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What to do with anti-Zionist Jews? Try talking to them, some Jewish researchers say
(JTA) — A survey showing that only around one-third of American Jews identify as Zionists set off shockwaves in the Jewish world last week, triggering speculation about what could have caused so many Jews to spurn a label once thought as nearly synonymous with Jewish identity.
From his home in Israel, Robbie Gringras had a different reaction.
“I wasn’t surprised,” he said about the survey, conducted by Jewish Federations of North America. “I have a feeling many more of these pieces are now going to come out.”
Together with Abi Dauber Sterne, Gringras runs For The Sake of Argument, an organization that consults on how to hold “healthy arguments” focusing on Judaism and Israel. A few months ago the two embarked on a project few other Jewish groups would attempt: interviewing dozens of Jewish American anti-Zionists directly about what turned them away from Israel.
Avowed anti-Zionists make up a relatively small portion of American Jews, according to the JFNA study: 7% overall, and 14% among Jews ages 18-35. But they shared a consistent story, according to Gringras and Sterne’s findings, which they are releasing on Thursday.
“Throughout all the answers to this question we heard an unmistakable theme: These people report that they reached their rejection of Israel in response to the behavior of Jewish Israelis and Jewish Americans,” Gringras and Sterne write.
Gringras said he understands that the takeaways might be disconcerting to Jewish leaders, who might be drawn to the theory that Jewish anti-Zionists have taken that stance as a result of ignorance, or because of the influence of non-Jewish progressives with no attachment to Israel. But he said he believes the findings can have a positive impact on those who encounter them.
“I have a lot of faith in people who confront things and think about them,” Gringras told JTA. “So the moment that the leadership is thinking about this, is confronting it, then good things will happen.”
Gringras and Sterne are not alone in trying to more deeply understand how contemporary Jews think about Zionism — which the JFNA survey shows does not have an agreed-upon definition — and what Jewish anti-Zionists more specifically are thinking.
Brandeis University researcher Matt Boxer said he felt “vindicated” by JFNA’s survey. He’s embarked on his own, very similar, multi-year survey project asking American Jews to define Zionism, supported in part by the Anti-Defamation League, where Boxer is a former fellow.
When Boxer first distributed his own survey in 2022 with open-ended responses, he received negative feedback from all corners, even death threats, in a sign of just how sensitive even raising the subject can be.
“I’ve had people tell me I’m an antisemite just by asking the questions, by having people tell me what these things mean,” he said. “And I’ve had people telling me I’m committing genocide against Palestinians.”
Even so, turnout was strong. More than 1,800 American Jews, from all over the world, submitted usable responses on whether they describe themselves as a Zionist or anti-Zionist, and what they thought the terms meant. Some synagogues and similar Jewish spaces circulated the survey within their communities. The results, which Boxer first presented in 2024, largely mirrored JFNA’s own findings this week (a study which Boxer had also consulted on, and which was led by one of his former graduate students).
“It’s so much deeper than we’ve left room for in our discourse,” Boxer said. He described what he called “the ‘Rashomon’ effect,” a reference to the classic 1950 Japanese film in which the same event is retold from drastically different points of view. The same thing has happened with Zionism, he said: Every Jew has their own definition.
“We’ve made this out to be a binary: If you’re Zionist you’re good, if you’re anti-Zionist you’re bad,” he said. “But it’s so much more complicated than that.”
Boxer is currently polishing off a new paper based on the data, exploring the Jews — including many self-declared Zionists — who described Israel as an apartheid state.
In 2024 Boxer’s senior colleague, the social researcher Janet Aronson, surveyed 800 Jewish anti-Zionists. “It’s not a group that we just want to dismiss out of hand,” said Aronson, who heads Brandeis’ Jewish Studies center and has conducted population studies for local Jewish federations for years.
Referring to the combined number of declared anti- and non-Zionists found in the JFNA survey, she added, “I think 15% is a lot of people.”
The push for more and higher-quality dialogue with Jewish anti-Zionists comes as the larger Jewish world is grappling with the seeming collapse of the Zionist consensus, expressed in everything from reactions to Oct. 7 to the election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City. Some Jewish leaders are calling to extend olive branches to Jewish anti-Zionists, while others want to close the big tent to them.
Those who do engage with Jewish anti-Zionists, these researchers say, will likely encounter a group of people who are very knowledgeable about Judaism and often grew up in Zionist spaces. That stands in contrast to what they say is a common misconception of the population: that Jewish anti-Zionists don’t know or don’t care about Judaism and other Jews.
For example, the Movement Against Antizionism, a new advocacy group founded by the McGill University doctoral student Adam Louis Klein, defines Jewish anti-Zionists as “those who seek safety or acceptance by echoing the accusations leveled against their own people.” The group draws a historic line connecting the Hellenistic Jews of the Maccabee era, through Jewish Soviet Bundists, to the modern-day anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace — all Jews that it says identify not with their own people but with antisemites in their broader society.
The researchers studying Jewish anti-Zionism don’t see things quite the same way. While none of the studies claims to be representative of the Jewish anti-Zionist population, 40% of Aronson’s respondents either worked, or had previously worked, in Jewish organizations — echoing the profile of the day school and camp alums who founded the activist group IfNotNow a decade ago. Many of them became involved in anti-Zionist minyans or similar upstart Jewish spaces that reject Zionism — a growing rallying cry among left-wing Jews.
“Those are people who we would expect to be current and incoming leaders of the Jewish community,” Aronson said. “What does it mean for the Jewish community when they say, ‘We’re not going to be part of these Jewish institutions, we need to start our own’? What a loss to the Jewish community, this pipeline of leadership and energy.”
Most of Gringras and Stern’s interviewees, likewise, “talked of a childhood and Jewish education that embraced the centrality of Israel,” the report states. “Their Israel journeys did not begin with an ideological rejection of Zionism. Yet nearly all of them underwent a paradigm shift, and now see Israel through primarily anti-Zionist eyes.”
First-person accounts from the report describe painful breaks with the Jewish community. They shared stories of being cut off by family members for asking their opinions about Israel’s human rights record, or of being rebuked by rabbis for suggesting that post-Oct. 7 donations should be directed to Israeli healthcare services rather than the military.
“It is far, far easier to come out as gay than to come out as anti-Zionist,” one subject said.
Another interviewee, who grew up in a religious Zionist family that lived for a time in a settlement in the West Bank, stated, “I know that my parents are terribly sad that I am no longer a Zionist. I think they don’t realize how sad I am, too, that I am no longer a Zionist.”
“We weren’t meeting people who didn’t care,” Gringras summarized, describing their subjects as “sad, if not brokenhearted, about the way in which they not only find no expression for their Judaism, but also find the Judaism that they’re meeting very challenging.”
Gringras and Sterne are far from anti-Zionists themselves. Both are Jewish emigres to Israel; Sterne has held senior roles with the Jewish Agency and Hillel International, while Gringras is a former leader of the Jewish Agency’s Israel Education Laboratory. They founded For the Sake of Argument in 2022, with support from funders such as the Jim Joseph Foundation and the Natan Fund — realizing, in Gringras’s estimation, that “the way to learn about Israel, to be engaged in Israel, is to be engaged in its arguments.”
Talking to anti-Zionists wasn’t the project’s initial plan. At first, For The Sake of Argument sought out to explore what they’d theorized was a purely generational divide in Jewish views on Israel. But, the report’s authors say, they soon realized that age wasn’t the appropriate framing for the divide. Some younger subjects “expressed deep support for Israel,” the found, and some older ones “were deeply critical.”
The real divide, they determined, “is over Israel itself, between Zionists and anti-Zionists.” So they pivoted to interviewing anti-Zionists directly — with connections made via intermediaries, mostly on the East Coast, and the wording of questions carefully constructed in advance with “the assumption that no one is born Zionist or anti-Zionist.”
In fact some interview subjects said that, far from being born anti-Zionist, they only made the leap in the aftermath of Oct. 7 and the subsequent war in Gaza, out of distress over Israel’s behavior during the war. Some made asks of their Jewish leaders, such as to remove the Israeli flag from the bimah, that they had not previously considered.
All of it, the paper said, came from a place of deep identification with and concern for the Jewish community amid the anti-Zionists’ beliefs that it was aligning itself with an immoral cause.
The researchers all say Jewish leaders should conduct similar interviews within their own communities, to understand the real contours of sentiment about Israel.
For the Sake of Argument plans to offer programming to help facilitate such dialogue. Aronson emphasized that those conversations would ideally come from a place of mutual respect and vulnerability.
“I don’t think it will be effective if it comes from this position of, ‘We are mainstream Judaism, we are willing to have a conversation with you,’” she said. “It can only be done if it’s really from a willingness that all sides need to be open and listening to each other.”
Aronson noted that Zionist Jewish leaders, following one of JFNA’s own conclusions from its report, may see it as their job to try to convince their counterparts why Zionism matters. That approach could easily backfire, she said.
“For these highly engaged anti-Zionists who have gone through serious Jewish education and involvement, they actually have already heard all of the arguments that mainstream Judaism has to present,” she said. “I think that’s one of the reasons why they say, ‘We don’t need to hear your side.’ Because they’ll say, ‘We have learned it. You’ve taught it to us and we reject it.’”
Boxer noted that, in many of the Jewish population surveys he’s worked on, “community after community” has told him they struggle to broach conversations about Zionism. That makes them all the more essential, he said.
“I think it’s going to be painful, but we have to have these conversations,” Boxer said.
All the researchers agreed on something else: The divide between Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews is deep, and concerning.
“We don’t know what to do,” Gringras and Sterne admit in the report. Aronson concurred.
“I don’t know how we put the community back together. I don’t know that this is a bridgeable line, to be honest,” she said. “This is certainly not the first time in Jewish history when people have left and made their own tents.”
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Trump announces he has ‘largely negotiated’ Iran deal, Strait of Hormuz opening
(JTA) — President Donald Trump announced in a post on Truth Social Saturday afternoon that a deal with Iran had been “largely negotiated,” despite saying earlier in the day that he was undecided on whether to agree to a proposal or resume strikes.
Trump described the deal as a “Memorandum of Understanding pertaining to PEACE” that was “subject to finalization” by the United States, Iran and other countries that participated in talks on Saturday. He noted that he’d “just had a very good call” with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan and Bahrain.
Trump said in his Truth Social post that, separately, he had spoken with Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a conversation that “went very well.” There was no immediate statement released by the Prime Minister’s Office following Trump’s post.
“Final aspects and details of the Deal are currently being discussed, and will be announced shortly,” Trump added.
In the post, Trump said the deal would include the opening of the Strait of Hormuz, though a widely reported quote from Iran’s Fars New Agency, which is close to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, said that Trump’s assertion was “incomplete and inconsistent with reality” and that the strait would remain under Iranian control.
Trump’s announcement comes over a month since he unilaterally extended a fragile U.S.-Iran ceasefire in April.
The announcement did not make mention of Iran’s nuclear program or highly enriched uranium, which Trump has previously stressed must be included in a deal.
Trump’s announcement came hours after he told Axios that he was a “solid 50/50” on whether he would be able to make a “good” deal with Iran, or else “blow them to kingdom come.”
Trump also told Axios that Netanyahu was “torn” over the potential deal but rejected the idea that the Israeli leader was “worried” that he might strike an unfavorable agreement.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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In Trump’s assault on democracy, echoes of Nazi Germany but new glimmers of hope that America will be different
In the final, tumultuous years of the Weimar Republic, a succession of arch-conservative chancellors ruled by emergency decree rather than go through the Reichstag, the German parliament. Germany had become a democracy in name only, as reactionary power brokers steered the nation deeper into totalitarian waters, ultimately opening the door for Hitler.
As we approach our mid-term elections, America too is at a pivot point — with the burning question being whether Donald Trump’s grip on MAGA lawmakers can be broken so that Congress, feckless like the Reichstag of the late Weimar Republic, can resume its constitutional role as a check on the executive.
It’s a matter of life or death for American democracy as it nears its 250th birthday.
As Trump’s poll numbers tank while GOP lawmakers’ support for him endures, I find myself musing about the Weimar Republic and the self-immolation of its national legislature.
In the final months before they came to power on Jan. 30, 1933, Hitler and the Nazis were actually on the ropes. After they had become the largest party in the Reichstag in July elections a year earlier, two million Germans abandoned the Nazis in an election that November. Many Germans were less enamored of the Nazi leader, fatigued by a sense that the Nazis thrived on disorder. The spell seemed to be breaking. Does this ring a bell? Economics also played a role: Germany was finally emerging from the Great Depression.
But the German republic had already been brought to a breaking point by street fighting, political chaos, the Great Depression, and a coterie of arch-conservative power brokers who schemed and maneuvered to scrap Germany’s first democracy. They included Chancellor Franz von Papen.
Papen was unable to form a majority coalition after the July 1932 election because of huge gains by the Nazis and losses by other key parties, so he continued to govern by emergency decree with the consent of President Paul von Hindenburg, relying on the broad emergency powers of Article 48 of the constitution that had already hollowed out parliamentary rule.
More internal scheming resulted in Papen’s ouster after the November 1932 election. He was replaced by General Kurt von Schleicher, a master of intrigue. But Schleicher lasted only two months, as disagreements raged over whether to give Hitler a role in the government, and what that role should be. The reactionary schemers eventually reached a consensus: Let Hitler have the chancellorship but keep him in check by loading the cabinet with archconservatives like Papen. Once Hitler became chancellor on Jan. 30, 1933, it didn’t take him long to outmaneuver all of the other schemers, who became puppets of the Nazi leader instead of the puppet masters.
Germany’s political establishment — all but the Social Democrats and the banned Communists — ceremoniously handed the keys over to Hitler on March 23, 1933, when the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act, dismantling parliamentary democracy and giving Hitler dictatorial powers.
Which brings us to the question: Whither American democracy?
Under Trump, our Congress has been reduced to a shell of its former self, an American analog of the toothless Reichstag. As Trump has launched assault after assault on the pillars of American democracy — on the judiciary, on higher education, on free speech, our election system, the rule of law, and even on unflattering but true chapters in American history — Republicans have kept quiet, fearing Trump’s wrath and retribution.
But now there are glimmers of hope. Trump’s broken promises, self-aggrandizement, megalomania, corruption, utter indifference to everyday Americans’ economic suffering, and relentless catering to the country’s wealthiest are finally catching up with him. New polls put his approval rating at a dismal 37%. In a New York Times/Siena poll, just 28% of voters approved of how Trump is handling the cost of living, while only 31% approved of his war with Iran. Even Fox News had him at 39% approval. That same poll showed GOP support for Trump weakening considerably on his handling of the economy.
Economic pain is driving the collapse. The soaring costs of the war in Iran, Trump’s vanity projects, and his proposed $1.8 billion slush fund for the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, coupled with his push for lifetime immunity for himself and his family to commit tax fraud, have incensed voters who are already struggling to afford groceries, gas, housing and health care.
As Americans make impossible choices, the 47th president touts the glitzy White House ballroom he wants to build and his plans for an arch that would dwarf the Arc de Triomphe, all while prosecuting a war that has closed the Strait of Hormuz and driven up prices worldwide. The widening gap between Trump’s self-indulgence and the country’s hardship is finally producing something late Weimar never managed: a meaningful break in the habit of submission to an aspiring strongman.
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This Jewish artist hadn’t painted in more than 5 decades. Then came Oct. 7.
Sid Klein has finally found his subject. More than half a century after he scrambled to pick a topic for his senior art project at Brooklyn College—and settled on exploring the porcelain curves of a toilet bowl in a 20-painting series—he’s discovered a purpose.
Klein, 78, took a five-decade hiatus from art between college graduation and retirement. He picked his brushes back up just a few months before the events of Oct. 7.
Upon hearing of the Hamas attacks, Klein processed the news with acrylics. Soon, he began looking back to the Holocaust. He felt compelled to render contemporary and historical victims of hatred on paper and ultimately take on the mantle of combatting antisemitism, not with words or weapons but with images.
“For the first time in my life, I’m so motivated in my art,” Klein told me over Zoom from his home in South Florida. “All of a sudden I went from, ‘I don’t know what I want to paint,’ to, ‘I’ve got to make a record of this so people can look at these paintings and see what does antisemitism naturally lead to.’”
Born and raised in Brooklyn, Klein noticed at a young age that he could depict objects in three dimensions. “I started drawing with Crayola crayons with paper that my mom would pick up [at] the local five and dime,” he said.
But his mother died when he was seven, leaving his father to raise three children on his own. Though they weren’t particularly religious, Klein said, he attended yeshiva. The extra-long school day helped his working single father make sure he was safe. Klein continued dabbling in art through elementary and high school.
The Holocaust was not part of his education, as far as he remembers, not at the yeshiva and not later in college, where he flitted from pre-law to economics to philosophy before settling on fine art. “I’d never been exposed to it,” he said. “I’d never seen the photographs. I consciously avoided the photographs.”
“I was living in this bubble so I could pretend that antisemitism did not exist,” he said.
He remained in that bubble through business school and a long career in marketing. During that time, “painting didn’t even cross my mind,” Klein said. “For 55 years, I focused on the business and totally ignored the art.”
It wasn’t until his career drew to a close that he thought he might try again. “I wanted to give it a try and see what was left,” he said. But he wanted to keep painting only if he had a worthy subject, which he found in the wake of the Hamas attacks.
“That murder affected me in a profound way,” said Klein, who has two sons and five grandchildren living in Israel. “I started painting in my mind what these 1,200 people would have looked like. And that was my return to art.”
The segue from the horrors of Oct. 7 to those of the Holocaust felt natural to Klein. “For me, all of those are one of the same. They’re all Jew hatred at different times in history,” he said. “The amount of evil in our world is just—I don’t know how to measure it.” There are endless tragedies, he said, “but I’m focusing on our people.”
Klein paints in a corner of the family room he’s designated as his studio. He regularly pores over hundreds of black-and-white photos taken in ghettos and camps, looking for his next subjects to call out to him.
In one photograph, he recalled, he saw lines upon lines of women and children, standing near cattle cars, waiting, exhausted. He distilled the scene to one row of imminent victims in “Innocents.” They’re “going to be taken to a gas chamber and they’re going to be dead in 20 minutes or a half hour, and they don’t know that,” he said. On the right, a boy tugs at his mother’s coat. The woman on the far left balances the small child in her arms alongside her pregnant belly. In the middle, another grasps a toddler’s hand. Their eyes implore the viewer to grapple with their fate.
Several of Klein’s Holocaust works were displayed earlier this year at the Gross-Rosen Museum in Rogoźnica in Poland, on the grounds of the concentration camp system of the same name, where an estimated 120,000 people were imprisoned and 40,000 died.
“As employees of a Memorial Site, we have constant access to disturbing historical photos and documents; these are undeniably important, but viewing the victims through the eyes of an artist is an entirely different, more intimate experience,” Bartosz Surman, who works for the museum’s education department, told me. Surman estimated that approximately 4,000 people saw Klein’s work there between January 27 and March 31. “For a Memorial Site located in a village of fewer than a thousand people, we consider it a significant success and a testament to the power of Mr. Klein’s work,” he said.
Four thousand miles away, “My Zaidy” hangs on the wall at the Dr. Bernard Heller Museum in downtown Manhattan as part of the exhibition “Proverbs, Adages, and Maxims.”
The man in the painting wears a star under his heart. The bright yellow patch and pearlescent and gold shimmer of his face contrast with the matte blue of his coat and hat. But turning the corner of the exhibition, it’s the eyes that catch you. “I left them blank, so you can put in his eyes, any eyes you want,” Klein said—his zaidy’s or yours or a stranger’s.
The eyes may be missing but the gaze is powerful, as though this old man, as he approaches his cruel end, is staring and saying, “Look at me. Do you see what’s happening? Why are you just standing there?”
“A lot of bubbes and zaides were exterminated,” Klein said, including his paternal grandfather. But the zaidy in the painting isn’t Klein’s, exactly, he said. He can’t recall ever seeing a photo of him. Instead, he painted another elderly man in a photo that struck him: This is what a zaidy selected for the gas chamber looks like. This is what Klein’s zaidy could have looked like.
“I decided I was going to do a painting, and fill that hole in my heart,” Klein said.
“There’s something very haunting about the hollowed, empty eyes,” museum director Jeanie Rosensaft told me over the phone. “We were very touched, because although [Klein] has not had a long resume of art production, we felt that the image that he provided was very compelling.”.
Klein is one of 58 artists in the exhibition, and his work will be included in a tour the museum is organizing following its New York run, which ends June 24. “We hope that he continues on this path,” Rosensaft said. “It’s really essential that art bear witness to the past and provide a bridge to the future.”
Seeing the pain
Klein’s next painting, he told me, was inspired by a photo of two small children, empty bowls in hand, begging for food.
“If I had more working space, I would make my paintings bigger,” said Klein, who says he hopes to one day create life-size portraits. “Right now you’ve got to get pretty close to see what the hell is going on,” he said. “I want size to be part of your experience seeing the pain.”
Spending his days sifting through Holocaust photos and painting its victims takes a toll. “When I paint, I become emotionally involved. But when it’s done, I listen to my music for a couple of hours, and that gives me the emotional strength to continue,” says Klein, who puts on Vivaldi, Mozart, or Brahms, for example. “After I do a painting, I need this music to settle my nerves.”
“Sometimes I say, ‘Klein, try something else!’” he said. But he can’t imagine abandoning his subject or newfound mission for any others. Which means he’ll need more of that music in the years to come, as might those viewing his paintings.
“A lot of my work is grotesque,” Klein said, and that’s intentional. “I want to shake you up.”
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