Carlson is no longer a threat. Others worry he’ll run for president. appeared first on The Forward.
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Canada’s new council to tackle antisemitism divides Jewish groups
(JTA) — Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has announced a plan to fight antisemitism, but Canadian Jews are debating whether it’s enough.
Carney said on Monday that the country was “failing Jewish Canadians” as antisemitic hate crimes rose to the highest levels seen in Canada since World War II. In a speech at Toronto’s Holy Blossom Synagogue, he announced a new Ministerial Advisory Council on Rights, Equality, and Inclusion to guide the government in combating all forms of hate and racism, with the “first responsibility” of addressing antisemitism.
Pressure was mounting on Carney to stem the tide of attacks since 2023, which have included gunfire at Jewish schools and synagogues and attacks on Jewish businesses and community centers.
Carney’s response has exposed faultlines among Canadian Jews over what tackling antisemitism should look like. Carney, the leader of Canada’s Liberal Party who recognized a Palestinian state last year, joins a growing number of left-leaning world leaders to grapple with fighting antisemitism while preserving room for Israel critics in their political tents.
Some Jewish groups are criticizing the council’s bureaucratic mandate and Carney’s general targeting of “hate,” saying his proposal is too broad and ineffective for Jews in need of urgent protection. Some Conservative politicians and Jewish leaders also targeted the makeup of the council, whose seven members include one prominent Jewish politician alongside a lawyer representing pro-Palestinian campus activists and a former Liberal Party lawmaker and ex-chair of the Canadian Arab Federation. The last especially has been criticized by some pro-Israel voices.
Other Jewish groups support Carney’s move to unite efforts against antisemitism, Islamophobia and other forms of racism under one umbrella. Liberal and progressive leaders including Maytal Kowalski, head of the group JSpaceCanada, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that attacks on the council’s Arab member were “rooted in racism.”
Carney said the new council will assess the nature, scale and drivers of antisemitism, align federal policies and public safety programs to confront hate, and improve data collection on hate incidents.
Those measures did not satisfy B’nai Brith Canada, the country’s oldest Jewish advocacy group, which called for stronger enforcement and prosecution.
“Absent was a clear commitment to mobilize all levels of government, law enforcement, prosecutors, security agencies, educational institutions, and civil society around a coordinated national response,” the group said in a statement.
Melissa Lantsman, a Jewish Conservative MP, said Carney showed Canadian Jews “he thinks you are stupid.”
“‘Canada’s civic compact is failing Jewish Canadians’ is an extraordinary admission,” Lantsman said on X. “It should have been followed by concrete actions and concrete consequences for those doing the failing. Didn’t happen.”
Some Jewish groups also objected to how Carney defined antisemitism. B’nai Brith Canada, which promotes Zionism and Israel, pressed him to condemn anti-Zionism as a root of the crisis.
“Anti-Zionist manifestations of antisemitism have become increasingly legitimized and normalized,” said CEO Simon Wolle. “A government cannot successfully fight antisemitism while refusing to confront one of its most prevalent contemporary forms.”
The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, an advocacy arm of the Jewish Federations of Canada, similarly said that Canadians “needed to hear” Carney address anti-Zionism. “It is essential to recognize anti-Zionist extremism as a driver of hostility toward Canadian Jews since the Hamas-led October 7 terrorist attacks,” the group said in a statement.
Carney acknowledged the shadow of Israel in his speech, though he never explicitly named the country. He urged Canadians not to “transpose foreign conflicts onto each other” and ensure that “no Canadian child goes to school being seen as a representative of any foreign state.”
Attacks on Canadian Jews have surged since the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the ensuing war in Gaza, which has deeply soured Canadian views of Israel.
Rather than identifying political ideologies, Carney pointed to a broader threat of hatred spreading “when conspiracy becomes discourse.”
That statement was applauded by Jewish leaders like Kowalski, who said that conspiratorial thinking and polarization lay at the root of dangers not only against Jews, but all minority groups.
“I think that it is a mistake to say that it is Israel or anti-Zionism, or the war in Gaza, or what is happening now in Lebanon or Iran, that is causing the rise of antisemitism,” said Kowalski, whose liberal Zionist organization, JSpaceCanada, advocates for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “I think, quite frankly, that’s giving antisemites too much credit. It’s saying once these things end, they will cease to be antisemitic, and that is simply not true.”
Independent Jewish Voices, a progressive group, also told JTA that it welcomed the government’s decision to “bring together the fights against antisemitism, Islamophobia and other forms of organized hate.”
The council’s makeup has been closely scrutinized by Conservative politicians and Jewish leaders.
Carney announced the appointment of Marc Gold, a lawyer and Jewish community leader who retired last year from the Senate of Canada, to join the body. The council will be chaired by Marc Miller, the minister of Canadian identity and culture. It also includes former Liberal MP Omar Alghabra, the first Syrian-born Canadian elected to the House of Commons and previous chair of the Canadian Arab Federation, and Avnish Nanda, a lawyer who is representing pro-Palestinian activists in a lawsuit against the University of Alberta.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre singled out Alghabra, telling reporters on Tuesday, “I’m not sure he’s the right guy to combat antisemitism.” He accused Alghabra of “lobbying me before he was in politics to keep Hezbollah legal.” Poilievre did not respond to a request for more information about his allegation and Alghabra did not respond to a JTA request for comment.
During a parliamentary debate in 2016, Alghabra said that Hamas was a “terrorist organization” and called for “peaceful dialogue and consultations to reach a peaceful resolution to the two-state outcome that we would like to achieve.”
Alghabra’s appointment was also decried by Rabbi Zolly Claman of Montreal’s Tifereth Beth David Jerusalem Congregation. Claman told Fox News on Thursday that he was “truly shocked” because Alghabra “publicly mourned the death of Yasser Arafat and remained silent when asked to condemn the attacks of Oct. 7.”
Alghabra condemned the attacks on Oct. 13, 2023, saying on X, “The terror attacks committed by Hamas against Israelis are horrific and unjustifiable.” He added, “The images of mass destruction of Gaza are horrifying. Civilians in Gaza are defenceless and Israel has obligations under international law.”
The Fox piece linked a video recorded by a member of the far-right website Rebel News, in which a videographer followed Alghabra while he walked on a street and asked whether he condemned the attack. Alghabra did not answer or acknowledge the videographer’s questions.
After the 2004 death of Arafat, the first president of the Palestinian Authority who both oversaw terror campaigns against Israel and negotiated a framework for peace with it, Alghabra told the Globe and Mail that Arafat “played a tremendous role in highlighting the Palestinian struggle for independence and making it visible in the international arena.”
Kowalski said many critics of Alghabra’s appointment were “writing someone off because they are Arab.” She worked with Alghabra on a panel hosted by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz last year, during which she said that he contributed a “great voice” to discussions about Canada’s relationship with Israel.
“It’s very upsetting to me, because he is someone who has always been a great ally to the Jewish community,” said Kowalski, who told JTA that Alghabra was not doing interviews after he did not respond to a request for comment.
Nanda is currently representing two Palestinian Canadian alumni and a Jewish American professor in a lawsuit against the University of Alberta. They allege that the school violated their freedom of expression, assembly and association by directing police to forcibly remove a pro-Palestinian encampment in May 2024, according to the CBC.
B’nai Brith has not explicitly addressed the claims made about members of the council, but has said the group “lacks the mandate and expertise to lead the fight against antisemitism in Canada.”
Kowalski argued that the stakes of combating hatred called for a diverse coalition. “If such a council were to be built for anti-Palestinian racism, I would equally hope that they would have Jews on that council,” she said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Progressive Jews are trying out post-Zionism. There’s one big flaw in their approach
The data is clear: American Jews are feeling increasingly alienated from Zionism. But a new progressive coalition is failing to reckon with why the Zionist ideology their members mostly reject was so powerful in the first place.
On May 18, more than 40 Jewish organizations launched the Jewish Diaspora Movement, which, in their words, rejects “the vision of Judaism that is state-centric, militarist, ethno-nationalist.” The organizations declared on their website they want to build “an ethical future for Jews, Jewishness, and Judaism” and that they “joyfully view wherever we are in the entire world as our home.” They charge the Jewish establishment with “conflating antizionism with antisemitism” and “refusing to engage in meaningful dialogue with dissenters.”
JDM is right that too many Jewish spaces exclude thoughtful criticism of Israel. But even as it seeks to build new Jewish spaces, where Jews can live freely and practice their version of Judaism without hindrance, JDM isn’t reckoning with the fact that Zionism itself sprang out of exactly this kind of desire for Jewish self-determination — or the clear historical explanations for why it did.
What the movement is
Rabbi Alissa Wise, one of JDM’s organizers, has said the rollout was meant to be “an agitation.”
The founding members of the Jewish Diaspora Movement include Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow, Rabbis for Ceasefire, the American Council for Judaism and the magazine Jewish Currents, as well as synagogues and prayer groups in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Hartford, Minneapolis, New York, Los Angeles and Pittsburgh.
JDM has no executive, no paid staff, and no physical location. It says it will be run horizontally, through a referendum of member organizations, under the fiscal sponsorship of a project called Beloved Garden, supported by the Fetzer Institute and Henry Luce Foundation.
Whatever one makes of its aims, JDM is a serious attempt to build parallel Jewish institutions, based on an old argument made new again.
The flawed argument of ‘hereness’
As the First Zionist Congress convened in Basel, Switzerland in 1897, a different vision for the Jewish future was emerging in Vilnius, Lithuania.
The Jewish Labor Bund emphasized doikayt, or “hereness,” the idea that a Jew’s future belongs to the place where they already live. The Bundist theorist Vladimir Medem argued in 1920 that “a national home in Palestine would not end the Jewish exile.” The Jewish Diaspora Movement makes the same point: that “all Jews live in diaspora.”
The Bund was right that Jews should be able to live freely in whatever community they were already in, whether it’s Vilnius or Warsaw, Baghdad or Tehran, Paris or Amsterdam, Buenos Aires or New York. But the reason Jews so intensely debated questions of home and future was largely because of forces outside of their control.
My late grandfather did not choose to be deported from Lithuania, the birthplace of the Bund, to a Soviet gulag. My grandmother did not choose, as a young child, to run away from her Polish neighbors who chased her and other Jews in her town with sticks and knives. The Jews who had lived across the Islamic world for centuries did not choose to be expelled after the creation of the State of Israel. Whether they believed in “hereness” as an ideology turned out not to matter.
Even today, emigration to Israel is frequently driven not by idealistic Zionism or a rejection of the diaspora, but by the cold calculus of safety. Many contemporary French and British Jews, for example, describe the sense that they have no future in the place where they grew up. They are not dismissing “the joy of intermixing and learning from our non-Jewish friends and neighbors,” which JDM describes as one of its core values. Rather, they are increasingly — and justifiably, amid an upsurge in violent antisemitic attacks — scared of their neighbors.
It’s telling that across a lengthy FAQ and thousands of words on their site, the single mention the Jewish Diaspora Movement makes of antisemitism appears to be an objection to conflating it with anti-Zionism.
A flawed reaction to a real issue
JDM is right to point out the ways in which establishment Jewish spaces have shut off criticism of Israel, including foundations who cut off funding for Jewish organizations that speak in favor of Palestinians and rabbis who have been fired for talking about Gaza.
Years ago, while interning at a legacy Jewish institution, I pressed its leadership on their silence about Palestinian casualties during Israel’s 2021 Guardian of the Walls Gaza operation. The head of the organization told me that he held his tongue because there was enough criticism out there already — even as he allowed that people inside the organization might privately object to some of Israel’s actions.
Mainstream Jewish leaders increasingly recognize, however, that shutting down criticism risks creating alienation. Yehuda Kurtzer of the Shalom Hartman Institute warned on a podcast this past January that narrowing the bounds of acceptable dissent threatens “to irreparably change the boundaries of Jewish identity itself.”
For many counter- and anti-Zionists, opposing Zionism offers the clearest way to stand against the things Israel does wrong. But JDM, at least in one domain, risks taking things too far.
To say that “all Jews live in diaspora, even those who live in Jerusalem” as JDM does, is to tell nearly half the world’s Jews that the place they live is not really home — even if JDM may view diaspora as a theological or spiritual condition rather than a geographic one.
It’s one thing to say Jewish people don’t need to center Israel to live a full Jewish life. It’s quite another thing to tell Israelis themselves that the place they see as home isn’t. Just as it’s fair to say that legacy Jewish organizations shouldn’t get to define a single diaspora attitude toward Israel, it’s fair for Israelis to say this new diaspora organization shouldn’t get to define them.
Rather than seek to redefine, JDM might follow the example of someone like the progressive Zionist author Joshua Leifer, who resigned as a contributing editor from Jewish Currents after Oct. 7. In his book Tablets Shattered, Leifer writes that the “ethical task of global Jewish life is now to make the modern experiment in Jewish sovereignty a just one.” Or like Rabbi Sharon Brous, a progressive Zionist, who has described the war in Gaza as a spiritual catastrophe.
Neither of these figures loosened their attachment to Israel to make room for their criticism.
Escalating Alienation
American Jewish life is being driven to the extremes by escalating alienation. Each side increasingly acts as if to acknowledge the other’s valid points is a concession they cannot afford. And each such refusal becomes the next side’s alibi for digging in.
Many Jews live somewhere in the middle. They might believe a Jewish state has a right to exist, and be critical of the Israeli government.
I count myself among them. I’m an American Israeli who is furious at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition and those who ignore the state’s misconduct. But I’ve simultaneously become estranged from former friends and colleagues on the political left who have engaged in Hamas apologism and crossed the line into antisemitism.
So I understand JDM’s impulse to create a communal space for those who feel excluded, even if I wouldn’t feel at home in their framework.
When you feel you cannot live your Judaism freely in the institutions you have, you make your own. But the act of building parallel Jewish spaces concedes that Jews do not simply get to define how we live. It’s a tacit acknowledgement that the terms are sometimes set by others, and that the freedom to practice on our own terms must be deliberately built.
That is the animating spirit of Zionism, bubbling up in a movement trying to leave it behind.
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