The Loyalty Test Hidden Inside Conversations About Israel

Jews are uniquely expected to distance ourselves from our homeland before being accepted in "progressive" society.

photo: Levi Meir Clancy/Unsplash

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This is a guest essay by Vanessa Berg, who writes about Judaism and Israel.

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

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On Saturday evening, I went out with a friend to Abbot Kinney in Venice, one of those quintessentially “progressive” Los Angeles enclaves where people seem to carry their politics with the same care they carry their reusable tote bags.

The streets were crowded. The restaurants were full. Everyone looked healthy, educated, professionally accomplished, and morally certain about the world.

The bar we went to had shared seating, so we ended up next to two women in their late 30s. Both seemed intelligent and successful. One was a lawyer, the other worked in tech. One mentioned she was originally from a suburb of Philadelphia with a large Amish population. Somehow, the conversation wandered from the Amish to the Mormons, and from the Mormons to Jews.

My friend mentioned that the Mormon Church was reportedly worth over $100 billion, which led to a discussion about tithing, religious communities, and communal financial structures. One of the women then made a passing comment about ultra-Orthodox Jews doing similar things. The conversation remained light and friendly.

At that point, we mentioned that we were both Jewish, and my friend noted that he had lived in Israel for more than a decade.

The energy shifted immediately. It wasn’t dramatic or overt, and no one became hostile; there were still jokes, laughter, and banter. But anyone perceptive enough understands these moments when they happen. Something changes in the room, and an invisible ideological sorting process quietly begins.

About 30 minutes later, one of the women — who was born and raised in India — looked at my friend and said: “I have to ask you a question. It’s a loaded question.”

My friend invited her to ask it.

“Since you lived in Israel for so long, what are your thoughts and feelings about the Israel-Palestine genocide? It must be complicated for you.”

My friend answered: “That’s an interesting question, Mandy — because, since you’re Indian, I also wanted to know your thoughts and feelings about the India-Pakistan ‘genocide.’ It must be complicated for you.”

Okay, that is not how my friend responded to Mandy, but I wish he had — because that is the question underneath the question, and the reason nobody would ever ask her that is precisely the point.

Nobody assumes that every Indian bears personal moral responsibility for Kashmir, Modi, Hindu nationalism, sectarian violence, or the treatment of Muslims in India.

Nobody assumes Russians must publicly perform anguish and disavowal before being socially accepted at a bar in Venice.

Nobody asks Chinese immigrants to explain Xinjiang before discussing music, dating, or technology.

Nobody asks Americans whether they have a “complicated relationship” with the United States because of Iraq, Afghanistan, drone strikes, mass incarceration, or civilian casualties abroad.

And crucially, many of the same people who demand this moral ritual from Jews would never ask a Palestinian whether they have a “complicated relationship” with Gaza because of Hamas, October 7th, suicide bombings, rocket fire, human shields, or the explicit genocidal language embedded within mainstream Palestinian political culture.

Only Jews are asked to stand trial for our collective association. Only Jews are expected to enter public space already prepared to morally distance ourselves from Israel and the “genocide” in Gaza (that never happened).

That is what makes these interactions so psychologically revealing. The question is never merely geopolitical. It is civilizational. It is existential. It is about whether Jewish particularism itself is morally legitimate.

The woman at the bar almost certainly believed she was asking a thoughtful, compassionate, intellectually serious question. That is what makes this phenomenon so difficult to explain to people outside the Jewish experience. The hostility is often masked as sophistication. The prejudice arrives clothed in “humanitarian” concern.

The modern “progressive” world has developed a moral framework in which Jewish attachment to Jewish survival is uniquely suspicious. A Frenchman can love France, an Indian can love India, a Mexican can love Mexico, an Armenian can love Armenia, a Palestinian can love Gaza — but Jewish attachment to Israel is often treated as morally contaminated from the outset, and something requiring explanation, apology, or public qualification.

This is why so many Jews increasingly feel that conversations about Israel are never actually conversations. They are indictments and loyalty tests. This is not because Israeli policies or politicians are beyond criticism. Every country deserves criticism. Israel deserves criticism too. Israelis criticize their own government constantly. The country practically runs on eternal internal arguments.

But criticism is not what many Jews increasingly encounter. What we encounter is the presumption that Jewish solidarity itself is evidence of moral compromise; that merely feeling emotionally connected to the world’s only Jewish state now requires explanation in polite society.

And this is where the word “genocide” becomes important.

The deployment of the term has increasingly become detached from analytical precision and attached instead to moral theater. The accusation itself functions socially before it functions legally. Once Israel is framed not as flawed, not as assertive, not as mistaken — but as genocidal — then every Jew connected to Israel becomes psychologically adjacent to evil. The Jew is transformed from participant in a tragic conflict into associate of absolute malevolence.

That transformation matters enormously.

As Hillel Neuer, the executive director of UN Watch, so brilliantly (and sadly) observed:

“They are not rationalizing violence against Jews because they believe Israel is doing evil; they are accusing Israel of evil in order to rationalize violence against Jews.”

“The accusation itself — casting Israel as a uniquely malevolent force in the world, and the Jew as a kind of cosmic embodiment of evil — becomes psychological license by which ancient animosity can masquerade as humanitarian virtue, hatred as justice, and aggression as a moral necessity.”¹

That insight explains far more than many people realize. Once Israel is recast as the singular moral monstrosity of the modern world, extraordinary standards suddenly become ordinary.

Jewish businesses become legitimate targets for protest regardless of their connection to Israeli policy. Jewish students become fair game for intimidation. Jewish symbols become provocative. Zionism becomes treated not as a national movement, but as a metaphysical stain. And Jews themselves become uniquely interrogatable.

That is why a casual night out in Venice can suddenly become a tribunal. It is not a discussion about military strategy, or a nuanced conversation about the Middle East, or a question of curiosity such as, “Since you lived in Israel for over a decade, what did you see on the ground that we don’t get to see on the news or on social media? What can you teach us?”

Instead, we get a tribunal about whether Jewish allegiance itself is morally acceptable. We get, “I saw something on Instagram and the painstakingly obvious, indisputably clear conclusion is that Israel performed a genocide in Gaza.”

What is perhaps most striking is the obsessive disproportion. As Shane Shmuel, a Future of Jewish guest writer, recently observed:

“Australia’s political Left appears so consumed by Israel that one could be forgiven for thinking there are no other issues facing the country.”²

The same could easily be said about America’s Left, Canada’s Left, Europe’s Left, and large segments of elite Western culture more broadly. The fixation itself tells a story.

The world contains mass atrocities of staggering scale: Sudan, Syria, Yemen, Congo, Xinjiang, Ukraine, Ethiopia. Yet somehow the Jewish state persistently occupies a uniquely obsessive place in global moral consciousness.

People insist this obsession exists purely because they care deeply about “human rights.” Perhaps some do. But if universal humanitarian concern were truly the driving force, the emotional intensity would be distributed differently across the globe.

Instead, Israel functions symbolically.

The Jewish state has become the screen onto which vast numbers of people project anxieties and frustrations. And Jews living thousands of miles away increasingly become avatars for all of it.

That is why the woman’s question at the bar lingered with me afterward — not because it offended me, but because it clarified something. For many “educated” Westerners, Jewish identity now comes with an implicit expectation of ideological disclaimer. Jews may participate socially, professionally, culturally, and politically, but somewhere in the background exists the expectation that “good Jews” must visibly demonstrate sufficient discomfort with Jewish power.

And Israel, more than anything else, represents Jewish power, as in actual Jewish sovereignty, actual Jewish self-defense, and actual Jewish agency. For centuries, Jews were hated as powerless outsiders; now we are increasingly hated as (or at least resented for) powerful insiders.

The costume changed; the structure remained.

And so the Jew in 2026 often finds himself in a peculiar position: expected to answer for Israel in ways no other diaspora population is expected to answer for any other country on earth — not because Israel is uniquely evil, but because Jews remain uniquely symbolically useful.

The irony in all of this is that earlier in the evening, when the conversation revolved around the Amish and the Mormons, Mandy had made her worldview unmistakably clear. “I can’t stand organized religion,” she said. “It’s used to control people and suppress their freedom of thought.”

And yet somehow, over the course of a single conversation, she had unconsciously reproduced the very thing she claimed to oppose. What was the question she ultimately asked my friend if not an ideological loyalty ritual? It was not about curiosity, genuine complexity, or an invitation to mutual understanding. It was a test, a demand that Jews publicly position themselves correctly before being granted moral comfortability in “progressive” social spaces.

That is the contradiction at the center of so much contemporary discourse surrounding Jews and Israel. Many people believe they are resisting dogma while merely replacing one orthodoxy with another. They believe they are challenging tribalism while constructing new moral tribes of their own. They believe they are defending free thought while enforcing rigid ideological boundaries around which identities are considered morally legitimate and which are considered morally suspect.

And increasingly, Jewish identity — particularly Jewish attachment to Israel — falls into the latter category. The modern “progressive” world often prides itself on rejecting inherited religious structures, but human beings rarely eliminate moral orthodoxies. More often, they secularize them. They transfer the language of sin, purity, heresy, blasphemy, confession, and redemption into society and politics.

Israel became one of the central theological symbols within this new moral order. The “good Jew” is the Jew who denounces Jewish power loudly enough. The “bad Jew” is the Jew who remains emotionally attached to it. The “enlightened Jew” is the Jew who reassures everyone else that Jewish nationalism is uniquely shameful. And the “unforgivable Jew” is the one who insists that Jews — like every other people on earth — possess the right to survive history on our own terms.

That is why these conversations so often feel strange to Jews, even when they remain polite on the surface. Beneath the smiles and social sophistication lies an unspoken expectation that Jews must continually demonstrate moral distance from themselves.

And once you notice that pattern, you begin seeing it everywhere.

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1. Hillel Neuer on Instagram

2. “Why Is Israel Labor’s Obsession While Australia Faces Crisis at Home?” Shane’s Substack.