The Politically Acceptable Jew

The old demand was assimilation. The new one is ideological surrender.

photo: Nikolas Gannon/Unsplash

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This is a guest essay by Steven Abraham, the rabbi at Beth El Synagogue in Omaha, Nebraska.

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

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Joel Rubin’s warning should make Western Jews uncomfortable precisely because it is not really about Israel. It is about us.

Rubin, who served as U.S. Congressman Bernie Sanders’ Jewish outreach director in 2020, recently wrote that anti-Zionism is becoming “the boundary marker separating the politically acceptable Jew from the politically suspect one.”

That is the sentence worth sitting with.

The argument is no longer simply over settlements, Netanyahu, Gaza, or the borders of a future Palestinian state. Something else is happening: In parts of the Western Left, the question is increasingly not what Jews believe about Israel, but whether Jews are willing to place Jewish peoplehood itself on trial.

The acceptable Jew may criticize Israel, renounce Zionism, universalize Judaism into an ethical tradition detached from peoplehood, and assure everyone that Jewish safety requires no particular Jewish political claim.

The suspect Jew says something much simpler:

I am a Jew. I belong to a people. That people has a homeland. And after 2,000 years of dependence on the goodwill of others, I am unwilling to apologize for the existence of Jewish sovereignty.

That Jew has become a problem.

Rubin’s testimony matters because he did not enter the Sanders campaign as an adversary. He joined to create a political home for “progressive” Jews who supported both Sanders’ domestic agenda and Israel. Instead, he encountered activists for whom a two-state solution was already insufficient because the objection was not merely to Israeli policy, but to Israel’s existence.

There is a temptation among Jewish leftists to explain this away.

It is only the activists. It is only the campus Left. It is only social media.

Perhaps.

But political movements are often transformed first at their edges. Ideas that appear eccentric in activist circles eventually migrate into the vocabulary of institutions, candidates, staffers, universities, nonprofits, and journalists.

The question is not whether every liberal is anti-Zionist. Obviously not. The question is whether anti-Zionism is acquiring moral prestige within an increasingly influential part of the Democratic coalition. Rubin believes it has — and Western Jews should stop pretending not to notice.

For decades, many of us operated according to an almost instinctive political assumption: The Left was the natural home of the Jew because the Left defended minorities. That story was never entirely false. American liberalism, for example, opened doors for Jews. Jews helped build the labor movement, civil-rights organizations, universities, philanthropy, and the architecture of postwar liberal democracy. The Democratic Party became, for generations of American Jews, not merely a political preference but part of an identity.

Then Jews became successful — and the ideological categories changed.

A political culture increasingly organized around power began to have difficulty understanding a minority that possessed some. A movement trained to see the world through the binary of “oppressor” and “oppressed” encountered Jews and discovered that we refused to stay in our assigned box.

We are a tiny minority, and oftentimes prosperous. We have suffered persecution, and we are not powerless. We are indigenous to the Middle East, and many of us have European roots from more recent centuries. We are a religion, and also a people. We are diasporic, and we are sovereign. We are vulnerable, and we are powerful at the same time.

The contemporary ideological imagination has trouble with that complexity, so it simplifies us. The Jew becomes “white.” Israel becomes “colonial.” Jewish sovereignty becomes “supremacy.” Jewish self-defense becomes “oppression.” And, suddenly, the Jew can recover his moral innocence only by renouncing the parts of Jewish identity that complicate the narrative.

For most of modern Jewish history, the surrounding society offered Jews some version of the same bargain: You may enter, but first become less conspicuously Jewish. Christian Europe asked Jews to convert. Enlightened Europe asked Judaism to become a private religion. Certain forms of contemporary “progressivism” ask Jews to sever Judaism from peoplehood and peoplehood from Zionism.

The vocabulary has changed. The demand is remarkably familiar.

October 7th should have ended our willingness to indulge this. What happened after the massacre was, in some ways, almost as revealing as the massacre itself. Before Israel had buried its dead, people were explaining the “context.” Before hostages had been identified, demonstrators were celebrating “resistance.” Before Israel had launched the war that would consume the next years of Middle Eastern politics, university organizations were assigning blame to Israel for the slaughter of Israelis.

Many Jews saw something clearly in those days that they had resisted seeing before. Jewish suffering does not automatically produce Jewish moral standing. Sometimes it produces suspicion. The dead Jew can be mourned. The Jew who refuses to remain dead becomes politically complicated. That distinction is at the heart of the present crisis.

There is a strain of contemporary politics that is comfortable with Jewish vulnerability but deeply uncomfortable with Jewish agency. It can commemorate the Holocaust while recoiling from the political lesson many Jews drew from it. It can condemn antisemitism — in theory — while treating the one state created to protect Jews as uniquely illegitimate. It can love Jewish ethics while distrusting Jewish peoplehood. It can quote Heschel while sneering at Herzl.

That is not an incidental contradiction. It is the contradiction.

Zionism, stripped of slogans and caricature, begins with an inconvenient proposition: Jews are not merely practitioners of a religion. We are a people, and peoples have political interests. That is what parts of the Left increasingly cannot tolerate. Not because Jews are insufficiently universalist, but because Jews refuse to be only universalist.

Judaism has never taught that moral seriousness requires the abolition of particular loyalty. The Torah does not begin with “humanity” entering covenant. It begins with Abraham, a family, a people, a land. And from that particular covenant emerges a universal moral claim.

The Jewish tradition never understood particularism and universalism as enemies. Modern ideology often does, which is why the pressure placed on Jews is so revealing. When every other minority is encouraged to recover its history, honor its ancestors, preserve its identity, and articulate its collective aspirations, Jews are increasingly told that our collective aspiration is precisely the problem.

Everyone else may decolonize; the Jews must diasporize. Everyone else may recover ancestral identity; the Jews must transcend ours. Everyone else may describe inherited trauma as politically meaningful; Jews invoking Jewish history are accused of weaponizing it.

Eventually one must ask whether the rules are actually universal. Joel Rubin’s conclusion is severe: He now argues that Bernie Sanders and the wider activist structure around him are “actively fueling antisemitism in this country.” The material before us does not supply enough of Rubin’s full essay to evaluate every piece of that indictment. But the larger warning is already clear enough: A movement need not hate Jews to become inhospitable to Jewish life. It need only create a definition of justice under which normal Jewish commitments become evidence of moral failure.

That is how a boundary is constructed.

One does not announce: Jews are unwelcome. One says: “Zionists are unwelcome.” And then one defines Zionism broadly enough to encompass the overwhelming majority of Jews who believe that Israel should (obviously) continue to exist. The distinction allows everyone to feel virtuous. “We do not hate Jews (only Jews who believe the Jewish state has a right to exist).” “We welcome Jewish voices (only those willing to explain why other Jews are wrong).” “We oppose antisemitism (provided the antisemitism arrives in vocabulary approved by the coalition).”

Western Jews should recognize the danger of becoming comfortable with this arrangement.

Jewish political seriousness requires something harder: no permanent friends, no permanent enemies, no political messiahs, no party gets our loyalty by inheritance. The Torah commands loyalty to covenant, not caucus. Perhaps that is the political lesson us Western Jews most need to relearn.

For generations we asked which party was better for the Jews. That may now be the wrong question. The better question is whether we possess enough Jewish confidence to make every political party earn our support.

There is dignity in political homelessness if the alternative is ideological servitude. Abraham hears the command לֶךְ־לְךָ (lech lecha) — go forth. Leave what is familiar. Jewish history begins, in a sense, with the refusal to confuse familiarity with destiny. Perhaps Western Jews are arriving at another such moment.

That does not require abandoning liberalism. It requires abandoning the idea that any party is our home. A home does not demand that you leave your identity at the door. And that is finally Joel Rubin’s warning. The politically acceptable Jew is always welcome. There is only one condition: They must first demonstrate that when Jewish particularism collides with the ideology of the moment, they will choose the ideology.

Western Jews should refuse the bargain — because we have tried being acceptable before. It has never been a particularly successful Jewish survival strategy.

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