Israel is not something Jews support. It is who we are.
The attempt to separate Judaism from Israel misunderstands something fundamental about what it means to be Jewish.
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This is a guest essay by Peter Himmelman, an award-winning author and musician.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
There has been an intense effort on the part of anti-Zionists to separate Judaism from Israel and to convince people that Jews and Israel are two different things.
It is a false notion, and one that serves a purpose: to weaken Israel and make it less safe for the vast majority of Jews who support it.
That said, it is very difficult to explain Jewish peoplehood and Jewish connection to Israel to someone who either does not see themselves as part of a people, or is not Jewish. Let me try to explain this through an event that happened to me a few months after October 7th.
I happened to see the Twitter feed of a well-known actor. She had perhaps half a million followers. What caught my attention was her tagline: “I love all peoples.”
I have always been struck by statements like that. They feel like an annoying form of virtue signaling. Better to come out and say, I am just better than you.
I scrolled through her feed. It was full of pro-Palestinian posts. That, in itself, is not a problem. To each his own. But for a person who “loves all peoples,” I could not find a single sentence about what had happened on October 7th. Nothing about the murders, the rapes, the burning of people in their homes, the slaughter of entire families.
So I left a comment, never expecting her to see it. I wrote: “Madam, I question the veracity of your tagline. You say you love all peoples, yet I’m afraid I can’t find anything on your feed about what happened in Israel.”
Interestingly, she sent me a direct message. Maybe she knew me from my music, I am not sure. She wrote, “You misunderstand me. I do love all peoples. Would you like to meet and discuss this?”
I thought, okay, let’s see where this goes.
She lived not far from me. We met at a coffee shop, I bought her a latte and we sat down.
“I have an admission to make,” she began. “Something I feel a little strange about.”
“What is it?”
“Because I work in the entertainment business, I have a lot of Jewish friends. I may have more Jewish friends than non-Jewish friends. And they’ve asked me where I was on October 7th. And I feel bad, like I should apologize, because I don’t really remember where I was.”
She told me that her Jewish friends knew exactly where they had been. Who they were with. What they were doing. Some even remembered what they were wearing. October 7th had become the kind of date that gets frozen in memory.
“I just don’t remember,” she said.
I told her there was nothing to apologize for. In fact, there was no reason she should remember.
“You’re seeing something about your Jewish friends that you may never have seen before,” I said. “You’ve gone to the same restaurants with these people. You’ve been to their children’s bar and bat mitzvahs, their baby namings and brisses. You’ve gone to their Hanukkah parties and they’ve come to your Christmas parties. You’ve sat in business meetings with them.”
She knew them very well. At least she thought she did.
“But now you’re seeing an aspect of their essential selves,” I told her. “You’re seeing them in relation to Jewish peoplehood. You’re seeing them react to what happened on October 7th as if members of their own family had been raped, murdered, kidnapped, or tortured in their homes.”
She had told me she was a lapsed Catholic, that she did not feel any particular connection to Catholicism, either as a religion or as a community. Again I said, “Why would you have known where you were on October 7th?”
She told me about her boys, ages 14 and 17.
“You love your sons,” I said. “Of course you do. I get that. But wouldn’t it be strange if you loved your neighbor’s boys like you loved your own? Wouldn’t it be disturbing to your sons to learn that they weren’t loved particularly, but only in some general sense?”
Because love is, by nature, particular.
The idea of universal love is an abstraction. People love their own children more than other people’s children. They love their own families more than other people’s families. There is no moral defect in this. And none of it precludes us from loving other people. In fact, our particular loves — our relationships with our parents, our children, our siblings, our closest friends — are how we learn to love other people in the first place.
Her own Twitter feed had already disproven her claim. Among the dozens of things she’d posted about Palestinians, there was nothing about what had happened to Jews in Israel on October 7th. Not a word. Her universal love had turned out to be highly particular after all.
What she was encountering in her Jewish friends was something she did not understand, could not understand, because she had never experienced it herself: peoplehood.
She had communities, of course. She had her community of like-minded people in the entertainment business. She had groups of friends. But that is not the same thing. The Catholic world she had left behind was far too vast, and in her case too distant, to give her this particular experience.
There are roughly 16 million Jews in a world of more than 8 billion people. Nearly half of them live in Israel. For most Jews, those 7 million people are brothers and sisters. Even at thousands of kilometers or miles away. Even when they do not know their names, their faces, or anything about them.
For more than 3,000 years, we have prayed toward Jerusalem. At the end of the Passover Seder we say, “Next year in Jerusalem.” Mentions of Israel run constantly through the Torah, Jewish prayer, Jewish history, and Jewish memory. Even Jews who are not necessarily religious understand this instinctively. A Jew who rarely enters a synagogue will still reach out and kiss the Torah as it passes.
Israel is not alien to us. It is within us.
And the 7 million Jews who live there, nearly half the Jewish People, are not alien to us either. They are, in a very real sense, family.
That was what this actress had seen in her Jewish friends after October 7th. She had known these people for years. She had eaten with them, worked with them, celebrated with them — but suddenly she was seeing something she had not known was there. She was seeing a people.
And to those, politicians and pundits, trying on for size the new and insipid battle cry: “Judaism is a religion. Israel is a country” — to somehow make the point that what we feel is wrong and illogical, I say the same thing: You are seeing a people, inseparable from each other, inseparable from Israel.
 | A guest post by
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There is an entire generation of people born Jewish who also lack that understanding of Jewish people hood. It’s quite sad. It’s a terrible failure of the parents and perhaps parents of parents. Many of these people are antizionists, and it would not surprise me if they are the last in their family to call themselves Jewish.
Citizenship on Condition of Self-Erasure
The path to Jewish citizenship in 18th-century Europe was defined by a single, sharp condition, captured in Count Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre's 1789 declaration to the French National Assembly: "To the Jews as a nation, nothing; to the Jews as individuals, everything." Citizenship was on offer, but only at a price — the dissolution of Jewish peoplehood.
The idea of Judaism as "merely a religion" was itself a European invention of this period. Jews had long understood themselves as a nation: a people with their own laws, communal institutions, and collective identity, not simply a group of individuals who shared certain beliefs. But the emerging nation-states of the Enlightenment had no place for a people within a people. To become a citizen, a Jew had to relinquish that national identity and re-emerge as something the state could recognize: an individual who happened to practice a private religion called Judaism.
In other words, emancipation was conditional on self-erasure. One could not enter the ruler's world as a Jew belonging to the Jewish people — only as an individual adherent of a faith, stripped of the communal and national character that had defined Jewish life for centuries.
The American Echo
Some observers argue that a version of this bargain persists in the United States today — but with a distinctive twist: it is often internalized and voiced by Jews themselves, not just imposed from outside. In a civic culture shaped by the separation of church and state and a general discomfort with ethnic or national loyalties that might complicate national belonging, many American Jews have found it safer, and more comfortable, to describe their Jewishness as a religion — something practiced privately, on weekends, at synagogue — rather than as membership in a people with a shared history, land, and collective fate tied to Jews elsewhere in the world.
On this view, when American Jews say "I'm Jewish, but that's just my religion, I'm not part of some nation," they are echoing Clermont-Tonnerre's formula from the inside. It becomes a kind of pre-emptive reassurance, offered to a surrounding society that has made clear the terms of full acceptance: individuals, yes; a people, more warily. The framing lets Jewish identity fit neatly into the American model of religious pluralism — one faith among many — while sidestepping the more difficult, and more historically accurate, claim to peoplehood.