How is Israel manifest in Jewish religious and spiritual thought today? The answer varies across the different Jewish belief patterns. But in every case, Israel has become far more important in defining Jewishness than it was even in the recent past. And in every case, changes in how the idea of Israel functions are having epochal consequences for the future of Jewish experience, thought, and self-conception.
I began part I with Jewish Traditionalism, because Traditionalists explicitly claim to constitute the true, authentic Jewish way of life and because the conflict between their worldview and liberal values is so clear. I’m going to begin my analysis of Israel’s place in contemporary Jewish thought with Jewish Progressivism, because it is experiencing the most easily visible internal conflict over Israel. That conflict calls out for a framework to make sense of it and illuminate its trajectory.
So far, I will argue, there have been three phases in the history of Progressive American Jewish engagement with the idea of Israel. The first phase was identity-based skepticism. The second was total theological embrace. The third phase is internal contradiction, characterized by the conflict between the holdover of the second phase and the challenge that Israel now poses to Progressive Jewish values. We are in the middle of the third stage now, and a potential fourth stage is dimly discernible. That stage, which would certainly not come until some time after the dust of battle has settled, would constitute a substantial realignment of Progressive Jewish belief about Israel, back to something resembling stage one. But it would require a major theological revolution, one that many Progressive Jews are loath to undertake, and that might not occur at all so long as Israel is embattled and the trauma of Hamas killing women and children and taking hostages remains fresh.
The earliest Reform Jews, the founders of Progressive Jewish thought, were decidedly not Zionists. Classical Zionists insisted that the Jews were a nation and that Jewishness was not a religion, or rather should not remain one. Jewish Reformers insisted that the Jews were not a distinct nation and that Judaism precisely was and must be a religion, not a communal or ethnic or other group. Zionists held that Jews would never be accepted as full citizens of European nations. Reform Jews believed that only by making Judaism into a private religion, parallel to Protestantism, could Jews be accepted as full public citizens of the European nations to which they rightly belonged.
That is why the early Reform point of view on Zionism was the epitome of skepticism: Zionism posited a Jewish national identity that conflicted directly with the Jewish religious identity that early Progressive Jews were seeking. That skepticism lasted longer than most Progressive Jews today realize, or in some cases would care to admit. The Pittsburgh Platform, the ideological blueprint adopted by American Reform Jewish leaders in 1885, specifically rejected Zionism. “We consider ourselves,” it read, “no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.” In 1898, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the main Reform association, declared that “America is our Zion.” Even in 1950, two years after the establishment of Israel, the UAHC offered a mixed message about the new government: “Although mindful that it is the primary privilege and obligation of this Union of American Hebrew Congregations generously and wholeheartedly to further and support Judaism in America, we do now endorse moral and material support for Israel and recommend to our constituency wholehearted assistance to the United Jewish Appeal and Bond drive for Israel.”1
The second stage of the Progressive Jewish attitude to Israel began in the early 1960s, as American Jews gradually became more confident in their status as full American citizens who could support Israel without compromising their loyalty to the United States. Its primary inflection point was the Six-Day War of 1967, which had massive effects on all American Jews’ feelings for Israel. Trepidation in the run-up to the war was followed by pride in Israel’s military success. I recall my father describing older academic colleagues of his suddenly “coming out” as Jews after the war. The 1967 victory consolidated and enshrined the state of Israel in the minds of American Jews. Israel no longer appeared to be a beleaguered, semisocialist experiment. It was a proud model of victory, at a time when the United States itself was losing the war in Vietnam.
But pride in Israel’s military accomplishments was only part of the picture of how Progressive Jews began to embrace Israel in this second stage. The other, crucial element of the embrace was belated recognition of the tremendous losses of the Holocaust and the attempt to make theological sense of their enormity. This process was complex, and the argument I’m going to make about it treads on sensitive ground. So let me proceed carefully, and please judge my argument charitably as I lay it out.
The story of how the Holocaust became part of the national consciousness of American Jews turns not on the immediate aftermath of World War II but on a specific event that occurred in 1973: the Yom Kippur War, referred to in the Arab world as the October War. If that sounds strange, it should. Not only did the Yom Kippur War take place almost thirty years after the Holocaust ended, it had little if anything to do with the Nazis, Germany, or Europe.2
To see how the 1973 war triggered modern American Jewish Holocaust memory, you have to begin by realizing that until that time, most American Jews, including the organized American Jewish community, did not spend much time speaking publicly about the Holocaust or focusing on it. There were no Holocaust museums or memorials in American cities. The technical term “survivor” was not in use. Elie Wiesel was an unknown, struggling writer. His first draft of the book that would become Night was an 862-page memoir—in Yiddish. Wiesel managed to get a much-shortened version published in French in 1958. The first English edition, published in 1960, took three years to sell three thousand copies, its initial print run.3 Anne Frank’s Diary received significant attention when it came out in English (in 1952) and subsequently became a play (1955) and a movie (1959). But the diary, written by a young girl in hiding from the German occupation in Amsterdam, had nothing direct to say about the camps or the destruction of the Jews. And its well-known message that “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart” could be read as avoiding the problem of evil posed by the Holocaust.
You don’t have to be a Freudian to conclude that American Jews were, in that postwar period, unconsciously suppressing the trauma of the Holocaust, which was literally too much to bear. Even today, it is hard for any Jew, myself included, to contemplate the enormity of the death of six million of one’s people, among them a million and a half children. American Jews, the great majority of whom had (themselves or their parents and grandparents) immigrated to the United States in the period from 1880 to 1925, felt unspoken guilt about their own survival. They also no doubt felt unconscious guilt about their collective inability to do anything meaningful to stop the Holocaust other than supporting the U.S. effort to win the war. It was not that American Jews stood idly by while their literal cousins were killed, but that they were impotent to affect U.S. or Allied policy.
Nor was downplaying the Holocaust uniquely Jewish. At the Nuremberg trials, Justice Robert Jackson, who was the chief prosecutor, did not charge the Nazi defendants with a separate crime of genocide for perpetrating the Holocaust. Rather, the Nazis were charged with crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The Holocaust was presented as only a subpart of the Nazis’ wrongdoing. Jackson’s reasoning, shared by the U.S. establishment, not to mention the Soviet, British, and French governments who participated in the trials, was that it would not serve anyone’s interests to depict the Nazis’ crimes as primarily targeting Jews. The war had been fought on behalf of humanity, they posited. The Nazis’ crimes were against all humanity, not a specific, targeted subgroup.4
If the 1967 war inspired Jewish pride, the 1973 war inspired Jewish fear. In 1967, Israel achieved victory via a lightning surprise attack on Egypt and Syria. In 1973, the Egyptians and Syrians reciprocated, surprising Israel on Yom Kippur. For several weeks, as Israel struggled to win the elaborate tank battle that took place in the Sinai Peninsula, world Jewry had occasion to fear what would happen if the Egyptians broke through. Independent of the actual military risks, American Jews found themselves contemplating the theoretical possibility of a Jewish bloodbath.
That contemplation, followed by Israel’s eventual, costly victory in the 1973 war, seems to have awakened in American Jews a willingness to revisit the Holocaust. It also awakened an emotional and intellectual association between the Holocaust and the state of Israel. Israel’s victory had averted an imagined possible massacre of Jews. That conjured up the powerful idea that Israel itself was a response to the Holocaust.5
The notion that Israel should be understood in relation to the Holocaust was not completely new. The international debate that led to the United Nations’ 1947 partition plan rested implicitly on the idea that after the Holocaust, most European Jews could not or would not return to their prewar homes—and that there was some moral justice in affording them a homeland. In 1958, the Jewish American author Leon Uris had published a bestselling novel, Exodus, which was made into a successful 1960 film starring Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint. The novel and film focused on the efforts of displaced Jews to reach Palestine from Cyprus after World War II, toward the end of the British mandate, when Jewish immigration was still banned. Exodus implied clearly that Israel was necessary for Jews to defend themselves and so avoid another Holocaust, this time, by implication, at the hands of hostile Arabs.
Yet it is also important to recognize that Zionism predated the Holocaust by more than half a century. The Zionist institutions in mandate-era Palestine that were transformed into the government of Israel in 1948 long preceded the Holocaust. Zionists had certainly pointed to antisemitism and pogroms to argue that Jews should leave the European countries where they would never be truly safe or accepted. But even the most doomsaying Zionists did not predict the full scope of the Holocaust, any more than other analysts of the Jewish question did before the rise of Nazism. In historical terms, the Holocaust contributed to the United Nations’ willingness to recommend partition and so played an oblique, tragic role in fulfilling the dreams of Zionism. In ideological terms, however, the Zionist vision of Israel was complete and instantiated before the Holocaust even occurred.
The bringing together of Israel and the Holocaust was therefore itself an important historical development. The relationship between these two epochal events in Jewish history was not obvious, however. Multiple models of the connection could be imagined, and multiple models were advanced.
In Israel, the model of the relationship took a specifically Zionist form. Many Israelis viewed the deaths of six million Jews, most of whom offered little in the way of violent resistance, as to a degree shameful—shameful because they had not resisted. Those Jews had gone “like sheep to the slaughter,” the poet and anti-Nazi partisan fighter Abba Kovner (1918–1987) put it. Kovner, who emigrated to Israel in 1947, was using a metaphor that could be traced to the Bible and had been used by earlier Zionists to argue in favor of resisting antisemitic attacks. The Zionist way was to fight, not to be passive.6
Consequently, when Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, considered when to commemorate the Holocaust in the early years of the state, it settled on the date that the Warsaw Ghetto uprising had begun. The holiday established on that day was not named Holocaust Remembrance Day but “Remembrance Day for Holocaust and Heroism.” The heroism, exemplified by the brief and doomed uprising, got equal billing with the Holocaust. Conveniently, on the Jewish calendar, the date of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising fell eight days before Israel Independence Day. The Holocaust and the heroic resistance could be assimilated into the narrative that the establishment of the state of Israel repaired the tragedy of the destruction of European Jews.
In the United States, the model evolved differently. Some American Jews certainly believed that the main purpose of Israel was to protect against another Holocaust. But many American Jews instead viewed the United States as the better guarantor of the safety and security of Jews around the world. In the struggle of the 1970s to obtain freedom for Soviet Jews who wanted to express their Jewish identities, American Jews took the lead. They sought to influence and work alongside the U.S. government, not Israel, which had no leverage over the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
What was more, for American Jews in that era, Progressive Jews especially, it would have felt strangely self-denying to view Israel as the only place of true safety for Jews, as many Zionists continued to insist through the 1990s. After all, American Jews had achieved full citizenship as well as sociocultural and economic influence in the United States. For American Jews, the United States really had become their Zion. Jews were safer, better off, and more secure in the United States than they had been in any other country at any moment in world history, including Israel, where Jews remained subject to the threat of Arab invasion.
For Progressive Jews comfortable in their American identity, the ideas of the Holocaust and Israel slowly began to take on a different relationship. Increasingly, the two ideas became twin polestars of the expression of American Jewish thought and practice. To put it in the simplest possible way, American Jews recognized the importance of the Holocaust as a moral-historical event, and they supported the existence of Israel.
As I explained in part I, for Progressive American Jews, God is best served, honored, and worshipped by acts of social justice. As I also explained, this formulation does not fully answer the question of what makes Jewish religious or spiritual experience unique, even when it is married to the idea of a covenant between God and the Jewish people. Jewish thought and spirituality, however, call out for some version of Jewish specialness or chosenness, which is so enmeshed in the Jewish tradition.
As consciousness of the Holocaust began to grow among American Jews in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, the experience of the Holocaust itself began to function as a solution to the question of what made the Jews special. Most Progressive Jews would be uncomfortable saying out loud that the Jews are the chosen people, an idea arguably inconsistent with the basic moral proposition that all people are equal and therefore must be equally loved and chosen by God. In this era, however, most Progressive Jews were comfortable saying that the Holocaust was a unique event in world history, unique in its intent and unique in its effect. The Jewish people might not be God’s chosen people, but they were subjects of a unique historical event. They were in that sense distinct and special.
The slogan “Never again,” intended as a moral exhortation, gave social justice content to the intuition that the Holocaust determined Jewish uniqueness. In old-fashioned, pre-Holocaust, Progressive Jewish theology, Jewish chosenness mandated that Jews play a special role as “a light unto the nations,” spreading the message of monotheistic ethics. Jewish suffering played a role in that Progressive theology. As the Bible had put it, “You shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” The Holocaust could now be interpreted to provide a similar moral guidance. “You must never again allow a Holocaust to occur, for you yourselves suffered a Holocaust in the old country of Europe.”*
At the level of theodicy, this theory also hinted at a response to the nearly overwhelming challenge that must plague any believer after the Holocaust: How could a just God allow the Holocaust to happen? Progressive Jewish theology offered no single, overt solution.† But it did offer an authentically Progressive Jewish reaction: from the fact of suffering, one could infer a duty to prevent the suffering of others.
Through this Progressive moralization of the Holocaust, the historical event gradually assumed a central position in Progressive Jewish religious thought. The theologian most closely associated with this process is the philosopher and Reform rabbi Emil Fackenheim (1916–2003), who himself escaped Hitler. Fackenheim framed the Holocaust as creating what he called a 614th commandment in addition to the 613 commandments commanded by God in the Bible: “Thou shalt not give Hitler a posthumous victory.” As Fackenheim explained this proposition, it entailed a range of duties:
We are, first, commanded to survive as Jews, lest the Jewish people perish. We are commanded, secondly, to remember in our very guts and bones the martyrs of the Holocaust, lest their memory perish. We are forbidden, thirdly, to deny or despair of God, however much we may have to contend with him or with belief in him, lest Judaism perish. We are forbidden, finally, to despair of the world as the place which is to become the kingdom of God, lest we help make it a meaningless place in which God is dead or irrelevant and everything is permitted. To abandon any of these imperatives, in response to Hitler’s victory at Auschwitz, would be to hand him yet other, posthumous victories.7
Much can be said about this formulation, beginning with the extraordinary notion that a human act—the Holocaust—could be described, even metaphorically, as creating a divine commandment. What matters for our purposes is that the theology of the 614th commandment makes the Holocaust into the normative ground for affirmative Jewish life and faith: for belief, for practice, and for the Progressive objective of seeking social justice.
I could give many concrete examples of the penetration of the theological idea of the Holocaust into Progressive Jewish thought, but one proof-text should suffice. It appears in the liturgy for Yom Kippur found in the official prayer book of the Conservative movement. Designed for dramatic recitation, it consists of the ancient text of the mourner’s Kaddish prayer, in which each Aramaic word is followed by the name of a Nazi death camp or the site of a Nazi massacre of Jews: Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Treblinka, and so forth.
This version of the Kaddish makes the Holocaust into a theological event: a martyrology intimately connected to the sanctification of the divine name for which the prayer stands. One who recites this new prayer literally sanctifies the Holocaust, through commemoration of the holy martyrdom of the Jews who died in the camps.
The Jewish tradition has long recognized the sanctification of martyrdom. The section of the Yom Kippur liturgy in which this new form of the Kaddish appears includes poetic laments over ancient as well as medieval Jewish martyrs. “The death of the righteous atones,” according to a rabbinic statement that appears in the Talmud and elsewhere.8 Of course, the sanctification of martyrdom as an expression of divine presence also resonates with Christian ideas about martyrdom. There is a healthy scholarly debate about whether and how medieval Jewish conceptions of martyrdom were affected by Christian context.
Like historical Jewish martyrology, the development of the Holocaust into a liturgically recognized theological component of Progressive Jewish thought is not reducible to Christian influence. Nevertheless, like older Jewish martyrology, the Christian context deserves to be noticed. Progressive Jewish thought does not exist in a vacuum, nor has it ever. Early Reform Judaism grew up in close theological proximity to Protestant Reform theology, in both Germany and the United States. Today’s Progressive Judaism is, in a different way, part and parcel of broader American Progressive religious thought.
The centrality of the Holocaust to Progressive American Jewish belief can be summed up in a thought experiment. Imagine the rabbi of a large Progressive temple getting up in front of the congregation and beginning a Yom Kippur sermon with the words, “Some days I find I do not believe that God actually exists.” The congregation might be mildly surprised, but it would not be scandalized, particularly if the rabbi went on to say that she does believe in God on other days. Indeed, in 2001, Rabbi David Wolpe, one of the most prominent Conservative congregational rabbis in the United States, made headlines with a Passover sermon questioning the historicity of the exodus from Egypt.9 His career continued to thrive.
Now imagine the same hypothetical rabbi in the same temple on the same day. This time the sermon begins, “Some days I think that we should just get over the Holocaust and move on.” The rabbi would be fired by the board of directors—at a special meeting that would be convened as soon as the services were over, if not before. It would not matter if the rabbi’s sermon went on to say that, on the whole, she was convinced of the historical importance of the Holocaust. Questioning the central religious place of the Holocaust would be a firing offense.
A good test of orthodoxy in any religious context, including one that claims to deny that it has any orthodoxy, is to ask what words would get a member of the clergy fired from her job. By that measure, the deep religious significance of the Holocaust is today a central, orthodox component of Progressive American Jewish belief. For now, for a long time to come, and perhaps for all time, it cannot be questioned.
THE ORTHODOXY OF ISRAEL
At roughly the same time that the Holocaust came to function as one theological pillar of Progressive Jewish thought, Israel came to function as a similarly fundamental pillar. The process was complicated, perhaps more so than the theologizing of the Holocaust. Taking place from the 1970s through the 1990s, it was bound up in a transformation of classical Zionism into a form much more palatable to Progressive American Jews. And in comparison to the Holocaust, the idea of Israel occasioned a greater degree of ambivalence among Progressive Jews, an ambivalence that has returned with a vengeance in the current, third era of Progressive Jewish thought on Israel.
For Progressive Jews to embrace the idea of Israel, the first necessary step was for Israel to be reimagined not as the single national home for the whole Jewish people but as one place of refuge in which Jewish life could flourish. In its original, nationalist form, Zionism contradicted the Reform embrace of full national citizenship, first in Germany and then in the United States. Genuinely nationalist Zionism denied that Jews could be full citizens of any but a Jewish nation. That rendered the Reform vision of equal citizenship through privatized religion a vain hope. Equally important, classical secular Zionism rejected the very notion that Judaism should continue as a religion, picturing instead the transmutation of Jewish religion into a secular Israeli national identity. That would have heralded a historical situation in which Reform Judaism would be unnecessary and, indeed, barely imaginable. This is why Progressive Judaism is, statistically, almost nonexistent in Israel, and was indeed barely visible in Israel until very recently.
Put simply, in the era after the 1973 war, Zionism in Israel shifted its attitude toward Jews living outside the land of Israel. Much of the unconscious motivation for this change was political-pragmatic. Like other nationalisms, Zionism long held the aspirational idea (some would say fantasy) that political sovereignty equated to genuine national autonomy, understood as the military capacity to deter all enemies and provide for the country’s own security.10 The ideology of autonomy followed Zionism in Israel from 1948 up until 1973, as Israelis imagined their country being self-sufficient and capable of protecting itself and therefore, by extension, all Jews who might immigrate there. The fact that Israel became a nuclear power in 1966 or 1967 contributed to this ideological aspiration. Nuclear weapons were, then and now, understood as crucial tools of the sovereign capacity to self-defend. The apparent ease of the lopsided 1967 victory underscored the ideal of autonomy; if Israel could easily defeat her neighbors in a war fought alone, Israel must be truly autonomous.
The Yom Kippur War sent a sobering message to Zionists with respect to autonomy. A nuclear threat was of limited use, even in the face of an Egyptian attack that threatened briefly to reach Israeli population centers. Israel could have launched missiles to kill many Egyptians, but at what cost? And with what gain? Nuclear deterrence, it turned out, did not fully guarantee safety from invasion.
What was more, in October 1973, Israel badly needed U.S. supplies and support to win the war. Henry Kissinger, then U.S. secretary of state, was perceived in some quarters as having delayed that support so as to push Israel to learn the lessons of its dependence and act in a correspondingly more accommodating manner when pressed by the United States to negotiate peace with Egypt. Whether that was accurate or not (Kissinger was still denying it in an interview to mark his one hundredth birthday in 2023), the reality was that Israelis had to acknowledge that in a world of great power competition, Israel needed the United States to act as guarantor of its national security.11
Without American Jewish support, Israel could not then rely on the American alliance, because it was not at all certain that Israel was objectively the best regional ally for the United States to choose. The energy crisis of the 1970s showed the vast importance of Saudi and other Arab oil supplies to the U.S. economy. It followed that Israel needed to engage American Jews more fully, as a practical matter, and treat them as partners in protecting Israel’s national security. That was a far cry from the view that many Israeli Zionists took of Diaspora Jews before 1973, roughly that they were weak, second-class Jews who should send donations but should remain silent if they disagreed with Israel’s policies. For their part, American Jews also observed after 1973 that Israel needed them, at least insofar as it needed the United States.
The result was an Israeli Zionism that increasingly treated Israel as a Jewish national homeland for those who sought refuge there, not as the historically necessary culmination of two thousand years of Jewish history or the negation of the Diaspora in its entirety. This chastened, modified version of Zionism welcomed American Jews to see themselves as, in a sense, partners in the Zionist national project even without moving to Israel. To be sure, to Israeli Zionists, the partnership was not equal. The government of Israel was to take the lead and specify both strategy and tactics. American Jews were to follow that lead. But American Jews were nevertheless to be treated as part of the overall effort to maintain and enhance Israel’s national interests.‡
This form of Zionism-as-partnership suited both Israelis and Progressive American Jews. On the Israeli side, it cost relatively little in practical terms. Ideologically, the newer version of Israeli Zionism lacked some of the absolutist insistence on a single homeland associated with the older form. But that seemed like a small price to pay for greater American Jewish support. And as a matter of practical reality, it had already become evident that American Jews had no intention of emigrating en masse to Israel. So Zionism without its aim of negating the Diaspora had the advantage of being a bit closer to reality than a more totalizing Zionism.
On the Progressive Jewish side, the benefit of the more inclusive (to American Jews) version of Israeli Zionism was ideologically and theologically substantial. Israel existed, and by its persistent existence implied that American Jews needed to take it seriously. Progressive American Jews were proud of Israel after 1967. It was no longer viable for Progressive rabbis or lay leaders to assert that the main responsibility of American Jews must be to support the American Jewish community, not Israel.
At the level of Progressive Jewish religious belief, the idea of Israel also offered a solution to a problem created by a forthright acknowledgment of the Holocaust. Without a forward-looking narrative of redemption, an American Judaism focused on the Holocaust would have become a backward-looking religion of mourning. Before fully confronting the immensity of the Holocaust, Progressive Jewish thought had tried to redeem the historical legacy of Jewish suffering through equal citizenship and social justice work. Abraham Joshua Heschel’s embrace of the civil rights movement fit this model well: African Americans could, like Jews, be redeemed from their subordination through equal citizenship, and Jews would redeem themselves by supporting this struggle.12
But once American Jews began to confront the reality of the Holocaust, it became harder to rely on this traditional, citizenship-and-social-justice solution to the theological question of redemption. The devastation of the Holocaust showed, among other things, that equal citizenship, as Jews had formally achieved in Germany, France, and even Poland before World War II, had not sufficed to protect or save Jews from genocidal murder. Jewish survival through equal citizenship in the United States looked like an almost accidental feature of the superiority of American liberal constitutionalism, not a success of the Progressive Jewish strategy of relying on liberalism. To a significant degree, omitting the United States, the classical prewar Zionist critique of Progressive Jewish political liberalism had been correct. Equal citizenship, privatized religion, and the struggle for social justice had not saved Europe’s Jews, much less redeemed them.
American Progressive Jews could not and did not want to abandon their commitment to America or to liberalism. They were not prepared to redefine Jewish redemption entirely in classically Zionist terms as the achievement of a unitary nation-state. But they were willing and even eager to work to protect Israel. And they could now admit that in the light of the Holocaust, Zionist nationalism might have a role to play in Jewish historical redemptive experience. Redemption could not plausibly be restricted to social justice activism insofar as that narrative of redemptive activism sat poorly with the narrative of the destruction of European Jewry.
After 1973, then, Zionism came to offer an alternative, supplemental account of post-Holocaust Jewish redemption for Progressive American Jews. The Holocaust had martyred European Jewry. But the modern state of Israel had been born from the ashes. Israel did not redeem American Jews, who were in no need of a separate redemption. It did, however, redeem the suffering of the martyrs of the Holocaust. Their deaths had not been entirely in vain. From destruction came rebuilding. And Israel’s existence would prevent another Holocaust from occurring by providing Diaspora Jews with an escape hatch should antisemitic pressures make life untenable.13
This shift in the American Jewish Progressive view of Israel in the post-1973 period may seem incremental, but it was also transformative. For the first time, Progressive American Jews could integrate Israel into their theological picture of the relationship between God and the Jewish people. The liberal social justice ideals that were essential to Jewish Progressivism could remain, because they were still relevant to the religious-spiritual lives of Jews in the United States. Yet simultaneously, the suffering of the Holocaust could be paired with the redemptive power of the idea of Israel. Instead of Progressive American Judaism devolving into a cult of Holocaust memorialization, it could pair the martyrdom of European Jewry with the redemptive possibilities of Zionism.
As a result, support for Israel became a theological orthodoxy for Progressive American Jews. Return to the thought experiment of the rogue rabbi. Imagine she told her congregation, “Some days I find I do not believe that the state of Israel should exist.” She would be fired as quickly as if she had questioned the Holocaust. Progressive rabbis have maintained the capacity to criticize Israel’s formal refusal to acknowledge them legally as rabbis. But that is about as far as foundational criticism of Israel has been allowed to go in most Progressive American Jewish temples and synagogues, at least until very, very recently.§
SYNTHESIS: MARTYRDOM AND REDEMPTION
What emerged in the 1980s and 1990s was a new, distinctively Progressive American Jewish synthesis of the centrality of the Holocaust and the redemptive narrative of the creation of Israel. This synthesis constituted the core of Progressive Jewish post-Holocaust theology. At the level of theological narrative, it made some partial sense out of the deaths of the six million by depicting Israel as the redemptive solution to the problem of genocidal antisemitism. At the level of practice, it enabled Progressive American Jews to organize for two supplementary purposes: memorializing the Holocaust and supporting the state of Israel.
The Holocaust memorialization project became a staple of American Jewish local activism after the Jewish-Black alliance of the 1960s splintered, making it harder for Progressive Jewish communities to coordinate local social justice activism with national liberal Democratic politics. Beginning in the 1980s, local American Jewish communities built hundreds of public Holocaust memorials. Today sixteen Holocaust museums exist in the United States, with more planned to open soon.14 I will use the largest and most important, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, to explore the project of Holocaust memorialization, its religious-theological character, and its complex relationship to the idea of Israel.
The origins of the museum lie with a President’s Commission on the Holocaust, created by Jimmy Carter’s administration in 1978, precisely when Holocaust consciousness was rising among American Jews. The commission was the brainchild of Elie Wiesel, not yet a household name, who became its chair. The stated goal was to explore the creation of a national memorial to the Holocaust. The commission duly recommended exactly that. The funds to build and endow it, some $200 million, would be raised privately. But the location, on almost two acres of land adjacent to the Washington Monument, just off the National Mall in Washington, DC, belonged to the federal government. In 1980, Congress voted to dedicate the land to the museum/memorial. The building opened in 1993 and as of 2023 had hosted 47 million visitors.
That the government of the United States should take an interest in the creation of a Holocaust memorial or museum was itself remarkable. The Holocaust did not happen in the United States. Its perpetrators and victims were not Americans. That the institution should be established in such close proximity to the National Mall, where the Smithsonian and its family of museums resides, was more remarkable still. The Smithsonian museums collectively represent an effort to document and represent American national experience, past, present, and future. At the time the Holocaust Museum was conceived, the National Museum of the American Indian had not yet been created, nor had the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
The presence of the Holocaust Museum so close to the symbolic epicenter of American culture represented, in no small part, an expression of identity for American Jews. The political power to acquire the site and the economic clout to build and create the museum were clear markers of American Jewish capacity. Visitors to Washington, DC, would encounter the museum and with it the implicit presence of American Jews.
The choice of the Holocaust as the identity marker for American Jews was particularly significant. Historically, Jews of all persuasions have always memorialized Jewish suffering in prayer and fasting, but put their financial and cultural resources into building institutions of Jewish learning and prayer—of Jewish life, not Jewish death. They built synagogues, schools, and yeshivas, not memorials or museums. The Holocaust Museum made the commemoration of trauma into the leading concrete, public manifestation of Jewishness in the American capital, and beyond.
The Jewish community could conceivably have sought congressional approval for a museum of American Jewish history. But such a possibility, which so far as I know was never even considered, would have lacked the distinctive moral-theological quality of the Holocaust. It would have established the Jewish community as just another ethnic American immigrant community, no different from Italian Americans, Irish Americans, and so forth, none of whom have or had museums or memorials on the Mall. In contrast, the Holocaust could be interpreted to assert a claim of universal significance for the particular Jewish experience of suffering. To build a museum, and build it in that location, was to treat the Holocaust as an event of national, indeed global consequence, one in which the Jews played a central and identifiable role, even if it was the role of victims.
Seen from the standpoint of Progressive Jewish theology, the Holocaust Museum embodied and literalized the centrality of the Holocaust as a defining event that conferred or reconferred uniqueness on the Jewish people, and that carried a lesson for all humanity. The lesson was “Never Again,” a moral-ethical takeaway from the horrific facts of the destruction of the Jews of Europe. The museum was intended to turn the Holocaust into a moral lesson of universal significance.
As ultimately built, the Holocaust Museum thus came to function as a pilgrimage site for American Jews that would also hold meaning for all Americans, or rather all people. Not unlike a medieval cathedral, it simultaneously depicted and embodied a narrative of martyrdom. It was dedicated to symbolizing the transcendent meaning of a particular religious event. And it reflected the piety, wealth, and political power of its builders.
So perhaps it is not a coincidence that in the building of the Holocaust Museum, the most noteworthy policy debate centered on whether relics of the Holocaust—the eyeglasses, human hair, gold fillings, and other physical and cultural remains found at Auschwitz-Birkenau—should be literally brought to the museum or should be represented by replicas.15 A medieval cathedral ordinarily houses the relics of a saint that are, to use the technical term, “translated” there from wherever they may have been found. The debate over the Holocaust relics was settled in favor of the translation of actual relics from actual death camps.
The narrative presented at the U.S. Holocaust Museum does not directly culminate in the creation of the state of Israel. Within the permanent exhibitions, the section named “The Last Chapter” scrupulously shows Jewish Holocaust survivors settling in “Europe, Israel, and the United States.”16 This is in contrast to Yad Vashem, “The World Holocaust Remembrance Center,” first established in Jerusalem in 1957 and entirely rebuilt in 2005. The Israeli Holocaust memorialization more closely links the Holocaust to the deep history of European antisemitism. It depicts the state of Israel as the historic solution to that problem. And it treats post–World War II Middle Eastern and Islamic antisemitism as continuous with the antisemitism that led to the Holocaust.17
It would therefore be crude, and I think inaccurate, to argue that the role of the Holocaust in Progressive American Jewish thought is to drive support for Israel. The lessons of the U.S. Holocaust Museum are meant to be universal, in keeping with the intellectual and spiritual legacy of Progressive Jewish universalism. The Holocaust Museum is not, in its design or its narrative, a pro-Israel entity.
Yet the idea of Israel does come into complex interplay with the idea of the Holocaust in Progressive American Jewish thought through the pairing of Holocaust martyrdom with the redemptive story of Zionism. If one were to see it through the lens of Protestant theology, translated into the American Jewish context, the Holocaust would stand in for the passion, and the state of Israel for the resurrection. The social gospel of tikkun ‘olam can sit comfortably alongside this implicit theology.
It is certain that no Progressive American Jewish thinker ever consciously intended to re-create the theological structure of American Protestantism in translation, any more than medieval European Jews trying to make sense of Jewish martyrdom at the hands of Christians were conscious of being influenced by Christian ideas of martyrdom. Heaven forfend. The very thought is anathema. What I am suggesting is that the enormous theological challenge posed by the tragedy of the Holocaust (once acknowledged) called out for a response. In the context of American religious thought more generally, the attraction of Israel as a paired, redemptive, resurrectionary supplement to the Holocaust was and is overwhelming.
For purposes of comparison, consider the Israeli secular Zionist reception of the Holocaust. It treats the state of Israel as a nationalist solution to the problem of the Holocaust, itself understood as a problem of what happens to a people when they are stateless. In so doing, the Israeli view, unlike the Progressive American Jewish view, does not have to make the Holocaust into an event that proves Jewish uniqueness or that has a universal moral message for all humanity. That is because the Israeli secular Zionist view of the Holocaust doesn’t have to embody a theology of Jewishness or Jewish chosenness. The American Jewish Progressive view of the Holocaust does. In that theology, the Holocaust becomes a transformative and transcendent world-historical event that establishes Jewish uniqueness. And the idea of Israel comes to soften the depressive qualities of unique martyrdom by giving meaning to the martyrdom of the six million, whose deaths were redeemed by the creation of the state.
The result is, or rather was, a coherent Progressive Jewish theology of the Holocaust and Israel. Together they formed the twin orthodoxies of a Progressivism that preferred to think it had no religious orthodoxies at all.
LOOMING CONTRADICTION: JEWISH AND DEMOCRATIC
The third phase of Progressive American Jewish theology is the one we are living through now. Its beginning point cannot be specified precisely, but it is simplest to date it to the period immediately after the second intifada. Unlike the first intifada (1987–1991), which was characterized by stone throwing, the second intifada (2000–2005) was characterized by suicide bombing aimed at civilians. In response to the bombings, Israel gradually erected a barrier or wall along much of the border between the occupied West Bank and Israel. (The wall also protects Israeli settlements and infrastructure in the West Bank and does not follow the border exactly.)
The combination of the bombings and the barrier precipitated a crisis of confidence among left-leaning Israelis and Progressive American Jews who had hoped for the fulfillment of a two-state solution in the aftermath of the Oslo peace accords. As late as the summer of 2000, on the eve of the second intifada, it was still possible to imagine a functioning Palestinian state emerging in ever-increasing swaths of the West Bank. I brought a group of international CEOs to visit the West Bank at the time, and I can vividly recall the hopefulness of the scene as they were welcomed at a new Palestinian stock exchange and a new Palestinian telecommunications company and were fêted at a brand-new casino reached by cable car on a cliff outside Jericho. The bombings within Israel that followed convinced many (loosely pro-Israel) observers that peace was not a realistic possibility from the Palestinian side. The barrier in turn convinced many (loosely anti-Israel) observers that Israel intended to make its occupation of the West Bank permanent and avoid any serious efforts to reach a two-state solution.
The consequences of these shifts in perception have been felt intensely—and generationally—by Progressive American Jews. The structural challenge derives from applying the progressive, liberal values those Jews hold in respect of U.S. politics to the situation of Israel, in particular in relation to the rights of Palestinians living as noncitizens under Israeli rule.
For Progressive Jews who embraced Israel in the 1980s and 1990s, it was important that Israel self-define as a “Jewish and democratic” state, a formulation that appears in Israel’s declaration of independence. To classical Zionists, the “Jewish” in “Jewish and democratic state” did not mean the state would be religiously Jewish or fulfill God’s prophetic plan. They meant the state would be nationally Jewish: it would possess a Jewish majority, be controlled by the Jewish nation, and express Jewish cultural-national values. It was in this sense that Theodor Herzl had titled his secular Zionist classic Der Judenstaat, The State of the Jews. Under the version of nationalism they espoused, a state with all its modern institutions—law, language, a parliament, an army, and so forth—was the sine qua non of national self-expression. With a state, a people could play out the state’s identity and defend its physical as well as spiritual well-being. Stateless, a people would be lost to history, culturally and maybe literally. Stateless people, as the philosopher Hannah Arendt noted, were people without rights.
Notwithstanding its original meaning in context, for Progressive Jews living fifty years after the establishment of the state, the dual formulation “Jewish and democratic” could be read in a different way: as an assertion of the compatibility of Jewish values and democratic values. That promise of compatibility appealed uniquely to Progressive Jews, who believed (unlike secular Zionists!) that the Jewish religion in fact entailed a commitment to liberal democratic values.
Making the ideal of the Jewish state as a liberal democratic state even more attractive, Israel’s High Court of Justice in exactly this same historical period undertook what is sometimes called a “rights revolution,” creating and announcing fundamental liberal rights even though Israel has no single, written constitution. The court, led then by its president, Aharon Barak, singlehandedly gave legal effect to an ideology of a Jewish and democratic state. In one of the iconic decisions of the rights revolution, the 2000 Ka’adan case (also called the Katzir case), the court held that it was unlawful for the state to allocate land to the Jewish Agency, a quasi-governmental institution created before the state of Israel, if the agency refused to sell or lease land to Palestinians. As an assertion of formal legal equality, the decision had echoes of Brown v. Board of Education.18
In the process of expanding liberal rights, Israel’s high court encountered some criticism from other Israelis who denounced the court’s judicial activism. In the United States, however, among those aware of the court’s activity, the rights revolution contributed to the perception that one could support Israel while simultaneously and consistently espousing liberal beliefs. Even when it came to Israel’s use of force in this period—whether in Gaza or the West Bank—the high court attempted to play a supervisory role, applying international humanitarian law to require the IDF to respect human rights as the court interpreted them.
Seen from an external perspective, the challenge to the narrative of Israel as a Jewish and liberal democratic state came, first and foremost, from the legal and political status of Palestinians who were not citizens of Israel and lived in the West Bank or Gaza. Those Palestinians were, according to Israeli judicial rulings, entitled to the protections conferred by international law on people living under military occupation. But they were not citizens of any liberal democratic state and did not enjoy the equal civil or political rights of Israeli citizens. That they lived under Israeli authority but without political or legal equality called into question Israel’s claim to be a liberal democratic state.¶
For effectively the entire second phase of Progressive Jewish Holocaust-Israel theology, Progressive American Jews who worried about the rights of Palestinians had an answer to this problem. They were able to tell themselves that Israel was in the process of negotiating a lasting peace that would lead to the creation of an independent Palestinian state. In such a Palestinian state, liberal rights would be respected, and if they were not, blame would lie with the Palestinian government, not with Israel.
The possibility of such a Palestinian state did not seem especially remote. The 1978 Camp David Accords were a hopeful start, and the peace between Israel and Egypt, however cold, created optimism about a potential future solution. Although the first intifada worried many American Jewish Progressives, it was followed almost immediately by the Oslo Accords, the first directly negotiated deal between Israelis and Palestinians. The Oslo Accords suggested the possibility of resolving the question of Palestinian rights in the foreseeable future. They allowed Progressives to believe that Israel was a liberal democracy for its citizens, Jewish and Arab, and that the anomalous status of noncitizen Palestinians was an unfortunate artifact of the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict that ultimately would be fixed.
The second intifada and the wall broke that complex of beliefs—not all at once, but gradually and thoroughly. Today, Progressive American Jews increasingly find it difficult to see Israel as a genuine liberal democracy, mostly because some three million Palestinians in the West Bank live under Israeli authority with no citizenship rights. Two million-plus more Palestinians live in Gaza, which was self-governing under extreme constraints until Hamas attacked Israel and Israel responded, leaving the political fate of its population uncertain. The idea that Israel is a democratic state has become possible to sustain only by excluding those Palestinians from the calculus.
Many Progressive American Jews would still point out that the reason for this situation is complex and related to the history of failed peace negotiations and Hamas’s refusal to accept Israel’s existence. Yet it is also true that those same American Jews recognize and privately acknowledge that the occupation of the West Bank has become effectively permanent. Israel has existed since 1948. During its nearly seventy-five years, it has ruled the West Bank for all but nineteen.
To compound the problem, Progressive American Jews fully understand that mainstream Israeli politics have moved far to the right since the early 2000s and are today by far the most right-wing they have ever been. When he was prime minister from 2009 to 2021, the second of his three times holding that office, Benjamin Netanyahu openly allied himself not only with the Republican Party but with Donald Trump. That left little doubt about Netanyahu’s orientation from an American perspective. But the government Netanyahu formed on returning to power in 2022 went considerably further right.
In a column titled “The Israel We Knew Is Gone,” the New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman described Netanyahu’s coalition as an “alliance of ultra-Orthodox leaders and ultranationalist politicians, including some outright racist, anti-Arab Jewish extremists once deemed completely outside the norms and boundaries of Israeli politics.”19 The government depended on a number of far-right parties, at least until some centrists joined a temporary wartime coalition government in October 2023. One of these is called Jewish Power (‘Otzmah Yehudit). It is a lineal descendant of the old Kach (“Thus”) Party, founded by the ultranationalist Rabbi Meir Kahane; its name echoes (maybe unwittingly) the Black Power movement that influenced Kahane in the late 1960s.20 Kahane’s original party was outlawed by the government of Israel for its incitement of racism against Arabs and advocacy of domestic terrorism. Itamar Ben-Gvir, the leader of Jewish Power and a disciple of Kahane, is so extreme that when he was eighteen, the IDF refused to conscript him because of his racist anti-Arab beliefs. Weeks before the assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, Ben-Gvir appeared on Israeli television showing off a hood ornament stolen from Rabin’s official car and saying, “We got to his car, and we’ll get to him, too.”21 In 2007, he was convicted of inciting racism and supporting a (Jewish) terrorist organization. In short, Ben-Gvir’s views contradict every principle of democracy and civil rights that Progressive Jews hold dear.
Another party in Netanyahu’s coalition is the Religious Zionism party, led by the outspoken ultranationalist Bezalel Smotrich, who has made opposition to gay rights one of his signature issues. The Religious Zionism party combined with Jewish Power and another ultranationalist, religious party called Noam to form an electoral bloc that emerged from the 2022 election as the third-largest party in the Knesset. Ben-Gvir and Smotrich are both senior members of Netanyahu’s cabinet.
Meanwhile, in the same 2022 election, left-of-center liberal democratic parties crashed and burned. The Meretz party, founded in 1992 to advance civil rights and civil liberties, failed to win even a single seat in the Knesset. The old Labor Party, the party of Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak, which pursued and favored peace with the Palestinians, won a total of four seats out of 120.
In the aftermath of Netanyahu’s victory, the ongoing internal debate over Israel’s status as a liberal democracy turned into a major societal conflict. Netanyahu, already under criminal indictment, initiated legislation changing the way Israel’s high court justices are selected so as to give his coalition government a decisive voice. This was considered a prelude to other proposed laws that would allow the Knesset to overrule the high court with a simple majority vote, crushing judicial review. In response, hundreds of thousands of Israelis, including a large number from the country’s high-tech sector, took to the streets in protest, warning that passing the laws would destroy Israeli democracy and send the country down the road of Hungary and Poland. When Netanyahu’s coalition actually passed legislation that denied the court the power to overturn governmental acts as unreasonable, the protests increased further. Israelis on both sides of the issue feared the possibility of a constitutional crisis should the high court strike down laws that interfered with its powers and the government in turn refuse to acknowledge or implement the judicial decision.
On the one hand, the protests could be read as strong evidence that many Israelis care deeply about the country’s liberal democratic character, so much so that they were prepared to fight for the high court’s capacity to check the majority. On the other hand, the legislation reflects a willingness by many other Israelis to favor majoritarian electoral democracy over liberal democracy based on judicial review. As of this writing, it is impossible to know which side will prevail or what eventual compromise might mean for the country’s liberal democratic future, especially in light of the Hamas-Israel war that broke out while the two Israeli sides were locked in political conflict with each other. In any case, Israel’s high court had already ceased to issue stirring proequality decisions after being chastened by the argument that the justices were usurping the role of the democratically elected Knesset. The court is unlikely to be highly activist in the wake of the curtailment of its judicial review powers and the threat to change its membership.
None of the challenges to Israel’s liberal democratic bona fides came as a surprise to Israel’s critics on American university campuses, among the first places where Progressive American Jews began to attack Israel openly. Writing in 2010, the journalist Peter Beinart alerted mainstream American Jews to an emerging generational rift over Israel, which he attributed roughly to college-aged Progressives’ liberal sympathies for the plight of the Palestinians.22 The organized American Jewish community responded by trying to kill the messenger, stunning Beinart, who at the time identified as a centrist Democrat, a liberal internationalist, and a Zionist. Beinart’s prediction was, however, accurate; since 2010, the views of Progressive Jews on college campuses have become in many cases decidedly anti-Israel, not merely questioning or skeptical, as responses to the Hamas attacks on Israel have demonstrated.
Some of the older generation of Progressive American Jewish Zionists continue to defend the views of previous decades and lament young people’s turn to the left. Israeli Zionists observe acidly that as the left wing of the Democratic Party becomes more openly critical of Israel, American Jewish Democrats are pulled alongside it. Both analyses are accurate yet superficial. Both fail to confront the actual problem faced by Progressive American Jews in relation to Israel. It is not primarily a problem of identity politics. It is a problem of morality, theology, and belief.
THE PROGRESSIVE GOD AND THE EXISTING STATE OF ISRAEL
As you read these words, the community of Progressive Jews is going through a painful generational conflict. On one side are the people roughly my age: the Gen X leaders of the movement, rabbis and laypeople alike. They are Progressive Jews in my terminology. They are also, for the most part, progressive Democrats in the current political meaning of the term in the United States. When it comes to domestic policy, they lean left of center, identifying more with Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders than, say, Hillary Clinton.
The Gen X Progressive Jewish leaders are (still) liberal Zionists. They love Israel. They also criticize it. They wish Israel would recognize Reform and Conservative rabbis. They wish Israel would be more just to Palestinians. They wish there were some solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. They often don’t identify with AIPAC, the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which coordinates much pro-Israel lobbying by American Jews and that historically has allied itself closely with whatever government is in power in Israel, no matter how right-wing. Instead, they have their own liberal Zionist organizations that they favor and fund, like J Street, a lobbying body that calls itself “the political home of pro-Israel, pro-peace Americans,” and the New Israel Fund, which says its “aim is to advance liberal democracy, including freedom of speech and minority rights, and to fight the inequality, injustice and extremism that diminish Israel.” They publish anguished books justifying their positions with titles like Fault Lines: Exploring the Complicated Place of Progressive American Jewish Zionism.23 When Israel is attacked, however, they respond instinctively with solidarity and support. Their commitment to the Jewish state, and to fellow Jews, is unquestioned.
On the other side of the conflict are the kids, whose views on Israel are very different.** Some Gen Z Progressive Jews participate in campus organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine, a “collective of organizers that supports over 200 Palestine solidarity organizations on college campuses across occupied Turtle Island (U.S. and Canada).” On October 12, 2023, as Israel began its response to Hamas’s attack on Israeli civilians, SJP’s national office posted on social media “condemning the Zionist project and their latest genocidal attack on the Palestinian people.” Closely associated is the campaign for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions, which self-describes as “a Palestinian-led movement for freedom, justice and equality.” Its view is that “Israel maintains a regime of settler colonialism, apartheid and occupation over the Palestinian people.” BDS, “inspired by the South African anti-apartheid movement,” encourages boycotting Israeli cultural institutions and businesses and anyone associated with them.
Jewish Voice for Peace is a specifically Jewish group that supports the BDS movement and works alongside SJP. Its website boasts of sixty chapters, two hundred thousand supporters, and ten thousand donors. The organization says it “is guided by a vision of justice, equality and freedom for all people.” It follows, for JVP, that “we unequivocally oppose Zionism because it is counter to those ideals.” On October 14, 2023, the organization posted: “As U.S. Jews [we] believe that never again means never again for anyone, and that includes Palestinians. Never again is now.”
It seems probable that a relatively small proportion of Gen Z Progressive Jews has been radicalized to the point of embracing formal anti-Zionism outright. Many are conflicted themselves about what they should think about Israel. Others would prefer not to focus on Israel at all. Yet it is fair to generalize by saying that many have been moved by the analogy, widespread on college campuses, between Israel and apartheid-era South Africa. In 2021, Human Rights Watch issued a long report finding that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians satisfied the definition of apartheid under international law.24 So did the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem.25 In 2022, Amnesty International did the same.26 Progressive American Jews are accustomed to treating these human rights groups as mainstream exponents of liberal values. A students’-eye version of the issue was expressed by the Harvard Crimson, an undergraduate newspaper, in an April 2022 editorial endorsing BDS. “The arguments made against BDS could have been and indeed were once made against South Africa,” the editorial board wrote. BDS tactics “helped win the liberation of Black South Africans from Apartheid, and have the potential to do the same for Palestinians today.”27
The upshot is that Gen X and Gen Z Progressive Jewish leaders and activists often find themselves seriously at odds with each other about Israel. The disagreement is painful for both sides, the way generational arguments often are. The middle-aged Progressives think the kids have failed to learn how important Israel should be for them as Jews. The kids think the old folks are mired in a discredited ideology they can’t escape.††
I want to suggest that the generational rift reflects not two different conceptions of Progressive Jewishness but something else: two different visions of Israel, refracted through a common commitment to social justice. As I argued in part I, Progressive Judaism gives expression to what it considers the biblical values of justice, equality, freedom, and the like. When the Holocaust and Israel became part of this social justice theology, both had to accord with it. The Holocaust became a moral lesson of Never Again on par with the Hebrews’ slavery in Egypt. Israel became a model of aspirational redemption, a role it could play only because it was possible to imagine the Jewish state as liberal and democratic.
If Israel does not embody the values of liberal democracy, however, it cannot serve as a moral ideal for Progressive Jews whose beliefs mandate universal human dignity and equality. In the starkest possible terms, a God of love and justice cannot bless or desire a state that does not seek to provide equality, dignity, or civil and political rights to many of the people living under its authority. Progressive Jewish belief can be reconciled with a Jewish and democratic state, provided the state aims to treat Jews and non-Jews equally. But to Progressive Jews, a state that denies equal treatment to its subjects is neither democratic nor properly Jewish.
Put another way, the “Jewish” part of Jewish and democratic means two different things for Zionists and American Jewish Progressives. To Zionism, the Jewish part of Jewish and democratic originally meant nationally Jewish, not religiously so. That much followed from the Zionist belief that Jewishness itself must be understood as a national quality, not a set of religious beliefs or practices. To American Jewish Progressives, however, inheritors of the Reform movement, “Jewish” means “religiously Jewish” in the Progressive sense. A Jewish state must be a state committed to Jewish values, and those values are the values associated with the Progressives’ faith. The Jewish and democratic state was, Progressives believed, possible because Judaism’s values matched those of democracy. If Israel abandons the ideals of equality, freedom, and dignity for all, it can no longer be genuinely Jewish in the Jewish Progressive religious sense. Nor is it democratic in the American progressive political sense.
From this it follows that for sincere, committed Progressive Jews, it would be a self-contradictory betrayal of their Jewish commitments to remain Zionists if Israel does not match the ideals of liberal democracy. Israeli Zionists who are shocked by this development have forgotten that Progressive Judaism was long skeptical of Zionism because Progressives saw Jewishness as a set of moral teachings, not as a national identity. Israeli Zionists often assume that Progressives are irreligious (in Hebrew, hiloni), as secular Israelis typically describe themselves to be. That is a mistaken projection, one encouraged by the outdated Zionist belief that Jewish religion could not survive in the Diaspora. Today’s Israeli Zionists sometimes think and act as though American Jewish Progressives owe Israel a duty of loyalty. For Jewish Progressives, however, the higher duty of loyalty lies to divine principles of love and justice, not to the state of Israel.
For the middle-aged and older generations of American Jewish Progressives, the painful difficulty of the current situation is that they find themselves trapped in the mire of intergenerational apologetics. They believe as Jews in a divine order of love and social justice. Indeed, it is they who (successfully) taught the younger generation of Jewish Progressives to believe in that vision. They want to believe in the possibility of Israel as a genuinely Jewish and democratic state. But they find they must spend their energies excusing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in order to reconcile their competing beliefs. That sort of apologetics is agonizing, painstaking work. No one enjoys it. And like most religious apologetics, it rarely convinces anyone who doesn’t already have the relevant set of commitments.
One can feel sympathy for the Boomer Progressives who made Israel central to their contribution to Jewish theology. The Holocaust-Israel juxtaposition, their distinctive generational contribution to Progressive theology, is now foundering because of the politics of the actually existing state of Israel. On the one hand, the association is as powerful as ever: images of Israelis murdered and taken hostage recall the horrors of the Holocaust. On the other hand, Israel is a real-world nation-state, populated by living Israelis whose beliefs and views differ from those of American Jewish Progressives. That actually existing Israel, with its geopolitical and domestic political struggles, has put the older generation of Progressives into a condition of internal turmoil that can be resolved only by holding fast to an interpretation of Israel’s form of political governance that may not compel or even convince their own grandchildren.
As for the most thoughtful of the young Progressives, they, too, face a deep challenge. On the one hand, they believe in the prophetic teachings of social justice that compel them to social action. On the other hand, they find that they cannot avoid the broken reality of Israel, a reality that, they believe, Jewish tradition commands them to repair.
Their great-grandparents, if they were Reform Jews, had the option of de-emphasizing Israel, almost to the point of ignoring Zionism. Before the state of Israel existed, they did not need to reconcile their beliefs about Judaism as a private, Diasporic religion with the aspirations of Zionist Jews. Even after the state arose, it was possible, for a time, to treat it as separate from Jewish thought, practice, and identity.
The young Progressives do not have that luxury. They inherited a form of Judaism that already incorporated Israel into its theology. They do not know how to be Jews without engaging Israel. Yet the content of their broader theology—their beliefs about Jewish morality and tikkun ‘olam—make support of Israel difficult or even repugnant to them.
Their solution—their Jewish, Progressive, sincerely felt solution—is to express their Jewish belief in social justice by criticizing or condemning Israel for its failures of equality, liberty, dignity, and human rights. If Israel were a liberal democracy, they could conceivably support it. If it isn’t, and has no realistic prospect of becoming one, it must be subject to the critique that could produce social change.
It emerges that young Progressive Jewish critics of Israel feel an unstated connection to Israel even as they resist and reject it. They do not feel committed to the actually existing state nor connected to the secular nationalist Zionism on which it was built. But while they feel no special duty or obligation to criticize most other illiberal states around the world, they do feel a particular need to criticize Israel, because it matters centrally to their worldview as Jews. They cannot easily ignore Israel, like early Reform Jews ignored Zionism. (Although some Jewish students on American college campuses certainly do try to avoid involvement with Israel in any way, positive or negative.) So they engage Israel—through the vehicle of Progressive critique. The phrase “Not in Our Name,” sometimes used as a slogan of this critique, captures the sense of personal implication in Israel’s conduct that both marks and challenges their sense of connection.
This is why many young Progressive Jews are at the forefront of the pro-Palestinian movement on college campuses. Difficult as it is for older generations to accept, the cause is not self-hatred, a tendency characteristic of an isolated and scorned minority, not a successful and powerful one. It is, rather, that criticism of Israel and support for the Palestinian cause is the very essence of their Progressive Jewish self-expression.
In some fascinating cases, the nature of this religious Jewishness as critique becomes overt. For a handful of Jewish congregations, the spiritual and even liturgical glue of the community comes from critical activism. In an absorbing work of participant ethnography titled Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians (2019), Atalia Omer, a professor at Notre Dame, describes one such community, called Tzedek Chicago.28 In that community, a Yom Kippur sermon might be about Israel, as it could be in many other American congregations. But it would take the form of multiracial, multiethnic intersectional critique of Israel, not support. Seen in the light of current trends in Progressive American Judaism, this sort of critique demonstrates a mode of Jewish self-expression that criticizes and even condemns Israel because it feels connection to Israel. That connection is a result of the promotion of Israel to a central place in Progressive Jewish thought in the 1980s and 1990s.
It is unlikely that the Tzedek Chicago mode will take over American Jewish Progressivism. As today’s college students become adults and gradually assume leadership of their movements, however, Progressivism will have to work out its attitude toward Israel—both the idea of Israel and the actually existing state. Whatever solutions it reaches will have to be innovative. Going back to the old Progressive model of ignoring Zionism would be hard to do, at least for now. But so is embracing simultaneously a God of loving social justice and a state that rejects the path of liberal democracy. Israel will not change just because Progressive American Jews want it to. They will have to find their own answers to the looming crisis facing them, and soon, before a new generation finds itself alienated from a Jewishness whose inner contradictions it cannot reconcile.