Planting Trees: Why Jewish Identity Is the Key to Our Future

Over the last year, I chaired the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver’s Antisemitism Task Force. Over that period, we heard and reviewed truly distressing accounts of violence and intimidation targeting the Jews of British Columbia. Visibly Jewish students were surrounded by mobs and screamed at through megaphones. A student had their artwork, a capstone project for graduation, destroyed and defaced with “pro-Palestinian” graffiti. Parents were told by other parents they should not raise concerns about antisemitism endured by their children in school if they did not first condemn Israel’s actions in Gaza. We heard repeatedly about Jewish experiences of social exclusion, justification of anti-Jewish violence, betrayal by trusted institutions, colleagues, and friends, and the erasure of Jewish experience and identity.

These stories were not isolated; they reflected a pattern stretching across the school system, universities, health care, labour unions, arts institutions, and the public service. What we heard was not only interpersonal hostility, but systemic and institutional failure: complaint processes that went nowhere, policies that erased Jewish identity, equity offices with little cultural competency or understanding of historical antisemitism nor the artifice of “antizionism” through which it is so often deployed and a persistent refusal to engage in learning about it, and leadership bodies unwilling to act. It is trite to say antisemitism today thrives not only in overt hate but in bureaucratic indifference and discriminatory application of EDI frameworks.

In nearly every institution, a clear pattern emerged whereby a comparatively tiny minority of antizionist Jews were platformed to falsely suggest they were representative of a Jewish consensus. It appeared clear that the intended effect of this strategy was to marginalize Jewish accounts of antisemitism and to skew Jewish perspectives, while simultaneously projecting an illusion of consultation.

Having obsessively promoted a worldview that all evil runs through a “Zionist” molten core, and that “Zionism” is what stands between humanity and all that is good, the antisemite washes their hands of the burning synagogues and Jewish daycare centers in their neighborhood with a simple liturgical refrain: I only hate Zionists, not Jews. The notion that one may bifurcate these two forms of Jew, as delineated by the non-Jew, is of course one of the oldest stories on earth. Across all these spaces, we saw institutions reproduce this old message: Jewish identity is acceptable only in the forms that fit our desired view of it.

The Old Bargain That Never Protects

To understand today’s crisis of Jewish identity, we must recall the origins of the modern “devil’s bargain” that began with Napoleon, the French Revolution, and the Enlightenment’s promise of universal rights. In theory, the 1789 revolution promised equality. But for Jews, freedom came at a cost; they could be emancipated only if they ceased to exist as a nation. That condition was articulated explicitly on the floor of the French National Assembly on the eve of the French Revolution. Speaking in support of Jewish emancipation, the Count of Clermont-Tonnerre famously declared:

Jews should be denied everything as a nation, but granted everything as individuals…The existence of a nation within a nation is unacceptable to our country.

In doing so, the Count articulated the foundational principle of Jewish emancipation that would be carried forward to the lands Napoleon conquered, and woven through the Bundists and the Bolsheviks through Soviet Jewry to modern day antizionists on college campuses: Jewish peoplehood must be abandoned in exchange for acceptance. It was no accident that the Count was speaking in support of Jewish emancipation; this call for erasure often came from those who claimed to be vehemently against anti-Jewish hatred and indeed, fighting for Jewish inclusion.

Napoleon’s Sanhedrin — a staged assembly modeled on the biblical Jewish court, not to restore Jewish self-governance, but to provide a Jewish stamp of approval for his assimilationist policies — codified this view. Through this body, he required Jewish leaders to affirm that Jewish particularism and collective identity, especially one rooted in an ancestral homeland other than France, was incompatible with enlightened citizenship. Antizionists today often point selectively to the proclamations of the Sanhedrin, devoid of the context of a sword pressed firmly against the necks of the jurists, and see confirmation for their denialist views.

Bundists, Bolsheviks, and later Soviet Jews inherited, emphatically adopted, or were coerced into versions of the same ideology: Jewish identity must be de-nationalized, depoliticized, and reframed solely as “religious” identity, a category that did not previously exist in Jewish liturgy or experience. The only word available in the Hebrew language, dat, actually meaning “law”, was jerry-rigged to apply to this foreign concept to please the master. The goal was to dissolve Jews into universal humanity.

This history matters because today’s antizionism draws directly from its legacy. It repeats the same demand that Jews may be tolerated as a religious group, but Jewish peoplehood as expressed through a distinct language, history, and affiliation, longing and belonging to their ancestral land, must be rejected. This legacy of erasure is embedded in how contemporary institutions categorize Jews. Jews are conveniently treated only as a religious group, a framing that persists everywhere from educational settings to the bureaucracy of Statistics Canada (here in Canada).

If Jews are “just a religion,” then calling for the destruction of Israel, where half the world’s Jews live, or barring “Zionists” from entry to public life, can be viewed as a political position rather than identity-based discrimination. The latter would require one to reconcile the prevailing zero-sum narrative that frames Israel and Zionism as inherently evil, with an anti-racist self-conception. The artificial division between Judaism and Zionism — the belief that the Jewish nation has a right to self-determination in parts of their indigenous homeland — of course requires willful blindness to the fact that Jews just happen to bear the brunt of every so-called “antizionist” action that targets synagogues, Jewish schools, community centres, and visibly Jewish individuals. It requires averting one’s eyes to the requirement that Jews alone pass virtue tests in which they must renounce their identity and sever themselves from their community, simply to exist as equal citizens.

In this framing, Zionism becomes an ideology that Jews are free to “give up,” rather than a core expression of Jewish peoplehood. This fiction is sustained by selective readings of Jewish history, amplifying anti-Zionist Bolshevik Jews, for instance, without acknowledging the broader context: the centuries of horrific violence endured by the Jews of the Russian empire and the promise of safety, dignity, and freedom that Bolshevism and its universalist principles held for a people who had never before tasted the sweetness of equality, dignity or safety.

It erases the part of the antizionist story that actually has most to teach us about Jewish existence: that Jews are human beings. And when faced with a promise of life, some will fervently hang on to the rope of that promise, abandoning themselves for that solace. It also fails to relay how that story inevitably ended every single time throughout Jewish history: with the Jew climbing the rope of that promise, heaving himself over the edge, finding he has been left with nothing but the end of that rope — not his history, not his people, not his culture, not his language­­ — only to find the rope swiftly tied around his neck by the very hand that pulled him up.

The great tragedy is that many Jews, especially Jewish youth, do not know this history and have internalized this erasure themselves. And we cannot blame them because they were never taught otherwise. They are able to see themselves reflected in the Jews who walked into the gas chambers but not in the Yevsketziya. They may theoretically know of Jewish Bundists and Bolsheviks and see their own antizionism as an inheritance therefrom, but they do not ask why so few Bundists and Bolsheviks sat in armchairs in their old age, proudly reflecting on their membership. They may proudly tattoo Doikayt on their bodies, and may even lament how so many Doikayts found their end in Hitler’s gas chambers, but they do not know or reflect on what it means that the same Jews found themselves in Stalin’s gulags. They do not know that Lenin, too, convened a committee to combat antisemitism, to which he appointed Joseph Stalin as chair, whilst simultaneously outlawing Hebrew and Jewish culture and ultimately destroying Jewish life in ways we will never truly understand nor be able to quantify.

Planting Trees

The most important lesson of Jewish history is that antisemitism manifests not only as genocidal violence but also the seductiveness of conditional belonging and the price of self-erasure it requires. The tragedy of our modern Jewish age is that we have failed so spectacularly in teaching ourselves our own history such that we continue to be vulnerable to this slow-burning internal destruction.

So many Jewish people believe that Judaism is a religious identity alone and lack the historical context to understand that the Jewish people simply predate modern categories of religion, and like many persecuted peoples, neutered their identity in order to make themselves appear non-hostile to a violent majority. Indeed, we are watching many Jews do so today in the same tradition. And for this, we cannot blame our youth. We have offered them nothing and ask them to sacrifice everything for it. We have given them a half-baked identity consisting largely of sorrow, pickles and bagels and Larry David, and now demand that they risk social exclusion and safety for vacuousness. We have failed to place them within the rich context of their history and their ancestors because we too have internalized the language of our oppressors; a language intended to mold us into something more palatable and comparable, and intended to dissolve our particular history and peoplehood.

The Task Force articulated a dual framing to the work combatting antisemitism. We described the first as “putting out fires”, addressing the immediate threats facing our community and investing in safety and survival. We framed the second area as “planting trees”. And, perhaps counterintuitively, this is where I believe we must devote our efforts as a people and a community with all our strength, because this is the path that splits towards our destruction or our survival.

Planting trees speaks to educating ourselves about Jewish history, memory, resilience, and belonging. It requires teaching the fullness of Jewish identity; the fullness of a people with history, culture, language, diversity, continuity, and a homeland. It means speaking to young Jews honestly about our diverse history and helping them understand that Zionism is not an optional ideology one can take off like an old hat, but the modern expression of a 3,000-year-old identity. It means giving them the tools to understand that a movement denying Jewish peoplehood, regardless of the vocabulary given to it, is not a modern phenomenon but rather, a carcinogenic assault on our people with deep historical roots. It means understanding that the remedy to anti-Jewish hatred and violence is identity rooted in historical and cultural self-awareness.

Planting trees takes time. But reclaiming what was taken from us is the most powerful long-term response we have to combatting this ancient hatred.