Tag: antisemitism

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Trying to make sense of these complex issues isn’t easy. It’s something most progressive Jews struggle with constantly. This is very much a personal piece, based on grappling with this situation since I was a small child. I don’t claim that this post speaks for anyone other than myself.

To complicate things, the words “zionism” and “antisemitism” have wildly different meanings to different people. I define zionism as the tenet that Jews, like other ethnic and cultural groups around the world, have the right to a homeland of our own.

The version of zionism I was raised with was an idealistic extrapolation of this principle that embraced the social experiments in Israel, such as intentional communities (notably the kibbutz and the moshav), women’s equality extending even to compulsary military service, and the commitment to agriculture and reforestation that would “make the desert bloom” as it had in biblical times. This happy, upbeat vision even had a soundtrack: happy, upbeat Israeli songs in Modern Hebrew such as “Tzena, Tzena,” popularized here in the US by the politically progressive quartet The Weavers in 1951.

But it was also rooted in the shameful slogan, “a land with no people for a people with no land”: a racist lie that ignored the thousands of years of Palestinian history dating back at least as far as the Old Testament battles with the Philistines, a lie that was used to justify the Naqba (also spelled Nakba)—the expulsion of tens of thousands of Palestinians from what is now Israel—and the continuing oppression of Palestinians both within the Green Line that marked Israel’s 1948 borders and in the West Bank and Gaza, which are still majority-Palestinian but have been under Israel’s control since the 1967 war.

Another myth underpinning the idealistic version of zionism is the idea that Israel, the lone democracy and only non-Muslim country in the region, was our democratic outpost, the only place championing human rights in a region that was openly hostile to Jews and to Israel: the little David surrounded by heavily armed Arab Goliaths who wanted to drive Israel into the sea.

The human rights champion part would be great if it were true. But Israel’s society is stratified. In 1986, when we first visited, there was still a clear prejudice in favor of Jews of Eastern European origin or born in Israel or Palestine; Sephardic Jews from Spain and Portugal were second-class citizens, third class for those from Turkey, Iran, and the Arab countries, fourth class for those from Africa—and the non-Jewish Arab populations, whether Muslim, Christian, or Druze, were at the very bottom.

The first two classes had integrated by the time we returned in 2014, but the rest of the stratification remained. Discrimination against Arabs and Palestinians remains rampant. From roadside checkpoints to destruction of their villages and orchards, long imprisonments, and more, Israel has fomented oppressive conditions for the populations under its heel.

This certainly didn’t start under Netanyahu, but he has made it much worse, culminating in the genocide of the Gaza war and its continuing aftermath.

Another strain of zionism is the post-Holocaust push for a Jewish homeland so there would always be a refuge for Jews, historically marginalized, ostracized, expelled, and murdered for more than a thousand years—a way of giving teeth to the “Never again” slogan that sprouted as the truth of those awful years started to come out. It was that experience that gave wings to the dream of a Jewish state.

The movie “Israelism” is a really good analysis of how we Jews in the US were raised to believe we were doing good for the world in our zionism—how good a job the propagandists for Israel did at inculcating these messages and beliefs across US Jewish society—even as our heroes from David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weitzmann to Golda Meir secretly embraced ethnic cleansing and driving the Palestinians out.

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Antisemitism is prejudice against Jews. It’s an odd choice of word, because Arabs are also Semitic peoples. For progressive Jews, it is something completely separate from criticism of Israel or sympathy to the Palestinian cause. I claim a right to criticize Israel, just as I criticize the government of my own country (especially in its brutal and disgusting current incarnation). In fact, I’ve criticized and protested against every US president since Nixon, who was elected when I was eleven—yes, even Carter, Clinton, Obama, and Biden. They all did things I thought were wrong, and I wasn’t shy about writing letters or showing up for—or even organizing—demonstrations or lobbying my elected officials to change those policies.

But in the right-wing Jewish world, any criticism of the Israeli government, even the current genocidal one that by comparison makes even the horribly cruel Stephen Miller look relatively tame, is labeled antisemitism. Ditto any endorsement of the Palestinian cause. Somehow, these people can’t envision a world that has room for both Jewish and Palestinian homelands.

These would-be censors have gone so far as to add a rider to a military spending bill protecting Israel from boycotts. This passed the US House last September but, thankfully, as far as I can tell, has not been taken up in the Senate. We’ve also seen the punishment of pro-Palestinian students such as Lebanese Mahmoud Khalil and Turkish Rumeysa Ozturk, imprisoned and deported (Khalil) or threatened with deportation (Ozturk) over their criticism of Israel.

This ridiculous conflation of opposing the Israeli government with hating Jews goes back decades. In the 80s, I was in a group called New Jewish Agenda that advocated a two-state solution. For this, we were ostracized and marginalized within the mainstream Jewish community. We did not get speaking opportunities at synagogues. I am amazed to watch Jewish Voice for Peace emerge from similar marginalization in recent years to become the main US Jewish voice for Palestinian rights. I’ve been thrilled to see integrated Israeli-Palestinian peace groups such as Combatants for Peace and Standing Together get those synagogue speaking opportunities in the last 20 years or so.

And yet that right-wing narrative is so embedded in mainstream Jewish institutions that I know many people who are in pretty much basic agreement with me on so many other issues but can’t overcome their own Islamophobia or anti-Arab bias. They still see any criticism of Israel, especially from non-Jews, as antisemitism. They call NYC Mayor Sohran Mamdani, who constantly makes pro-Jewish statements and has Jewish advisors, an antisemite even as they paint their signs for the next No Kings march—because Mamdani has accurately called out the Netanyahu government’s war crimes, protection of anti-Arab extremists, and oppression of its own Palestinian population.

In fact, this post was inspired by a conversation on Facebook that started with me praising Mamdani for his comment in response to having higher poll ratings than Netanyahu among NYC Jews: “My focus is on delivering for each and every New Yorker, and I’m proud to be the mayor of the city with the largest Jewish population in the country” and pointing out that he has made many pro-Jewish statements in his time campaigning for and serving as Mayor.

That generated two comments from this camp. “I am not at all impressed with him. His stance on Israel and Jews is dangerous and deplorable.” and, in response, “I agree. Look, he’s entitled to his opinion about the Middle East. But keep it to yourself, Zohran. Your job is to make NYC a more liveable city. Focus on that and you’ll get great support. Stop talking about Bibi (who I dislike, too, but for different reasons).”

My immediate response was:

I have actively looked into a bunch of accusations that claim Mamdani is antisemitic. If I could find any, I’d immediately stop supporting him. However, what I find each time are the ACCUSATIONS of antisemitism rather than any actual speech or action that is against Jews. He has been loud and consistent in condemning Netanyahu and Israel’s present government, yes. But that’s not antisemitism. It is condemning genocidal, brutal attacks on Palestinians and Lebanese and claiming to do so in the name of all Jews. Well, I am Jewish and I condemn Netanyahu and his genocide. Just as I speak out as a citizen of the US against the brutal policies of this government and its insistence that the government only has to represent right-wing so-called able-bodied, cis, straight, mostly male Christian Nationalists—who are not Christian, if you read Christ’s words—so I speak out against what is happening in my name over there.
What’s even worse is the way right-wing Jews insist on conflating criticism of Israeli policies with hating Jews. IMHO, that leads directly to more antisemitism, because the haters say, “look, the Jews are telling us that all Jews support Israel’s government and that government represents all Jews. THAT leads to wildly negative outcomes. Ignorant people will ingest that sick messaging and then commit pogroms—just as ignorant people in the US right have attacked immigrants, trans people, and others who got on this administration’s bad side.
This post is a longer response.

 

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Ethics in Government, Ethics-International, language, Mindset, Peace and War, Politics, propaganda, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , , , , ,

This post started on Facebook, as a response to replies to this article by an Israeli expat living in the US who’s an expert on genocide, which I posted on April 22. There’s a spirited discussion going on at that post, which you can read by clicking on this sentence. Be sure to read the replies to the comments, and the replies to the replies—and to make sure that you’re viewing either “all comments” or “newest” and not “most relevant,” which will block some of the responses.

What follows is a response to Richard, who defends Zionism as providing a safe haven for Jews in a world that never had one before, a place where Jews can seek refuge from the pogroms of their particular generation—and to Robert, the person he was responding to, who posted that trauma often begets trauma, unless there is a deliberate effort to “alchemize” it into something positive, and who criticizes Zionism as “designed by colonialist and brutally implemented, and is now more ruthless than ever.” It’s posted there as a reply to Robert

This post is a substantial expansion of what I wrote—with considerable updating here but not in the original response, including several links to back up my claims:

Robert, Zionism had two impulses: One was protection against antisemitic violence, as Richard so eloquently describes in his response to you. The other was the one we progressives were hoodwinked into believing: that this was the chance to create a utopia, a place where women and men were equal, a place to recover a desert “land with no people for a people with no land”—(as I was told at the yeshivas [Jewish day schools] I attended as an elementary school student and again in the meetings of the Jewish Student Union at my secular city-wide high school), a semi-socialist endeavor based on cooperation.

It’s a bit hard to find, but the movie, “Israelism,” has an excellent analysis of how that idealism didn’t match the reality on the ground. Something I don’t remember if the movie addresses is the way the land itself was colonized. In my childhood, we were always sending money to the Jewish National Fund to plant trees in Israel. But just as we didn’t know about the Palestinians forced into exile, we also didn’t know that JNF was ripping out native species to plant non-native pine forests that have not been kind to the ecosystem—and of course, the Israeli government frequently bulldozes Palestinian olive trees in retaliation for perceived injuries, while Israel also often narrows the land of the local Palestnians so the settlers end up harvesting stolen oil.

The racist plans of Golda and Ben-Gurion [Perplexity.ai search for “statements against arabs from David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir made before 1967”, conducted April 24, 2026) were not in the open, and neither was the reality that, ahem, this was NOT “a land with no people.” It was a land whose people had largely been kicked out in 1948. So you had the yin and the yang, protection from evil and creation of good. But the creation of good was largely built on a lie and certainly doesn’t match the cruelty of today’s Israeli government agains tthe people their parents and grandparents threw off their land. Yes, Palestinians within the Green Line can vote and even have representation in the Knesset. But they have been actively discriminated against the whole time, just as Blacks in the US have been. Housing and job opportunities are not equal. Open racism is common.

Richard, I’ve been to Israel twice, in 1986 and again in 2014. Both times, Dina and I have sat and talked with Palestinians—and on the first trip, we interviewed several leaders of different organizations within the Israeli peace movement. We stayed part of the time with a Palestinian family in the Galilee, part of the time with my right-wing settler relatives, and even in an Arab-owned hotel in East Jerusalem. And we visited the ultrareligious Yiddish-speaking branch of my family that had fled to Israel to escape the Holocaust. On the first trip, we stayed in a traditional kibbutz, and on the second trip, a kibbutz for people in the Transcendental Meditation world. My right-wing Orthodox sister made Aliyah [moved to Israel] with her husband and three of their four grown children, who have all had kids born in Israel.

So I have sat down and broken bread with people on all sides of the spectrum—including a man who was ten years old in 1948 when the soldiers told his family they’d be back in their homes in two weeks. That was not a planned encounter; he was conducting a one-person Occupy movement at the one surviving building (the Orthodox church) in his childhood village WITHIN the Green Line, which the Israelis had bulldozed and turned into a national park that he now had to pay to enter.

That interview was conducted in Hebrew and translated for us by our host, a Dutch Holocaust refugee. He and his fellow refugee wife were two of the three Jews in a Druze village (the third was an elderly woman we didn’t get to meet, the last of her line, whose family managed to stay during the Babylonian Exile of 70 A.D. when the Jews were thrown out of present-day Israel). He also took us around to meet a bunch of his neighbors. And this couple were also the custodians of the actual carob tree that sustained Shimon Bar Yochai when he was hiding out from the Romans in a cave, 2000 years ago.

To me, if Zionsm is to remain viable, it MUST “alchemize” into something far more humane—something that would bring reality to the Koolaid we collectively swallowed as the utopian vision that didn’t exist was spooned out to us through a wall of lies, false promises, and exceptionalism. In its current form, not only is it attacking others, it also makes Jews LESS safe around the world. This is in part because conservative elements of the Jewish community insist on conflating antizionism with antisemitism—a conflation that I utterly resist and abhor. This division within the Jewish community is not new. It goes back at least as far as the founding of modern Israel in 1948.

But most Jews who get interviewed on national newscasts—politicians and college presidents, assorted right-wing pundits—claim that any criticism of Israel is antisemitism, and punish anti-Zionists (Palestinians especially, but also groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace). At the same time, the current US government has weaponized false claims of antisemitism to extort money from universities and attempt to control college curricula and suppress student activities—while, ironically, waving a banner of free expression.

These actions from the government and from right-leaning Jewish officials give the real enemies of Jews something to cling to and organize around, and creates a climate where hate crimes against Jews are somehow seen as forgivable because those who attack Jews just because they’re Jews can claim that Jews themselves have said that Jews must support the Israeli government’s vicious actions. We Jews are stereotyped as suppoters of an evil empire, and thus fair game for whatever mayhem comes our way. Thus, they claim they’re just opposing the racist and brutal incarnation of Zionism as conducted by the Netanyahu government.

Netanyahu has given advocates of peace and human rights real things to worry about (e.g., the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and looking the other way when Israeli settlers attack Palestinian civilians in the West Bank or within the Green Line)—never mind that a huge percentage of Jews both in Israel (which has had a massive peace movement for decades, though it had to rebuild after the Hamas attack on Israel of October 7, 2023) and in the Diaspora.

It’s important to note that many of these right-wing ideologues spouting this nonsense identify as so-called Christian Nationalists (not Christian at all, if you read Christ’s teachings, as I have). And many have a public history of antisemitism themselves. Here are some of the president’s anti-Jewish remarks and actions. And here are more of them (slight overlap) along with notes on antisemitism from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., FBI Director Kash Patel, and several other appointees.

I condemn the violence on all sides, including the violence of lies that demonize either people.

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I was not expecting to be totally blown away by a politician’s victory speech on Election Night. But I was moved to tears several times.

Whether you like his politics or not, you have to acknowledge his oratorical skills—both in the crafting of this speech and in the delivery, where he comes across to me as humble, inclusive, and committed. And if speaking is any part of your communications (which it should be), there are a lot of lessons in this speech.

The politician is Zohran Mamdani, just elected as the first Muslim mayor of New York City—a municipality with more population than 38 of the 50 US states.

You can view it at https://www.c-span.org/program/campaign-2025/zohran-mamdani-election-night-victory-speech/668370 (including the sweet family moment at the very end) and read the full transcript at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/05/nyregion/mamdani-speech-transcript.html (I had to set up a free account to see it).

He hits high notes immediately, quoting Eugene Victor Debs, “I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity.” Debs ran for president as an open socialist—from his prison cell. Then Mamdani hits us with this powerful and poetic paragraph centering his working-class base:

Fingers bruised from lifting boxes on the warehouse floor, palms calloused from delivery bike handlebars, knuckles scarred with kitchen burns: These are not hands that have been allowed to hold power. And yet, over the last 12 months, you have dared to reach for something greater.

Next, a hat tip to his opponent, who he wishes “only the best in private life.”

Then came the only thing I would have edited out: “But let tonight be the final time I utter his name, as we turn the page on a politics that abandons the many and answers only to the few.” His deeper meaning is ambiguous, but it could be seen as holding some resentment, not wanting to even speak the opponent’s name again. I would have skipped the first clause and jumped to “We have turned the page on a politics that abandons the many and answers only to the few.” When I listened, I misheard the word “utter” as “honor,” and that may color my negativity toward the bit about not speaking his name.

But he pivots immediately to his mandate for change, for making the city affordable, and for including marginalized populations:

Thank you to those so often forgotten by the politics of our city, who made this movement their own. I speak of Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas. Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses. Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties. Yes, aunties.

He then tells stories of a few people he met during the campaign: a man who has to commute two hours each way because he can’t afford to live in the city, another who can’t afford to take a day off, and a woman who says she’d lost her love for her city.

His inclusiveness and focus on the glowing future expand to his enormous volunteer network:

This victory is for all of them. And it’s for all of you, the more than 100,000 volunteers who built this campaign into an unstoppable force. Because of you, we will make this city one that working people can love and live in again. With every door knocked, every petition signature earned, and every hard-earned conversation, you eroded the cynicism that has come to define our politics… To my campaign team, who believed when no one else did and who took an electoral project and turned it into so much more: I will never be able to express the depth of my gratitude. You can sleep now.

Then he acknowledges just how ambitious his goals are:

Central to that vision will be the most ambitious agenda to tackle the cost-of-living crisis that this city has seen since the days of Fiorello La Guardia: an agenda that will freeze the rents for more than two million rent-stabilized tenants, make buses fast and free, and deliver universal child care across our city.

Years from now, may our only regret be that this day took so long to come. This new age will be one of relentless improvement. We will hire thousands more teachers. We will cut waste from a bloated bureaucracy. We will work tirelessly to make lights shine again in the hallways of NYCHA developments where they have long flickered.

Safety and justice will go hand in hand as we work with police officers to reduce crime and create a Department of Community Safety that tackles the mental health crisis and homelessness crises head on. Excellence will become the expectation across government, not the exception. In this new age we make for ourselves, we will refuse to allow those who traffic in division and hate to pit us against one another.

From there, he segues directly into something even more ambitious: confronting a hostile federal government and the bigots who enable it—those who want to sow division and hatred, while he calls for unity and invokes, one after another, Jews and Muslims (two other groups who are often at odds on certain issues)—leading first with the community that he is not a member of, but that I am:

In this moment of political darkness, New York will be the light. Here, we believe in standing up for those we love, whether you are an immigrant, a member of the trans community, one of the many Black women that Donald Trump has fired from a federal job, a single mom still waiting for the cost of groceries to go down, or anyone else with their back against the wall. Your struggle is ours, too.

And we will build a City Hall that stands steadfast alongside Jewish New Yorkers and does not waver in the fight against the scourge of antisemitism. Where the more than one million Muslims know that they belong — not just in the five boroughs of this city, but in the halls of power.

No more will New York be a city where you can traffic in Islamophobia and win an election. This new age will be defined by a competence and a compassion that have too long been placed at odds with one another. We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about.

This next bit could sound like bravado—I’d love to hear some specifics on HOW he will meet those high expectations—but to me, it comes across instead as another call for unity and actual bravery: being willing to stand up and be counted—and looking ahead to what future would-be dictators we will need to organize against:

They want the people to fight amongst ourselves so that we remain distracted from the work of remaking a long-broken system. We refuse to let them dictate the rules of the game anymore. They can play by the same rules as the rest of us.

Together, we will usher in a generation of change. And if we embrace this brave new course, rather than fleeing from it, we can respond to oligarchy and authoritarianism with the strength it fears, not the appeasement it craves.

After all, if anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him. And if there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power.

This is not only how we stop Trump; it’s how we stop the next one. So, Donald Trump, since I know you’re watching, I have four words for you: Turn the volume up…

So hear me, President Trump, when I say this: To get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us. When we enter City Hall in 58 days, expectations will be high. We will meet them. A great New Yorker once said that while you campaign in poetry, you govern in prose.

If that must be true, let the prose we write still rhyme, and let us build a shining city for all. And we must chart a new path, as bold as the one we have already traveled. After all, the conventional wisdom would tell you that I am far from the perfect candidate…

He goes on to poke a bit of fun at himself, listing several characteristics that would have been thought of as liabilities—then proclaiming, “I refuse to apologize for any of this.”

And he concludes with inspiration: another strong call for hope:

Let the words we’ve spoken together, the dreams we’ve dreamt together, become the agenda we deliver together. New York, this power, it’s yours. This city belongs to you.

Again, I suggest that you watch the speech, take notes on what you feel did and didn’t work, and think about what you can bring to your own presentations.

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