The Real Rupture in American Jewish Life

Israel, Liberalism, and the Illiberal Left

Gustave Doré’s depiction of the death of Korah, which marked an earlier rupture in Jewish life. After his rebellion against Moses in the desert, the earth swallowed up Korah and his followers. Source: Wikimedia Commons

October 7 and its consequences have been a political earthquake for American Jews. According to Peter Beinart in The New York Times, the war in Gaza has catalyzed an irreparable rupture between liberalism and Zionism, “two creeds that for more than half a century have defined American Jewish identity,” and American Jews must choose between the two. As an advocate of a binational, one-state solution in Israel/Palestine, Beinart’s preferred choice is clear: “For many decades, American Jews have built our political identity on a contradiction: Pursue equal citizenship here; defend group supremacy there. Now here and there are converging. In the years to come, we will have to choose.” Beinart is right that there’s been an ideological rupture leading to a decision point for American Jews, but he’s wrong about the nature of that rupture and the true choice at hand.

As Franklin Foer writes in The Atlantic, the real rupture is between traditional Jewish-American liberalism and an antisemitism-ridden, illiberal left. According to Foer, “The intersectional left self-consciously rebelled against the liberalism that had animated so much of institutional Judaism, which fought to install civil liberties and civil rights enforced by a disinterested state.” Instead, the new left “considered the idea of neutrality—whether objectivity in journalism or color blindness in the courts—as a guise for white supremacy,” with Jews “treated in sectors of the left as the epitome of whiteness.” Foer also documents and criticizes resurgent antisemitism on the right, but like many liberal American Jews, he was blindsided after October 7 by the depth and ferocity of leftist hatred for Israel and often Jews more generally.¹

While the old Jewish-American liberalism espoused cultural pluralism, for the left influenced by Ibram Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, there are only racists and antiracists, colonizers and colonized, oppressors and oppressed. In this Manichean, literally black-and-white worldview, Israel is wholly in the wrong and the October 7 attacks are to be justified or even celebrated. Liberal Zionists are, at best, the equivalent of whites who refuse to see their privilege and thus contribute to structural racism. At worst, they are de facto oppressors and legitimate targets of ostracism or violence themselves. Thus, for example, one in five non-Jewish college students said in a survey that they “wouldn’t want to be friends with someone who supports the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.” In Foer’s analysis, Zionists didn’t abandon the left; the left abandoned liberal Zionists.

While Foer is overly wistful for a liberalism-girded “Golden Age of American Jewry,” he offers a useful corrective to the ideological blindness of Beinart’s piece. While Beinart posits a principled break between the left and Zionism, he routinely conflates the illiberal left that Foer (among many) describes with liberalism as traditionally championed by most American Jews (and center-left New York Times readers). For example, Beinart writes that “universities offer a preview of the way many liberals — or ‘progressives,’ a term that straddles liberalism and leftism and enjoys more currency among young Americans — may view Zionism in the years to come.” But to imply that campus progressives are simply idealistic young liberals is to condone the abandonment of formerly cherished liberal principles.

In the context of criticizing American Jewish institutions, Beinart blithely provides one such example: free speech. He writes, “Given the organized American Jewish community’s professed devotion to liberal principles, which include free speech, one might imagine that Jewish institutions would greet this ideological shift by urging pro-Israel students to tolerate and even learn from their pro-Palestinian peers.”² But if free speech is a liberal principle, and campus progressives don’t support free speech, are they really liberals? As Nate Silver observes in his analysis of college survey results, left-wing students “are at best inconsistent in their support of free speech and have very little tolerance for controversial speech they disagree with.” Israeli or pro-Israel speakers, in particular, have routinely been shut down and subject to abuse on college campuses. If Beinart wants to count the cancelers and hecklers as liberals, he can’t at the same time condemn American Jewish institutions for abandoning liberal principles, because he clearly doesn’t view free speech as a core liberal principle himself.

A more dangerous example comes when Beinart writes that many young American Jews are “jettisoning Zionism because they can’t reconcile it with the liberal principle of equality under the law.” Here, the stakes are higher, because Beinart is committed to a vision of a binational Israel-Palestine state in which Jews and Arabs have equal rights. He assumes, incredibly, that most anti-Zionists want a consistent application of liberalism “from the river to the sea,” because he is blind to the implications of the oppressor/oppressed dichotomy that dominates the illiberal left. Thus, he criticizes advocates of the slogan because “imagining a ‘free Palestine’ from the river to the sea requires imagining that Israeli Jews will become Palestinians, which erases their collective identity.” In response, he says, progressive Jews “have not only the right but also the obligation to care about Jews in Israel and to push the Palestine solidarity movement to more explicitly include them in its vision of liberation.”

Let me be explicit instead: this is dreampolitik, more utopian than even past left-wing fantasies of a workers’ paradise. If Jews are colonialists with no legitimate ties or rights to historic Palestine, as most anti-Zionists believe, then they won’t have any rights, collective or individual, in a future Palestine either. “From the river to the sea” chanters do not imagine Israeli Jews will become Palestinians. They imagine Israeli Jews will disappear. And far from criticizing a theoretical Palestinian state for depriving Jews of equality under the law, the illiberal left would applaud it for applying the greater principle of equity. Equity, to quote a representative DEI glossary, “means acknowledging and addressing structural inequalities — historic and current — that advantage some and disadvantage others.” To address the structural inequalities between Palestinians and former Israelis, the “privileged” ex-Israelis would be expelled at best and massacred at worst. For Israeli Jews (and, in all likelihood, Israeli Arabs, who were also murdered as collaborators on October 7), their place in the “from the river to the sea” vision of Palestinian liberation is in the sea.³

While Beinart casts Zionism and liberalism as an unnatural pairing, destined to split, national self-determination is a historic, indeed anti-colonial, liberal principle. Because of Woodrow Wilson’s promotion of the collective rights of peoples to decide their own fate, a number of the countries we know today were formed from collapsed empires after World War I.⁴ Of relevance to Beinart’s binationalist dream, the Wilsonian countries that no longer exist (Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia) are those that attempted to fit multiple nations into a single state. A consistent liberal would support Zionism, the Jewish right to national self-determination, as well as the Palestinian right to national self-determination. Zionists who deny Palestinians the right to a nation-state alongside (not in place of) Israel can rightly be criticized according to liberal principles. But to say that Zionism (or any nationalism) and liberalism are inherently contradictory is to misunderstand the nature of both political traditions. Classical liberalism triumphed in tandem with the modern nation-state (as compared with kingdoms that based their legitimacy on dynastic claims),⁵ while Israel’s Declaration of Independence promised to “ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.”

If left-wing critics did predominantly frame the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in terms of competing, but legitimate, national interests—and in the contradiction between Israel’s founding principles and its policies in the West Bank—they would find a sympathetic audience among most American Jews. As Foer notes, American Jews are actually more likely than the overall US population to believe in the possibility of peaceful coexistence between Israel and an independent Palestine. But instead, the loudest voices on the left deem the very existence of Israel to be less legitimate than the most extreme acts of violence by Palestinians. That is the source of the rupture between the far left (not liberalism) and mainstream American Jews. If, per Beinart, Poetry Slam, Columbia’s “only recreational spoken word club,” declares that they “see Palestine as the vanguard for our collective liberation,” then perhaps the problem is with Poetry Slam. Instead, Beinart advises Jewish students to gently persuade slam-poet jihadis to slightly soften their maximalist demands.

Beinart is probably correct that “a sizable wing” of American Jews will pick social belonging on the left over even the barest of solidarity with the roughly half of Jews worldwide who live in Israel. But many others will realize that the liberal values they hold dear—meritocracy, equality, free speech, national self-determination—are increasingly coded right, and change their political identification accordingly.⁶ The Orthodox, a growing segment of the American Jewish population, already lean conservative, as do Russian-speaking Jews.⁷ October 7 and its aftermath revealed, and widened, a rupture not between liberalism and Zionism, but between the illiberal left of campus culture and the moderate liberalism of most American Jews. To borrow a term, denying the legitimacy of the state of Israel is “intersectional” with denying the legitimacy of a neutral public sphere, “triggering” speech, biological sex, and a colorblind society. Accordingly, the choice for most American Jews is not whether to adhere to liberal principles or to support the existence of Israel; it’s whether to fight for traditional liberal principles on the left or to abandon the left entirely.

1. Here’s a choice quote from a New York Times article on the subject: “It’s like, I belong to this political organization that believes in three things: affordable housing, raising the minimum wage, and the wholesale murder of Jews. Two out of three ain’t bad!”

2. An article in The Atlantic by a Stanford University student provides one such example of attempted dialogue:

“Are you pro-Palestine?” the protester asked.

“Yes,” the attendee responded, and he went on to describe his disgust with the human-rights abuses Palestinians have faced for years.

“But are you a Zionist?”

“Yes.”

“Then we are enemies.”

3. Per scholar Guy Ziv: “A mid-November [2023] survey found that 75% of Palestinians residing in the West Bank and Gaza Strip support a Palestinian state from the river to the sea, as opposed to either a one-state or two-state solution for two peoples. In other words, for the vast majority of Palestinians, the ‘from the river to the sea’ slogan means precisely what it says it means.” It’s also hard to detect much yearning for co-existence in another popular pro-Palestinian slogan, “There is only one solution! Intifada revolution!”

4. As historian Margaret MacMillan writes in Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (2003), Wilson “believed in separate nations and in democracy, both as the best form of government and as a force for good in the world.” Zionists were among the many national claimants who met with Wilson and other allied leaders at the Paris Peace Conference: “That winter and spring, Paris hummed with schemes, for a Jewish homeland, a restored Poland, an independent Ukraine, a Kurdistan, an Armenia. . . . The petitioners came from countries that existed and ones that were just dreams.”

5. Hans Kohn’s The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in Its Origins and Background (1944) is an excellent primer on the subject. As he recounts, “Before the [French] Revolution there had been states and governments, after it there emerged nations and peoples. The new authorities were infinitely stronger than the old governments, for they were rooted in the nation and filled with a new morality. . . . the new message, fundamentally one, could realize itself only among the conditions created by the past and differing from country to country.”

6. This is not to say that the right consistently adheres to these principles. But as the most vocal segment of the left abandons traditionally liberal values (eg, by prioritizing equity over equality and harm reduction over free speech), they cede them to the right by virtue of polarization. For example, a leftist review of Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s The Coddling of the American Mind calls the authors “right liberals” for, among other transgressions, quoting Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

7. Notably, in Britain, many Jews who once supported the left-wing Labour Party have switched their affiliation to the Conservatives.