How I learned to stop apologizing for being a Jew

From Golden Promises to Bitter Disillusionment – and Back Again

I was once a rabbi’s daughter reciting the Hatikvah with a blue hamsa dangling from my neck. A day school student wrapping tefillin, leyning Torah, and arguing Talmud—like a feminist. Then I was a disillusioned progressive renouncing Zionism to prove my virtue. A student publishing articles calling Zionism “settler colonialism” and “ethno-national white supremacy.”

At seventeen, I pledged in a blue and white journal that I would fight for Israel in “an all-out war.” At twenty, I swore I would never forgive my community for indoctrinating me. Now, nearing thirty, I recognize both vows came from the same hunger—to belong, to feel righteous, to make sense of my place in society.

But belonging was never the point. Being a Jew matters more.

My name is Zahava Michal Feldstein. My hair curls like my mother’s. My nose could carry the scene in Dirty Dancing. My name bears both the Yiddish of exile and the Hebrew of return. I don’t pretend to be neutral, because the most Jewish act is refusing to be simplified. To hold contradiction without apology.

I grew up immersed in American Jewish education. Through sixteen years of Jewish day school, my teachers trained me in names and dates: the pogroms, the expulsion from Spain, the aliyot, 1948. I learned to love Israel with a kind of righteous certainty. At seventeen, I stood on the train tracks of Auschwitz wrapped in an Israeli flag, convinced that Jewish survival deserved any cost.

I arrived at college idealistic, certain of my convictions, and desperate to be on the side of justice. My professors taught me that Zionism is a colonial project, depicted Jews as European interlopers, and described Israel’s existence as dependent on the continual subjugation of Palestinians. They said, Zionism was “a structure, not an event.”

I wish I could say I argued back, but the truth is: I didn’t have the language. The antizionist arguments I consumed had already accounted for my defenses. My classmates and professors already agreed that, growing up in American Jewish institutional life, I had already internalized “Zionist propaganda” designed to dispossess Palestinians by erasing them from collective memory. To earn my place in progressive spaces, I was required to perform my guilt until nothing remained but shame.

And, truthfully, my Jewish education was too fragile to survive the certainty of leftist antizionism. My Jewish teachers never taught about the words “Palestine,” “Palestinian” or “Occupation”—so when my college professors defined these terms for me, their perspectives became the ones I believed. I could not lean on my Jewish education to fight against anti-Jewish indoctrination because Jewish educators never provided me a different meaning. 

So I walked away. First from Zionism, then from Judaism itself.

At that point, I thought I had liberated my conscience. In truth, I had only hollowed it out. I spent years in that wilderness.

In my mind at the time, rejecting Zionism, recognizing my “privilege,” and diminishing Jewish communal knowledge equaled solidarity with the oppressed.

Really, though, I was living in a borrowed story—a story written by others, for whom Jewish pain is always suspect, Jewish safety always provisional. Slowly, the contradictions in this story began to show.

After October 7, while enrolled as a PhD student at Stanford, I experienced firsthand how quickly progressive spaces slip from their defense, “political anti-Zionism,” into irrefutable Jew-hatred. I didn’t just read about “campus antisemitism.” I didn’t just study it. I lived it.

I was pursuing a doctorate in research about how progressive intellectual spaces talk about, describe, and define Jewish racial identity. I am trained in critical race theory, ethnic studies, and Jewish and Middle Eastern history. After October 7, I became my own research subject.

Most Stanford classmates measured my solidarity by my willingness to endorse the murder of Jews, the rape of Jewish women, and the immediate dissolution of the Jewish state as necessary for the project of “decolonizing Palestine.” Absent my agreement, they deemed me complicit in a racist, ethno-supremacist, expansionist national project.

These classmates refused my right to feel pain. To mourn the loss of Jewish lives. To them (and quite a few professors), Jewish grief was invalid—the selfish conspiracy of an oppressor.

Yet the same progressive thinkers who demanded I acknowledge complexity in every other struggle refused to grant even a fraction of that nuance to Jewish experience. Certain they knew my people’s history better than I did, certain they could define Zionism better than I could, they interpreted my attempts to humanize Jews as proof of my complicity in empire and racism.

There is a particular loneliness in being accused, as the only Jew in the room, of supporting genocide and apartheid in a Stanford graduate seminar.

Over the course of a year, my classmates sent emails declaring “From the River to the Sea.” They boycotted class in “solidarity with Palestine.” They called perpetrators of anti-Jewish violence “martyrs.” They wore keffiyehs to class and assured me that if I believed Israel should exist, we could never be friends. They accused Israel of manipulating the United Nations. They experienced my very presence as a reminder of systemic violence.

I’ll wager most of them did not ask whether their activism honored the realities of Jewish trauma. They cited their ideologically misinformed classroom contributions in prejudiced assumptions. And when I countered—when I named my discomfort, my pain, and my research expertise in this exact field of study—these classmates assured me that unless I was in agreement that Jews deserve to be murdered in the fight for “Palestinian liberation,” I would never belong in their intellectual community.

At Stanford, like many other colleges and universities, students and professors reduced the Jewish story to a footnote in someone else’s manifesto. 

The intellectual left, which once claimed to welcome me, consistently dehumanized my community. And required me to do the same. Intellectual engagement demanded advocating for the literal murder of Jews. 

And my classmates they rolled their eyes when I named their bias: Antisemitism. 

I now refuse to believe Jewish longing for safety is inherently suspect. I refuse to make myself smaller to fit into activist spaces that deny my right to mourn.

If I could tell Jewish students one thing, it would be this: You don’t need to shrink yourself to fit someone else’s definition of solidarity. You don’t have to choose between your people and your conscience. You can carry the whole story—even when it doesn’t fit on a protest sign. You can hold the ache, and still stand proud.

My journey taught me that American Jewish education must change. It should be radically honest, psychologically safe, intellectually rigorous. We can’t pretend that omitting counter-stories will keep young Jews committed to Jewish life. Without the right tools, they may, like me, be seduced by the simplicity of rejection. 

I have been a Zionist. I have been an antizionist. Now, I am simply a Jew who will not let others define me. A Jew who refuses to apologize for the long arc of our story, even when that story is difficult. 

Wrestling is not foreign to Judaism. Being a Jew has always meant refusing to abandon our inheritance simply because it makes others uncomfortable. I am no longer willing to shrink to make my belonging more palatable. I am no longer willing to erase my grief to prove my humanity. I am no longer willing to apologize for being a Jew.

And if that makes me unwelcome in some spaces, so be it. I have learned to sit in the ache. I have learned that the ache itself is sacred—evidence that we are still here, still arguing, still alive.

I have come back to my community, not because it is flawless, but because it is mine. And I will never again let anyone tell me that loving my people klal Yisrael is something I must outgrow.