The 'Judaism of I' is killing Judaism.

When Judaism becomes overly personal, the Jewish People become increasingly fragile.

photo: Will Gullo/Unsplash

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This is a guest essay by Hava Mendelle, who writes the newsletter, “Decolonization of the Jewish Mind.”

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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There is something unsettling about how easy it has become to customize Jewishness.

Even writing about Jewish identity in the language of the personal gives me a slight uncomfortableness. It feels against the traditional Orthodox structures I grew up with.

Yet I have had to reconcile many personal adjustments when it comes to Judaism. It brings into focus the tension between personal life and inherited civilization. The awareness that stepping too far into personal definition (even if so inherently natural and necessary) can sometimes put you at odds with the very foundation that holds the Jewish people together.

This quiet recognition that Jewishness has been reframed through lenses that prioritize the individual is a process of Judaic individualization, which helped many Jews feel at home and accepted. Yet it weakened the frameworks that allows Judaism as a people to connect us across generations.

In these environments, Jewishness often becomes a set of personal choices: how much tradition to keep, which practices to adapt, which parts feel meaningful, which to leave behind. Judaism is encountered as something self-prescribed. Indeed, a look at polling over the last decade tells this story.

The 2013 major Pew Research Center survey of American Jews found that most define Jewishness primarily through ancestry or culture rather than religion, indeed a pattern repeated in Pew’s 2016 study of Israeli Jews where over half said the same. In Europe, a 2022 Institute for Jewish Policy Research study reported that only about one-third of Jews identify Jewishness primarily as a religion, with the rest emphasizing ancestry, culture, peoplehood, or some hybrid. And Australia’s Gen17 survey from 2017 concluded bluntly that there is no “typical” Australian Jew at all; Jewish identity instead is a deeply personal construct shaped by individual interpretation rather than a shared template.

One must ask, so how did we get here — to the “my meaning, my practice, my interpretation, my identity” position that forms these branches, splinters, schisms manifesting across Judaism that has left us fragile to colonial narratives like anti-Zionism, secularism, and diasporism?

To answer this, we need to look at the moment that the modern Diaspora was given an intellectual framework for this shift: the Kaplan Era. And for this, we have to go back to the historical moment that Kaplan’s ideas formed: America in the 1920s.

Millions of Jews had arrived in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, pushed by waves of Russian pogroms, antisemitic legislation, political upheaval in the collapsing Tsarist empire, and deep economic hardship.

During the roaring 1920s whilst the U.S. economy was booming and jazz clubs were gaining in popularity, the cities were growing; modernity and individuality shaped this decade of optimism. For Jewish immigrants and their children, they began to build permanent lives in the U.S. — upwardly mobile, becoming secular, professional, entering schools instead of cheder, children assimilating. In short, a changing time for Diaspora Jewry embracing American culture. Mordechai Kaplan captured this era.

A Conservative Orthodox Rabbi, Mordechai Menachem Kaplan, uncomfortable with his own doubts and criticisms of Jewish Orthodoxy, saw a revolutionary way forward for the Jew to survive as a people without depending on strict Halakhic (Jewish law) observance or traditional communal structures. He reframed Judaism as a modern “religious civilization” whose continuity could be secured through an all-encompassing blueprint of shared culture, history, ethics, and peoplehood, rather than through law or land alone.

It goes without saying that Kaplan’s intellectual and revolutionary shift was both enabling and disabling for many Jews. It offered a way for Jews to remain connected in a rapidly assimilating America, but it also set in motion a transformation: the slow migration of Jewish identity from inherited obligation to personal meaning, what the American political scientist and prolific author on Jewish life and Israel, Charles Liebman, later described as “Jewish personalism,” what today we can call the “Judaism of I.”

A portable, almost fittable Judaism is appealing, except when it creates a vulnerability that disconnects Jews from the very structures and foundation that protect their continuity. It works only as long as Judaism is organized around the individual, even the individual community. But once Israel re-enters as the fruition of dispossession, constant yearning, and political struggle, and peoplehood is recognised as a state with borders, the surroundings begin to shift. A Jewish person is now recognized as the Jewish People and an individual Jew may have to account for the plural. The “Judaism of I” finally confronts the Judaism of we, and it is not a smooth one.

Jews can fold themselves into the societies around them: We modernized, we reformed, we secularized, we built full Diaspora lives. And so my burning question is: Even if Diaspora Jews are capable of doing it, how much individuating or personification of their Judaism do they have to do in order to stay? And how does that impact connection to the collective, including our historical homeland?

In the 2013 Pew Research Center survey, about seven in 10 American Jews said they are emotionally attached to Israel. Similar patterns are seen in multiple surveys globally. After October 7th, surveys showed the same pattern. Jews consistently support Israel even if they criticize its governing coalition. A 2024 Jewish People Policy Institute survey found that 66 percent of Jews who feel connected to Israel felt even closer to Israel as a result of the Hamas-led massacre against Israel on October 7, 2023. Moreover, the 2024 American Jewish Committee survey found that 85 percent of American Jews say caring about Israel is important to their Jewish identity.

But even if Jews remain connected and supportive, there is a growing segment of “progressive” and Left-wing Jews and organizations that have either withdrawn support, intensified their lack of support to the point of advocating for the dissolution of the State of Israel, and express that “Jewishness” should be the “displacement of identity” — which means the erasure of one’s own identity including any collective identity.

And this is where the consequences of the “Judaism of I” are reflected. It has primed the conditions for the Jewish defector, the “anti-Zionist Jew,” who believes Jewishness can be entirely self-invented, a private project, severed from peoplehood, land, and shared destiny. It has reduced Jewishness to an Identity Building Venture, one that becomes whatever one wants it to be according to the prevailing Zeitgeist. Weightless. Expressive. With no obligations or responsibility to the collective.

These consequences are most visible among LGBTQ Jews, but the broader impact in academic, activist, and human-rights circles are just as notable. Jews in these environments are shaped by highly individualized models of identity and by Critical Race Theory, a framework that describes the world through binaries of power and oppression. These so-called “progressive” spaces have become dogmatic, violent, aggressive, and the most unaccepting of all. Queer Jews are told their Jewishness has to be the “right” kind: symbolic, cultural, de-nationalized. The me, me, me and the I, I, I.

This is why so many queer Jews report feeling they must hide or dilute their Jewish identity in LGBTQ circles, or become “anti-Zionist” and denounce any remanence of what it means to be Jewish.

Even Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie — the poster child of progressive, queer-affirming, Diaspora-friendly Judaism — has run his brand into a wall. He said that, at an “anti-Zionist” rally he attended, he heard chants of “kill the Jews” and had to leave. If someone like him, whose entire public identity is built on progressive inclusion and human-rights activism, can stand in a crowd he should theoretically belong to and still hear antisemitism of the most grotesque kind, then what does that say about the spaces “progressive” Jews are told to trust? It shows that even the most individualized, politically acceptable version of Judaism is never enough when the underlying hostility is anti-Jewish in all its facets.

Mordechai Kaplan’s model served its historical moment, but it has trained Jews to shrink themselves to fit the expectations of others. Philosopher and hebraist Simon Rawidowicz wrote that Jews believe they are “the ever-dying people.” He meant that every generation thinks it is witnessing collapse and every generation survives because enough Jews refuse to dilute their civilization to appease the world around them.

Hence, the Diaspora’s “Judaism of I” is not enough for this moment. You cannot transmit a civilization privately. You cannot pass on peoplehood as a lifestyle preference.

So here I am. But think of the many Jews, like me, who contend with this differently — each trying to weave together the self we’ve become with the people we belong to. Perhaps the real task of our time is not to reject the “I,” but to anchor it again in the “we.” To build a Jewish self that is personal without being privatized, expressive without being weightless, modern without severing the ancient cords that bind us to one another.

If Jewish identity is going to survive the forces pulling it apart, then we must learn to inhabit both truths: I am a Jew, and I am part of the Jewish People. Anything less risks leaving us with a Judaism too thin to endure, and a people too fractured to continue.

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