How do they square a growing American rejection of what many regard as apartheid and genocide with generations of conviction that a Jewish state is essential?
Nicholas Lemann, a prominent American Jewish journalist, is among those struggling to reconcile evolving progressive politics with a long-held commitment to Zionism.
For many leftists, there is no longer room for a political worldview that champions equality on issues such as abortion and LGBTQ rights while also defending a state that privileges one religious or ethnonational group over others.
In The New York Times, Lemann struggles through a muddled introspection on his own understanding of Jewish consciousness, given his upbringing in the Jewish community in New Orleans.
You can skip dancing around the issue and get straight to the point: Lemann doesn’t think we can separate Zionism from Judaism the way many Jewish progressives are doing at present.
First, he said:
But the idea that a psychological divorce from Israel is possible seems fanciful. Almost half of all Jews live there; many of us have Israeli friends and relatives. Most of us are regular visitors. It’s hard to imagine a week going by on our resolutely apolitical internal email list, heavily devoted to recommendations of plumbers or electricians, that doesn’t mention Israel as a routine aspect of life’s logistics.
Lemann was once dean of the Columbia University School of Journalism, where students are taught to avoid words like “seem” or “appear”. Use facts. Cite numbers.
The lack of evidence here leaves us wondering where he gets these ideas. Do a significant number of diaspora Jews really have close Israeli relatives? “Most” Jews are regular visitors?
In what world does anyone without professional business in Israel think a regular vacation there is a Jewish rite on par with putting on tefillin? If anything “seems fanciful”, it’s this passage.
More accurately, a recent Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found that “Among Jews with a religious affiliation…Only about half say Israel’s ongoing military operations in Gaza are justified” and “About one-quarter believe Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.”
Not a majority by any means, but people like Lemann can’t dismiss this population as fringe. And the New York Daily News, reporting on the same poll, reported:
More American Jews approve of how NYC Mayor Mamdani is doing his job than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a new poll reveals, as younger and more liberal Jews grow increasingly disenchanted with the actions of the Israeli government and the war in Gaza.
That’s despite the right-wing Zionist rhetoric that Mamdani’s support for Palestinian lives is equal to Antisemitism.
The reality, according to the figures, is fuzzier than Lemann claims.
The Jewish Telegraph Agency reported that the Milwaukee Jewish Federation “found that 43% of Jewish adults said they identified as Zionist, while 42% said they did not” and that “52% of respondents agreed that ‘Israel regularly violates the human rights of the Palestinian people’”.
Sure, that’s one American city, but this comes after a Jewish Federations of North America study “found that 37% of Jews identified as Zionist”, the wire service said.
It gets even better, according to the Forward:
Almost half of American Jews under 35 say the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be solved by creating a single country in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza with a government elected by both Israelis and Palestinians, according to a poll conducted by the Jewish Voter Resource Center.
In other words: one democratic Palestine from the River to the Sea.
Lemann’s pompousness might have been lost on his editors, but professing a need to zip off to the Holy Land with regularity smacks of the kind of out-of-touchness many Times opinion writers are often accused of.
At a time when the populist right is openly embracing Antisemitism, complaints that Jews aren’t flying El Al enough are tone-deaf in an era when even a single overseas trip is beyond the reach of many.
This rhetoric is striking because no other diaspora community speaks this way.
It reinforces the false notion that Jews are not fully rooted in their own countries; that they are not complete members of the societies in which they live because their allegiance is to a foreign power.
Once again, maybe it’s not the best idea for a Jewish writer to add fuel to Antisemitic myths about dual loyalties and otherness.
But there is more from Lemann:
The main story line of the Hebrew Bible is of an exiled people’s search for a homeland. Long before Herzl, Jews prayed facing Jerusalem, and at least notionally have longed for the rebuilding of the Temple there. Zionism touched a deep collective yearning for self-determination, for self-protection, for freedom from perpetual outsider status. All this makes the idea that Israel and Zionism can easily be factored out of American Jewish life seem almost fantastical. It asks us to give up a portion of our souls.
There is quite a difference between the idea of a Jewish presence in historic Palestine and Jewish supremacy in law and government.
The notion of Jews moving to Palestine in the Ottoman Empire and British Mandate didn’t have to be controversial. Jews, like many other groups, were moving around all the time.
Why not build up Jewish culture there like Jews were doing in New York City and Buenos Aires? Join congregations, start communities.
Palestinian Jewry had a chance to flourish in post-colonial fashion with other Palestinians. Instead, they created a state that values one life over another.
Jews praying toward Jerusalem is absolutely separate from having a state that has complete possession of the city.
Muslims pray toward Mecca. That doesn’t stop Muslims from condemning the Saudi government for committing similar sins as Israel, including New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Bathing in the Ganges in Varanasi is undoubtedly holy for Hindus. That doesn’t negate the threat far-right Hindu nationalism poses to Indian democracy and the nation’s religious minorities.
Lemann also betrays a common Jewish tradition of constantly reminding how old and deep Jewish history is. All of a sudden, Jewish history starts in late 19th-century Europe.
“Zionism, as a political ideology, is 130 years old,” said Molly Crabapple, author of Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund. “It is the state ideology of a country responsible for countless acts of ethnic cleansing and now a genocide in Gaza.”
“The Jewish religion, in various forms, is over 3500 years old, and Rabbinic Judaism is a two-millennia-old wisdom tradition of deep argumentation and dispute,” she added.
That’s a matter of ignoring the history of the Jewish people, but for Crabapple it is also ethical. “I am appalled by the conflation of my identity and the actions of a genocidal ethnostate,” she said.
There’s another annoying but telling problem with Lemann’s approach. Leftists are often berated by their critics for allowing feelings like rage and empathy to override cold analysis.
We’re pro-Palestine because we rely on our hearts but not our brains, apparently.
But pieces like this prove that this insult is projection. There’s no rational attachment to the Israel project here, other than “yearning” and “our souls”.
Lemann may very well feel this way, and he’s entitled to that. But let’s leave those emotions outside of adult political discussion.
When it comes to “what is to be done”, our scholar offers this:
My own advice for the perplexed among liberal American Jews would be, first, participate actively in the religious life of the community. That will connect you deeply to your people, back through time and everywhere in the world in the present. Second, and inextricably linked, study the Torah and the other essential texts.
This comes after Lemann tells us that he has chosen to be “more observant, and more particularist” than how he was raised.
It’s a clear nod to The Guide for the Perplexed by Moses Maimonides, meant to fuse Jewish religious texts with logic and other philosophical traditions.
But Lemann wants a different path for liberal Jews who can’t quit Israel: retreat into religious observance.
The Baruch Spinozas of the contemporary Jewish world are on the rise, and the tired old rebbes are powerless against them.
So cut yourself off in shul, away from the difficult questions and let the dirtiness of history run its course without you.
Fortunately, the rest of us aren’t so “perplexed” and know how to build a humanistic Jewish politics that fights for equality in Palestine and beyond.
Photograph courtesy of Paul Goyette. Published under a Creative Commons license.
