Uncategorized
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.”
The post What to do with anti-Zionist Jews? Try talking to them, some Jewish researchers say appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
VIDEO: ’Love was there too:’ A Yom Hashoah commemoration in Yiddish
די פֿאַרגאַנגענע וואָך האָט דער „ייִדישפּיל“־טעאַטער אין תּל־אָבֿיבֿ אַרויסגעשטעלט אַ ווידעאָ פֿון אַ „יום־השואה“־אַקאַדעמיע וואָס די טרופּע האָט דורכגעפֿירט אין 2022. די טעמע פֿון דער פּראָגראַם איז געווען מאָמענטן פֿון ליבע בײַ ייִדן אין די געטאָס און קאָנצענטראַציע־לאַגערן.
אינעם ווידעאָ לייענען די אַקטיאָרן פֿאָר זכרונות פֿון לעבן געבליבענע ווי אויך ייִדישע לידער אָנגעשריבן בשעת דעם חורבן. זיי באַשרײַבן ווי אַזוי געליבטע פּאָרלעך האָבן זיך געטראָפֿן בשתּיקה; רירנדיקע מאָמענטן פֿון געזעגענען זיך און ווי די לעבן געבליבענע האָבן זיך באַמיט מיט אַלע כּוחות צו געפֿינען די געליבטע נאָך דער באַפֿרײַונג.
דער ווידעאָ הייבט זיך אָן מיט אַ באַגריסונג פֿונעם תּל־אָבֿיבֿער בירגערמײַסטער, רון חולדאי, אויף העברעיִש, אָבער די פּראָגראַם גופֿא איז אין גאַנצן אויף ייִדיש.
The post VIDEO: ’Love was there too:’ A Yom Hashoah commemoration in Yiddish appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
In Elie Wiesel’s latter years, he and I discussed the effects of the Holocaust. Those conversations are now an opera.
Back in 2012, while on assignment as the Chicago Tribune’s longtime music critic, I received a phone call from my editor that would change my life.
Elie Wiesel had just accepted the newspaper’s annual Literary Prize. Would I be interested in interviewing him for the paper?
Would I?!
There was only one minor problem: I had never read a word Wiesel had written, not even his revered Holocaust memoir Night. Holocaust education was not required in the 1950s and ’60s when I was growing up – not even in Skokie, a nexus of Holocaust survivors where I lived with my family. As the son of two survivors, I considered Holocaust books, films and TV programs emotionally overwhelming and something to be avoided, if possible.
My avoidance ended abruptly in 2001, when my then 69-year-old mother began re-experiencing her unspoken Holocaust childhood in the form of delusions. This prompted me to unearth her hidden story and tell it in a Tribune article and a subsequent book and a documentary for PBS – all aptly titled Prisoner of Her Past.
I assumed that work was the reason the Tribune tapped this music critic to interview Wiesel.
After a few weeks of reading everything he wrote that I could lay my hands on, I flew to New York and found myself seated inches away from him in his Manhattan office. Within minutes, we were speaking with a degree of comfort and intimacy I had not anticipated.
Even more remarkable, after Wiesel and I held a public conversation before 2,500-plus people in Chicago’s Symphony Center — a longstanding feature of the Tribune’s Literary Prize proceedings — he suggested that we stay in touch.
That’s when I realized we had the beginnings of a book: two generations — a survivor and a son of survivors — trying to come to terms with what happened to our families and to our people. For the next four years, I visited Wiesel regularly in New York and Florida and spoke with him often on the phone. The utterly unexpected privilege of these conversations ended suddenly with his death July 2, 2016, at age 87.
In effect, Wiesel had spent the last four years of his life communing with me about the Holocaust and its apparently never-ending after-effects, my tape recorder rolling all the while. These proved to be his final thoughts on the subject, which I took as precious lessons on a fraught subject. For Wiesel had given me answers to questions I never had been able to ask my parents. To them, the Holocaust was a subject not to be discussed with me or my sister, presumably to spare us the burden of such tragedy.
Wiesel poignantly addressed what I needed and wanted to know: How does the second generation deal with feelings of guilt over our parents’ unrelieved sufferings? How do we live up to our parents’ expectations of us, without suppressing our own dreams? How do we even speak of this terrifying subject? How religious must we be? How politically active? How do we cope with the enormity of it all?
And more.
I packed the answers – and our reflections on them – into my 2019 book The Art of Inventing Hope: Intimate Conversations with Elie Wiesel, which is the basis of the new opera: The Dialogue of Memories, which premieres next month in Seattle.
Why an opera?
Though I was glad to have captured on paper my treasured experiences with Wiesel, I wanted to share the wealth — to let others see and feel and hear what it was like to be in the room with him. I wanted audiences to witness Wiesel explaining and illuminating my own past to me. And like Wiesel, I’ve always believed in the indescribable but unstoppable power of music to go where words alone cannot.
In 2024, the Seattle-based non-profit Music of Remembrance commissioned composer Jake Heggie and librettist Gene Scheer to write Before It All Goes Dark, an opera based on my Mac’s Journey stories in the Tribune about a Vietnam vet who learns he’s heir to a priceless collection of art looted by the Nazis (I had identified and located him).
After that opera’s success, I suggested to Music of Remembrance founder Mina Miller that my years with Wiesel represented a story of profound enlightenment that could be powerful onstage. Miller wasted no time commissioning the eminent American opera composer Tom Cipullo to write the music, with libretto by me with Cipullo.
The opera features three characters: Wiesel (sung by baritone Daniel Belcher); my mother, Sonia Reich (mezzo-soprano Megan Marino); and me (tenor Dominic Armstrong). Past and present, memory and prophesy, delusion and reality intermingle in its words. And Cipullo’s music lifts those words into the realm of sublime drama as only opera can do.
I don’t know how I’ll feel watching singers portraying Wiesel, my mother and myself confronting demons that have haunted all three of us, and millions of others around the world.
But as we mark Yom HaShoah, I do know that moments once shared by Wiesel and me alone now will be available to everyone. I hope that Wiesel’s brilliant insights and my mother’s tragic experiences will help others who — like me — have long struggled with dark and enduring histories.
The Dialogue of Memories plays May 17 at Benaroya Hall in Seattle; May 20 at the Presidio Theatre in San Francisco; and May 23-24 at the Studebaker Theater in Chicago. For details and tickets visit www.musicofremembrance.org. Howard Reich can be reached at howard@howardreich.com.
The post In Elie Wiesel’s latter years, he and I discussed the effects of the Holocaust. Those conversations are now an opera. appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
J Street says Israel should fund its own defense
J Street, the progressive pro-Israel, pro-peace political advocacy, is shifting its stance on defensive U.S. military aid to Israel as a growing number of Democrats, including some of the congressional candidates it endorsed this year, call for ending such assistance.
Jeremy Ben-Ami, the organization’s longtime president, said in a lengthy post on Monday that the organization is now advocating for phasing out direct financial support for arms sales to Israel when the current $38 billion 10-year memorandum of understanding between the two countries expires in 2028. He called it “a fundamental reassessment of the U.S.-Israel security relationship,” citing “the war in Gaza, rising extremist Jewish terror in the West Bank and the US-Israel war with Iran.”
Also stressing that “the US-Israel security relationship remains a central pillar of American policy in the Middle East,” Ben-Ami added that joint research and technological investment “should continue” and that the U.S. should continue to sell short-range air and ballistic missile defense capabilities to Israel. However, “all future Research and Development agreements with Israel must include genuine cost-sharing and aim to produce defense items that both countries plan to field.”
Ben-Ami’s post includes this statement, in boldface: “The goal of this reassessment is to advance the broader American interest of a more stable and prosperous Middle East that includes both Israelis and Palestinians living in security and freedom.”
U.S. funding for Israel’s Iron Dome first started under the Obama administration in 2011. J Street’s acceptance of the position for candidates appears aimed at navigating divisions among congressional Democrats as Democratic Party voter views swing against Israel and influential progressive figures in the congressional delegation, most conspicuously Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who previously backed missile-defense funding, and Rep. Ro Khanna of California, join calls to end all military aid to Israel.
Other members and candidates in the party still back Iron Dome funding from the U.S. seek to condition offensive weapons sales on Israel’s compliance with human rights and international law.
Brad Lander, a Jewish challenger to Rep. Dan Goldman, said last week he would oppose any additional U.S. aid to Israel, arguing the country is in violation of human rights and international law.
Last week, Brad Lander, a Jewish Democrat running for Congress who has described himself as a liberal Zionist, on Friday joined the calls for an end to U.S. aid to Israel, while adding that “Israel should have access to purchase it with their own funds.” Lander, who has been “primary approved” to challenge Rep. Dan Goldman of New York — who is the official J Street pick in the race — told the Forward he did not coordinate his announcement with the group’s, which came after his.
Democrats are already taking legislative action. The Senate is expected to vote on Wednesday on two measures — filed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Jewish Vermont Independent and longtime critic of U.S. aid to Israel — to restrict at least $660 million in weapons sales to Israel. A record 27 Senate Democrats — a majority of the caucus — supported a similar pair of resolutions to block weapons transfers. J Streets urged members to vote in favor. In the House, the Block the Bombs Act, which would restrict certain offensive arms sales to Israel, currently has 60 sponsors.
J Street’s red line
Ben-Ami maintained that J Street’s updated stance to end grants, known as the Foreign Military Financing (FMF) program, aligns with calls by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, to gradually “taper off” U.S. military aid to Israel over the next decade until it reaches zero. “This reform would normalize the relationship and place Israel in the same category as other capable allies that purchase U.S. defense equipment without subsidy,” Ben-Ami said.
Ilan Goldenberg, J Street’s senior vice president and chief policy officer and previously an aide to former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, said the organization will still support the sale of Iron Dome components and other missile defense systems as long as it’s consistent with U.S. law and aligns with U.S. policy objectives and interests.
The strategy reflects a broader shift in politics, where Israel policy and Palestinian rights have become a litmus test for progressive candidates. Recent polls showed the tensions within the Democratic Party, which loomed large in the 2024 presidential election in the wake of the Gaza war — and now opposition to the war in Iran — are likely to shape the midterm elections.
J Street PAC is backing 133 House and Senate incumbents as well as Democratic challengers running against Republican incumbents. The group has also approved several candidates competing in open Democratic primaries, allowing its donor network to support their campaigns
Speaking with the Forward during J Street’s annual conference in Washington, D.C. last month, Ben-Ami outlined the organization’s red lines for endorsements. “If you’re in favor of a complete arms embargo against Israel, and you don’t recognize that Israel should be the national homeland of the Jewish people, you won’t come anywhere near our list,” Ben-Ami said.
A recent poll commissioned by the organization found that 70% of American Jews support placing some conditions on military assistance, including 26% who favor halting aid altogether.
The departure from the long-standing bipartisan consensus backing unconditional military support for Israel has drawn criticism from some Israel supporters.
Joel Rubin, a national security expert and a former Obama administration official who was the founding political and government affairs director at J Street in 2008, called it a “major shift” that “undermines” pro-Israel organizational support for the U.S.-Israel security assistance relationship and also “puts more pressure” on Democrats to oppose aid to Israel. “J Street is playing with fire regarding the US.-Israel relationship,” he said. “It’s much easier to tear down a relationship than it is to build one up.”
The post J Street says Israel should fund its own defense appeared first on The Forward.