New York Times Discusses "The Unraveling of American Zionism"

Attention has been focused upon the decline of Zionism in the American Jewish community by an article in The New York Times Magazine (Nov. 7, 2021) by Marc Tracy. The article is appropriately entitled, “Inside the Unraveling of American Zionism.”

A letter signed by 93 rabbinical students last May during the Israeli onslaught on Gaza declared that Israel maintains “apartheid” in the occupied territories and called on American Jews who have taken on structural racism in the United States to oppose “racist violence” in Israel. The letter declared: “Blood is flowing in the streets of the Holy Land. For those of us for whom Israel has represented hope and justice, we need to give ourselves permission to watch, to acknowledge what we see, to mourn and to cry. And then to change our behavior and demand better.”

The rabbinical students urged Jews to re-think their support for American military aid to Israel, which totals roughly $3.8 billion annually, and insisted that Jewish educators alter their teaching of Israel’s founding to convey “the messy truth of a persecuted people searching for safety, going to a land full of meaning for the Jewish people, full of meaning for so many other peoples, and also full of human beings who didn’t ask for new neighbors.”

Mr. Tracy notes that, “The letter contained several provocations. It compared the Palestinians’ plight to that of Black Americans: ‘American Jews have been part of a racial reckoning in our community, and yet so many of those same institutions are silent when abuse of power and racist violence erupts in Israel and Palestine.’ It describes in Israel ‘two separate legal systems for the same region’ and called this system ‘apartheid.’ It arrived amid war, violating the imperative many Jews felt to stand with Israel as the rockets fly…”

The 93 men and women who signed the letter are students at eight institutions that train rabbis and represent 17% of the students at those schools. The letter was published in the widely read Jewish newspaper, The Forward of May 13, 2021. Lex Rofeberg, co-host of the “Judaism Unbound” podcast said, “This list includes future leaders of American Judaism.”

One of the students who signed the letter, Leah Nussbaum, a student at Hebrew Union College in New York, was interviewed by Marc Tracy. She told him, “The modern state of Israel is a country like any other country. It has problems with discrimination and racism. That doesn’t reflect what I believe are Jewish values, even though it’s a Jewish state. And I think there can be a state that reflects Jewish values and ethics. Israel can do a lot better. I signed this letter because I feel it’s Jewish to also support Palestinians.”

It is Marc Tracy’s view that, “The letter intimated not only that the pro-Israel consensus is fraying, which has been apparent for a while, but something else, too: that the primary cause of this fraying may not be something so straightforward as the actions of Israeli governments or the assimilation of American Jews. Instead, a generation of American Jews is confronting head-on the tension between universalist principles and the idea of Jewish particularity…For years, American Jews could look upon Israel as a tiny state full of long- oppressed people with hostile neighbors, and even see themselves as underdogs…The letter entered this fraught terrain and asked American Jews to view the Middle East conflict structurally, as another instance of one powerful group’s oppressing the less powerful one. This was its most profound and destabilizing argument: that Jews, after two dozen centuries of dispossession, persecution and exile have the upper hand and the responsibility to act like it. Hannah Bender, a third year student at Hebrew Union College, put it to me this way: ‘All of our texts were written during a history when we were the victims. What do we do now that we have power?” ***