The Moment of Truth for HUC

There are moments in the life of a movement when ambiguity is no longer humility. It is evasion.

This is one of those moments.

At the Re-CHARGING Reform Judaism Conference, Reform rabbis, cantors, educators, lay leaders, and lovers of our movement gathered because we believe North American Reform Judaism still has a future worth fighting for. We gathered because we believe the Reform Movement is not an institution to be managed into irrelevance, but a covenantal project to be renewed with courage, clarity, and love.

And this year, the conference body passed a resolution that said plainly what too many have been afraid to say publicly: Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, the seminary of the Reform Movement, must stop admitting and ordaining anti-Zionists.

Not critics of Israeli policy. Not students who wrestle honestly with occupation, democracy, pluralism, religious coercion, Palestinian suffering, or the failures of any particular Israeli government. Reform Jews should wrestle. Zionists should wrestle. Jews have always wrestled.

But anti-Zionism is not wrestling with Israel. It is rejecting the legitimacy of Jewish sovereignty itself. It is denying the Jewish people what Reform Judaism has, for generations now, affirmed: that Am Yisrael is a people, that our bond to Eretz Yisrael is not incidental to Jewish identity, and that the State of Israel is the central expression of Jewish peoplehood in our time.

Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch named this with prophetic clarity. The Reform Movement, he reminded us, once took a wrong turn. In its earliest American expressions, it denied Jewish nationhood and distanced itself from Zion. But history, Jewish suffering, Jewish courage, and Jewish vision brought our movement back. Reform Judaism became a Zionist movement not by accident, but through struggle, through leadership, through figures who understood that Judaism severed from Jewish peoplehood becomes something thinner than Judaism.

The founder of Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, Rabbi Stephen Wise, lived before the State of Israel existed. He spoke in a world before October 7, before the language of “settler-colonialism” had been weaponized against the Jewish people, before anti-Zionism became one of the most potent modern languages for laundering ancient hatred into respectable academic and activist forms. To invoke Wise’s commitment to free inquiry as a defense for ordaining anti-Zionist Reform rabbis today is not historical sophistication. It is historical evasion.

Dr. Andrew Rehfeld, president of HUC, has tried to stand in two places at once.

On the one hand, he has said publicly that HUC is a Zionist institution. At Re-CHARGING, he stated that HUC is “a proud Zionist institution” and that someone who came into admissions saying, “I’m an anti-Zionist; I don’t believe Israel has a right to exist,” would be told, “you’re in the wrong place, period.”  

On the other hand, in that very same exchange, he rejected the idea that HUC should refuse ordination to students whose political commitments are contrary to Zionism, describing such a boundary as a kind of “Jewish McCarthyism” and warning against “litmus tests.”   He argued that a liberal seminary must allow students to grapple freely, even if “some may not come to see the world the same way we do.”  

But this is the problem: HUC already has litmus tests.

It should.

Every serious institution does.

A student who said gay marriage is an abomination would not be told, “Come spend five years with us, and we hope liberal education transforms you.” A student who rejected women’s ordination, or LGBTQ equality, or the religious legitimacy of Reform Judaism itself, would rightly be told that HUC is not the proper seminary for them. That would not be called illiberal. It would be called integrity.

So why is Jewish peoplehood different?

Why is the right of LGBTQ Jews to dignity rightly treated as a core Reform value, while the right of the Jewish people to sovereignty is treated as a matter for endless academic play? Why can HUC draw boundaries around every other sacred commitment of Reform Judaism, but when it comes to Zionism, suddenly boundaries become fundamentalism?

The question is not whether students may ask hard questions. The question is whether the seminary of the Reform Movement should ordain clergy who reject one of the central religious, historical, and moral commitments of the Reform Movement.

Rabbi Geri Newburge put it exactly right in response to Rehfeld: HUC has standards. Admissions essays, Hebrew requirements, psychological evaluations, recommendations, interviews — all of these are standards. And standards are not the enemy of liberal Judaism. They are how a movement teaches what it believes.  

Rabbi Tarlan Rabizadeh gave voice to what so many of us have known but not named: that Zionist students at HUC have often felt marginalized, mocked, or silenced in the very institution that should have formed them as proud Reform Jewish leaders. She described being warned not to write about Israel in her HUC application because “Israel is a controversial issue,” and later, as a student, being told to remove an Israeli flag from a prayer space.  

That is not openness. That is not liberal education. That is a culture that has become confused about its own soul.

I have also been told — and I hope HUC will address this directly — that only last week, Dr. Rehfeld had dinner with current HUC students, including many who identify as anti-Zionists, and assured them that they and their views would remain welcome at HUC. If that report is inaccurate, HUC should say so clearly. But if it is accurate, then Reform Jews deserve to know: which statement reflects HUC’s actual policy? That antizionism is “not welcome”? Or that anti-Zionists will be welcomed, defended, educated, ordained, and sent into our pulpits?

HUC cannot keep speaking out of both sides of its mouth.

It cannot reassure donors and congregants that it is Zionist while reassuring anti-Zionist students that their ideology poses no obstacle to ordination. It cannot claim anti-Zionism is outside its values while insisting that refusing to ordain antizionists would betray liberalism. It cannot say Israel is central and then treat Jewish sovereignty as optional.

This is not only about HUC. It is about the future of Reform Judaism.

Our movement is already facing declining affiliation, shrinking institutions, weakening literacy, and a thinning sense of Jewish peoplehood. Rabbi Hirsch warned years ago that “we are losing the soul of the Reform movement,” and that if Reform Judaism becomes — in fact or even in perception — anti-Zionist and anti-particularist, most American Jews will abandon us.  

He is right.

No movement can survive by ordaining leaders who reject its foundations. No seminary can save itself by lowering its ideological expectations until anyone willing to enroll is deemed fit to lead. If HUC is struggling for applicants, the answer is not to redefine Reform Judaism downward. The answer is to inspire a generation of students who love Judaism enough to serve it, who love the Jewish people enough to stand with them, and who love Israel enough to help shape her future with honesty and devotion.

The resolution passed at Re-CHARGING is not an attack on HUC. It is an invitation back to clarity.

I am so inspired and proud to be part of Re-CHARGING and Amplify Israel and to know that there are incredible leaders, like Rabbi Ammi Hirsch and Rabbi Tracy Kaplowitz, who refuse to give up on our values and our future.

The Resolutions we passed call HUC to honor the Reform Movement’s hard-won commitments to Jewish peoplehood, Zionism, and Israel. It asks our seminary to form rabbis, cantors, educators, and leaders who understand that Reform Judaism is not merely a set of universal ethics with Hebrew words attached. It is a living expression of the covenant of the Jewish people.

Now, Dr. Rehfeld and HUC must choose.

They can take this resolution seriously. They can bring it to the Board of Governors. They can bring it to faculty, students, alumni, and admissions committees. They can clarify that love of the Jewish people, commitment to Israel’s existence as a Jewish and democratic state, and opposition to anti-Zionism are not optional extras, but essential qualifications for Reform Jewish leadership.

If they do, HUC may yet help lead a Reform renaissance.

But if they do nothing — if they continue to soothe critics with polished speeches while admitting and ordaining anti-Zionists; if they continue to defend anti-Zionism as a legitimate outcome of liberal Jewish education; if they continue to confuse ideological surrender with openness — then Reform Jews will know where HUC really stands.

And no speech, however thoughtful, will be enough to hide it.

The time for ambiguity is over.

This is the moment of truth.