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Open Letter to My Students 80: What I Believe About Israel

Posted on July 24, 2025 | 1 comment

After my latest Open Letter on the generation split among Jews, regarding Israel, I have been asked what I would say, were I to be in dialogue with those who do not think as I do. So here goes…

At stake are three questions:

1. Do Jews even have a right to a nation state? 

2. If so, where? 

3. Given that they have such a state, and conceding that a Jewish state (like all states) must guarantee their citizens’ safety, how should that state prosecute its current war?

Would-be Jewish critics must first concede that it is the Israelis, not Diaspora Jews, who were massacred on October 7; it is they, not we, whose lives depend on the war-time decisions that we discuss from the comfort of our studies and dinner tables. Still, the ripple effect is impacting Jews everywhere. We all have a stake not just in Israel’s survival, but in the kind of state that Israel is. It is painful watching it move implacably toward excommunication as a rogue state in the community of nations. Also, Israel’s policies impact anti-Semitism toward Jews in general. Finally, Israel came into being as a Jewish state, not just an Israeli state. Jews world-wide have the right to an opinion.

With that in mind, I begin with Question 3: Israel’s war in Gaza. 

If you read deeply about past Israel-Arab wars, you cannot but marvel at  the complexity of military decisions and how little we outsiders knew at the time. So too now: lacking military expertise ourselves, we must draw conclusions from a host of rival reports, some reliable and some not. I give greater credence to the free press in Israel than to reports from within Gaza that are subject to totalitarian Hamas propaganda. It matters, then, that many reliable Israeli voices, some of them in the military and security establishment itself, suggest that the war is no longer tactical but punitive, political, or driven by right-wing ideologues intent on driving the Arabs out altogether.

To complicate matters, Hamas leaders, sitting comfortably nowhere near the war zone, are happy to see the war continue. Even as I write this, international negotiators from Qatar itself are rejecting Hamas proposals as being unworthy of even bringing to the table. So peace may be impossible, no matter what Israel does, but more bombing and killing, more population displacements, and the non-stop demolition of infrastructure that provides food and medical care are looking increasingly suspect. 

So in Question 3, I am increasingly critical of Israel’s government and its right-wing coalition partners who sometimes admit outright that their goal is to make good their biblically based “right” to own it all. “From the river to the sea” is a despicable phrase no matter who says it, Arab or Jew. 

More troubling are Questions 1 and 2, where critics deny the very right to have a Jewish state; especially on the biblical land that was once Judea/Israel, and then renamed by Rome as Palaestina (Palestine).  

Their most strident objection is that Israel is the fruit of imperialistic colonialism. But just the reverse is the case. If anything, Jews are the indigenous people to the area. To be sure, the Amorites, Jebusites, and so on were there first, but that was in pre-antiquity, akin to the multiple tribes that preceded classical Rome. Jews are to Judea as Romans are to Rome. Dig deep enough in Israel’s soil and you get biblical cities, Maccabean homes, and ancient synagogues. The return of Jews to the biblical and rabbinic Jewish land is a lesson in anti-colonialism, even though their internationally approved right to return to part of it does not entitle them to claim it all.

True, the return was facilitated by colonial powers. But so too were the Arab states that came into being simultaneously: not just Israel, but Syria, Iraq, and Jordan too were colonial inventions, part of the 1916 pact whereby Francois Georges-Picot for France and Sir Mark Sykes for England unfurled a map of the Ottoman empire to carve a set of arbitrary states out of it. 

In the Arab-Jewish war of 1948, all these just-being-born states fought not only to defeat one another but to expand territory as well. Jordan hankered after the entire West Bank. Iraq sought parts of the Galilee all the way to Haifa. Egypt dreamed of owning the Negev and the Mediterranean coast. 

Yes, contrary to the angelic picture offered many of us in synagogue religious schools, we now know that Israel too sought territorial expansion. And yes too, Israel was born by an ethnic people (the Jews) seeking to return to its geographic roots, its legitimate home-land. To oppose Israel, however, but not all the other ethnically derived states that the twentieth century birthed (Rumania, Slovakia, Serbia, Croatia, and so on) is anti-Semitism. 

Still, all such states are properly held to moral standards – which I addressed above.

There is some hope – at least long-term. British foreign secretary and then prime minister Lord Palmerston (1784-1865) opined that nation states have interests, not friends. “Interests,” he averred, “are eternal and perpetual” but “we have no eternal allies, and no perpetual enemies.” In other words, even enemies can become allies – as we now see with Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and maybe even Syria and Saudi Arabia in the near future. In time, we may see a Palestinian state as an ally – but only if both sides wish it to be so. Continued war and takeovers, whether in Gaza or the West Bank, are not the way to get to “Yes.”

Palestinians, like Israelis, want a home, but looking homeward can be good or bad, depending on where you train your vision. Neither side can look to what home once was, as if to restore some prior golden age when Muslim powers relegated Jews to subservience; or when biblical kings owned Israel/Judea, centuries before Islam was even born. We Jews cannot convince radical Islamists, but we can do the right thing ourselves. 

Israel is a proper and necessary Jewish state; it needs secure borders; it does not need more territory. 

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Open Letter to My Students 79: Mamdani Long-Term, and the Jewish Future

Posted on July 7, 2025 | Leave a comment

As intellectual Gertrude Stein lay dieing, her disciples are said to have pleaded with her, “Gertrude, Gertrude, what is the answer?” She responded, “What is the question?” Everything depends on the question. 

Hence, the Passover Haggadah’s “Four Children” narrative. What makes each questioner wise, evil, or naive is the question they ask.  

What question, then, should we ask about Zohran Mamdani’s election as the Democratic party’s mayoral candidate in New York City? Wall Street wonders how a socialist mayor can run the city that is the epicenter of American capitalism. Jews agonize over an anti-Israel candidate who even advocates the “globalization” of the Intifada.  

 These are real issues, and immediate ones. But long-term, we might wonder whether the voting pattern that brought Momdani his victory spells something larger: the passing of one Jewish era and the birth of another. Trigger warning, first: if you are a baby boomer or older, you might not like the answer. 

Precincts populated by older and established Jews voted against Mamdani. Precincts where young Jews predominate voted for him. The explanations are several. Young people who suffer from New York’s high cost of living found Momdani’s populist socialism appealing. Momdani also mastered the social media by which young people follow the news. But many young Jews supported him not just despite his anti-Israel rhetoric, but because of it. 

This Jewish generational split may be temporary. But what if it is more? What if we are witnessing a genuinely historic moment: not just the end of the boomer generation’s influence but the end of the entire era. As boomers continue aging out of their influential years, the younger generations’ ambivalence about Israel may become the new norm.  

At stake is what has been called “Jewish Civil Religion,” an idea that goes back to a 1967 article (“American Civil Religion”) by sociologist Robert Bellah.[i] Bellah analyzed religion into its component parts: beliefs, sacred holidays,  sacred stories (or “myths”), a code of behavior, and so on. All of those, he said, are offered by just being American. “Americanism” is itself a sort of shadow religion to which all Americans can feel that they belong.

In 1987, Jonathan Woocher applied Bellah’s theory to American Jews.[ii] Side by side with their official Judaism, he said, Jews here are fiercely loyal to a civil Jewish religion, in which pride in Israel is central. Its sacred “myth” is the story of near destruction in the Shoah, but rebirth in the Jewish State. Its rituals include missions to Israel, or even (acting out the myth) travel first to Auschwitz and then to Israel to celebrate redemption there.

Israel in the 1980s, when Woocher wrote his book, was threatened as much as (and maybe even more than) it is today. Israelis were regularly being killed or maimed by terrorist attacks, to the point where Israel launched an all-out invasion of Lebanon in 1982. But the attacks continued. A 1983 assault on an IDF base caused 60 Israeli casualties.1984 ended with the UN denouncing Israel as “not a peace loving nation.” In 1985, Israel had to down two Syrian MIGs; and sink a terrorist ship just off the coast in the Mediterranean; on October 7 of that year (yes, October 7) Palestinian terrorists hijacked a ship and then shot and dumped overboard the body of a wheelchair-bound American Jew, Leon Klinghofer. 

But through it all, the sacred myth remained intact, because Israel still looked to be on the side of the angels. In the face of the crisis, Yitzchak Shamir (right-wing Likkud) and Shimon Peres (left-wing Labor) formed a unity government. We were shocked to hear that in Lebanon, Israeli officers looked away, while their allies, Christian militias, massacred the Muslim population in Sabra and Shatila. But almost immediately, the Knesset empowered a Supreme-court appointed commission of inquiry, which censured those involved and forced several resignations.[iii] In 1985, an Israeli court convicted west-bank settlers of terrorism and even murder. Can we imagine that happening today?

I will not address here the complex situation in Gaza, because debate over the extended war there hides more obvious and unforgivable travesties on the west bank. Israeli settlers, often aided by the IDF itself, are systematically taking over Arab land, while terrorizing and even killing its long-time owners. This wanton behavior hardly comports with our civil-religion tale of an Israel to be proud of. 

This Jewish civil religion animated the baby-boomers’ love affair with Israel. Their Gen X  children grew up with at least some familiarity with it. Not so, the millennials who supported Mamdani; they were born well after these glory years of a Jewish State with a conscience. They have probably never even heard of the Jewish civil religion from the 1980s; and if they have, they would find it laughable. 

Every generation has a window of influence, usually the period from about age 40 to 65 or 70. Boomers born in 1946 to 1964 are now 61 to 79 years old. Their Gen X children (born 1965–1980, now aged  45-60) are still a moderating bridge to what’s coming. But tomorrow will be written by generations who see Israel altogether differently. That is not just a generational turnover; it is a change of era. 

Some caveats apply. The current war may end with Hamas, Hezbollah, and even Iran so weakened, that Gaza can be rebuilt into a Palestinian partner with Israel. The Israeli electorate may at last drive out its current ruling coalition and the west-bank adventurists whom it is empowering. Maybe also, the absurdity of demanding the dismantling of a Jewish state because of so-called “colonial” beginnings will dawn on the American Jewish critics; who simultaneously may discover the vast majority of  their Israeli Jewish counterparts who supported this war because Hamas had to be destroyed, but who deplore the Jewish thugs as much as they, the American millennials, do.   

It may be too that the Jewish youth in New York are so utterly different from the rest of the country that my entire analysis is irrelevant. But I doubt it. The Mamdani phenomenon may repeat elsewhere, with other Mamdanis, and other Jews too who will attain their own era of influence while believing that Zionism is evil, and that the Israel of their parents was an illusion. That is what scares me. 

[i] Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Dædalus 96:1 (Winter 1967), pp. 1-21.

[ii] Jonathan Woocher, Sacred Survival (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).

[iii] https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-kahan-commission-of-inquiry

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Open Letter to My Students 74: Will the Real Jews Please Stand Up?

Posted on March 9, 2025 | 2 comments

Some 70 years ago, a rabbi (Morris Kertzer) described inviting a visiting Japanese army officer to attend a Shabbat service. When it was over, the officer surprised the rabbi by asking, “What kind of Christian are you?” Upon being informed that he was a Jew, the officer inquired, “Jews? What are they?”

Yes, what are Jews? That question arises again today, not because some visiting army officer from Japan, Jakarta or Johannesburg has never heard of us, but because we ourselves need to decide what we are. There are different kinds of answers. 

Halachah: The usual answer is halachic, the way Jewish jurisprudence sets boundaries to Jewish Peoplehood: to decide who is in and who is out.

Race: The Nazis used a racial definition:  to decide who to murder. 

Secular: Israel, a secular state with an admixture of halachah, has struggled with the issue – as in the case of Oswald Rufeisen, a Polish Jew and Zionist, who hid from Hitler in a convent; then was baptized, became a Carmelite Friar, and took the name Father Daniel. In 1959, he sought entry to Israel under the Law of Return. Israel, he claimed, admits born Jews who identify as ethnically Jewish even though they are atheists and practice no Judaism whatever. Then why is he any different? He too was a born Jew who identified as ethnically Jewish. At least one of the supreme court justices who heard the case was inclined to accept his petition, on the halachic grounds that even Jewish sinners remain Jews. But the court rejected a halachic solution. The Law of Return, it said, “does not refer to the ‘Jew’ of Jewish religious law, but to the ‘Jew’ of secular law.”[i] 

Gender egalitarian: In 1983, American Reform Judaism decided to honor patrilineal (not just matrilineal) claims of Jewish descent. 

Were the Japanese army officer to ask today, “What  are Jews?” we would have to answer, “Regarding what? It all depends,” for there are other definitions too, including a moral one. Consider convicted pedophile Jeffery Epstein, clearly Jewish by any halachic definition. But when the case came to light, several people said, “Well, he’s not very Jewish in my book!” Yes, Jeffery Epstein was legally Jewish but morally, he was not “very Jewish in my book.”  

I want to build on that moral answer using the Max Weber’s concept of “ideal type.”  An ideal type is a hypothetical model, an abstract ideal (positive or negative) against which examples of real life can be measured. Each culture has its own ideal type. 

From about the 5th century to the 13th, the ideal type for classical Christianity was the monk, who exchanged the real world for the monastery, a place to work, meditate, and pray. The American ideal type is the capitalist entrepreneur who goes from rags to riches by dint of hard work and business acumen. 

Traditionally, ideal types were gendered. The ideal Victorian man succeeded at business, but was also titular master of his home and family; like Mr. Banks (appropriately named) from Mary Poppins. The ideal Victorian woman was a home maker, mother, and moral exemplar for her children.  

The classical Jewish ideal type is 1. a Torah scholar, who, however, 2. uses Torah learning to be a good person in the world. It’s not unlike Plato’s ideal of 1. a philosopher, who 2. pursues wisdom to achieve virtue. Yiddish eventually provided a word for the second half of the Jewish ideal: mensch. 

With secularization, that ideal was generalized to scholarship in general. Stories abound about immigrant Jewish mothers giving library cards to their little children. To this day, Jews attend college and even graduate school in record numbers. But the Jewish ideal type must also use all this education for good:  the “mensch  factor,” that is, which shows up in the percentage of educated Jews who are honored for accomplishments that benefit humanity.  Between 1901 and 2023, of the 965 winners of Nobel Prizes, at least 216 (22%) have been Jewish.  

It is not enough to be highly educated and financially successful. The Jewish ideal must strive publicly for the general good of humanity. We will never know the intimate details of people’s private lives: their messy divorces, their failures as parents, and such. But we expect them to try to live good lives at home; and if their private failures degenerate into moral disasters, they lose all claim to ideal status: The Jeffrey Epsteins and Harvey Weinsteins, for example, are out.  So too are the Bugsy Siegels and Meyer Lanskys, mob bosses in what has been called the Kosher Nostra.[ii]

I’m willing to bet that Bugsy and Meyer, at least, never claimed to be ideal Jews. But some Jews do claim the mantle of Jewish respectability, even though their actual lives defy the very notion of the historic Jewish type. I think, particularly, of the West Bank settlers bent on violently displacing Arab landowners, to fulfil a dubious biblical promise of a Greater Jewish Land of Israel.

So like the Japanese officer, I ask, “What is a Jew?” – not halachically, racially or ethnicly, but morally. What is the age-old ideal type that Jews for centuries have pursued as the right and proper way to realize their Jewish identity. It is not the west-bank thuggery but scholar mensch who betters the human condition. 

[i] Rufeisen v. Minister of the Interior [Father Daniel Case] Israel Supreme Court, HC 72/62 PD 16 2428 (1962). Here in the United States, Commentary (the most prestigious Jewish journal at the time) published a dissent, charging that Father Daniel’s commitment to Jewish history and even peoplehood was clear; the court should have admitted that it was specifically Father Daniel’s Christianity that decided the case (https://www.commentary.org/articles/marc-galanter/a-dissent-on-brother-daniel/). Indeed, a Jew who practices Yoga and accepts the dictates of Buddhism would doubtless be admitted today. 

[ii] https://mjhnyc.org/events/kosher-nostra-the-life-and-times-of-jewish-gangsters-in-the-united-states/

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Open Letter to My Students 72: War and the Murky Middle

Posted on January 10, 2025 | 1 comment

“No one likes middles: reaching middle age, for example, or watching our own body middle expand.” So said the late (and great) Rabbi Dr. Michael Signer, bemoaning the unpopularity of his own area of expertise: the Middle Ages. 

In ethical quandaries too, rather than occupy the uncomfortable middle, we prefer doubling down at one extreme, and then demonizing the opposition, which is doing its own double-down on the other. But by definition,  a quandary contains some truth on both sides. It helps, sometimes, to temper our certainty (on either side) with a viewpoint from the murky middle. 

The war in Gaza is such a quandary. I am a rabbi for whom Jewish Peoplehood is a theological, moral, and spiritual reality; I feel called upon to sustain Jewish peoplehood for the benefit of the world — to be (in biblical terms) a blessing to humanity. In addition, I have lived through enough history to know the necessity of a Jewish State. 

But equally, I know the excesses that ethnic states are capable of; and I am an Enlightenment universalist who seeks that elusive (and probably illusive) quality we call world peace. 

As to the war, the precipitating factor, the October 7 Hamas butchery, has indelibly seared my soul. I know too that if they could, Hamas, Hezbollah and a host of fellow travelers would slaughter every Jew in sight. How, then, can I not support military attempts to eradicate this ongoing threat to the Jewish People? But equally, I cringe at the killing of innocent civilians, so how can I not support moderating the military on humanitarian grounds? 

That is the Jewish quandary of our time. Desperate to avoid the troubling middle, people plunk for one side or the other with every ounce of moral certitude they can muster. And Jews, as they say, are news; so unlike ongoing wars elsewhere, “Israel at war” generates daily headlines that both sides read to confirm or deny their respective position.

Take, for example, the New York Times analysis of December 26, 2024.  

Whether true or false, the Times has often been perceived as biased against Israel. But whatever its editorial policy, Times reporters are exceptional journalists who cannot easily be discounted. What, then do we make of this extensive background piece with the headline, “Israel Loosened its Rules to Bomb Hamas Fighters, Killing Many More Civilians in Israel’s Bombing Strategy”?

To be sure, the report suffers from limitations imposed by the question it seeks to answer: whether Israel has been bombing civilians excessively. It doesn’t inquire about the war generally: the hostages, for example.  

But even so, its findings are troubling in the extreme. The Times reports a “severe” weakening of Israel’s “system of safeguards” meant to protect civilians, by expanding “the circle of accepted casualties.” In addition, instead of limiting attacks to those plotted by Israel’s central command, Israel, this time round, empowered field officers to determine bombing targets; and not all such officers operated with the same moral scruples as their superiors. At times too, Israel used heavy tonnage bombs that guaranteed the destruction of entire apartment blocks. In the past, Israel had warned apartment dwellers by “roof knocks,” exploding small charges on the roof before leveling the building, and in this war, such warnings were not always given. So yes, the bombing in this war has been particularly devastating.

But there is another side to things. The report substantiates the carnage of the October 7 attack that Israel understandably saw as “unprecedented,” in scale. It confirms also the fact that Hamas “militants hide among civilians in Gaza” with an “extensive tunnel network” underneath heavily populated areas.

Traumatized by what Hamas had done and promised to do again, Israel felt obliged to uproot Hamas entirely. It therefore widened its military targets to include not just the  Hamas chief planners, but ordinary Hamas fighters and even financial operators who move money back and forth to obtain war materiel. But that required overcoming the Hamas use of human shields. As the report puts it, “The group embeds itself in the civilian population, firing rockets from residential areas, hiding fighters and weapons inside homes and medical facilities, and operating from underground military installations and tunnels.” Israel bombed particularly heavily at the beginning, because it wanted to neutralize Hamas before Hezbollah opened up a second front from the north. 

As to roof knocks, consider Shaldan al-Najjar, an Islamic Jihad commander who had orchestrated many attacks on Israel. Israel had tried to kill him in 2014, but failed, because when it warned innocent neighbors to leave beforehand, al-Najjar escaped as well. This time, they issued no warning and succeeded – but with collateral damage.

In sum, the bombing, though not indiscriminate, was horrific. It did not target civilians deliberately, but enormous civilian casualties resulted. It expanded the circle of acceptable collateral damage but there was at least an ongoing existence of such a circle. Israel’s war was understandably severe but the severity took its toll. 

So back to the murky middle. Those like myself, who accept the attempt to dismantle Hamas must also reckon with Israel’s policies that increased civilian casualties.  

Those who champion the Palestinians should meet me in the middle, by at least acknowledging that if Israel has killed citizens who happened to be in harm’s way, it is the Hamas policy of using human shields that put them there in the first place. Hamas bears the blame for beginning the war in a particularly heinous manner, and then waging it in such a way that Israel would have to kill civilians in order to defend itself.

If the reporting is honest, however, the accompanying headline is not. Instead of “Israel Loosened its Rules to Bomb Hamas Fighters, Killing Many More Civilians in Israel’s Bombing Strategy,” it might equally have been, “Hamas Fighters Embed War Machine among Civilians, Causing Israel to Expand Casualties.” 

But perhaps that is misleading on the other side. Newspapers of the Times’s stature should avoid headlines that lure either side away from the middle. Imagine the same story introduced by the heading, “Complexity of War Revealed: Civilians Suffer From Hamas Human Shield Strategy and from Israeli Expansion of Bombing Regulations.” 

I have other misgivings as well. If Hamas has been virtually destroyed by now, why is Israel still bombing in the Gazan north? And even if the Gaza strategy is not a case of ethnic cleansing, the West Bank settler movement is; if the settlers have their way, they will transport their ideology to Gaza as well. 

But equally, how is it that Hamas still retains Jewish hostages (truly civilian innocents)? And as to the Times, I would love to see other background pieces of the quality of this one: not just the Israeli failures but the cruelty and genocidal rationale of Hamas as well. 

Meanwhile, I am left with occupying the murky middle. Taking sides with certainty might feel good, but it does not do moral justice to reality. 

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Open Letter to My Students 68: The Weight of a Year Gone By

Posted on October 8, 2024 | Leave a comment

Time has weight and the Jewish year just ending has been the heaviest year in recent memory. Every day brought fresh rockslides of headline news crashing round about us. When you are buried in rubble, you struggle to get out. So I have been struggling. 

The looming presidential election alone has been a heavy burden. How can so many Americans be so cruel as to watch one school shooting after another and still reject all gun control? So deluded as to send death threats to Haitian immigrants because they purportedly eat their pets? So willing to replace democracy with a home-grown version of right-wing fascism?  But liberals must now reckon with an ever noisier far-left coalition that applauds every identity except “Jewish.” 

The state of the American electorate alone would elicit a serious Dayyenu: “Enough, already!”

Eclipsing all of that, however, is the Hamas butchery of October 7, a boulder massive enough to convert the rockslide into an avalanche, as if time itself came tumbling down upon us – and then stopped, refusing to let October 7 slip quietly into the past. Hostages are still imprisoned, or dead. Hamas is still fighting. I wake up to October 7 every day, a nasty Jewish Groundhog Day.

The closest parallel to October 7 was 9/11, which Americans watched obsessively, as if super-glued to TV screens. A direct line connects the two events as chapters in the same story. The mastermind behind 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was schooled by the Muslim Brotherhood, which seeks to “liberate” Jerusalem and rid “Palestine” of Jews – in World-War-II parlance, to make it Judenrein. The Holocaust connection is real. Political scientist Matthias Küntzel cites an Al Jazeera speech in which another Brotherhood leader, Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi preached the need of every generation to produce its own divinely appointed agent to “punish Jews.” Hitler was one. Islam is destined be the next.[i]

Meanwhile, right wing anti-Semitic parties are gaining power in Hungary, Germany, France, Italy, and the Netherlands. Here at home, where hurricane victims are cleaning up from inundating floods, Elon Musk’s X carries anti-Semitic charges that “Jews are conspiring to orchestrate the disasters, sabotage the recovery, or even seize victims’ property.”[ii] 

So I struggle with anti-Semitism. 

I have never believed that anti-Semitism is some metaphysical pollutant, indelibly soldered into world culture. The scientifically minded historian in me seeks a causal chain that links Nazi anti-Semitism to Islamic anti-Semitism. Küntzel provides that link. 

But here’s the rub: Having been traumatized by Islamic radicalism in 2001, Americans should have rallied to, and remained steadfast allies of, Israel. Many did, but many did not. I am no apologist for Israel’s right-wing coalition; I abhor the settler-movement on the West Bank; I deplore the Jewish thugs who carry it out. But the Hamas attack had nothing to do with that.  It would have happened anyway. And yet, so many Americans replaced their horror at the Hamas massacre with their vilification of its Jewish victims. Any rational argument accusing Israel of an overly destructive retaliation would at least deplore as well the Hamas attack and call for the release of innocent Jewish hostages. That does not happen. Opposition to Israel is not rational. 

No one I know has cheered the tragedy of children dying in Gaza. But Palestinian activists — even UN agency teachers — cheered wildly at the Hamas carnage.[iii] On October 10, just three days after the attack (before the Israeli response even began) the Harvard Student Body declared “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence. Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum. For the last two decades, millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an open-air prison.”[iv]

They were partly right. Gazans have indeed “been forced to live in an open-air prison.” But who is the culprit? Israel or Hamas? The Modern War Institute at West Point estimates the extent of the Hamas tunnel system to be somewhere between 350 and 450 miles long, and costing “as much as a billion dollars”![v] Canada’s Mackenzie Institute (which specializes in security and military intelligence) details a further eleven billion dollars held by just three Hamas leaders living in Qatar.[vi] How many starving children would all those billions of dollars have fed?

And the rockslides continue. Just yesterday, the one-year anniversary of the Hamas bloodbath, New York Public Radio’s Gothamist Daily reported hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters gathered on Columbia’s campus, chanting, “Free, free Palestine,” and, “There is only one solution, intifada, revolution.” Read that as “only one solution, violence, violence, by any means possible.” The organizer of this and other protests is Within Our Lifetime, whose cofounder, Nerdeen Kiswani, a Palestinian American CUNY Law School alumnus supports the complete replacement of the state of Israel with one called Palestine.[vii]

None of this is (or should be) actual news. It is a new-year reflection on the heaviness of time and the exacting struggle that it demands from us who are buried under it. How bad can history get? Will the American democratic experiment come to an end? How long can so many well-meaning observers miss the anti-Semitism behind the Hamas/Al-Qaeda Islamism?  How deep does university anti-Semitism go? How much war can Israel manage without losing the peace at the other end?

The Yom Kippur message of human frailty seems especially apt now. I look forward to the sound of the shofar at the day’s conclusion, a long blast that heralds my own task for 5785: to hold out hope on all these fronts, in part by digging my way through the avalanche of the past year, and rescuing memories of the way our lives once were, and the way, perhaps, they can be again. As hard as it is to recall those buried years, I know this much: underneath the rubble lie tales of kindness, hope and happiness. 

When archeologists unearth specimens of the past, they display them in museums for visitors to see. They are a mixed bag: the artistry of the human spirit; but also weapons of war. I am an archeologist of pre-5784, excavating memories of times when wars were fought and people killed, but when, also, optimism ruled; when anti-Semitism was something we studied, not something we feared; when extremes both on the left and on the right were just that – extremes; and when beauty and science and love and laughter were our lot.  

[i] “German expert warns: Islamist and European antisemitism now dangerously intertwined,” Jerusalem Post (September 26,2024).

[ii] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/10/08/hurricane-helene-antisemitic-misinformation-x/.

[iii] https://www.nationalreview.com/news/u-n-agency-teachers-cheered-hamas-as-october-attack-unfolded-called-for-execution-of-jews-in-group-chat/; https://www.timesofisrael.com/pro-palestinians-celebrate-hamas-attack-as-israel-supporters-rally-in-new-york/.

[iv] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/10/10/psc-statement-backlash/.

[v] https://mwi.westpoint.edu/gazas-underground-hamass-entire-politico-military-strategy-rests-on-its-tunnels/.

[vi] https://mackenzieinstitute.com/2023/11/hamass-top-leaders-are-worth-billions-heres-how-they-continue-to-grow-rich/.

[vii] Jessica Gould  and Bahar Ostradan, “Hundreds of Columbia students walk out as NYC campuses brace for Oct. 7 protests,” Gothamist Daily (October 7, 2024).

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Open Letter to My Students 65: Thoughts on Israel Part 2: The Student Protests in Perspective

Posted on May 16, 2024 | Leave a comment

It’s time to see the campus protests in perspective. Why do students protest? And how does a Zionist like me respond?

            The “why” has many answers. 

            Start with the human urge to matter. When you’ve given or heard your share of eulogies, you realize that except for their immediate families, most people, for most of their lives, don’t live for anything terribly profound. They work, travel, golf, take the kids to the doctor, figure out what’s for dinner, go bowling. But deep down inside, there stirs a desire to matter; and to document our mattering for posterity. American soldiers in World War II scrawled graffiti on European walls announcing “Kilroy was here.” Antique shops still sell grammar school desks where generations of students etched initials into the wooden surface.

            There is also a demographic answer. You need a certain amount of leisure time to worry about mattering, and college students have that. Between 1961 and 2010, the weekly average of hours spent studying dropped from 24 to 14.[i]  Add in class time, and you get, roughly, a 30-hour week. Some 17 hours go into socializing, dating, joining groups, having fun. 

            And there is an existential answer. The practice of musing on what life is all about starts in adolescence and deepens at College, where people read, think, discuss, and debate; and when nothing matters quite so much as deciding who we shall become and with whom we shall become it. 

            I mean no disrespect when I say that student protests are the equivalent of marquis lights on Broadway, announcing the next generation’s coming of age, a young people’s version of “Give my regards to Broadway and tell ‘em I’ll be there.” But it is a Broadway-like presence that is endowed with moral purpose, a proclamation that their existence as appendages of their parents has ended, that they are individuals to be taken seriously. It is also what Emil Durkheim called collective effervescence, the experience of being part of something big, grand and glorious: we are not alone; we are one among hundreds, even thousands, united in a cause beyond ourselves.

            The cause varies: in July of 1908, Young Turks overthrew the Ottoman Sultanate and founded modern Turkey. On May 10/11, 1968, some 40,000 French students marched to champion the Marxism of Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, and Mao Zedong. On May 4, 1970, student protests against the War in Vietnam climaxed with the killing of four Kent State students in Ohio. The list goes on and on: Students Against Apartheid in South Africa; student sit-ins in the Jim Crow segregationist south. And now, student solidarity with Palestinians. 

            Not all causes are alike; not all of them turn out, in retrospect, to be equally legitimate or even desirable. The same Young Turks who brought down the Ottoman sultanate later launched the Armenian genocide. France is better off having defeated the Marxists.  

            It’s always tricky trying to learn from history, but a few things seem clear. Student protests come and go. They tend to happen in good weather, often just before students leave school for summer vacations. Protests do have their revolutionaries; they also have an abundance of peaceful and well-intentioned moral activists; but students join for a whole host of reasons, and overall, as in any crowd behavior, most participants have not deeply studied the issues in question. Even the slogans they yell can mean different things to different people.  

            It follows that in the campus protests now roiling our country, we should avoid tarring everyone with the same brush. I will ignore for now the “fellow travelers” who join protests mostly for the effervescent thrill of it all – a not inconsiderable proportion, actually. But even the seriously engaged ones span a gamut of opinions and motivations. Some of them really are bad actors: haters of Israel, anti-Semites who celebrate the Hamas butchery (rapes, murders and all), and would demolish Israel and kill every Jew in it, if they could. But most of the students are in other categories. A good number of them are legitimately horrified by images of Gazan civilians buried under bombed out rubble or lacking medicine, food and water.       

            Whether you agree with the cause or not, some of the students quite legitimately protest in favor of a Palestinian State and, by extension, against Israel’s right-wing government which has done everything it can to make such a state impossible. If I were of Palestinian descent, I would probably do the same thing. And there are lots of Jews involved, Jews who are no less Jewish because they despise the current Israeli coalition and abhor the suffering of innocents in Gaza. I do wish they showed parallel sympathy for the traumatized Israelis who just want to return home and live out their lives without being attacked again. But they are not our enemies; not traitors to the Jewish cause. We know these people. They are our children, our students, our families; They are us. 

            There is much about the protests to deplore: the biased presentation of Israel as the enemy; the group amnesia that conveniently forgets the Hamas barbarism that began the war; the politicized left-wing faculty who advocate rather than teach, enflame rather than instruct. But the Israeli government is, at the very least, complicit, if only because of its West Bank policies that compromised its moral high ground years ago and that continue unchecked each day. It’s complicated, and, as I recall from my own student days, students are genetically endowed to take sides without necessarily reveling in nuance. Their parents and grandparents who have learned to balance complexities should not rush to the ramparts to embrace simplicities on the other side. 

            One such simplicity would be to overgeneralize anti-Semitism as the dominant motivation. We should recognize that one can, sometimes, criticize Israel but still be proudly Jewish. It is also true that even poorly advised protests can sometimes have positive outcomes: the French Revolution’s reign of terror was a horrendous chapter in world history; but “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” still rings true. 

            I believe that Israel must achieve security and safety for its inhabitants; but I worry about the cost to innocent human life, and suspect that Israel is being drawn into the morass of guerrilla warfare that is inherently unwinnable (think Vietnam and Afghanistan) – especially if it leaves Israel without allies and alienates it from the next generation of Diaspora Jews. I am outraged by its failure to reign in the extreme right wing, who do believe in ethnic cleansing, and are trying to finish off the west bank while no one is looking. 

            I believe that this moment in time calls on us Diaspora Jews to strengthen the hand of Israeli protesters against this government. I believe that Israel need not stand alone; it can reaffirm its ties to allies, first and foremost the United States itself. I believe that war is indeed hell; that this war cannot end too soon. And I hope that when it does, it will not be too late for the Jewish People, in Israel and beyond, to regain its moment in the moral sun.

[i] Cf. https://flaglerlive.com/college-study-time/#gsc.tab=0; https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED511233.

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Open Letter to My Students 64: Thoughts on Israel Part 1: I am a Zionist. So are Lots of People Who Say They are Not. Back to Basics. And What I Fear Most.

Posted on May 13, 2024 | 9 comments

This is not the first time the word “Zionist” has come under attack. Back in 1975, 72 nations supported a United Nations resolution that called Zionism “a form of racism and racist discrimination (35 nations were opposed; 32 abstained). The resolution was reversed in 1991. But here we are again, no UN resolution this time round (at least so far), but, instead, international student protesters, many of them Jewish. Most of them have never known a Jewish state governed by anyone except Benjamin Netanyahu – who is part of what I fear most: but more on that later. 

                  So back to basics: What is Zionism anyway? Put simply, it is the belief in the legitimacy of and the moral obligation to support a Jewish state — first and foremost, to protect Jews from persecution, and even outright obliteration; secondarily, to exercise the right of every people to pursue its own religious and cultural artistry.

                  Especially in the light of attempts by Nazi Germany (but also Czarist Russia, Stalin’s USSR, and others) to eradicate Jews from the face of the earth, most Jews I know – indeed, most people I know – are, therefore, Zionists. What even these Zionists may fail to grasp is that a Jewish state is not just a minor appendage to what makes Judaism what it is; the existence of a Jewish homeland has, since biblical times, been a sine qua non of Jewish being. 

                  A Jewish commonwealth of some sort goes back to King David some 3,000 years ago. In medieval times, the area was contested by warring Christians and Muslims, but throughout it all, Jewish settlements of some sort remained, while Jews outside the Land prayed regularly to return “home.” Open the Bible that is central to Judaism, almost at random, and the Land, this land, is already there.

                  The idea of Zionism as a modern nation state, however, is more recent. Pretty much none of the Middle Eastern states existed until after World War I, when the Ottoman Empire that owned most of it was dismantled and the victorious powers (England and France) carved them out: Syria here, Jordan there, Jewish Palestine elsewhere, and so on.  None of them were independent at first; they were all colonial creations. Only eventually did they develop their own sense of nationalistic selves.

                  In the competition for independence there were winners and losers. The various Arab states in the region expelled their Jews – who settled in Israel and were absorbed there as examples of the very persecuted Jews for whom the Jewish state was founded. But the people we call Palestinians faired more poorly. When the surrounding Arab states decided not to admit the existence of a Jewish state, but, rather, to attack it, Arabs within that state were displaced as well. Some fled the war zone, expecting that an Arab victory would enable them to return. But also, the Jewish government under attack by Arabs without feared the rise of Arabs within as a fifth column, and expelled many of them. These are the Palestinians who were not absorbed by neighboring Arab nations, and who have ever since been living largely in refugee camps. Various powers have arisen to represent them, Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and its successor the Palestinian Authority (PA), first and foremost. Hamas is a terrorist organization that fought the Palestinian Authority and emerged victorious in Gaza, from which it seeks to eliminate Israel and its Jews.

                      But—there is a big “but.” The current Israeli government is itself a corruption of the Zionism that I and my many friends espouse.  My Zionism believes that every people deserves a national home. To be sure, the nationals who inhabit such a home would have to admit the legitimacy of a Jewish state next door, and so far, that has not happened. But the Israeli government has played its own role in discouraging a peaceful solution. Among other things, it has empowered Israeli hyper-nationalists to persecute Arab farmers and take over their land on the West Bank. The current Israeli coalition, in particular, includes religious extremists and nationalist expansionists who are indeed racist and who behave like the fascist thugs of Mussolini’s time.  

                  My kind of Zionism deplores that kind of Jewish government. It accepts the claim of Palestinians to have a home of their own – the two-state solution, as it has been called. Hamas rejects that solution: hence its attack, designed to frighten Israelis away from any Palestinian state at all, lest it too be taken over by Hamas-type anti-Israel and anti-Semitic fanatics.

                  Can you oppose those Israeli governmental policies that you judge as immoral? My Zionism says it is not just possible but mandatory. 

                  Can you oppose Israeli policies yet not be anti-Semitic? My Zionism says you can, as long as your solution is governmental/political policy change, not the dissolving of the Jewish state as somehow illegitimate.

                  Can you oppose the continuing war on humanitarian grounds and still be a Zionist? You can, as long as your opposition does not whitewash away the actual culprits on the other side, Hamas; and as long as you support the principle of Israel’s legitimacy and the right of Israel to protect itself (like any other sovereign nation). 

                  Can you join others to advocate for a Palestinian state and still be a faithful Jew? You can, as long as your partners in protest do not advocate or sloganize about such a state as being a replacement of Israel; and as long as they and you do not imagine that the entire Palestinian condition has been brought about entirely by Israel. International politics is messy; only in misguided ideological posturing is there always a single bad-guy oppressor and a single good-guy victim.

                  I, frankly, do not see how Jews cannot be Zionists. Do we really believe that anti-Semitism is gone for good? That Jews will never need a haven that guarantees us the right of sanctuary, with sufficient independence and means to guarantee it? Are we really in denial about the threat of Hamas, of Iran, or Hezbollah; and their desire to murder every one of Israel’s 7,000,000 Jews? I doubt it.

                  But here’s the kicker: the Netanyahu government’s alliance with the right-wing settlers movement that is systematically menacing and even murdering West Bank Arab farmers, in what truly is an exercise in ethnic cleansing. One argument to oppose the war is the terrible slaughter in Gaza, which less and less looks either militarily or morally sustainable. Another is the immediate need to elect a new government that will roll back the specter of west-bank Jewish fascism. Were the settlers to win, I would still be a Zionist but a theoretical one, supporting a Jewish state, but not the semi-fascist one that it becomes.  

                  Proper Zionism is neither racist nor oppressive. It is the Jewish People’s right to a Jewish state in its historic homeland; to live there in peace and harmony; and to extract from our own experience as an oppressed minority the obligation to oppose the parallel oppression of others.

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