I study the relationship between Zionism and Judaism. Oct. 7 may have changed it forever
WASHINGTON, DC – JULY 23: Demonstrators from Jewish Voice For Peace protest the war in Gaza at the Canon House Building on July 23, 2024 in Washington, DC a day before Prime Minister Netanyahu addresses Congress. Photo by Photo by Tierney L. Cross/Getty Images)
After a year of war, are we experiencing a historical break between young Jewish people and their elders when it comes to the identification between Judaism and Zionism?
As a longtime student of that identification, my answer is: yes.
But that break isn’t as extreme as many have billed it to be, because even for young non-Zionist Jews, the issue of a Jewish state rests at the heart of their Jewish identity — even if negatively so. Support Israel, or don’t support Israel: It seems as if, after Oct. 7, there is currently no way of being Jewish that doesn’t center around a strong opinion on Zionism, and the state it has built.
It’s true that the growing rift between older Jewish generations — for whom a belief in Zionism has broadly become a dogma of sorts — and the younger Jews now calling for a specifically Jewish critique of Zionism is enormously consequential.
But even for that latter group, who claim a Jewishness that is pointedly not Zionist — if not outright anti-Zionist — this past year has confirmed Israel as an inescapable fact of Jewish life. We are all forced to contend with its existence — and even, albeit often inappropriately, asked to answer for its actions. So young peoples’ efforts to find meaning in their Jewishness outside the shadow of the state of Israel and of Zionism must now, paradoxically, take place in the context of an intense activist focus on the state itself.
In the course of history since the onset of the Zionist movement, this phenomenon is new. Never before have concerns around the existence of a Jewish state so fully defined what Jewishness means. And, as this conflict continues to play out, there’s much to fear about what a singular focus on the state of Israel might mean for the state of Judaism.
I have studied the intersection of Zionism and Judaism for more than two decades, interrogating the determined insistence by many Israeli and Zionist spokespeople that Zionism is an essential element of the only modern, meaningful form of Judaism worthy of its name. Through that study, I have been intrigued by the emergence of this new type of Jewishness — what I called “statist Jewishness” — with its fatal dependency on the politics of the Jewish state.
I, like many other scholars, have found much to worry about in certain efforts to situate the state of Israel, even more than tradition, as the gravitational core of the Jewish world.
Several commentators, concerned with the potential impact of the identification between modern Jewish identity and Zionism, have in the past called for disrupting the tie between Judaism and Zionism. Writers like Daniel Boyarin, author of The No State Solution, and Judith Butler, who has called for Jews and Judaism to “part ways” with Zionism, have argued that preserving the “diasporic” sense of Judaism is crucial for its survival.
Their most persuasive argument has always been that a critical Jewish engagement with the ideology of Zionism — which has increasingly appropriated the contemporary meaning of Jewishness — is necessary for Judaism to remain viable. And the protests against Israel’s war in Gaza seem to have given this specific critique a new lease of life.
Israel and its advocates view that reinvigoration as an existential threat to the state. They fear that it risks undoing decades-worth of intense work to make Israel a built-in part of diaspora Jews’ identity, and so they do not mince their words in delegitimizing this as yet another expression of “Jewish self-hate.”
But that fear may prove to be largely misguided, as Israel seems to be ultimately winning this Jewish and political contest.
If Zionism is increasingly seen to determine the meaning of Jewishness — not only for its adherents, but also for its detractors — it is proving itself to be an intractable feature of Jewishness, rather than a factor at risk of fading out of relevance. And it remains to be seen what other sources of Jewish meaning Zionism’s detractors might successfully put forward in its stead.
They have some strong historical precedents to draw upon. Before World War II, Zionists were a small minority in the Jewish world. Jewish movements largely centered around diasporic political ideology — such as that preached by the Jewish Bundists, who advocated a Jewish nationalism centered around Yiddish culture, not around the state — religion, and assimilation.
The Holocaust changed that. In the 76 years of Israel’s existence, it has realigned the very meaning of Jewishness.
It is against this background that the Jewish protesters against the war have expressed their newly assertive stance against Israel.
The question, now, is whether modern Jewishness can once more realign itself. In younger Jews’ efforts to break ties with the Jewish state, might we really find the creation of a new, meaningful definition of authentic Jewish identity?
A main issue to investigate in this context is just how much of the protest movement is fed by genuine concern for questions of Jewish tradition, and how much of it is merely a rehearsing of American progressive politics writ large.
The prevailing sense of identity politics dictates that when someone says: “As a Jewish-American I opposed the atrocities perpetrated by the Israeli state,” their liberal, progressive political stance is also, necessarily, a Jewish one. The same is true, of course, of the opposing position.
At stake here is what we may call the Jewish chicken and egg question: Does Judaism determine what Jews are like, or do Jews determine what Judaism means — that is to say, Judaism is whatever Jews happen to practice, think, write and say?
It seems to me that much of today’s identity politics-driven arguments take the second perspective. Speakers claim that their political stance is the most authentic Jewish one possible, due to the fact that they themselves are Jews. This is true both for Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews.
In that argument, I see both sides increasingly tending to avoid the often difficult, demanding engagement with questions of Judaism that are naturally entailed in these political crises — questions that would necessarily take center stage if we adhered to the traditional belief that Judaism precedes not only the Jews, but also their state.
In order to truly reorient Jewishness away from being in some ways defined by Israel, anti-Zionist Jews will therefore have to take on a challenging task: Constructing a positive Jewish critique of the current meaning and future outlook of Jewish politics — not an argument against Israel, but an argument for an entirely different approach to Jewish identity altogether.
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