American Jewish Identity Challenges after October 7th

Introductory Notes: I was invited on Sunday, February 23rd by the Washington  Hebrew Congregation (WHC) in our nation’s capital and co-sponsored by the National Jewish Book Council to deliver the WHC Amram Lecture in its 70th anniversary year to discuss the identity of liberal American Jews as well as my most recently published book, From the West to the East – A Memoir of a Liberal American Rabbi – https://westofwestcenter.com/product/from-the-west-to-the-east/ and at Amazon. This was the first time I had returned to WHC since I served there as Associate Rabbi from 1986-1988. It was a kind of home-coming and its Senior Rabbi Susan Shankman presided with her customary grace and intelligence. This talk and the Q and A session following was recorded and will be available in the coming days on the Washington Hebrew Congregation YouTube site.

This is what I said:

So much has happened in the Jewish world, 38 years since I began my service with you. I want to speak with you this morning about the historic challenges facing Israel and the American Jewish community today, especially since October 7th, and share some of the broad themes and inflection-point stories in my life and rabbinate that I write about in my Memoir that I believe have universal take-aways for us all.

Today is the 506th day since October 7th. The trauma of that day remains palpable in both Israel and for so many of us as well. Israeli society, despite the release of some hostages, is still frozen by the horrors of that day, arguably the deadliest and most traumatic day for Jews since the Holocaust. Border communities bear the scars of destruction and displacement. The trauma of war affects virtually every Israeli in how they relate to their families and with friends, with fellow Jews around the world, with the Palestinians and their Arab neighbors.

As much as we Jews are thrilled that some of the hostages are home, we worry about the well-being of the remaining hostages and we fear that this deal will fall apart any day. Despite the joy of seeing the freed hostages reunited with their families, there’s something morally repulsive and offensive in the fact that these innocent Jews and others who were stolen from their bedrooms and from fields filled with music on that day were exchanged for those very Hamas terrorists who committed atrocities against our people or who support the murderous Hamas intentions.

To see the starving and tortured faces of the three hostages released a few weeks ago recalled the old black and white photographs taken when the camps were liberated which is why President Trump’s ‘solution’ for Gaza was acceptable to Israel’s far right wing. His plan mainstreams for the first time in Israel’s history the idea of “transfer,” a euphemism for ethnic cleansing, without any concern for the rights of the Palestinians living there, most of whom are not terrorists, nor were members of Hamas, and are suffering. His plan threatens the Israeli-Egyptian and Israeli-Jordanian peace agreements, the future of the Abraham Accords, the lives of the remaining hostages, and feeds the most extremist, messianic, and illiberal trends in Israeli society.

Just as Israelis find themselves at a significant crossroad in their history, so too do we American Jews find ourselves at a significant cross-road. For the first time in American Jewish history since the founding of the State of Israel, many liberal American Jews who love the Jewish state have been deeply disturbed not only by what happened on October 7th but also by Israel’s overwhelming and massive military response against Hamas that killed and injured so many thousands of Palestinian civilians and essentially destroyed Gaza. I was one of them, however, in fairness to Israel it’s important for us here to understand that this war, the longest in Israel’s history by far, was a response to what the Israeli government and army most feared would happen immediately after October 7th.

Israel’s leaders believed then that they were fighting for the existence of the Jewish state itself. They knew that Hamas intended to expand its attack, that there were realistic threats also by Hezbollah and Iran to join the war, and that a sympathetic uprising could ignite in the West Bank forcing Israel to fight simultaneously on three fronts. It was unclear then whether Israel could meet those threats. Hamas was organized and executing a plan that it had developed over many years. The IDF was disorganized. The Israeli army command believed that it had to distribute immediately its authority to a far lower level of officers than it had ever done before. That decision reduced the IDF’s customary safeguards to protect as much as feasibly possible Palestinian civilians who were used by Hamas as human shields, a massive war crime on top of what Hamas did in Southern Israel, massacring 1200 Israelis, raping and taking as hostage 250 more.

The army command believed that Israel had to fight with overwhelming fire power to disrupt Hamas’s chain of command and reach its leaders hiding everywhere under homes, apartment buildings, schools, community centers, hospitals, and mosques. If Israel didn’t succeed in disrupting Hamas immediately and demonstrating to Hezbollah and Iran how capable the IDF still was, Israel’s military and government leadership feared that tens of thousands of Israelis would be killed.

Both Israelis and American Jews are only now beginning to ask about the horrible impact this war has had on both Israelis and Palestinian civilians and what long-term psychological damage has been done on both peoples. We’re trying here in Diaspora communities as well to figure out where exactly we stand as American Jews and how much we want to say and reveal publicly about our fears and moral concerns in the war and the illiberal trends that are taking over Israel.

Taking a 10,000 foot view, the significance of this period in Jewish history is unparalleled in the modern era except for the three years from 1945 to 1948 when the Jewish people went from our lowest nadir after the Shoah to the establishment of Israel. That wide swing of the pendulum is testimony to the Jewish people’s durability and ability to survive, adapt and thrive after catastrophic events. Perhaps, the tragedy of October 7th and Israel’s turnaround military successes will have a strong deterrent impact on the perceptions of Israel by its enemies.

Despite Israel’s military successes, only a completed cease-fire and hostage deal will bring October 7th to an end and enable Israelis to begin a process of healing. But, any peace deal must include also a pathway to a demilitarized Palestinian state of some kind in Gaza and the West Bank in the context of a larger Middle East peace agreement that includes Israel and Saudi Arabia and all its moderate Arab neighbors.

That larger deal won’t be easy to attain because right-wing Israeli political parties and the extremist settler movement want to keep the war going as long as possible to enable Israel to annex Gaza and the West Bank into Israel. Should those extremist and messianic forces have their way, more terrorism and more war with the Palestinians and Islamic extremists will be inevitable and Israel’s international standing will remain diminished for decades to come.

Thankfully, polling of Israelis today suggests that the grip of the extremist right wing on the Israeli government is weakening. Sixty to seventy percent of all Israelis say they want all three stages of the agreement with Hamas to go forward with the return of the hostages and a permanent end to the war.

Even if and when that were to happen, there are immense residual problems facing Israel that have to be confronted and resolved including the massive humanitarian crisis in Gaza, the lack of an Israeli consensus about the role of the Palestinian Authority in the future governance of Gaza and the West Bank, Israel’s severely damaged international standing, what we in the American Jewish community think and feel about Israel and Zionism, and the dramatic rise here in antisemitism.

Among the greatest and immediate internal challenges facing Israel is that it has yet to set up a State Commission of Inquiry into what happened leading up to October 7th and Israel’s conduct in the war. Israel needs a power-house authority to undertake this inquiry to restore the people’s confidence that every lesson has been learned, that leadership failings are exposed, conclusions are drawn, and whether military excesses and war crimes were in fact committed.

In considering Israel’s culpability, however, we Jews who love Israel have to be able to distinguish between two kinds of criticism leveled against Israel’s conduct of the war.

There’s criticism from Israel’s friends that the IDF went too far, bombed Gaza too heavily using thousands of those huge 2000-pound dumb-bombs that destroyed entire apartment buildings and neighborhoods to get at Hamas command sites deep underground thus causing far too much damage to life and property, and that Israeli commanders and soldiers in the heat of battle crossed red lines against international moral standards of war. Israelis need to address this legitimate criticism from Israel’s friends and not characterize it as either anti-Israel or antisemitic.

The second kind of criticism is very different and comes from those who believe that the Jewish State has no moral legitimacy, is a colonial and foreign entity in the Middle East, has no right to exist and therefore no right to defend itself. That criticism clearly is based upon antisemitism.

Despite the loss of hundreds of young Israeli soldiers, the suffering of the hostages and their families, and the massive carnage in Gaza and the loss of life and property in the Strip, there have been a few positive things that have come from this war for Israel. Immediately after October 7th, Israel’s civil society came together from across all political and religious lines to support one another following a year of intensive demonstrations and hatred that brought hundreds of thousands of Israelis into the streets and tore apart the fabric of Israeli society as a consequence of the government’s proposed Judicial Reform efforts, or over-haul, or Judicial coup de etat – however one characterizes it. And hundreds of moving Hebrew songs have been written focusing on war and peace, hopelessness and hope.

In Diaspora communities $1.4 billion was raised for Israel representing the single largest set of contributions on behalf of Israel in our history, and 300,000 Jews and friends of Israel came together here in Washington in solidarity with Israel, the largest Jewish demonstration since the 1987 Soviet Jewry rally on the Mall.

All of that is a source of inspiration and pride. However, the rise of antisemitism here and around the world has been dramatic. Between March and May of 2024, Jewish students on 147 campuses in North America were under attack. The ADL counted 10,000 incidents against Jews representing an increase of 200 percent over the year before. In a new survey released three weeks ago by the ADL and Hillel International, 83 percent of all North American Jewish students have experienced or witnessed antisemitism firsthand since October 7, 2023.

An American Jewish Committee study reported that over 50 percent of us won’t show in public spaces anything that identifies us as Jews including wearing kippot, the Magen David, dog tags with the names of Israeli hostages, and yellow hostage ribbons.

At the same time, many American Jews have experienced a passionate reconnection to Zionism, Israel and their Jewish identity. However, 42 percent of young Jews under 35 have had difficulty finding common ground with the Jewish State. Some, though a minority, now say they’re anti-Zionists.

Antisemitism comes from both the far right politically and the far left. The far right doesn’t consider American Jews to be part of white America and that we’re foreign interlopers here with far too much power and influence in government, politics, the media, banking, business, and entertainment – classic antisemitic canards. The far left considers us to be part of white America and in league with right-wing colonialists around the world that oppress peoples of color most especially in America and Israel.

It’s unclear what impact October 7th and the war will ultimately have on each of us and on the character of our traditional Jewish institutions, most especially our synagogues, religious schools and day schools. In the early weeks and months of the war, many Jews sought out the organized Jewish community for themselves and their children. Many non-Jews were choosing to convert to Judaism in numbers greater than we’ve experienced in a generation. More American Jews began reading books, attending classes and on-line seminars that helped them better understand Zionism, Israel, and Middle East politics and history.

In the Reform Movement, many of my rabbinic colleagues, however, have confessed either that they don’t know enough or don’t understand well enough what’s really happening in Israel to be able to publicly speak and teach with confidence about it. Many who do love and understand Israel have feared for their positions if they spoke critically about Israel’s conduct in the war. They’ve worried that conservative wealthy and influential congregants will take exception to what they say and advocate for their dismissal. Too many synagogues have become unsafe places where rabbis and congregants are unable to discuss and debate openly the wide range of opposing views that exist in our community concerning Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, the war, the Israeli government, illiberal trends in Israeli and American societies, and the Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Arab conflicts.

We don’t know how our American and Israeli Jewish identities will evolve over time, but my sense is that we Jews are in a deeply troubling but also transformative era. Whereas in years past, Israelis were happy simply to take Diaspora Jewish dollars and seek American Jewish political support for Israel’s security needs, in a recent Israeli poll, 80 percent of Israeli Jews now feel strongly that the Israel-Diaspora relationship is important personally to them.

I characterize myself as a liberal American Reform Zionist and a lover of Israel and the Jewish people. But, even as I identify so closely with Israelis – many of whom are among my dearest friends – I’ve been confused why so many Israelis haven’t empathized nearly enough with the suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza.

Rabbi Donniel Hartman and Yossi Klein HaLevi of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem raised this issue last month in their weekly podcast For Heaven’s Sake. They noted that amongst the many challenges Israeli Jews have faced is that in the midst of the war they felt no significant moral angst about the suffering of Gazans because they themselves felt victimized first by Hamas’ attack on October 7th and then by the world’s remarkably quick turn-about against Israel once the IDF began fighting only days later.

Donniel and Yossi explained that victims generally respond to their enemies with fear, anxiety, rage, hostility, and a desire for revenge, and from that embattled position they morally justify themselves in whatever they do. I confess that in the initial months of the war, I felt the same way. These terrible effects of feeling victimized explain not only why Israeli society and the Israeli media did not focus on the destruction of Gaza and the huge loss of life there during the war, but why Palestinian society too has historically tolerated and embraced terrorism as a legitimate tool and moral response against Israel and the Jewish people. As victims, Palestinians living under Israel’s harsh occupation in the West Bank and formerly in Gaza until Israel unilaterally withdrew 20 years ago believe they’re justified in committing even the most vicious crimes without moral consequence.

At the beginning of the war, a colleague and friend called me distraught because his college-age daughter had joined the Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Israel, anti-Zionist and anti-nationalist Jewish organization. She claimed to want no part of Israel in her life and even expressed the view to her father, a rabbi and Reform Zionist, that Israel should never have been created. My colleague, as you might imagine, was deeply upset and didn’t know what to say to her. He asked me what I thought. A number of my congregants called me as well (though I’m retired they called me anyway) with the same question about their college age and twenty-something kids.

You might remember a letter signed by hundreds of young Reform Jews, children of rabbis and alumni of our American Reform Jewish summer camps that was published in the Jewish press that accused us older Reform Jewish leadership with hypocrisy – that we taught them liberal universal Jewish values but now support an illiberal and immoral Jewish state.

That letter provoked op-eds, sermons and conversations throughout our movement about how we Jewish leaders have failed to educate our people and especially our young Jews about Israel and Zionism.

To my colleague and congregants, I said the following:

“First – these are your kids. Your relationship with them is what’s most important now. Don’t say or do anything that will alienate them from you. Love them a lot which means listening to them without your having to instruct or correct them. Recognize that we’re all struggling in this new era of American Jewish history. Take a 10,000 foot perspective and remember that they’re at the beginning of their adult journeys as Jews and Americans and that they’ll likely evolve and change their thinking over time just as we’ve done over the course of our lives. You’ve instilled in them the Jewish values that are important to you. This isn’t the end of their engagement with Jewish life or in their relationship with Israel. Keep the door open to continuing a conversation with them. They already know, most likely, how you feel and what you believe about Israel. You don’t have to persuade them now about anything. Just listen and tell them that you respect them and love them. If they’re open to reading about why Israel matters to the American Jewish community and what liberal Reform Zionism has to offer them and Israel as a direct response to the illiberal trends in Israeli society, there are books that deal directly with these challenges.”

The greater question confronting us here now is what do we do to better educate ourselves and our young people about Israel and Zionism? That’s the $64 million question.

The best thing we can do is to go there individually or in congregational groups and meet Israelis face to face from the right, left and center, with Palestinian-Israeli citizens and Palestinians living under occupation in the West Bank, with Israeli and Palestinian journalists, with members of Knesset, and with our Reform movement rabbis and leadership, and especially with the leadership of the Israel Religious Action Center whose liberal values we share and who are working every day to counter the extremist actions of the government and on behalf of pluralism, equality and democracy in Israeli society.

Taking a longer view, there are a number of questions we need to be asking ourselves, debating, and striving to find consensus. Those questions include:

§  How we regard the impact of October 7th and the war on our Jewish lives and institutions?

§  How we memorialize what occurred on October 7th without identifying as victims?

§  What it means to belong to the Jewish people and to have a Jewish state?

§  How we look at the world today beyond our Jewish agenda and act on behalf of other minorities and groups who may feel towards us Jews as colonialists and interlopers?

§  How we regard ourselves as a distinct “other” in our Diaspora communities?

§  How we frame how others ought to be regarding us as American Jews who love Israel?

§  How we rebuild trust in our Jewish institutions and even in many of our clergy and teachers who some young people regard with a measure of suspicion and distrust because we haven’t been honest enough or knowledgeable enough about Israel, Jewish peoplehood, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict when they grew up?

§  And finally, how we understand anti-Zionism, anti-Israel sentiment, and antisemitism today, and what we do about it?

From the 1990s, the organized American Jewish community worked to reestablish inter-group relationships with the African-American, Latino, Asian, Christian, and Muslim communities in America. We worked on writing textbooks and developing curricula together, and we attempted to influence how other groups understood Israel and the American Jewish experience. Today, many of those efforts have been vacated. The American Jewish community is consequently in a shifting place, and though October 7th and the war contributed mightily to that shift, the events of the past 16 months were not the starting points of that shift.

There’s still, of course, so much that’s positive for us to celebrate about the American Jewish experience and opportunities to address the challenges I’ve mentioned. Our financial resources are great. We have many talented rabbinic, cantorial, academic, educational, professional, lay and political leaders helping us forge a new path forward.

Our message as American liberal non-Orthodox Zionists and as lovers of the people and State of Israel has to be clear and unrelenting – DON’T GIVE UP ON ISRAEL. We have a moral Jewish duty to fight for Israel despite her imperfections just as we fight for America despite its imperfections. My friend and colleague Rabbi Josh Weinberg, the Vice President for Israel and Reform Zionism at the Union for Reform Judaism, put it well with these words: “We have a duty to fight for Israel’s right to be the only Jewish state in the world and for Jews to be a free people thriving in our historic Homeland without always having to live by the sword. We liberal American Zionists also have a moral duty to fight for Israel to live up to the values articulated in Israel’s Declaration of Independence. We have the duty also to fight against those who constantly defame and delegitimize Israel, who unfairly criticize her and judge her by unreasonable double standards.”

As Reform Jews, we have the duty to join with our growing Israeli Reform movement in its fight for religious pluralism, democracy, equality, the return of all the hostages, and to pursue a pathway to peace with the Palestinians, the Arab and moderate Muslim world.

One of the most important ways for us American Reform Jews to do all of this is to vote in next month’s World Zionist Congress elections for the Reform ARZA slate. Rabbi Shankman is prospective delegate, as am I, and I hope you will vote in large numbers so that we will do very well in this election. Our liberal Jewish values are at stake in the National Institutions, the World Zionist Organization, the Jewish Agency for Israel, and the Jewish National Fund. The World Zionist Organization dispenses annually $1 billion dollars and since our Israeli Reform institutions are discriminated against by the government of Israel, having a large representation in the World Zionist Organization will enable more dollars to flow to our Reform movement programs in Israel that educate and advocate for liberal Jewish and democratic values.

Though I’ve articulated some of what I said this morning in my Memoir, I want to say a few more words about it. I chose as the title “From the West to the East – A Memoir of a Liberal American Rabbi” based on a medieval poem by the 11th century rabbi, poet and philosopher, Yehuda Halevi, who lived most of his life in Muslim Spain and eventually made his way to the Land of Israel. He said famously: “Libi b’mizrach v’ani b’kitzei ma’arav – My heart is in the East and I’m at the edge of the West” thereby expressing the age-old longing of the Jewish people for Zion, a longing I’ve felt since I was a little boy as parts of both sides of my family made Aliyah – my mother’s side in 1878 and my father’s side in the mid-1930s.

My Memoir is organized around many events in my life including the intense blow-back I received to sermons I delivered and actions I took in San Francisco, here in D.C., and in Hollywood.

I write about many causes I took up in my life-long social justice activism and in my role as a past national chairman of the Association of Reform Zionists of America (ARZA), and as a national co-chair of the rabbinic and cantorial cabinet at J Street.

I have a number of important mentors about whom I’ve written who have come from the Israeli political right, the American political left, the moderate-liberal center in both the American Jewish and Israeli Jewish communities. Each of their voices has guided me, and their voices inside my mind and heart often have been at odds with one another, pushing me one way and then another, always sowing doubt, but helping me to clarify my liberal American Jewish and Zionist moral values.

I write in my Memoir, for example, about a dramatic story at Congregation Sherith Israel in San Francisco in 1980 as a young 30-year old rabbi after I delivered a Rosh Hashanah sermon to a packed sanctuary stopping just short of calling for a Palestinian state alongside a secure Israel. A brawl almost broke out after the service when an Israeli leader of Tel Aviv’s right-wing Likud Party barged into a group of the synagogue’s leaders and took great exception to what I said.

I describe another dramatic story here in Washington, D.C. in 1987 after I delivered another High Holiday sermon and moral appeal for us to become a sanctuary synagogue on behalf of the 100,000-plus El Salvadoran refugees living in the nation’s capital, many of whom were being hunted by Salvadoran death squads, and how I was taken to task in the weeks following Rosh Hashanah by a group of Jewish advisors to then Vice President George H. W. Bush. However, I was supported by the former American Ambassador to El Salvador Robert White who told me to resist the pressure to recant what I said in that sermon that he told me was 100 percent accurate.

I told the story in 2012 about my then 32-year policy of not officiating at inter-faith weddings and then changing that policy and announcing it on Rosh Hashanah morning resulting in a surprising standing ovation, and how my decision became for me an inflection point in my life and rabbinate and an inflection point for my congregation with congregants crying in the halls and parking lot for weeks afterwards. As only one example, a good friend, an African American actor married to a Jewish woman, came to me immediately after the service before I even left the bimah and said: “John, I’ve always felt welcome here, but now I consider Temple Israel of Hollywood my home.”

I wrote in some detail as well about contemporary antisemitism, anti-Zionism, and anti-Israel sentiment and what it means to raise proudly identifying young Jews today to assure the future of liberal American Jewry and our positive relationship to the people and State of Israel.

I wrote about my cancer diagnosis 15 years ago, the overwhelming loving response of my congregation to me, my coping with what I believed initially was a death sentence thanks to the brutal way my first physician informed me of my condition, and of the pain I suffered during my recovery from surgery, radiation treatment, and a staph infection, and how the experience changed me and made me far more empathic than I had ever been before to those confronting life-threatening illness and chronic pain.

I share how we liberal Jews might refocus our faith away from the traditional God-King and narrow idea about God that comes to us from tradition – especially the God Who doles out rewards and punishments – a classic image in the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic tradition, but instead embrace a mystic model that asks not “Do I believe in God” but rather “How might I best experience myself as a spiritual being?” based on my life-long study of Jewish mysticism and the thought and writings of such luminaries as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.

And I wrote about the difference between optimism and hope, that hope is an attitude of the heart and a mindset that helps people endure even the most negative and destructive challenges without denying that reality around us, and what transpired at my family Seder a dozen years ago in which my millennial sons challenged me given their pessimistic and, at times, cynical understanding of contemporary American, Israeli and world events.

I wrote this Memoir first and foremost for them, my children and grandchildren, that they might know more about who their father and grandfather was in this fractious and troubled era of Jewish, Israeli and human history; but I believe that what I’ve written is relevant for the large non-orthodox American Jewish community and many outside our Jewish tent.

My father died when I was 9 years-old, and other than a group of letters he wrote to his cousins in Philadelphia during his period of service as a Navy physician during WWII in Hawaii and on the Midway Atoll, I have nothing from his hand communicating to me who he was, what he most valued and believed as an American Jew living in the first half of the 20th century, or any details about his parents and grandparents and their immigration to America in the closing years of the 19th century. Not having his reflections and beliefs have been for me a large missing piece in the greater puzzle of my family’s life, and I didn’t want my grandchildren and their children to have no record of what I’ve experienced, cared about, valued and learned that might be of use and importance to them.

When I served my congregation in Hollywood, I met with every family a year before each bar and bat mitzvah celebration, and I urged the pre-b’nai mitzvah young people to research with their oldest living relatives their life stories. I gave them a list of 40 questions to ask those family elders. Doing so became for the young people and their parents an enriched experience that offered them greater appreciation for the life-experiences of the oldest surviving members in their families and a larger context for their lives. If you’ve not done so yourself in writing, audial or video, I urge you to consider it. To have such a record will preserve your memories and lives for the generations to come.

Finally, I hope you will acquire a copy of my Memoir for yourselves, your adult children, grandchildren and friends, whether they be Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindi, or without a faith tradition who are open to expanding how they think about their lives in this era and what possibilities this period in our history holds for each of us and the Jewish people.