It’s Never Just About Israel: Four Tests, One Erasure

Last fall I taught our eighth grade Israel class, and something had changed. Students who once wore their Jewish stars or kippot proudly now told me they hid them, or thought about hiding them, when they went into New York city. They asked questions no Jewish child should ever have to ask. Is it safe to wear my Jewish star in the city? Should I cover the sweatshirt with our school logo, or a Jewish symbol on it? These were 13-year-olds learning that it can be risky to look Jewish. It broke my heart, and months later I have seen nothing to suggest it has gotten better.

They are not imagining it. The Anti-Defamation League and the World Union of Jewish Students surveyed more than seventeen hundred Jewish students across sixty countries. Most now hide their Jewish identity on campus. Even more hide any connection to Israel, just to feel safe. My 13-year-olds were learning at a young age what older Jewish students already know.

We are told there is nothing to worry about, because none of this is about Jews. It is about Israel, and criticism of a state is not hatred of a people. So let us test that claim, the way I would teach my students to test any principle that asks to be trusted.

If the criticism is with the State of Israel and not the Jewish people, then Jews who oppose Israel’s policies should certainly be safe from it.

They are not. Scott Wiener, a state senator in San Francisco, has called Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide and pledged to vote against military aid. Activists surrounded him at a Pride event and drove him out, shouting about his Israeli handlers. Other officials there, who never took his positions, were left alone. Dan Goldman, a Brooklyn congressman openly critical of the Israeli government, was banned from a coffee shop as a genocide enabler, his money waved off as probably coming from AIPAC anyway. Their actual positions bought them nothing, because their positions were never the charge.

If the criticism is with Israel, then Jews with no connection to Israel should be safe.

They are not. Last September, a shopkeeper in Flensburg, Germany hung a sign banning Jews from his store. A reporter asked why. He said it was because of what the Jews were doing in Gaza. Not Israelis. Jews. Germany’s own commissioner for Jewish life called it antisemitism in its purest form. In the Yale Youth Poll last fall, close to a third of the youngest American voters said it was appropriate to boycott Jewish American-owned businesses to protest Gaza. Not Israeli businesses. Jewish American ones. 

If the criticism is with Israel, then the Jewish dead should certainly be safe.

They are not. In Dublin, a small park has been named since 1995 for Chaim Herzog, sixth president of Israel, born in Belfast, son of Ireland’s first Chief Rabbi. Late last year, the city council moved to strip his name. The committee recommended removal with a single objection, stopped only on a procedural technicality, not because the substance was rejected. Ireland’s Chief Rabbi called it a shameful erasure of Irish Jewish history. When accused of antisemitism, ten councillors called their objection a political judgment, not religious prejudice. They could say that, and still not see what they had done.

And if the criticism is with Israel, then Jewish art, Jewish memory, Jewish characters in a novel should be safe.

They are not. In 2024, a New York bookstore cancelled Joshua Leifer’s book launch an hour before it began. The target wasn’t even Leifer, an “anti-occupation Jew” by his own description. It was his moderator, Rabbi Andy Bachman, a progressive who supports a Palestinian state. In the employee’s words, “We don’t want a Zionist onstage.” Neither man passed. This July, PEN America, no natural ally of the Israeli government, published an investigation into how Jewish and Israeli writers are treated in publishing. Agents reported being told to cut Jewish characters from novels, to downplay Jewish identity, because it would not sell. Not to change their politics, but to take the Jews out of the book. The finding cost PEN its own president, who resigned in protest of that report.

And again this month, a group called Theater Workers for a Ceasefire announced a boycott of Birthright, a play at MCC Theater following young Jews across eighteen years since their trip to Israel. The play argues no position. It simply lets its characters be human. And that is precisely the offense named. The organizers are not asking MCC to cancel this production. They are demanding a permanent policy on which stories may be staged going forward. The theater has so far declined.

Four tests. Four failures. A principle that fails every test it is given is not a principle. It is a permission structure.

And this past week, from the mayor of New York, the same test appeared again, sharper than before. Zohran Mamdani released a video calling Benjamin Netanyahu “the architect of a horrific genocide,” a legal conclusion serious scholars and governments genuinely dispute, and he did not hesitate to use the word. Days later, asked whether he considered the October 7th massacre, the deadliest single day of Jewish killing since the Holocaust, to be genocidal, he called it “a horrific war crime” that should be opposed “with every fiber of our being,” but he would not call it genocidal. The same contested word, certain in one direction, withheld in the other. The UJA-Federation called the video “political grandstanding” that “puts Jews at greater risk.” The city’s Jewish Community Relations Council warned it “further inflames tension.”

Unlike Wiener or Goldman, Mamdani is not a critic asking a Jewish state to do better. He has said for years that he does not believe a Jewish state belongs on that land at all, describing it in the language of apartheid and colonization rather than democracy under strain. That is not criticism of a government’s conduct. It is opposition to the government’s existence. A man who holds that position does not need to say a word about Jews to make his meaning clear. Erase the state, and there is no homeland left to erase. A state and the people whose peoplehood is bound to it do not fall separately. They fall together.

Days later, a man was stabbed on the Upper West Side by an attacker shouting “Allahu Akbar.” He has been charged with attempted murder as a hate crime. I do not know if the two events are connected, and I am not going to pretend that I do. But a community does not need proof of causation to feel, correctly, that the ground under it has shifted.

So what is the pattern? Look at what actually got tested. Two politicians opposing the war and calling it a genocide. A name on a park, of a dead man who cannot answer for anything. A rabbi who supports a Palestinian state and still is told he cannot go onstage. A fictional character allowed to grieve. A mayor who found the word genocide easy for one people and impossible for the other, and who does not believe that people is owed a state at all. None of it was Zionism in any way the word used to mean. They drew a line between the Jew and the Zionist, then erased it themselves, until almost any Jewish life, lived openly, falls on the wrong side of an imaginary line.

The irony is they are not wrong that the two are connected. That is the part we must own, because it is the heart of the matter. Zionism is not a policy position that somehow got attached to Judaism in the 1890s. Three times a day the Amidah asks for a return to Jerusalem. For two thousand years the seder has ended with next year in Jerusalem. Our Jewish holidays all originate in the land of Israel. And we break a glass under the wedding canopy for a city in ruins. All of this is centuries older than Herzl, older than the State of Israel, older than this war and every argument we are having about it.

When a movement demands Jews renounce Zion as the price of admission to society, it is not asking for a political concession. It is asking us to be a different people, and to cut the Jewish characters, keep the Zionist off the stage, take the Jewish name off the park, tuck the star inside the shirt. That is what I mean by erasure. Erase Israel and you erase the Jews, because you cannot remove one without cutting the other.

This is not confined to the left. When the United States and Israel struck Iran, the Anti-Defamation League tracked a surge in the claim that Jewish hands secretly control American foreign policy, spread by accounts with millions of followers. It begins as Israel, becomes Zionists, and lands, as it always has, on the ancient charge that the Jew is the one pulling the strings.

Some will say this is temporary, a wartime mood that will pass. I would like to believe that, but the evidence says otherwise. The pattern of the last century, in which each generation carried less of this prejudice than the last, has reversed. In an Economist and YouGov poll, twenty-eight percent of Americans under thirty agreed that Jews have too much power in America, nearly double the overall rate. The people who will run our universities, newsrooms, and publishing houses in twenty years are, right now, more likely to hold these beliefs than their parents. 

I will not offer comfort I do not have. We will name this ourselves and stop waiting for others. We stood up for everyone else and watched, when our turn came, who found reasons to look away. I have stopped expecting reciprocity. We will look after our own, and raise our children, with pride, to wear their stars in the city, uncovered, because the alternative is teaching them that safety comes from being a little less Jewish. That is the one lesson I will not teach.

I will never teach it, because that is what is being asked of us. Not that we change a policy, but that we make ourselves smaller: cut the characters from the book, take the name off the park, leave the Zionist off the stage, tuck the star inside the shirt. Every generation of Jews has been offered that bargain, and every generation has been told this time is different.

It is never different. And we are not smaller.