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The Israeli origins of Amitai Etzioni’s big ideas about community
(JTA) — “Although I was born in Germany, my formative years were spent in the early, idealistic days of the cooperative Jewish settlements, in pre-Israel, Palestine,” wrote Amitai Etzioni in his 2003 memoir, “My Brother’s Keeper.”
In writing about his early years in a cooperative settlement called Kfar Shmaryahu, the Israeli-American sociologist and polymath provided the origin story for the big idea that made him famous: communitarianism.
When Etzioni died May 31 at age 94, the obituaries noted how he came to Israel as a young refugee from Nazi Germany and fought in Israel’s war for independence. But few noted his early life in Israel shaped his life’s work. Nor did they note how far Israel had come — for better and for worse — in the years since he lived on a kibbutz, battled as a Palmach commando and studied at the Hebrew University.
Communitarianism is a social philosophy that emphasizes the importance of society, as opposed to the individual, in articulating the good.”[W]hile individual rights surely matter, these rights must be balanced with commitments to the common good — for instance, by protecting the environment and public health,” Etzioni explained.
He also held that the various liberation movements of the 1960s went too far in undermining authority figures and what he called “the accepted standards of upright conduct.”
Because it proposed a “third way” between liberalism and conservatism, communitarianism was also embraced — and ridiculed — on both sides of the aisle. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were fans. Some labeled George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” communitarian.
Etzioni left Israel in his mid-twenties for a teaching job at Columbia University. He opposed the Vietnam War and the nuclear arms race, activism that propelled him beyond the academy and into the role as a “public intellectual.” He taught ethics for two years at the Harvard Business School before launching into a hybrid discipline he called “socio-economics.” Hired by the Carter administration in 1979 as a senior adviser, he joined the faculty at George Washington University, where he taught international affairs for more than 30 years.
The theories behind communitarianism weren’t new, but Etzioni’s articulation came to wide public attention on the eve of the Clinton presidency, when, according to one profile, it was “supposed to be the Big Idea of the ‘90s, the antidote to ‘Me Generation’ greed and the cure for America’s cynicism, alienation and despair.”
“We need an awakening of values, of caring and commitment,” Etzioni told an interviewer in 1992. “The Communitarians are saying this is possible; in fact, it is inevitable.”
“It was as if I were growing up in a high school of communitarian theory and practice,” wrote Etzioni about his youth spent on an agricultural cooperative in Israel. (Courtesy of Yad Yitzhak Ben Zvi)
Although communitarianism never did live up to the hype, Etzioni became a reliable commentator and theorist in a host of fields and causes, including just war, bioethics, national security and privacy.
Although he occasionally wrote about Israel, his roots there were rarely front and center in his work or public image. In his memoir he notes that a lot of readers thought he was Italian. (“Amitai” comes from the Hebrew word for truth; he took “Etzioni” from a folk tale about a boy who learns to protect nature from a tree – “etz” in Hebrew.)
In his memoir, however, he delves deeply into his youth in Israel. “In those days, the country was quite different from what it has since become,” he writes. “[I]t was strongly imbued with the spirit of community (from which the term communitarian arises); most people were dedicated to serving the common good and to erecting a home for Jews escaping Nazi-dominated Europe. It was in that pre-Israel that I first knew the high that one gains when serving a cause greater than oneself.”
His parents were among the founders of the small farming community; a young Etzioni would attend co-op meetings with his father, where members would debate how cooperative they needed to be – a question, he writes, that was never settled.
“It was as if I were growing up in a high school of communitarian theory and practice,” wrote Etzioni.
He also discovered the limits of that practice after a year as a teen on Kibbutz Tel Joseph. He found the kibbutz “excessively communal,” with little tolerance for individuality or privacy. Communitarianism itself would often be attacked on the same grounds: Etzioni would later have a fierce antagonist in the American Civil Liberties Union, which felt some of his calls for limiting privacy and suspending individual rights in the name of the common good went too far.
Etzioni wrote movingly about watching friends die in the fighting for Israel’s independence. Although he never wavered in feeling the war was justified, he lamented that the Jews and Arabs might have avoided the bloodshed had they agreed to the two-state partition that, in 2003, he still felt was inevitable. Nor did he regret Israel’s founding: “The Jewish people require a homeland to protect them not merely from physical annihilation, but also from cultural devastation,” he wrote in 1999.
But perhaps the most fascinating influence on Etzioni’s thinking was the year he spent in a Jerusalem institute set up by Martin Buber, the Vienna-born social philosopher. The formidable faculty included Gershom Scholem on Kabbalah, Yeshayahu Leibowitz on biology and Nechama Leibowitz on Bible.
Etzioni imbibed Buber’s ideas about “I and Thou” relationships – the “unending struggle between the forces that pushed us to relate to other human beings as objects, as Its, rather than as fellow humans, as Thous.”
Etzioni would call this “moral dialogue,” as in his definition of democracy: “[O]ur conception of right and wrong are encountered through moral dialogues that are open and inclusive. It is a persuasive morality, not a coercive one.”
Etzioni’s memoir and his obituaries recall a more hopeful political climate, when right and left could briefly imagine common ground around the common good. They also recall a different Israel, before it largely embraced the free-market economics of the West and let go of many of its communitarian values.
In 2013 Etzioni wrote about his own seeming irrelevance – he called it his “gradual loss of a megaphone” — after his brief flurry of influence. He had no regrets, nor loss of confidence: “Until I am shown that my predictions or prescriptions are ill-founded, or not of service, I will try to get out what must be said. I’ll keep pulling at the oars, however small my boat, however big or choppy the sea.”
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As Trump officials cozy up to Germany’s far right, everything alt is neu again
In the 1930s, American Nazis looked to Berlin for inspiration. The German-American Bund held torchlit rallies in New York, slandered Jews, preached white supremacy, and sent their children to Hitler Youth-style summer camps for indoctrination — all in service of importing the Führer’s vision to U.S. soil.
Nine decades later, the current is flowing in reverse, as Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany) party makes pilgrimages to Washington, D.C. — at the invitation of Trump administration officials who see the German party as unfairly ostracized.
This September, two top AfD figures met with staff from Vice President JD Vance’s office and with State Department employees. Later that month, more AfD parliamentarians arrived in D.C., where they conferred with Darren Beattie, a former Trump speechwriter now embedded in the State Department.
Over the past several months, the Trump administration has, in effect, taken the AfD under its wing. Trump’s MAGA movement and the AfD both cast themselves as defenders of a civilization threatened by nonwhite outsiders, and both have tolerated displays of antisemitism from operatives within their ranks.
At Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration rally, Elon Musk made a gesture resembling a Nazi salute and declared, “My heart goes out to you. It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured.” Musk later denied any Nazi intent. But he raised eyebrows again when he appeared remotely at an AfD campaign rally in Halle, Germany, in February, where he praised the party as “the best hope for Germany” and urged citizens to “move beyond” their country’s Nazi past.
At the annual Munich Security Conference in mid-February, Vance rattled America’s European partners by saying democracy in Europe was threatened not by populist parties like the AfD, but by governments’ refusal to treat them like legitimate political actors. Vance added insult to injury by having a private meeting with Alice Weidel, co-leader of the AfD, before returning to the states.
This chummy relationship between the Trump administration and a German political party that has been designated an extremist organization by German intelligence presents a sort of reverse mirror image of the state of affairs between the two countries back in the 1930s.
Let’s set the time machine back to July 18, 1937, and the location to a summer camp in New Jersey — Camp Nordland. Operated by the German-American Bund, it wasn’t just a retreat; it was a staging ground for fascist pageantry. Swastika flags flanked the entrance. Uniformed men marched in formation. Children sang songs of Aryan pride. Politicians and Bund leaders gave speeches praising Hitler’s vision and denouncing Roosevelt’s “Jewish government.” It was America’s own slice of the Reich, nestled in the woods of Sussex County.
Camp Nordland was not an isolated hive of American-style Nazism. There were about 200 other camps like it, stretched across the nation.
The Bund’s rallies were near-perfect replicas of Nazi spectacles in Germany, none more brazen than the one held at Madison Square Garden on Feb. 20, 1939. More than 20,000 people packed the arena as uniformed men and women marched down the aisles in Nazi-style regalia. Swastikas flanked a towering portrait of George Washington. The crowd raised stiff-arm salutes as Bund leader Fritz Kuhn took the stage and declared, to roaring applause, that “the Jew is one thousand times more dangerous to us than all the others” and that the government must be “returned to the American people who founded it.”
The Bund’s dream of an American Reich collapsed soon after. Kuhn was convicted of embezzlement. The FBI cracked down. World War II made their allegiance to Hitler politically toxic. Camp Nordland was raided and shut down in 1941. But the ideology didn’t die — it went dormant, and it is resurfacing on both sides of the Atlantic.
Following the AfD’s September visits to Washington, Trump adviser Alex Bruesewitz traveled to Berlin in November, calling the AfD members of the Bundestag and party supporters “bold visionaries.”
“We are in this together,” said Bruesewitz, according to Politico. “The forces arrayed against us aren’t just ideological opponents, they’re manifestations of evil, seeking to extinguish the light of faith, family and freedom.”
“This spiritual battle isn’t confined to the United States,” he continued. “Oh, no. Germany and America may be separated by thousands of miles of ocean, but we face the same exact enemies, the same threats, the same insidious forces trying to tear us down.”
A month before Bruesewitz’s trip to Berlin, two AfD lawmakers were treated to a private reception in Manhattan, where an opera tenor serenaded them with the first stanza of “Deutschland über Alles” — a verse officially excluded from Germany’s national anthem and widely considered taboo for its Nazi associations, according to a Reuters report. The event was hosted by the New York Young Republican Club, a chapter of the national Young Republican Federation. Notably, a fall exposé by Politico revealed leaked Telegram messages from Young Republican leaders in multiple states, in which members praised Hitler, joked about gas chambers, slandered Jews and Black Americans, and fantasized about violence against political opponents.
All of this raises the question: Is there any danger in this transatlantic camaraderie between Trump’s MAGA movement and the AfD? Probably more so for Germans than for Americans.
The AfD has become a powerful player in German politics since its emergence just twelve years ago, rising from a fringe Euroskeptic movement to a dominant force — especially in the former East, where economic dislocation and cultural resentment have fueled its ascent. While Germany’s mainstream parties have steadily shed voters, the AfD has gained them. Of the Bundestag’s 630 seats, the AfD now holds 152, making it the second-largest delegation in the federal parliament. And yet, despite its electoral strength, the AfD remains politically isolated: Germany’s mainstream parties have refused to cooperate with the AfD on legislation or coalition-building.
The AfD hopes its courtship of Trump and his MAGA movement will increase pressure on Germany’s governing Christian Democrat–Social Democrat coalition to dismantle the firewall that has kept it politically isolated. Doing so wouldn’t just amplify the AfD’s influence — it could clear a path for the party to join a future governing coalition. To many Germans, this scenario evokes chilling memories of how Hitler rose to power: not by winning outright, but by exploiting the weakness and fragmentation of mainstream parties.
The AfD insists it is not a threat to democracy, despite being officially designated a “confirmed right-wing extremist” organization by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency in May. Party leaders call the label a smear, an attempt to silence dissent. That view has found defenders across the Atlantic. Secretary of State Marco Rubio condemned the designation as “tyranny in disguise.”
It could be argued that in some ways, what many Germans fear for their country has already happened here. In Germany, far-right ideologues are still waiting to enter government. In the U.S., they’re already inside — drafting policy, staffing agencies, shaping foreign alliances. What Germany still treats as a red line, America has already normalized.
The post As Trump officials cozy up to Germany’s far right, everything alt is neu again appeared first on The Forward.
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Some Black Jews feel more ostracized from Jewish communities post-Oct. 7, survey finds
Growing up as a Black woman in the South with a Jewish father, Autumn Leonard often felt like “an outsider looking in” on Jewish communities. She wasn’t raised particularly Jewish, and her Black and Jewish identities felt disconnected from each other — as if she had to choose one.
But after she married a Jewish man and wanted to raise Jewish children, she sought out ways to engage more deeply with her Jewishness. She found groups that affirmed both of her identities, chairing the “Race Working Group” at the progressive Brooklyn synagogue Kolot Chayeinu and becoming a lead organizer with the Black Jewish Liberation Collective.
“That made me feel like, Oh, Jewish is something I can be — as opposed to something over there that comes from my ancestors,” Leonard said.
After the attacks of Oct. 7, however, Leonard said she began to notice a shift. Jewish communities seemed more inward-looking, she said, with a heightened focus on combating antisemitism and a retreat from commitments to racial justice. She began hearing stories from Black Jews who felt increasingly sidelined or isolated.
So she set out to gather empirical evidence to test her hunch.
The result was a survey conducted through the Black Jewish Liberation Collective, a progressive group that connects Black Jews for political organizing and cultural events. The group circulated the survey beyond its own membership and received 104 responses from a geographically diverse group — most from New York state, but also with respondents in Canada, Portugal and the United Kingdom. Participants were between 21 and 75 years old and reported a range of religious observance levels, from just ethnically Jewish to Orthodox. Responses were collected between October 2024 and January 2025.
The survey — which represents a tiny subset of the estimated 1% of U.S. Jews who identify as Black — found that 62% of respondents reported “increased marginalization” in a Jewish community or space after Oct. 7, 2023.
Those feelings of ostracization largely had to do with disagreements around Israel and Gaza, according to the survey. While survey participants generally identified as more left-leaning on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, respondents on both sides of the political spectrum said they felt alienated.
In Jewish spaces, some respondents felt they were assumed to be more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause because of their race. Meanwhile, in progressive spaces, some Black Jews felt they were assumed to be Zionist because of their Jewishness.
“I do feel some kind of internalizing shame where I am more careful around the ways that I share my Jewishness in non-Jewish spaces,” one survey respondent wrote. “I resent the ways that Zionism is conflated with Jewishness, and the ways I have to extricate [or] preface that.”
According to Leo Ferguson, a member of the Black Jewish Liberation Collective’s steering committee, another troubling post–Oct. 7 trend is that people who voice criticism of Israel are increasingly labeled “fake Jews.” Black Jews often already face that accusation because of their race — and adding political litmus tests, he said, only intensifies the problem.
“What I have witnessed is more scrutiny of Black Jews. There is an ongoing question as to whether or not we will stand up and be ‘real Jews’ which means aligning with whoever’s politics is judging us,” one survey participant wrote.
Compounding these trends, some Jewish institutions have shifted away from the idea that advocating for a broad range of minority groups also benefits Jews, focusing instead on antisemitism linked to Israel. Just last month, the Anti-Defamation League entirely removed from the “What We Do” page of its website a section called “Protect Civil Rights” amid threats from the Trump administration. Although that change occurred after the survey was conducted, some respondents already saw the trend emerging.
“The way in which much of [the] Jewish community has turned from barely doing antiracism work wholly toward Israel and self-protection is so discouraging, especially as the racism within Jewish community is so severe,” one survey respondent wrote.
The survey offers recommendations based on the survey’s findings, including welcoming ideological diversity in Jewish spaces; having a time and place for Israel discourse, rather than letting it “bleed into all aspects of Jewish life”; and maintaining connections between Black and Jewish advocacy groups even if they disagree on issues surrounding conflict in Gaza.
“The discussion around Israel Palestine has taken up so much of the oxygen that it has made it impossible to then also talk about things like racial justice,” Ferguson said.
The post Some Black Jews feel more ostracized from Jewish communities post-Oct. 7, survey finds appeared first on The Forward.
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Hasan Piker Bashed Gal Gadot in Villainous ‘Variety’ Feature
Hasan Piker. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
In case you missed it, The New York Times recently did a fawning profile on popular Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, in which it mentioned, only in passing, that he once said America deserved 9/11. The article didn’t mention that Piker said he supported Hezbollah or that he took every chance to vilify Israel. It didn’t mention that he interviewed someone who he said was a member of the Houthis, only to later say he wasn’t.
Now comes an article in Variety by Tatiana Siegel, who uncritically lets Piker says his statement about 9/11 was about “blowback” and doesn’t push any further, accepting this nonsense that his own words were “weaponized” against him.
Siegel is more interested in writing that Piker is 6’4″, muscular, and plays basketball, instead of writing about how he interviewed a Houthi and vibed with him. Why get into any of that stuff? It’s much more important for Siegel to repeat a line from the Times article, as if it was her own, that Piker could be a possible answer to when the left-wing will find its own Joe Rogan. Maybe if they repeat it, suddenly Piker will be the next Joe Rogan!
Siegel tries to cast Piker as a moderate, because he disagrees with the insane conspiracy theory that Israel killed Charlie Kirk.
Siegel also interviews Taylor Lorenz. Yes Lorenz, the fool who said she felt joy when she heard news of the murder of United Health Care CEO Brian Thompson. Lorenz, who in televised interviews has said she thinks Piker is hot, and says the entire Internet has been weaponized against him. I doubt she’d be so quick to say this if Piker was unattractive.
Of course, Siegel is uncritical of Piker for saying that Amy Schumer should be cancelled, though she at least points out he falsely attributes a statement to Schumer that she never made.
But the kicker is Piker’s disdain for Gal Gadot, who has been a very vocal supporter of Israel. Piker likes his Jews quiet and embarrassed. He calls Gadot a “dogs**t actress” and complains of her normalizing Israel. I don’t remember Piker being a film critic — and of course no one talks about how Piker normalizes antisemitism. Good thing they got a writer with a Jewish-sounding last name to write a puff piece.
As Norman Finkelstein said when speaking about what Zohran Mamdani needed to do to fight off charges of antisemitism (which of course Finkelstein thought were fake) — people like this need to find Jews to do the “dirty work.”
Jewish actress Natalie Portman is okay, according to Piker, because she never served in the IDF. The Jewish actor who plays Superman is fine, because he’s not pro-Israel from what he’s seen. Who’s the Jewish influencer who says which Muslim actors are okay to watch in movies or not?
Oh, that’s right, there is none, as that would be seen as Islamophobic. But Piker gets another free pass to spew his hatred.
The article could not be complete without a little “Jews control the media” implication, as Piker criticizes Bari Weiss because she represents everything he “despises about access journalism.” Of course, Siegel doesn’t bother to mention that Piker got his career from his uncle, Cenk Uygur, founder of the Young Turks, one of the most noteworthy left-wing YouTube channels, for which Piker used to work. And there’s no mention of Weiss’ courage to quit the New York Times to start The Free Press. Because when Jews succeed, it can’t have anything to do with merit — it must be that they all help each other!
The writer could have asked about the Piker controversy surrounding his dog for which he’s received immense criticism, but I wasn’t shocked she didn’t mention it. That might get in the way of him being the next Joe Rogan!
The article ends with Piker saying he doesn’t have bodyguards, citing Fidel Castro who claimed to have a moral vest.
The article is good for only one thing — pointing out how much the media hates the Jews.
The author is a writer based in New York.