The ‘good Jew’ trap
When anti-Zionists define the “good Jew” as one who abandons Jewish peoplehood, they cast those affirming our nationhood as contaminated outsiders. The ticket to acceptance is self-erasure. We’ve seen this before, and it didn’t end well.
What is a good Jew? That depends on who does the defining.
In the Jewish tradition, a good Jew is someone who not only acts with kindness and pursues justice but also strives to remain deeply rooted in Jewish peoplehood. Jewish identity is not only about individual ethics. It is bound up with a collective story, a shared memory, and a covenant that links Jews to one another and to the Land of Israel. The words “Next year in Jerusalem” are not symbolic. They are a repeated affirmation of Jewish continuity and nationhood. A good Jew, as defined by Judaism, is a participant in a people that has endured centuries of persecution – including genocides – through faith, struggle, and belonging.
But there is another definition, one that comes not from within, but from without. In this version a “good Jew” is someone who rejects Jewish peoplehood by spurning Israel and Zionism and who embraces a purely individual or universalist identity.
The “good Jew” is useful for anti-Zionism. Their Jewishness provides cover for movements that attack Israel’s legitimacy or erase Jewish history. They are welcomed, praised, and platformed because they confirm the political beliefs of those who have no interest in Jewish survival on Jewish terms.
This distinction is not new. It reflects a pattern that has deep historical roots. In Christian Europe, Jews were tolerated only if they accepted the terms of the majority. One could be accepted into society only through conversion, to cease being a Jew. The majority that chose to remain Jews were marginalized.
Historian David Nirenberg, in his work Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition, examines the “redemptionist” antisemitism of medieval Christian societies that viewed Jewish conversion as a form of redemption, both for the individual and for Christian society as a whole. Only by shedding their identity – faith, peoplehood, and distinctiveness – could Jews be considered redeemed and accepted.
Today, we are witnessing an updated political and cultural form of the same idea. Instead of conversion to another faith, anti-Zionists demand Jews disavow Zionism. To be accepted, Jews are told, we must sever ties to our nationhood and recast ourselves as abstract moral agents. The underlying logic has not changed. The Jew is tolerable only when remade into something else.
This reasoning is enforced not only by non-Jewish anti-Zionists, but also by a fringe of anti-Zionist Jews like Jewish Voice for Peace, whose motto is “Judaism beyond Zionism.” These self-declared “good Jews” loudly reject Israel and Jewish peoplehood. Their message is crafted for outside approval. “Hey, look at me,” they say, “I am a good Jew. Please accept me.” (See the StandWithUs report “Jewish Voice for Peace – A Shield for Hate, Not a Voice for Peace”)
This is not prophetic conscience, but betrayal. Nor is it principled resistance but an obsequious act of submission. They do not challenge power but affirm the power of social and ideological approval from those that treat Jewish peoplehood, and Jewish peoplehood alone, as a moral crime.
Why is this dangerous? When Jews are told they must renounce their collective identity to be safe and acceptable, they are being set up for exclusion and violence if we refuse. As we’ve seen since October 7, the rejection of Jewish sovereignty in one place quickly became the rejection of Jewish safety everywhere.
Jews who identify with Israel (Jewish peoplehood) are targeted verbally, socially, and physically. Jewish students are harassed. Jewish institutions require increased security as the constant threat of attack has increased.
This is no abstraction. thus far in 2025, In the name of “free Palestine,” Jews were gunned down in Washington D.C., burned to death in Boulder, Colorado, in Melbourne a synagogue was torched and an Israeli restaurant attacked on the same night, a Jew was stabbed at Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial, a synagogue was set on fire in Rouen, France.
This script has played out before. The pressure on Jews to convert, to assimilate, to disappear took many forms. Today it wears the language of social justice. But it’s the same demand: to be redeemed, Jews must surrender something essential to who we are.
No society, movement, ideology, or institution has the right to determine modern Jewish identity nor to decide which Jews are acceptable. Jewish identity belongs to the Jewish people alone. It must never be surrendered, and it must never be defined by those who seek to erase it.
