Click here to read the full article in The New Republic
By Emily Tamkin
“I think this has thrown mainstream Jewish institutions in America into a tailspin.” Shaul Magid, who teaches modern Judaism at Harvard Divinity School, was describing October 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel and killed roughly 1,200 people, most of whom were Israeli civilians, and the tumultuous and tragic year that followed.
The year that followed has featured a war, carried out by Israel against Hamas in Gaza, that has seen over 40,000 Palestinians killed (some say this is a conservative estimate). It has featured massive rallies to stand with Israel and protests across the country to stop the war, both organized by Jews.
“The real crisis is in the liberal Zionist consensus that was operative since the 1970s,” Magid said. What October 7 and the war that followed did, Magid says, has been to carve out the liberal Zionist middle. The worldview of that middle has been built around certain principles: that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state; that the occupation is wrong; that there should be a two-state solution; that right-wing extremists in Israel are a minority, albeit one in power. But October 7 and the war forced American Jews in the liberal Zionist consensus to pick a side: Are you in favor of the war or not? If you’re in favor of a war that’s killed thousands of children, Magid asked, where’s the liberal part of “liberal Zionism”?
He answered his own question: “It has broken American Jewry in half.”
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“It’s been so hard,” said Audrey Sasson, executive director of Jews for Racial & Economic Justice. “It’s been so, so hard.”
Being called self-hating Jews and kapos (Jewish inmates in Nazi prison camps who carried out the will of the guards) “from our own so-called wider community” makes it hard, she said, to maintain community. And what were productive differences before October 7, in some cases, became “more oppositional.”
Still, she said, “I’m in many, many spaces with Jews I disagree with all the time.” She said she tries to keep that space open.
But the war is still ongoing. Israel is still killing Palestinians, and now, Israel has invaded Lebanon; Iran shot ballistic missiles at Israel the day before I sat down to write this. The fighting is continuing, as is the dying. And the pain and fear and unrecognition in American Jewish communities—that’s ongoing too. “I do think that we’re still in it,” Sasson said. “It’s hard to know where it’s going to land.”
American Jews are at odds not only over whether and how to support Israel but also what it means for their existence as political actors and simply as citizens here in the United States.