On Jews, un-Jews, and anti-Jews: Resetting an old table

The Pickle’s Introduction

Hey, it’s Kate.

As Israeli settler-state violence soars in the West Bank, with at least 190 Palestinians killed since 7 October, groups of Israeli and Jewish activists continue to drive down and stay overnight in the most vulnerable communities. The hope is that our presence will in some way ‘hold them back a bit’, as Azzam, a resident of the village of Susiya in the South Hebron Hills, puts it. Susiya, where I lived for three months earlier this year as a participant of Hineinu, was recently subject to a raid by armed settlers, who warned residents to pack up their belongings and leave within twenty-four hours or face death. It appears something of a cruel lottery which of the twenty-something villages making up the South Hebron Hills will bear the brunt of the terror each night. A number of villages have already been forced out. Susiya, so far, is still standing.

Solidarity is delicate and painful work at the best of times, and at a time like this, who is really to say what actions are worthy of the name. I do not know that we are very good at it: as we sit in Susiya, sharing cups of tea in the dark, it dawns on us that we have mistaken birdsong for somebody screaming, and we cry extremely happy tears. But we will continue to do it – solidarity, co-resistance, activism, whatever you call it – because it is surely the only thing to do. As it happens, I am also abundantly sure that it is the Jewish thing to do, as sure as I am of the blessings over the bread and the wine.

Israel would have it otherwise. Over the past six weeks, the government, along with prominent right-wing organisations, have sought to delegitimise international and internal Jewish opposition to apartheid, and to the bombardment of Gaza, by declaring that those Jews who say and do such things aren’t really Jews after all. As this sentiment takes hold, police have been increasingly emboldened to deploy brutal force against Israeli activists. In a show of irony last week, eighteen Israelis who came out to protest the arrest of several members of the Arab Higher Committee were themselves violently arrested.

In this week’s Pickle, we share an extract from Shaul Magid’s new book of essays, The Necessity of Exile, published this week by Ayin Press (you can order your copy here). A celebrated rabbi and scholar, Magid asks throughout these essays the most raw and essential questions of Israel, diaspora, and everything in between. Exposing the fallacies of a ‘majoritarian’ logic by which Zionism gets the final word on Jewishness, Magid provides us with a timely reminder that resistance is, and always has been, a Jewish value▼

We’re always looking for new contributors – we pay around £120 per article, depending on its scope. Our pitching guidelines are here.

Kate Greenberg

Editor

What follows here is an excerpt from a longer chapter which you can read on Vashti’s website.

The relationship between Israel, Zionism, anti-Zionism, Jewish identity, and Jewish peoplehood has become, in the past few decades, a main topic of conversation in American Jewish opinion pieces and, most recently, on social media. The rhetoric has been heating up, as seen in several essays from the 2010s and ’20s which argued, variously, that those who do not support the Jewish nation-state are bad Jews, disloyal Jews, not really “Jews” at all (JINO, Jews in name only) – or, at the very least, complicit Jews. That is, if you are not pro-Israel, you are (according to these arguments) a kind of anti-Jew, or, as one essay put it, an “Un-Jew.” One could cite thousands of pieces written in the last hundred years in which the gatekeepers of Zionist Jewish identity try to write anyone who doesn’t share their nationalist project out of Judaism. This rhetorical posture has become part of our collective history of argumentation.

What these current-day pundits seem unaware of (or are perhaps simply uninterested in) is that they are in fact reinventing the wheel. American Jewry today is often viewed through the lens of a process of Zionization (the supposed “Zionist consensus”), but if we examine the history of American Jewry in the twentieth century, we will find that opposition to Zionism was far more pervasive than we might have thought. This is explored in great detail in Marjorie Feld’s book Threshold of Dissent: A History of American Jewish Critics of Zionism, which documents the resistance to Zionism by prominent Jewish American thinkers even after the state of Israel was established.

Most American Jews today don’t know that William Zuckerman and Henry Hurwitz, both influential editors of popular mid-century Jewish publications (the Jewish Newsletter and the Menorah Journal, respectively), were deeply critical of Zionism or outright opposed to it. Henry Hurwitz, the founder and editor of the Menorah Journal from 1915 until his death in 1961, also held leadership roles in the American Jewish Congress (AJC) – not in any way an outsider or fringe character when it came to the Jewish establishment. Maybe some American Jews know of Rabbi Elmer Berger and the American Council for Judaism (ACJ), an unofficial anti-Zionist outgrowth of the Reform movement, but the ACJ was only one of numerous anti-Zionist organizations active at the time.

Recent scholarship has detailed this history, documenting the vibrant political activism of progressive American Jews in support of Palestinian rights, and critical of Zionism as a political movement, before and after the founding of the state of Israel. In this chapter, I explore what the present-day marginalization of so-called Jewish anti-Zionism (or robust critique of Israel in general) in the Jewish community is really about. Perhaps the famous Free Speech Movement motto from the mid-1960s applies here as well: “The issue isn’t the issue.” That is, the “issue” up for debate conceals a much more substantive and structural problem.

One of the classic tools of the trade of Zionist policing is the demonization of the term “anti-Zionism.” As Hannah Arendt noted in her essay “To Save the Jewish Homeland,” which she penned on the cusp of Israeli statehood, there existed a healthy tension in the Jewish community between Zionism and non-Zionism – and anti-Zionism – that she predicted would wane with the impending founding of the state of Israel. She lamented the imminent loss of that tension since, as she saw it, ideological hegemony is always a dangerous political phenomenon. We find her prediction playing out today, aided by strategic, rhetorical slipperiness on the part of Zionist gatekeepers and enforcers.

Those who demonize “anti-Zionism” today never quite define the term. Is it denial of a “Jewish” state? Or the denouncement of Jewish chauvinism or Jewish supremacy? Or rejection of the state of Israel itself?

There are multiple kinds of anti-Zionism, each with their own foundations and reasoning. There is the theological anti-Zionism of ultra-Orthodoxy, which is most explicit in the writings of the Satmar rebbe, Yoel Teitelbaum; the moral and anti-nationalist anti-Zionism of Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig; the secular anti-Zionism of the ACJ, associated with Reform Judaism; the diasporist anti-Zionism of the philosopher Judith Butler, or of the historian and Talmud scholar Daniel Boyarin; and the anti-imperialist anti-Zionism of linguist and political critic Noam Chomsky.

Are they all the same? Of course not. All have different assumptions, different thought processes, and in some cases, different goals. But for the enforcers of Zionist ideology, and the gatekeepers of Jewish identity, these nuances and distinctions don’t really matter.

It is obvious that in some cases, the opponents of such gatekeepers aren’t only Jews, but pretty serious ones. To take one example, Yoel Teitelbaum (1887–1979), the ultra-Orthodox Satmar rebbe, argued for his anti-Zionism from deep within Jewish religious sources; this sentiment was shared by most of his ultra-Orthodox contemporaries before the second world war. The same could be said for others, too, such as Daniel Boyarin, a widely respected contemporary scholar of rabbinics and ancient Judaism, whose 2023 book The No-State Solution: A Jewish Manifesto articulates his anti-Zionist position. And of course, Hermann Cohen was one of the great philosophers of his generation and had a solid Jewish education as well; Franz Rosenzweig was one of Judaism’s great defenders.

One may disagree with their highly informed readings, culled from the traditional sources, but one can hardly question their credentials as Jews. But this may be beside the point: many of their critics on this question haven’t even read their work.

To be fair, those maligning non- or anti-Zionists are not saying they are not Jews; it’s even worse than that. These critics argue that those who diverge from the Zionist platform are essentially anti-Jews, or counter-Jews, because for these enforcers, Zionism – meaning support for the state of Israel as a Jewish state – has become a more essential marker of Jewish identity than Jewish practice, or any other criteria.

In a sense, this is an exercise in marking modern-day heretics: Jews who, while still inside the orbit of the Jewish people, have become forces that actively undermine the Jewish collective. The Talmudic sages teach that the heretic (apikorus or min) is actually worse than the idolater. In their estimation, unlike the idolator, the heretic subverts Judaism from the inside. (This idea is so central to Judaism that it is codified in Maimonides’s Mishneh Torah.)

I would argue that Zionist enforcers are using this sentiment, rooted deep in the Jewish tradition, cynically. What matters most to those who want to marginalize critics of Israel from the Jewish community is the full Zionization of American Jewry: hegemonic support for Zionism as the national Jewish project, and at its center, support for the state of Israel as a Jewish state. Anything outside of that is taken to be a form of Jewish heresy. But if we contextualize these claims in Jewish history, especially in the complex contestations over the boundaries of Jewishness in the modern era, they become much harder to take seriously.

One question that often arises when one makes a normative claim – that is, a claim that is not just descriptive but prescriptive, assuming judgment over how things ought to be – is: By what authority is this prescription (the ought) derived? Many pro-Israelists place a lot of weight on popular opinion. They claim correctly that most American Jews today are Zionists in some form because they support Israel as a “Jewish” state. But so what? No serious thinker believes that popular opinion is a good metric for a normative claim. If that were true, Judaism as we know it would not have come into existence: the rabbinic sages, who were the architects of what we now think of as normative Judaism, were a small minority of the Jewish population of their time.

And according to such majoritarian logic, the early Zionists were the true heretics of the first part of the twentieth century – and actually, in many circles, they were considered so. Up until the 1930s, the preponderance of Jews in Europe and America were against the Zionist project. Consider also that, according to this same majoritarian reasoning, intermarriage would be the normative claim of Jewishness in America, since over 60% of American Jews who’ve married in recent years have intermarried – meaning that in order to be considered Jewish, one ought to intermarry. As one can see, this is a logic in danger of collapsing in on itself.

Essays attacking anti- or non-Zionist Jews seem to be driven by a terror that, unless the alarm is sounded, soon the majority of Jews won’t be Zionists. This, of course, seems highly unlikely; the Zionist consensus will almost surely hold as it has for the past 75 years. But it has its challengers. Serious ones. Jewish ones. And that, I submit, is good for the Jews. If we are to honor the way – in the words of anti-anti-Zionists Gil Troy and Natan Sharansky – “actual Jews do Jewishness,” then we have to honor it even when they do Jewishness in a non-Zionist (or even anti-Zionist) way. That is, if we are committed to pluralism, then anti-Zionism should be included in that orbit of tolerance. It is only when Zionism becomes Jewishness itself that non- or anti-Zionism is excluded▼

This is an excerpt from a longer chapter – read on over at our website (from the subheading).

Shaul Magid is the Distinguished Fellow in Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College.

Thanks to The Pickle for permission to repost.