The Progressive Jewish Bind

Last Tuesday, I was supposed to have launched my first book, Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life, with an event at a bookstore in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Dumbo—a conversation between me and the well-known Reform rabbi Andy Bachman.

The event didn’t happen. About an hour before the intended start, I heard from my publicist that the bookstore had “concerns” about Rabbi Bachman because he was a “Zionist.” I received another call while in a car on the way to the store: The manager was now refusing to host the conversation with the rabbi. When I arrived, I asked her why she would not permit the event to go forward as planned. Her response: “We don’t want a Zionist onstage.”

I was taken aback. Rabbi Bachman is an outspoken social-justice advocate and a supporter of the establishment of a Palestinian state (and my former teacher). My book is a history of American Jewish life in the second half of the 20th century, and deals critically with Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Because of my analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as my reporting about and public opposition to Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and siege of Gaza, I had feared that synagogues would be reluctant (and surely some still are) to host events. I did not anticipate that the trouble would come from a bookstore in Brooklyn.

[Adam Kirsch: The false narrative of settler colonialism]

Then again, perhaps I should not have been surprised at all. Since October 7, the public discourse on Israel and Palestine has curdled. Some right-wing supporters of Israel have become cheerleaders for violence. In certain spaces that call themselves progressive, intolerance has become endemic and conspiratorial thinking is on the rise. The result across the board: Nuance has evaporated, and humanity is in short supply.

My would-be book launch also exemplified the bind that many progressive American Jews face. We are caught between parts of an activist left demanding that we disavow our communities, even our families, as an entrance ticket, and a mainstream Jewish institutional world that has long marginalized critics of Israeli policy. Indeed, Jews who are committed to the flourishing of Jewish life in Israel and the Diaspora, and who are also outraged by Israel’s brutal war in Gaza, feel like we have little room to maneuver.

On the one hand, we can no more renounce our families, friends, and communities than we can ourselves, and the demand that we do so is wrong. It is straightforwardly anti-Semitic to ask, as the bookstore manager did with her blanket ban on Zionists, that Jews support Israel’s dismantling as a criterion for participation in intellectual life. This is a condition that most Jews, who when surveyed describe strong attachment to Israel, could not meet. And it is a kind of litmus test that should not be asked (and generally is not) of any other group of people.

On the other hand, we cannot ignore Israel’s devastation of the Gaza Strip, and should be fearful of shifting attention away from the human catastrophe unfolding in the territory. Friends on the left have warned me that making too much of last week’s deplatforming has already had this effect. I worry about bolstering tribalist thinking, which is precisely the mentality that for decades has blinded so many in mainstream Jewish institutions to the grinding, daily injustices of the occupation of the West Bank and siege of Gaza—and, more recently, inured them to the horrific fact that this war has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, most of them civilians.

But silence about the pitfalls of the left carries its own risks—including risks to the left itself. My experience last week was so demoralizing in part because such episodes make moving the mainstream Jewish community much harder. Every time a left-wing activist insists that the only way to truly participate in the fight for peace and justice is to support the dissolution of Israel, it reinforces the zero-sum (and morally repulsive) idea that opposing the status quo requires Israel’s destruction. Rhetorical extremism and dogmatism make it easier for right-wing Israel supporters to dismiss what should be legitimate demands—for instance, conditions on U.S. military aid—as beyond the pale.

The new left-wing norm that insists on one-state maximalism is not only a moral mistake. It is also a strategic one. If there is one thing that the past year of cease-fire activism has illustrated, it is that changing U.S. policy on Israel requires a broad coalition. That big tent must have room for those who believe in Jewish self-determination and are committed to Israel’s existence, even as they work to end its domination over Palestinians.

Many on the right, not just the far left, scoff at the possibility of such a coalition. For the past several days, my inbox has been filled with hateful crowing that the cancellation of my book launch is the bitter fruit that I and other left-wing Jews deserve. What did I expect? Hadn’t I written more than 100 articles documenting Israeli human-rights abuses and the occupation’s quotidian cruelty? Didn’t I advocate for policies, including boycotts, that would pressure Israel to change its policies? So how could I now complain that similar tactics were being used against me? The ejection of Zionists and Israelis from polite society was on my hands.

To these critics I must insist on a difference between boycotts of entire groups of people based on their identity or the ideas they are assumed to hold, and boycotts of goods produced in unlawfully occupied territories. The former are antithetical to democratic public life—as the owner of the bookstore argued in his statement apologizing for the cancellation. The latter, by contrast, are a staple of nonviolent resistance, crucial tools for achieving genuine democracy.

[Arash Azizi: Is a new Palestinian movement being born?]

No doubt, I regret certain sentences and even articles I’ve written about Israel in the past, which today I would phrase differently. The October 7 attacks painfully resensitized me to the reality of Israeli Jewish vulnerability, which exists despite the massive power imbalance between Israel and the Palestinians. I was too often willing to overlook this fact. Opening one’s eyes to the dehumanization of Palestinians does not require closing one’s eyes to the dehumanization of Israelis, and vice versa. If Rabbi Bachman and I had been able to have our conversation last week, we could have discussed what might be the one immutable truth about Israel and Palestine these days: Neither Israelis nor Palestinians are going anywhere, and both peoples have the right to equality, dignity, and self-determination. No movement that ignores this reality has any hope of success.