Many progressive Jews outside Israel may turn toward a Jewishness that is more personal, familial and spiritual and less national-political.
Noah Feldman is a professor of law at Harvard University, a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion and the author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People,” from which the following is excerpted.
This love-struggle is the key to understanding what’s going on for many Jews today, in the aftermath of Oct. 7. To understand it, you have to go back to what the classical, secular Zionists who dreamed up and first built Israel wanted it to mean. The Zionists wanted the Jews to be a sovereign nation, not a feuding family. For them, a Jewish state was not supposed to be an eventof Jewish history, understood as a tale of suffering in the diaspora.
Eventually, over the past 30 years or so, the idea of Israel began to transform Jewish religious thought from within. Jews of various religious stripes all over the world, including those who are not sure they have a theology at all, have learned to see their Jewishness in terms of Israel. In the 1980s and ’90s, the social justice vision of progressive Judaism acquired two new theological pillars: the centrality of the Holocaust and the redemptive narrative of the creation of Israel.
This pairing made some partial sense of the deaths of the 6 million. And it enabled progressive American Jews to organize for two main purposes: memorializing the Holocaust and supporting Israel. Todayand hundreds of public Holocaust memorials exist in the United States, with more planned to open soon. The United States Holocaust Museum, built on almost two acres of land allocated by Congress near the Washington Monument, has hosted 47 million visitors since it opened in 1993.
Instead, Gen X progressive Jewish leaders have their own liberal Zionist organizations, like J Street, a lobbying body that calls itself “the political home of pro-Israel, pro-peace Americans,” and the New Israel Fund, which says its “aim is to advance liberal democracy, including freedom of speech and minority rights, and to fight the inequality, injustice and extremism that diminish Israel.
Today, Gen X and Gen Z progressive Jewish leaders and activists find themselves at odds with each other about Israel. The disagreement is painful for both sides, the way generational arguments often are. The middle-aged progressives think the kids have failed to learn how important Israel should be for them as Jews. The kids think the old folks are mired in a discredited ideology.
One can feel sympathy for the generation of Jewish progressives who made Israel central to their theology. On one hand, the association is as powerful as ever: Images of Israelis murdered and taken hostage recall the horrors of the Holocaust. On the other hand, Israel is a real-world nation-state populated by Israelis whose beliefs and views differ from those of American Jewish progressives.