The Blogs: The Goyim Will Not Save Us

There is something almost too perfect about Jews for Jesus.

It offers Christians the Jew they have always wanted: recognizably Jewish, reassuringly familiar, and relieved of the burden of disagreeing with Christianity. The Hebrew words remain. The holidays remain. The Jewish biography remains. Only the troublesome Jewish refusal disappears.

Jews for Jesus insists that accepting Jesus does not require Jews to surrender their Jewish identity. That is the sales pitch. Christianity gets the convert, while the convert gets to believe that nothing essential has been relinquished.

Most Jews understand the trick immediately. A Jew can become a Christian. People convert. What one cannot do honestly is convert to Christianity and present Christianity as a more complete form of Judaism. Judaism’s refusal of Jesus is not some incidental custom, like preferring brisket to ham. It is one of the things that distinguishes Judaism from Christianity.

The maneuver is theological, but the temptation is larger. Again and again, Jews have sought acceptance by becoming the kind of Jews whom the surrounding world might finally approve of. The demanded conversion may be religious, ideological, cultural, or political. The bargain remains remarkably stable: admission for the individual Jew in exchange for surrendering some form of Jewish refusal.

The goyim will like us this time. They will protect us this time. We have finally found the correct universal doctrine, the correct politics, the correct denunciation of other Jews.

The bargain keeps failing. Jews keep offering it again.

The Bundist Wager

The Jewish Labor Bund deserves respect. Founded in Vilna in 1897, it organized Jewish workers living under miserable and discriminatory conditions. It built unions, schools, newspapers, youth organizations, cultural institutions, and Jewish self-defense. It fought antisemitism directly. Its members displayed extraordinary courage under the czars, in interwar Poland, and later in the ghettos. Anyone who describes the Bund as a collection of cowardly assimilationists is falsifying history.

The Bund also made a disastrous political wager.

Its answer to the Jewish question was doikayt, or “hereness.” There, where Jews lived, was their country. Jews would secure their future in the diaspora through socialism, civil equality, Yiddish culture, and national-cultural autonomy. Zionism, in the Bundist view, was a bourgeois illusion that diverted Jews from the necessary struggle where they already lived.

Hashomer Hatzair began in much of the same political and emotional territory. It too was secular, socialist, intensely Jewish, and committed to remaking Jewish life. It was also ambivalent for decades about exclusive Jewish sovereignty. Its commitment to Arab-Jewish fraternity and a binational political order was central, not decorative. Hashomer Hatzair cannot honestly be recast as a movement of uncomplicated Jewish nationalism.

Yet it made one choice the Bund rejected. It located the Jewish future in the Land of Israel.

The Bund said: Here.

Hashomer Hatzair said: Home.

Hashomer Hatzair educated young Jews for aliyah, physical labor, communal life, Hebrew culture, and the building of a Jewish society in Palestine. Its members went. They built kibbutzim. They learned to farm, organize, and defend themselves. Whatever their preferred constitutional arrangement, they helped create the material capacity for Jews to act collectively in history.

That is the decisive contrast. The Bund sought Jewish autonomy inside states controlled by others. Hashomer Hatzair moved Jews toward a place where the terms of Jewish existence would no longer be entirely set by others.

The Holocaust does not settle this argument as tidily as Zionists sometimes pretend. Bundists did not cause their own destruction by failing to predict it. Zionists possessed no crystal ball. The Nazi project was so totalizing that it destroyed Zionists, Bundists, religious Jews, assimilationists, and people who had never chosen any political program at all. Bundists fought the Nazis with staggering bravery. Marek Edelman, a Bundist and leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, deserves honor from every Jew.

The Holocaust nevertheless exposed the danger at the center of doikayt. A Jewish civilization could be magnificent, militant, and deeply rooted while its continued existence depended upon governments and populations Jews did not control. The socialist world subsequently failed the Bund’s hopes as well. The Soviet Union liquidated the Russian Bund, purged former Bundists, and suppressed Jewish culture. Poland did not become safe for its surviving Jews. Universal brotherhood proved contingent. Jewish vulnerability did not.

This does not make diaspora life illegitimate. I am writing these words in America. It means that diaspora flourishing and Jewish collective power answer different questions. A welcoming society can permit Jews to thrive. It cannot guarantee that it will remain welcoming forever.

Bernie, the Bundist Mensch from Hashomer Hatzair

Bernie Sanders once spent several months at Sha’ar HaAmakim, a kibbutz affiliated with Hashomer Hatzair. The irony is almost too neat. Bernie encountered one of the great institutions of socialist Zionism and developed a politics Bundist in structure.

I am describing a political disposition, not claiming a secret organizational genealogy. Bernie’s Jewishness is genuine and culturally deep. The murder of his father’s family in the Holocaust plainly shaped him. Yet his political faith rests primarily in universal class solidarity, American democratic socialism, and the moral reform of the society where he lives. Jewish safety sits inside a larger universal project.

Bernie also appears to be a mensch.

His universalism seems to arise from decency: solidarity with workers, revulsion at suffering, and a sincere conviction that no people’s dignity should depend upon another people’s subjugation. He has recognized Israel as the democratic homeland of the Jewish people and defended its right to exist, while becoming one of its fiercest critics in American public life.

I think he is deeply wrong about important things. I do not think he is contemptible.

Bernie represents the Bundist tragedy in its most honorable modern form: a decent Jew applying Jewish moral seriousness to a universalist politics that cannot reliably protect Jewish particularity. He carries the mistake together with the menschlichkeit.

Parts of the contemporary socialist left have retained the mistake and misplaced the menschlichkeit.

From the Bund to DSA

The Democratic Socialists of America are sometimes described as heirs to the Jewish socialist tradition. Much of the present organization has a peculiar way of honoring that inheritance.

The Bund organized Jews as Jews. It defended Jewish workers, maintained Jewish culture, demanded Jewish collective rights, and organized Jewish self-defense. Its alliance with universal socialism did not require it to treat Jewish vulnerability as imaginary or Jewish collective action as intrinsically racist.

Powerful currents within DSA and Young Democratic Socialists of America now advocate explicit anti-Zionism in “principle and praxis.” In 2024, DSA’s National Political Committee withdrew its conditional endorsement of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez while citing, among other objections, her support for Israel’s continued existence and defensive systems. YDSA activists have openly sought to make Zionism unacceptable within their organization. This is more than vigorous criticism of an Israeli government.

The distinction must be kept clear. Criticism asks what Israel has done and what it should do. Anti-Zionism asks whether a Jewish state should continue to exist at all. Opposition to occupation, settlements, civilian deaths, or a particular war does not require opposition to Jewish sovereignty. Israelis themselves argue furiously about all of these things.

Inside an explicitly anti-Zionist movement, however, Jewish repudiation performs a useful function. A Jewish speaker can present the movement’s rejection of Jewish sovereignty as an internal Jewish judgment rather than an external demand imposed upon Jews. The speaker’s Jewish biography becomes evidence for the prosecution.

This observation requires no diagnosis of individual motives. Some Jewish anti-Zionists reach their conclusions through serious moral reasoning. Some believe one democratic state would protect both peoples better than partition. Some have watched Israeli conduct with horror. Their arguments deserve to be answered on their merits. Sincerity does not make a political program safe, and error does not prove bad faith.

The organizational function remains. The good Jew is the Jew whose testimony can be used against the collective claims of other Jews. Jewish identity is welcomed precisely where it helps certify that Zionism, alone among national movements, deserves dissolution.

Jews for Jesus performs a religious version of this maneuver. The anti-Zionist Jewish left performs a political version. Each permits the retention of Jewish biography while recruiting it against a constitutive Jewish refusal.

The comparison has limits. Jews for Jesus seeks Christian converts. DSA seeks political conformity. The Bund sought neither. Its members built a robust secular Jewish civilization, frequently at immense personal risk. These movements are not morally interchangeable.

Their proposed bargains nevertheless share a dangerous structure. Each promises a corrected Jewish identity that the surrounding world can more readily embrace. Each places Jewish safety inside a universal order whose terms Jews do not set. Each identifies some expression of Jewish separateness as the obstacle to justice or acceptance. Each leaves Jews less capable of acting together if the promise fails.

The Photographic Negative of Masada

There is more than one way for a people to commit suicide.

Masada became a symbol of Jewish suicide through uncompromising defiance: death preferred to submission. The mythology and historical meaning of Masada are contested, but the symbol remains legible.

The diaspora left offers its photographic negative. This is Jewish suicide through uncompromising accommodation.

The psychologies are opposites. The zealots sought nobody’s approval. The modern anti-Zionist Jew may sincerely seek justice, fellowship, or a political home. Yet the political endpoint can converge: Jewish life is offered upon an altar of moral purity. The ancient zealots chose death rather than life under Rome. Their modern counterparts would dismantle Jerusalem while trusting Brooklyn, London, or Berlin to remain hospitable.

Calling a program suicidal does not mean its Jewish supporters consciously desire the destruction of the Jewish people. Most plainly do not. It means the program would strip Jews of collective defenses in a world that has given us very little reason to consider those defenses obsolete.

I understand the longing beneath it. Jews have lived among other peoples for two thousand years. We want neighbors, friends, allies, colleagues, lovers, and fellow citizens. We do not want to live forever with our backs against the wall. We are tired of being told that everyone else’s collective attachments are human while ours are pathological.

Longing still does not constitute a security policy.

The approval of non-Jews can be precious. It can also disappear between dinner and breakfast. Emancipated Jews have repeatedly learned that individual acceptance does not guarantee collective safety. A Jew may become the favorite Jew in the room and still possess no influence over what happens when the room turns against the Jews.

This is no argument for hatred or suspicion of goyim. Real friendship cannot depend upon self-erasure. The non-Jews worth trusting do not require Jews to become Christians, abandon Jewish peoplehood, or place Israel alone among the nations under a sentence of dissolution. They can condemn Israeli acts without requiring Jewish helplessness as proof of moral seriousness.

The task is neither isolation nor appeasement. It is relationship without surrender.

Jews need allies. We also need the capacity to survive the loss of allies. We need universal moral commitments and particular obligations. We need compassion for Palestinians and the power to protect Jews. We need friendship with the world without handing the world a veto over Jewish existence.

The Bund gave us courage, culture, solidarity, and a warning. Hashomer Hatzair moved Jewish socialism from aspiration toward collective capacity. Bernie Sanders shows how much goodness can inhabit the old diaspora wager. The anti-Zionist left shows how that wager can turn Jewish repudiation into political currency. Jews for Jesus exposes the underlying bargain in its least disguised form.

Keep the name. Keep the memories. Keep the accent. Just surrender the refusal.

The goyim will not save us. Righteous Gentiles will stand beside us. We had better remain capable of standing ourselves.