Being a Gay Zionist Activist in 2026: Refusing to Retreat on Israel
Remarks by Steven Goldstein for Shabbat services at United Synagogue of Hoboken in New Jersey, Friday, January 23, 2026:
Shabbat shalom.
If someone other than your extraordinary rabbi, Rob Scheinberg, asked me to speak tonight, I’d have said no. It has nothing to do with this congregation. You are Jewish peoplehood at its best.
It’s because the gay rights movement has broken my heart.
The movement that taught us silence equals death is now ravaged by Antisemitism through silence and overt action. The movement’s Antisemitism is spreading like Stage 4 cancer hidden inside the malignant cells of anti-Zionism.
And make no mistake: Anti-Zionism is today’s permission slip for Antisemitism, written by activists whose history lessons come from Instagram.
Before we go further, I speak tonight as an individual, not on behalf of an organization.
So fasten your seatbelts, and let’s begin with some context.
New Jersey is where you know me from as the founder of Garden State Equality, and my role as one of thousands of New Jerseyans who brought marriage equality, transgender equality, and more than 200 other LGBTQ laws to this state.
But Zionism has always been the heart of my political and religious identities.
I have been gay for 63 years, but a proud Jew and Zionist for thousands more.
That legacy is in this week’s parsha. In Parashat Bo, part of the book of Exodus, God delivers the final three plagues upon Egypt as the Israelites flee to the Promised Land.
The parsha reminds us that Zionism, our longing to live as a free people in our homeland, has been inseparable from Judaism since ancient times.
Our Jewish journey to freedom has shaped how I understand freedom itself. And sometimes the hardest truth is realizing that today’s gay rights movement no longer looks like the movement it once was.
The LGBTQ movement saved my life – and decades later, betrayed it.
Look, my gay pride hasn’t collapsed. My belief in the fairness of the gay rights movement has. And once you see that collapse clearly, the evidence is everywhere.
At some Pride marches, organizers have tried to ban not only Israeli flags, but also rainbow flags with a Star of David. You heard me correctly. Jewish stars, whether on the flag of Israel or standing alone, are now declared symbols of oppression. Jews holding them are told to leave.
And when Jews are told to leave, that is the oldest hatred in progressive drag, accessorized with a hashtag.
What a cruel inversion of history, especially given how Jews have been at the forefront of LGBTQ equality.
The world’s first organization for LGBTQ equality was founded in Germany by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld in 1897 — the same year as the first Zionist Congress, where he was a major force.
Harvey Milk never shirked from his Jewish pride and Zionist pride. In college he was an activist for Israel. Evan Wolfson, the architect of the marriage equality movement in America, is Jewish. As was Edie Windsor of blessed memory, who won her case for marriage equality at the US Supreme Court.
At one point, the statewide LGBTQ organizations in New Jersey, New York, California, Illinois, and Massachusetts all had Jewish leaders.
I thought standing shoulder to shoulder would count for something. It hasn’t.
These days, “Queers for Palestine” and their allies would dismiss my advocacy for Israel as coming from someone who lost his way and became inexplicably conservative. I certainly reject DSA, the Squad and Mayor Mamdani. But I am no conservative. I am no neo-conservative. I am, as ever, a sensible mainstream liberal.
Then again, anti-Zionist activists love to rewrite reality to fit their frauds.
They claim Israel is illegitimate because no country should be founded on religion. Then where is the outrage over the 82 countries around the world that have state religions in some form or another — including more than 40 Christian countries and more than 30 Muslim countries? Why is the Jewish state the only one singled out as immoral?
That is how anti-Zionism is Antisemitism.
85 percent of American Jews, according to a survey in 2024, believe the statement “Israel has no right to exist” is Antisemitic. But instead of listening to that overwhelming Jewish consensus, a number of LGBTQ activists cherry-pick a small minority of anti-Zionist Jews, like Jewish Voice for Peace, and present them as the so-called “Jewish voice.”
That’s not solidarity. That’s abandonment.
That’s not allyship. That’s erasure.
Colonialism, they say? Is Arabic really indigenous to vast parts of Africa? It wasn’t Jews who were the conquering foreign power.
Racism, they say? I didn’t see “Queers for Palestine” organizing against genocide in Darfur, the brutal oppression of China’s Uyghur Muslims or protesting Iran’s evil regime today.
You know why. No Jews, no news.
Sometimes it’s this simple: anti-Zionists don’t know what hell they’re talking about.
They call Israel a white colonialist state even though 68 percent of Israelis are, in whole or part, Sephardi, Mizrahi, and Ethiopian Jews. They scream apartheid while Muslims and Christians serve in the Knesset and on the Supreme Court.
Which neighboring country allows Jews to do the same? Absolutely none.
Genocide, they say? Genocide requires intent. Hamas, not Israel, has publicly declared its intent to wipe Jews off the map. On October 7, Hamas acted on that intent.
Astoundingly, some anti-Zionist activists say that if Israel didn’t exist, there wouldn’t be the global Antisemitism we see today. Come on! Before the establishment of the modern State of Israel in 1948, were millions of Jews not murdered in the Holocaust and pogroms?
In the twisted universe of “Queers for Palestine” and their allies, intersectionality means fighting every form of oppression except Antisemitism, and supporting every liberation movement except Zionism.
If your liberation requires a Jewish exception, you are creating the moral pogrom of the 21st century.
Well, I support the liberation of LGBTQ people from Palestinian rule.
In the Palestinian Authority – the allegedly moderate Palestinian Authority – LGBTQ people are beaten, imprisoned, blackmailed and tortured, sometimes with family approval. LGBTQ organizations in the Palestinian Authority moved their headquarters to Haifa and the western part of Jerusalem because they could not exist safely at home.
And what happens when Zionist gay Jews like me point this out?
We’re told we’re pinkwashing, bragging about Israel’s record for gay rights as diversionary propaganda.
I’ll tell you what pinkwashing is: It’s when activists are so consumed by Antisemitism that they can’t see, or won’t admit, Israel’s global leadership for LGBTQ equality.
Israel decriminalized homosexuality in 1988, banned employment discrimination in 1992, allowed open military service in 1993, recognized same-sex marriages performed abroad in 2006, began paying for gender confirmation surgery in 2014, and banned conversion therapy nationally in 2022. All these things happened years before the United States followed, or still hasn’t.
Meanwhile, Palestinian gays flee to Israel to escape torture — and I know several of them.
For some LGBTQ activists today, it seems hatred for Jewish liberation overrides love for gay liberation. Harvey Milk must be rolling in his grave.
You know what hurts most of all? The impact of Antisemitic LGBTQ activists on non-gay progressives. Just a couple of weeks ago, a human rights advocate – not gay but as fierce a proponent of LGBTQ equality as you’ll find anywhere – asked me why I’ve focused on supporting Israel and fighting Antisemitism since October 7 but no longer fight for human rights.
He didn’t realize what he was saying — that Jewish rights are not human rights, with the unintentional implication that Jews are not human.
When I ran Garden State Equality and focused all those years on LGBTQ equality, would anyone have asked me why I don’t fight for human rights?
I am telling LGBTQ leaders and our allies right now: Jewish rights are human rights. Jewish rights depend on Jewish survival. And Jewish survival depends on Israel’s survival.
I will stand for that principle, no matter the rise of Antisemitism, until my dying breath. I will do so as openly as the Israelites proclaimed their Judaism in Parashat Bo, when God told them to mark their doorposts.
So let me shout from the streets of New Jersey to the gates of Jerusalem, Israel’s capital, eternal and united:
Ani yehudi! I am Jewish!
Ani tsioni! I am a Zionist!
Ani ga’eh! I am proud!
Thank you, and Am Yisrael Chai.
