Letters / On “What Happened to IfNotNow?”

Two articles in the Spring 2021 issue—the editors’ responsa on antisemitism and Aaron Freedman’s examination of IfNotNow—have triggered my concern about how the Jewish left is being implicitly defined by Jewish Currents through omission.

The antisemitism responsa outlined a set of problems in the Jewish left’s approach to antisemitism, centered around organizations and coalitions that take April Rosenblum’s The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere as a central theoretical text in defining the concept of antisemitism. In so doing, it erased the fact that there are more radical parts of the Jewish left that have consistently been putting forward a different conception of antisemitism. The result was a flattening of the conception of who and what constitutes “the left,” leaving the reader with the impression that the Jewish left is limited to this particular approach, and obscuring the fact that there was already a dynamic conversation between these approaches.

Similarly, the article about IfNotNow lacked crucial political context that would have framed its place in the movement ecology, both historically and currently. This is in no way to understate the importance of the emergence of IfNotNow, which powerfully expanded the options for Jewish activism on Palestine—a mark of a healthy ecosystem. But Freedman spent just one dismissive sentence summing up JVP’s presence when IfNotNow emerged in 2014: as a “small but active group . . . many of [whose] members were older radicals estranged from mainstream Jewish communal life.”

In 2014, JVP already had about 5,000 members, and about 40 chapters, including a rabbinic council and between 5–10 campus chapters. “small but active” is a pretty serious erasure of the largest and most dynamic organization in this sphere, especially since 1,300 trained members is the number cited in the piece to illustrate IfNotNow’s impressive growth.

Over the course of 2014–2021—the period covered in this article—JVP continued to grow as a multigenerational movement now numbering about 20,000 members. Concurrently, we were being pushed by Jews of color and Mizrahi/Sephardi Jews to face the racism behind our Ashkenazi-centric and white-led structures; to do a better job of recognizing our intersectionality with and responsibility to Black, Indigenous, and immigrant-led movements; and to sharpen our politics accordingly, which we did by endorsing the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement in 2015 and taking an anti-Zionist position in 2019. To omit this context is a serious distortion of what was driving the Jewish left on Israel/Palestine.

These two pieces taken together seem to indicate an unwillingness to place those with more radical politics (a convenient shorthand being overt support for BDS and anti-Zionism) as a central and driving force in today’s Jewish left, and instead reinforces the idea that the left is solely represented by those that are actually more timid in their politics, at least on Israel/Palestine.

I think the first draft of history is being written here, which is a tribute to the persuasive power of Jewish Currents. But that makes it all the more important to ask how Jewish Currents defines the left it purports to represent.