What Does the Jewish Left Want?

The Premise: American Jewry is in a State of Social and Generational Rupture

While the destruction of Gaza may have been the accelerant, the present rupture of American Jewry that it initiated has arguably been in process for at least a decade, maybe more. Just as the stock market crash in 1929 was not a singular event to bring about an economic collapse, only the occasion to instantiate a series of errors and miscalculations extending back decades, so too the destruction of Gaza brought to the surface something that had been brewing in American Jewry in its relationship to Israel for a long time. ¹

We saw the rise of a new Jewish Left in the Occupy movement in 2010, Black Lives Matter in 2020, and even more so in the destruction of Gaza in 2024-5. This seeming desperate reaction among some American Jews, with accusations of “treason,” even evoking the category of “blood libel” for anyone calling Gaza “genocide,” an accusation of complicity in murder, begs the question as to what is going on?

Most recently, a poll published in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency added a new wrinkle to this unfolding saga, surprisingly showing only one-third of American Jews identify as “Zionist” while over 88 percent support Israel as a “Jewish and democratic” state. This poll constitutes the most recent, and somewhat confusing, but also illuminating, data point in the shifting sands of American Jewry. It is true, as has been noted, what is meant by “Zionist” in this poll and how it squares with supporting Israel requires examination. As Joel Swanson noted in a recent JTA essay “Zionism was Never a Single Concept” here:

Historically, Zionism has never been one single concept. It has been a family of arguments, not a single creed: political Zionism, cultural Zionism, religious Zionism, socialist Zionism, revisionist Zionism, and more. To say “Zionism” without adjectives is already to erase its internal diversity.

The result of this poll, however complicated and even confusing, is worthy of serious consideration and analysis. Whatever one makes of it, it should tell us something is changing. In a time like ours after Gaza, where pro-Israelism appears on the defensive, certainly in Jewish liberal circles, and when the moniker “Zionism” itself becomes demanding fidelity to the state-that-is (even if one can continue to criticize certain policy decisions), speaks to the need for a kind of reckoning. Anyone who works with philosophical and polemical literature knows that defensive arguments are often of limited value and only persuasive to those already convinced of the position being defended. Defensiveness is rhetorically a sign of weakness, not strength (see, for example, Botwinick 2005).

My assessment, that I have written about elsewhere, is that the half century “Zionist consensus” in America is shattered (see Magid 2025a, 2025b). This does not mean that Zionism is over, or even that a plurality of American Jews will no longer identify as Zionist (the complexity of the recent poll notwithstanding). Consensus isn’t determined statistically but normatively. Zionism can no longer be taken for granted as an unchallenged norm of American Jewish identity.

Liberal Zionism—the core of the consensus—is at the center of this storm. The crux of the crisis of liberal Zionism is not new, but it has arguably reached a new phase. One common response to this dilemma, of course, is to engage aspirational thinking. Thus, I suggest, liberal Zionism today has essentially become “aspirational Zionism,” defending a country not for what it is, but for what the liberal Zionist aspires it to be and thinks it can be. This is fine, but not a strong selling point in a moment of rupture like ours. In fact, at times such thinking becomes enabling rather than restorative, as Israeli politician Naftali Bennett (now a serious contender for Prime Minister) once said, “You keep talking ‘two states’ and we’ll keep building” (see Magid 2013).

For many who have abandoned Zionism, some turning to anti-Zionism by rejecting liberal Zionism’s aspirational thinking, it is because for many of them, “aspirational thinking” has turned into “enabling thinking.” Liberal Zionists will continue voicing aspirational opposition while, on the ground, Greater Israel continues to become a concrete reality.

A lesser noted statistic in the JTA survey cited above showed that 14 percent of American Jews from the ages of 18-34 identify as “anti-Zionist.” While we also need to parse what “anti-Zionism” means here, that statistic marks a significant rise since 2023. This increase is not insignificant. Some basic questions about Zionism are being rehearsed. There seem to be least two opposing responses to this question. One response is to expand the contours of what Zionism includes to enable the liberal (aspirational) Zionism to remain operational. Another response is to narrow the contours of Zionism, thereby drawing red lines that excise those who express views that challenge the Zionist status-quo.

Of course, being a Zionist, or a patriot of any country, does not require absolute fidelity to the actions of its government. But the half century occupation that is now arguably annexation (in the West Bank), and the destruction of Gaza coupled with the defensive, and sometimes justificatory, posture of the Israeli government and many supporters in response to the campus protests, and now opposition to the Iran war, puts this all in a new register. ² What does Zionism mean today? What does supporting Israel mean today? Not only regarding one’s relationship to Israel, but as a tenet of American Jewish identity? There are certainly more positive answers to these questions, but the answers after Gaza in my view, cannot be identical to the answers before Gaza. I submit that there is Judaism before Gaza, and there is Judaism after Gaza, the latter still in a state of development. Is there Zionism before Gaza and Zionism after Gaza?

The “Resurrection” of Jewish Anti-Zionism

While avowed “anti-Zionism” all but disappeared after 1967, except among a circle of ultra-Orthodox Jews, it has certainly seen a resurgence among young American Jews (14 percent according to the JTA poll) who have, as I understand, given up on the Zionist project and, for some, their connection to Israel. This shift raises a new issue, which is really an old one. Zionism began as an ideology, part of a robust modern Jewish experiment, one alternative among many in the marketplace of Jewish ideas after the emancipation of the Jews in Europe. Its beginnings were not very successful for a variety of reasons, and the project of creating a nation-state in Palestine consistently sputtered and was discounted by some as hopelessly utopian. In the Second Aliyah (sometimes called the First Zionist Aliyah 1904-1914), the immigration that gave birth to the kibbutz movement and the spine of ideological socialist Zionism, more than 50 percent (some say up to 70 percent) of those who immigrated to the land returned to Europe within five years. This limited success of the early Zionist project changed dramatically with the continued rise of antisemitism in Europe and then Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 where Zionism served as an escape mechanism for Jews trying to escape a Europe collapsing around them.

It is no surprise that international support to establish the state in 1948 was in part generated by the Nazi genocide and global complicity, as much, or even more, than its original idea of a Jewish liberation movement, a notion that Ben Gurion found problematic (see Segev 1993; Tevet 1996). Ben Gurion deeply believed that a Jewish state was the best way to assure the safety of the Jews, but he did not appreciate using the Holocaust as justification for Jewish self-determination. Zionism for Ben Gurion was justified even without the Holocaust, even though for him a state was the best way to save Jews. The ascending support of Israel in the American Jewish psyche gained ground after the Six-Day War in 1967 where most ambivalence about Zionism was swept away with Israel’s decisive victory.

But that was over half a century ago. Israel now houses about half of the world’s Jews, has become a first-world country, revived a language, and has created a Jewish cultural revolution (see Ha-Am 1948). But the great victory of 1967 contained a dark underbelly that was ignored in the throes of celebration and relief: the occupation. Ignoring that or thinking it would resolve itself, or that Israel could “manage it,” has come back to haunt this moment and has set the stage for the massacre on October 7.

I think what we are witnessing today is a new iteration of pre-state battles for, and against, Zionism among Jews, albeit now the context is different. A state exists, however, it exists under conditions and precepts that many who opposed Zionism before the state feared would occur and that served as the core underlying opposition to Zionism in the pre-state era.

What Does the (New) Jewish Left in America Want?

The Jewish Left in America today has become the ire of the pro-Israel camp. Why have they abandoned the Zionist project? What exactly do they want? Aren’t they like the Yevsektsiya, Russian Jews who abandoned their fellow Jews, working for the Russian Communist Party from 1918-1931? Erasing distinctions and the intentional deflection of nuance has become the tack of many institutions that claim to be intellectual resources of American Jewry. It seems they do not want to understand the Jewish Left, even as they may disagree with it, as much as use it as an illustration of Jewish self-hatred, a convenient companion to antisemitism.

But in general, the new Jewish Left in America today is not the product of assimilation, in fact it is arguably dissimilatory; many of the members have returned to a Jewish identity that often includes an amalgam of ritual and religion. They are not the Mark Rudds or Abby Hoffmans of a past era, disaffected Jews who turned their attention solely to matters of international justice. They are products of American multiculturalism, and many know more about their tradition and Jewish politics than their more centrist contemporaries. In many ways they embody the phrase suggested by Waskow (1971, 11-46) in his book The Bush is Burning, “from Jewish radical to radical Jew.” This new form of radicalism one sees in the rise of the new Jewish Left after Gaza I would not call Jewish radicalism but a form of radical Judaism. It is a dissimilatory articulation of Judaism refracted through a commitment to justice as a covenantal value. In this case, it is not only Jews standing in solidarity with other groups in need of aid and support but Jews standing against a state acting in their name engaged in horrific acts against a people under its dominion.

The notion that the Left’s focus on Gaza was atypical and thus antisemitic by design misunderstands how the Left has functioned for the last 120 years. For a variety of reasons, the Left almost always has a central focus, even though other horrible things are happening in the world. For many protestors, Gaza wasn’t solely about antisemitism; Gaza was about the mass death of civilians and the destruction of a society. There is also no doubt that some of that resistance is fueled by negative feelings about Jews, that is, antisemitism. But here is where distinctions matter and erasing them to serve political ends is dangerous and, I would add, counterproductive.

Why dangerous? For example, if one claims that anyone who says that Gaza was a genocide is “antisemitic,” what that does is increase those who fall under that rubric and, given that the claim of genocide is debated by experts in Genocide Studies, in a sense it normalizes antisemitism. What happens, for example, when people begin to say “Okay, if you say I am antisemitic because I oppose a genocide and the killing of over 18,000 children, then I guess I am antisemitic.” What has happened is that you have inadvertently given credibility to the very thing you want to oppose. One can disagree with the accusation of genocide without raising it to the level of antisemitism or blood libel. Doing so does not fight antisemitism; it arguably normalizes it.

I think one of the main issues the Jewish Left must grapple with is where to go with its anti-Zionism that emerged in the wake of the destruction of Gaza? I engaged this question in my address at the first “Conference on the Jewish Left” at Boston University three years ago (see Magid 2024). Can the Jewish Left move beyond Zionism and anti-Zionism? Can it evolve through various alliances of solidarity with other progressive movements and causes and no longer focus on opposition to a state that many in the Jewish Left no longer support? (see also Lober and Burley 2024).

What is Jewish Anti-Zionism Today?

Jewish “anti-Zionism” itself requires nuance (see Moser 2026; Magid and Mishell 2026, 1-95). Its history is as long as Zionism itself. Like Zionism, it can mean many things. Before the state, it opposed the idea that a state was the best path toward Jewish flourishing for a variety of reasons. After the state, as Hannah Arendt (1948 2007) noted in her essay “To Save the Jewish Homeland,” reality demanded fidelity to an idea, and to a place, and thus non/anti-Zionism faded from view. She did not say that positively but rather lamented the ideological hegemony that she claimed in that article and in her book Origins of Totalitarianism, was unhealthy for any society.

The hegemony of Zionism remained stable for almost half a century, except in some ultra-Orthodox and Jewish socialist circles. After 1967, many Jews thought occupation was temporary, a vehicle for a peace treaty in return of those lands to Egypt and Jordon. That belief in a temporary occupation then morphed into a belief in a Palestinian state with the advent of the Oslo Accords. Most American Zionists held onto those two beliefs: the temporary nature of the occupation, and the eventual establishment of a Palestinian state beside Israel. The latter has now become as obsolete as the former. Israel has settled into a quasi-democracy founded on the “necessity” of domination of another people as a vehicle of and condition for, its existence. And yet, and this is the operative point, Israel continues to demand fidelity from Diaspora (liberal) Jews.

Here is where I think anti-Zionism is the most constructive. Many, I would even say most Jews today who define themselves as anti-Zionist today do not think the state of Israel should cease to exist. That is a fallacy weaponized by the Zionist camp for polemical purposes. Rather, they contest Zionist hegemony. That is, they reject the notion that Zionism is a requirement for legitimate Jewish identity in the twenty-first century, certainly in the Diaspora. In short, to paraphrase Ruth Bader Ginsburg when asked about feminism, they want “Zionism to get their damn boot off their necks.”

There is an important distinction here between Israel, Zionism, and the land. Israel is a country, Zionism is an ideology, the land is a homeland. While they overlap, these three things are not identical. The notion that someone who identifies as an anti-Zionist doesn’t value or love the land of Israel is ludicrous (see, for example, Tamares 2024). Did R. Yoel Teitelbaum, the Satmar rebbe, not love the land of Israel as just as much as his contemporary R. Abrahm Isaac Kook (see, for example, Magid 2026, 91-117)? Did the bi-nationalist Martin Buber love the land any less than the revisionist Zev Jabotinsky?

One of the fundamental differences between liberal Zionism and Jewish anti-Zionism is the exceptionalism that underlies the case of Israel. For example, both groups have joined the fight against ICE and the abuse of immigrants in America. Both groups abhor Iran’s killing of its civilian protesters. Both groups demand freedom from oppression around the world. But, for liberal Zionists, Israel seems to have an exceptional status. While they may speak out against occupation, against unlawful imprisonment of Palestinians, against house demolitions and extra-judicial arrests, they treat these blatant injustices differently than ICE arrests in Minneapolis because, as I understand it, for them, for a variety of reasons, Israel is different. They can criticize state polices, but they are committed to defending the state. Many will courageously stand to protect immigrants, even get arrested, but will be more reticent to stand in front of IDF soldiers destroying the home of a Palestinian family (there are Jews who indeed do that). They may call Iran’s treatment of its protestors genocidal but will never call Israel’s mass killing of Gazans genocidal and even accuse those who do as guilty of a “blood libel.” It is this reflexive exceptionalism that many Jewish anti-Zionists reject in principle and in practice. Any country can commit genocide. Some do. This hazard of hypocrisy is nothing new. Hypocrisy has often been the Achilles heel of liberalism, as we learn from John Locke to Isaiah Berlin, from John Rawls to Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of the Enlightenment, even when it engages in the fight for justice (most recently, see Mishra 2025).

What Does it Mean to be Anti-Zionist as a Prelude to Being Non-Zionist?

Asked about the question of non-Zionism and anti-Zionism, Israeli philosopher Adi Ophir said at a conference on “Non-Zionist Traditions” at Brown University, “to become non-Zionist one first must become anti-Zionist.” What did Ophir mean?

Non-Zionism still existed before the early 1970s when Norman Podhoretz proclaimed, “We’re all Zionists now.” What Podhoretz meant was that as a result of the 1967 war and the realization that Israel’s precarity was now overcome by its strength, non-Zionism essentially ceased to function for Diaspora Jews. In large part, he was correct. The ubiquity of Zionism in the identitarian project of American Jews meant that one could not ignore Zionism as part of Jewish identity. If Jews can no longer accede to Zionism because of the realities they see, the only way to revive non-Zionism is by anti-Zionism, that is, breaking out of the Zionist narrative they were raised in. In that reading, anti-Zionism is a transitional phase that can produce a new iteration of non-Zionism or a new Diasporism where Jewish identity is reconstructed outside the Zionist narrative or, if you will, beyond the Zionist gaze.

Resistance to such ubiquity will always be fierce, as it upsets a half-century of identity building. The “establishment’s” weapon of choice is often antisemitism. Its strategy is exclusion from institutional life. Both are fully operational today but, as I see it, both underestimate the sheer power and passion of a younger generation, with the help of older ones. To develop a deeply Jewishly informed, progressively generated, and morally substantial attempt to say “no” to the establishment, to reject domination and not enable it, and to recognize that the over 3000-year wisdom tradition we call Judaism will not be undermined by a 125-year ethnonational project (see, for example, Angel 2025). Israel will remain. Zionism will remain. Israel’s citizens will decide its future. But the demand for fidelity, sometimes couched as “reasoned critique,” is no longer a necessary part of Jewish life and flourishing.

We all wish Jews and Palestinians in the land success. The land between the river and the sea remains the Jewish homeland and the Palestinian homeland. But the domination of one over the other will never yield the flourishing of either. Kant argued against the viability of domination in his essay “Perpetual Peace” and other writings and more recently, Omri Boehm’s Radical Universalism makes a case to return to, and re-read, Kant and his politics (Boehm 2025). The corrosiveness of domination, even if ostensibly justified as “necessary,” and even for those who dominate, remains true today. Domination over another people is not only immoral, it is unsustainable; it subverts freedom and our understanding of Judaism and Jewishness. As Aime Cesaire argued, domination in the form of colonialism does not civilize the colonized, but decivilizes the colonizer. (Cesaire 2000, 35). We pray for the land and its inhabitants, but we refuse to collapse our Judaism into the present state.

To end on a personal note: I left the US in 1979 at the age of 21 and immigrated to Israel. I believed as a Jew I should live in the land, and I suppose that believed in the state but I did not go as a Zionist. I barely knew what Zionism was. I was going to live in “the land.” I fell in love with the land, the religion, the language, the culture, and many of the people. When I landed at Ben Gurion airport on subsequent trips, I would bend down and kiss the tarmac. The land, not the state. People laughed. They didn’t understand.

But of course, there is a state, and, like any Israeli, I became fully part of it. For me, that affinity broke in 1989 when I served in the IDF in the West Bank during the First Intifada. I saw domination firsthand. I saw hatred in the eyes of children toward me and my fellow soldiers. I felt something had gone terribly wrong (see Bartov 2026). Others who may have had that same experience interpreted it differently. But for me it was a fissure that became a chasm that became a rupture. It has only gotten worse. Much worse. I still love the land, the language, the religion, and the culture. But the state has been poisoned by decades of domination that breeds hatred, arrogance, and supremacy. I believe that to have a chance, we must abandon Zionism. We need another way to share this land, to share this space, in equality and with justice. In my view, the path toward a just society is to leave Zionism behind. Ironically, that may be a messianic move. Wouldn’t it be ironic if true messianism was precisely the opposite of how messianism, formally and informally, is presently being implemented? ³ I am sure many others will disagree. But this is where I stand. And I think this is where many on the Jewish Left in America stand. In some way, this is our messianic aspiration. ⁴