Introduction: Symposium on the Jewish Left

The Jewish Left is having an intertwined renaissance and crisis. Organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and IfNotNow (INN) are among the most visible leaders of the campaign for a ceasefire in Gaza. Intellectuals like Peter Beinart, Judith Butler, Ezra Klein, and Shaul Magid are shaping international debates about identity, politics, and justice. Workers Circle, one of the oldest Jewish organizations in North America and an outgrowth of the Eastern European Jewish Labor Bund, is growing in size and activity, in sharp contrast to its decline in the late twentieth century.

This renaissance is a result of a generational shift. Opinion polls show massive gaps in how older and younger Americans think about Israel and Palestine, with younger generations turning away from Israel due to the one-state reality (Lustick 2019). Young Americans, including American Jews, are more likely to sympathize with Palestinians and more likely to criticize President Biden’s overwhelming support for Israel compared to older generations (Beinart 2024; Jewish Electorate Institute 2023). As a result, there has been a massive influx of new members to organizations like INN, JVP, and Workers Circle who are willing to condemn both the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023 as well as Israel’s mass killing in Gaza and the structural violence of its brutal occupation. As young American Jews seek their place in the world, the Jewish Left is drawing on a rich history of theorizing and activism to map a path forward.

And yet, despite this renaissance, the Jewish Left is also in crisis. Ceasefire protests have not stemmed the mass killing in Gaza, whereas of mid-May, more than 35,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel since October 7th, two-thirds of them women and children (Reuters 2024). And the crisis is multiple. A related crisis is the realignment of possible imagined futures in between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, with democratic and egalitarian ideals more marginalized than ever, and the Jewish Left in Israel increasingly marginalized. Another crisis is the rise in antisemitism and Islamophobia around the world, with everyday Jews and Muslim feeling less safe at home, at school, and in the workplace. A more cynical crisis is the manipulation of the language of antisemitism by white nationalist Republicans and American Jewish organizations like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), who by conflating anti-Zionism and antisemitism are erasing the history of Jewish alternatives to Zionism. A December 2023 U.S. House of Representatives resolution (H.Res.894) proclaiming that “anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism” tried to erase a long history of Jewish alternatives to nationalism. Newly emboldened conservative organizations such the Boston Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) have tried to require mass Jewish support for the Israeli government’s lethal Gaza campaign. The JCRC expelled the Boston Workers Circle due to its support for ceasefire protests, trying to police the boundaries of the Jewish community through an act of takfir (excommunication) akin to the radicals of the Islamic State (Meth 2023).

So, what explains the renaissance of the Jewish Left, now? What can the older generation—fighting and organizing for decades—teach to and learn from the young generation? Where are the possibilities for institution-building in this moment of renaissance and crisis? And why should scholars care about the Jewish Left?

On May 3^rd, 2024, Boston University’s Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs (CURA) organized a symposium on the Jewish Left to tackle these questions. Bringing together activists and theorists, scholars and practitioners, grandparents and grandchildren, the event worked to theorize the past and present to map the Jewish Left’s path forward. Speakers included some of the leading voices of the Jewish Left including Shaul Magid, Atalia Omer, Andy Izenson, Irena Klepficz, Daniel May, and representatives of the progressive Jewish organizations JVP, INN, and Boston Workers Circle. This inaugural event was a gathering space for scholars, students, and activists to examine the evolving role of the Jewish Left in contemporary social movements and global affairs. ¹

Why the Jewish Left, now? In some respect, the answer was obvious from attendance at the conference: when we suggested this event a colleague said “Jewish studies events have a hard time filling the room!” But the opposite was true, necessitating a venue change to accommodate the 500 BU and community members who registered to join the conversation online and in person. The deeper answer is the generational shift under way in the American Jewish community, with the liberal Zionist consensus becoming undone. Where once American Jews shared a common belief in liberalism and Zionism, and they imagined Israel to be a democratic country where egalitarian ideas were compatible with Jewish nationalism, that imaginary is no longer tenable. Over fifty years of brutal military occupation of the West Bank and an increasingly influential Palestinian solidarity movement in the U.S. have laid bare the structural apartheid of contemporary Zionism. Israel’s brutality in Gaza, plausibly a genocide, has made clear the incompatibility of a meaningful commitment to liberal values and to Zionism.

What can the older generation teach to and learn from the young generation? Shaul Magid’s keynote lecture at the conference, “Beyond Zionism and Anti-Zionism” provided a stirring two-fold answer to this pressing question. Past is present, Shaul reminded us. The new wave of criticism of Zionism so visible at ceasefire rallies and in the pages of Jewish Currents was foreshadowed in the middle of the twentieth century by the American Council for Judaism, Breira: A Project of Concern in Diaspora-Israel Relations, and in the work of activists like William Zukerman, James Marshall, and Rabbi Elmer Berger (Levin 2023). And it was legible in the writings of a generation of radical Jewish leftists like Arthur Waskow (1971), who envisioned an Israel that was socialist, liberatory, and stood in opposition to the America’s imperialist foreign policy.

And yet Magid goes further, showing us how today’s critiques of Zionism are qualitatively different from the past. In the 1960s and 1970s, a socialist and collectivist Israel was imaginable from Israeli settlements and American communes alike. Today, after fifty-six years of occupation and settlement expansion, and the capitalist turn of the Israel economy and society, Israel is a deeply conservative state and society, with politics more similar to deep-red Texas than to liberal Massachusetts. Where it was once possible to be a radical leftist Jew and a Zionist, today that space has disappeared, with even the far-left corner of Zionism wedded to a liberal vision at odds with the reality in the West Bank, Gaza, and the discriminatory policies of the state that codified Jewish supremacy through the 2018 Nation-State law (Waxman and Peleg 2020).

So what can the new generation learn from the past? With liberal Zionism in ruins, Magid suggested that the future of American Judaism lay not in anti-Zionism, but in Judaism.

So I am suggesting that we consider moving beyond anti-Zionism as a moniker, and to a new form of radical Judaism, or Jewishness, a form of spiritual life that frees practice from the confines of normativity and reconceives the universal as performed through the rubrics of collective affiliation. … But as long as we remain tethered to Zionization, even as expressed through anti-Zionism, we cannot fully turn to the land we call home, the Diaspora that is exile in the most positive sense, the place of “not-yet,” the place where a true “light to the nations” can be illumined. (Magid 2024, 223)

Magid recenters American Judaism in the United States, and in values that are universalized in order to combat injustice at home and abroad regardless of ethnic attachments.

Where is piety in this political movement? Andy Izenson’s poignant contribution to the symposium delved deeper into the commitment to place, drawing from the Bundist principle of do’ikayt (hereness). Rejecting the core-periphery logic of Zionism means building a just community wherever Jews live, alongside and in solidarity with others. Against nationalist binaries, and indeed against borders between genders, races, or states, Izenson (2024, 247) enacts a truly plural and mystical Judaism, writing: “I believe that our obligation as Jews is to make of our lives and our bodies numinous portals through which a healed world, olam haba’a, can whisper and sprout and blossom and ultimately be born, and I believe that in practice that looks like the healing of all of these wounds in the living universe that we have learned to call borders.” Looking back to the seventeenth century Sephardic mystic Baruch Spinoza and the sixteenth century Kabbalist Moses Cordovero, Izenson, like Magid, pushes against secular leftist politics that abandon spiritual concerns to the political right. The secular left not only cedes the terrain of Judaism and Jewish politics, but secular leftism can also be alienating to those craving transcendence. Instead, Izenson celebrates mysticism and the blurring of borders in the spirit of a radical inclusion.

Atalia Omer broadened the conversation on the Jewish Left beyond the American context and the Ashkenazi (Eastern European Jewry) normativity that dominates debates about contemporary Jewry. Instead, Omer centers queer, feminist, and Black and Mizrahi Jewish experiences to disrupt “Ashko-normativity” and the assimilation of Jews into whiteness (Slabodsky 2014). And she relocates the conversation to Israel and Palestine.

Her contribution begins with an intellectual and political history of the Zionist left and the independent left in the region, showing how the contradictions of the Zionist left diminished connections with Palestinians, thereby inheriting the restrictive framework of ethnonationalism. Instead, Omer narrates a more productive and intersectional process of hitmazrehut (becoming of the East) (Omer 2017). Hitmazrehut entails reclaiming and reimagining Mizrahi histories and counter-historical ideas that disrupt nationalist visions. She shows how from 1993 to 2023 the Jewish anti-occupation left has shifted away from prioritizing anti-colonial secular internationalist ideologies. Instead, the Jewish Left in Israel/Palestine has focused on labor, distributive justice, education, and healthcare with restorative justice dimensions including those of Palestinians. In doing so, Omer maps the grounds for visions of equality through a more intersectional vision of what “Jewish” might mean in the shared territory of Israel/Palestine. Omer’s vision is instructive, productively delineating a vision for intersectional institution-building in the years ahead.

Together, the contributions to the symposium highlight the history, vivacity, and challenges facing the Jewish Left at a moment of renaissance and crisis. But why should other scholars care? The normative answer is clear: in an age of exclusionary nationalism, the Jewish Left is working to broaden the ideas of community, identity, and politics that enable peacemaking. CURA is an academic research center with a public mission to lift up the peacemakers, and in the coming years we’ll be growing this community in number, in influence, by expanding our conception of community and liberation. CURA will continue to map out the contours and challenges of the Jewish Left at an annual conference over the coming years.

Beyond the normative issues, the theoretical concerns are profound, too. Studying the Jewish Left offers us an opportunity to map the political implications of demographic change, to observe how political institutions adapt and respond to moments of crisis, and to see the recycling and refreshing of a religious and political tradition. For these reasons and more, CURA is excited to share this inaugural symposium on the Jewish Left, and grateful to Critical Research on Religion for making it possible.