‘I, too, am the Jewish community’: rifts widen among Jews

JVL Introduction

Jews have never spoken with a single voice – indeed to treat Jews as a homogenous entity is generally regarded as a stereotype with antisemitic connotations.

Yet over Israel’s murderous war on Gaza many Jewish communities have an expectation, a demand even, for absolute unity which they try to enforce on their fellow Jews with a ferocious passion.

It’s a reality Jews supporting Palestinian rights have always had to deal with, but never more so than today, as our universalistic, always-with-the-oppressed values come into conflict with the emotions and political stances adopted by so many other Jews we know or encounter.

We repost here two articles exploring this subject, one among Jews in the US, the other in Sydney, Australia. The latter is especially powerful in its description of a “savage and toxic” meeting and its attempt to get to the roots of the extraordinary hatred of Jews and other dissenters expressed there.

RK

‘I, too, am the Jewish community’: rift among US Jews widens over Gaza war

Within families and congregations, on campuses, at protests and online, fissures within Jewish communities are deepening

Robin Buller, the Guardian, 4th November 2023

After years of searching for the right fit, Jackie Goldman was thrilled to finally join a synagogue in Providence, Rhode Island, last August. Goldman, who uses they/them pronouns, grew up in a conservative Jewish household, attended a Jewish private school as a child, and was active with Hillel, the Jewish student group, in college. As an adult, they kept kosher, but missed the rituals that accompanied being part of an organized community. “I was so excited to join,” Goldman said.

Those feelings quickly dissipated following Hamas’s attacks in southern Israel on 7 October, which killed more than 1,400 Israelis – mostly civilians. In the weeks since, Israeli strikes on the Gaza Strip have killed more than 9,000 Palestinians, including more than 3,000 children.

Goldman wanted to grieve Israeli and Palestinian deaths alike and was stunned by what they felt was a lack of empathy for Palestinian casualties on the part of their congregation. In the synagogue listserv, members characterized protests in solidarity with Palestine as violently antisemitic. Meanwhile, a fundraising effort for the Israeli Defense Force garnered widespread support.

With a heavy heart, Goldman left the congregation. “What now? What am I going to do for Jewish holidays in the future?” they lamented.

Across the US, Jews are facing complex emotions as they grapple with the escalating war in Israel and Gaza. Within families and congregations, on campuses, at protests and online, fissures within Jewish communities are deepening, reflecting broader divisions in public opinion over the war.

Even before 7 October, support for Israel among American Jews – who constitute the world’s second largest Jewish population after Israel – was shifting. One poll showed that while most Jews see caring about Israel as important to their Jewish identity, more than half disapprove of the country’s rightwing government. Another found that a quarter of American Jews agree Israel is an “apartheid state”, and one-fifth of those under 40 do not think the Jewish state has a right to exist.

These shifts have come with a surge in Jewish organizing on the left, with groups like IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace, which have long condemned Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, at the forefront of calls for a ceasefire and an end to US support of Israel’s war on Gaza. Since the war started, Jewish activists have shut down New York’s Grand Central station and been arrested for actions like occupying the halls of Congress and rallying in front of the home of the Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, who is also Jewish.

Rabbi Anna Levin Rosen, who oversees the University of Chicago’s Hillel Center, says such actions are isolating to Jewish students who feel they leave little space for their grief over violence against Israeli civilians. “That horror … being embraced as a justified form of resistance, felt shocking to so many of us,” Rosen said, pointing to an incident on campus in which a rally in support of massacred Israelis was drowned out by a protest led by Students for Justice in Palestine.

“It feels even more lonely when even Jews don’t see the right for Israelis to live in peace in our homeland,” Rosen said, emphasizing that she holds an “open heart” for Jews whose primary concern is for civilians in Gaza.

These splits have also infiltrated institutions, including the Association for Jewish Studies, the world’s largest professional organization for scholars of Jewish history and culture. On 9 October, the organization sent members an email expressing “deep sorrow for the loss of life” in Israel that was criticized for being vague, innocuous and absent of any condemnation of Hamas. The following day, it released an updated statement featuring more pointed language. That statement, too, was accused of “political squeamishness” by those who wanted the organization to more definitively stand behind Israel.

Other Jewish studies scholars are dismayed by what they see as a failure to sufficiently condemn violence against Palestinians. Jessie Stoolman, a doctoral student in anthropology at UCLA, has been involved in Palestinian solidarity movements for more than a decade – a background that she says is unusual for a field that often steers clear of criticizing Israel.

Still, Stoolman assumed her fellow scholars, many of whom study histories of persecution and genocide, would get behind demands for de-escalation, and was disappointed that more people didn’t sign her open letter calling for a ceasefire. “I figured that the point of dedicating your life to studying these moments of horror that are entirely preventable is that you also prevent [them] from happening again,” she said.

In Durham, North Carolina, Rabbi Daniel Greyber of Beth El Synagogue is trying to keep political discussions out of his congregation, whose members range from anti-Zionist activists to people more supportive of Israel’s actions and include relatives of people kidnapped by Hamas. One way he has done that is to hold processing sessions that air different views and in which debate is strictly forbidden. “If you can’t listen, take yourself out of the conversation,” he told his community.

He says he thinks worshipers have found the sessions productive, but also suspects that his middle-ground approach has upset some congregants on both the left and the right.

Rising incidents of both antisemitism and Islamophobia are intensifying divisions. Max Lazar, who teaches high school social studies at a Jewish day school on New York’s Upper East Side, said his students are struggling to understand how violence against Israeli citizens has led to the targeting of American Jewish neighborhoods. “Our students find it hard to understand that so many people marching for a ceasefire are not also calling for the release of Israeli hostages,” he said.

Near his apartment, also on the Upper East Side, Lazar has seen swastikas drawn on buildings, including one on the window of a historic Jewish deli.

To Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch of Manhattan’s Stephen Wise free synagogue, calls for ceasefire are themselves antisemitic – he believes they hold Israel to a different standard than other countries. “The idea that of all nations in the world, Israel alone doesn’t have the right to respond in self-defense, causes many of us to pause and say, ‘What’s really going on here?’” he said.

Pro-Israel and pro-Palestine protesters face off during a demonstration in Georgia.

“We’ve always had in our community Jews who have forcefully disagreed with one another,” he continued. Of Jewish Voice for Peace, he said: “Many of them aren’t Jewish, by the way, and they certainly aren’t for peace.”

Jewish Voice for Peace describes itself as a “grassroots, multiracial, cross-class, intergenerational movement of US Jews”.

For others, support for Palestine is deeply entwined with their Judaism.

Jay Saper, a leader with Jewish Voice for Peace, grew up hearing an aunt’s stories about living in Jim Crow Mississippi. Even after the local synagogue and rabbi’s home were bombed, the Jewish community continued its support for the civil rights movement, Saper said.

Today, that legacy inspires Saper, who studies and translates Yiddish literature, to protest in solidarity with Palestine. “My Jewishness is connected to a commitment to taking action for justice for all people,” Saper added.

Michelle Fine, a professor in psychology and urban education at the City University of New York graduate center, expresses a similar sentiment. “It’s painful for me to see censorship and silence as a Jewish practice,” she said, in reference to a crackdown on speech in support of Palestinian rights around the country. “That is not my experience of Judaism.”

Fine said that on a recent call, a university donor told her that many Jews are “very upset” about students standing with Palestine.

“The Jewish community is very diverse,” she said. “I, too, am the Jewish community.”

In the lion’s den

Waverley Council in Sydney recently voted to remove Greens councillors from their positions as Deputy Mayor and Committee members due to their position on the Israel/Palestine conflict. I was terrified of the deep irrationality and over-powering hatred and anger on display at the meeting. How can we usefully engage with such trauma and stop the horrors now being perpetrated against the people of Gaza?

By Vivienne Porzsolt, Pearls and Irritations, 3rd November, 2023

On Thursday 26 October, I, together with fellow Jewish peace activists, Michelle Berkon and Dr Peter Slezak, attended an Extraordinary Council Meeting of the Waverley Council, in Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs, an LGA with a significant Jewish population.

The meeting was called in response to the refusal of the two Greens councillors to support a very biased motion at the Council’s monthly meeting the previous week in support of Israel and the local Jewish community. The Greens councillors had proposed an amendment to include, alongside condemnation of the atrocities committed by Hamas against Israeli civilians on 7 October, condemnation of ‘the war crimes perpetrated by a right-wing Israeli government, including the bombing of Palestinian civilians’. When the Waverley Council meeting rejected this amendment, Councillors Ludovico Fabiano and Dominic Wy Kanak voted against the substantive motion.

A few days before the Extraordinary Meeting, a petition to the Mayor to remove Cr Fabiano from his position as Deputy Mayor was launched and attracted 2647 signatures.

The resolutions considered by the Extraordinary Council Meeting proposed removing Cr Fabiano from his position as Deputy Mayor and removing both councillors from most of their positions on advisory committees. These resolutions were passed with a strong majority, with the two demoted councillors and 2 Labor councillors voting against it.

The atmosphere at the meeting was savage and toxic. The packed chamber and anteroom seethed with anger, and erupted with constant interjections against the few speakers like myself who spoke in support of the people of Gaza, the two councillors and the democratic process. There were even howls of protest when I began my speech with an Acknowledgement of Country. My comment that, like many of them, many of my family were consumed in the Holocaust ovens, was greeted with ‘Pity you weren’t!’ and ‘You’re a traitor!’ The fake news of beheaded babies was widely cited. The suggestion that Palestinian lives and Palestinian babies were equally deserving of compassion and respect brought only contempt and dismissal. Several cries of ‘Dirty kaffir! Dirty kaffir!’ attested to a substantial and racist South African Jewish contingent in the room. There was considerable pushing. Posters with pictures of those taken captive by Hamas were shoved aggressively in our faces. This implied, totally erroneously, that we lacked compassion for those captured and murdered. They were so crazed by their own fears and rage that they were unable to hear us, even when we were agreeing with them.

Although recording, filming and photographs other than Council’s official record were expressly forbidden by Council rules, people were recording, live-streaming and photographing the meeting freely. Several made a point of including us in their filming but no steps were taken to stop it. However, security immediately challenged Michelle when she was taking notes on her mobile.

The Chair, Mayor Paula Masselos tried to keep the crowd in order but she did not take up the options of either removing the most prominent instigators or closing down the meeting when her efforts were in vain. Given the volatility of the crowd, she may well have decided that discretion was the better part of valour and allowed the meeting to continue. However, while speakers for the motion routinely spoke past the allocated 3 minutes, no time extensions were allowed for those opposing the motion, despite being constantly interrupted and shouted down by the crowd.

Consideration of civil liberties and the democratic right to dissent were thrown out the window in this tsunami of hysteria.

The Council chamber overflowed three times over with, from my observation, mostly Jewish constituents. This mass attendance had obviously been highly organised. One elderly woman said as she came in ‘I was told to come to this meeting at 6.30’. She didn’t seem clear about the topic. Many people flashed full-colour A4 posters headed ‘Kidnapped’. Each of them had a photo and name of one of those kidnapped, a different person on each poster. In full colour, with the posters individually printed, not a cheap exercise.

A number of people have contacted me, asking how I am after the abuse that greeted my speech. I am really ok. My strong feeling of connection with people, both Jewish and Palestinian, gives me a kind of shield and ground of security. I am filled with pity for my fellow Jews who are so driven by post-Holocaust trauma that they have lost all connection with their humanity and reason in relation to Israel and to the Palestinians as human beings. This trauma has been shamefully fed and manipulated by the Zionist movement to fuel their colonialist project. People witnessing last night’s scenes without appreciating or understanding this historical trauma could well respond with antisemitic impulses.

Nevertheless, I am terrified of the deep irrationality and over-powering hatred and anger on display at the meeting. How can we usefully engage with such trauma and stop the horrors now being perpetrated against the people of Gaza? It seems overwhelming. This needs the compassion and skills of Auschwitz survivor and psychotherapist Gabor Mate

When I see so many of my fellow Jews swept up by this all-consuming terror, I am appalled at this twisting of the human spirit and can only reflect that this is a dreadful posthumous victory for Hitler.

Vivienne Porzsolt is a a secular Jew whose parents were refugees from the Nazis. She is a longtime activist for a range of social justice issues. She is spokesperson for Jews against the Occupation in Sydney and has been an advocate for justice and equality in Palestine/Israel for many years.