Dear Reader,

At Jewish Currents, we take pride in publishing reader responses to our work. Such letters reflect the broad intellectual community that constitutes the backbone of our magazine. We include letters to the editor about articles that appear in print in the opening pages of each issue; you can find these alongside responses to web content on our Letters page.

In this newsletter, we’re sending you a selection of responses to recent articles. Readers replied to Jon Danforth-Appell’s essay “Against Zionist Realism,” highlighting the strategic benefits of organizing as Jews, the perils of overemphasizing American national identity, and the ways that Zionists and anti-Zionists still share a nationalist language. In response to publisher Daniel May’s “The Tangled Knot of Anti-Zionist Violence,” we heard from readers who questioned the possibility of disentangling antisemitism and anti-Zionism while most Jewish institutions remain Zionist, and who argued for definitions of antisemitism that integrated this fact. One letter critiques cartoonist Eli Valley’s use of the imagery of the mental institution to lambast Zionist critics of mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. And we have two letters about last year’s Winter Gift—a print by Liora Ostroff featuring words from Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s “Dissent”—that take issue with Ostroff’s “secularized and sanitized” use of the shiviti amulet, and a response from Ostroff. We’re also offering a brief update on a controversy around the print, which marked a teacher outside of Chicago for censure by the local school board.

As always, we encourage readers to submit letters of about 250 words to editor@jewishcurrents.org with the subject line “Letter,” followed by the title of the article. (Letter writers are more often cis men, so if you’re not one, we especially encourage you to write to us.) Please include your name and location. We look forward to hearing from you!

—The Editors

On “Against Zionist Realism”

For Jon Danforth-Appell, Jewish anti-Zionist organizing wrongly reinforces the bond between Judaism and Zionism, obscuring the more central role played by the United States in supporting Israel’s actions. But in arguing against “Zionist realism,” the author reifies nationalist realism—the idea that the only real polities out there are nation-states. This obscures a long tradition of Jewish thinkers and movements who supported Jews collectively taking responsibility for their futures outside the context of an ethnostate—a tradition whose esteemed successors now include IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace.

Danforth-Appell argues that we are not responsible for the actions of mainstream American Jewish organizations because they are undemocratic and don’t accurately represent the community they purport to speak for. Yet the same is true, to varying degrees, of US state institutions, which seemingly serve elite and special interests above those of their constituencies. In this moment of ongoing catastrophe, what is called for is political action, undertaken both as Jews and as Americans—because if we act like only national identity matters, we will fail to build a world beyond nationalism.

Simon Jacobs
Berkeley, CA

There was a time in recent history when “Jewish” was an identity category utterly unaffiliated with state power, imperialism, and genocidal violence. The slogan “Not In Our Name” hearkens back to this time. There was, however, never a point in time when the identity category “American” was not affiliated with an empire that was, and remains, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world,” in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Thus Jon Danforth-Appell’s implicit suggestion that the slogan “Not In Our Name” ought to refer to our Americanness over our Jewishness misses the crucial recognition that “American” is necessarily an identity category affiliated with genocide and empire. The hope of appending the phrase “Jews say” to our protest slogans is that Jewishness might yet be rescued from such an affiliation.

At its best, “Americans Say Not In Our Name” is an overly optimistic misdiagnosis of the possibilities of Americanness; at its worst, it gives fodder to “anti-Zionist” groups like If Americans Knew that posit Zionism as an aberration from true (white, Christian) “American values,” rather than continuous with genocidal histories of European and American imperialism. Danforth-Appell is right to note that American Jews are not uniquely complicit in Zionism’s atrocities, but his suggestion to de-center Jewishness and uplift Americanness in our protest of Zionism misses the moral bankruptcies of American identity. It also obscures the hope, which we imagine Danforth-Appell shares, that we might (re)create a Jewishness that stands in unwavering opposition to empire, Zionism, and American nationalism.

We aspire to a Jewish life that does not center or hallow any state or national identity. As American Jewish life becomes more and more defined by Zionist or anti-Zionist identification, we ask ourselves what of Jewishness remains or can be instigated otherwise. We’ve debated whether to release the term “Jew” from inherited identity toward literary use as a political symbol, or to limit “Jew” to its religious underpinnings, or, in our more enraged moments, to repudiate Jewishness entirely due to its inescapable implications in historical and contemporary violence. But we agree that replacing a Jewish protest identity with an American one leaves us on unstable, corrupted ground for political advocacy, while forsaking the possibilities present in explicitly Jewish protest that aims to undermine national allegiances as such. We look to identity as generative creative ground that strengthens us to disengage our ties to nationalist state projects.

Leora Fridman
New York, NY

Moriel Rothman-Zecher
Philadelphia, PA

It’s important for Jews working toward Palestinian liberation to ask ourselves whether our tactics and formations are more self-soothing than strategic, and to question the value of organizing as Jews at all. It’s true, as Jon Danforth-Appell says, that “the American empire’s support for Israel is rooted in geopolitics and the global capital of the arms trade, not a love for Jews.” But love for Jews is how the US’s foreign policy toward Israel is sold. Lawmakers invoke that love in appropriating endless billions of dollars for US-made weapons sent to slaughter Palestinians. As long as this is marketed as being on our behalf, we have to visibly oppose it as Jews—to attack the stated justification for, and thereby facilitation of, the genocide. Yelling “Not In Our Name” isn’t a plea for absolution (or a way of ignoring the responsibility of Americans). Rather, it’s an attempt to use the leverage we have. Let a politician announce that they’re doing it for Boeing’s shareholders or to bring about the rapture—we can change our t-shirts without missing a step.

On a personal note, this mode of organizing feels unavoidable to me: Because I’m a Jew, everything I do is as a Jew; because of my love for my community and my understanding of history, I’m unable to cede the public expression of Jewishness to supporters of genocide. Whether I hold a banner saying so depends on the venue, but when I say “I’m a Jew against this genocide,” I consider it both strategic and the most honest thing I can do.

Joe Dobkin
New York, NY

I appreciated Jon Danforth-Appell’s pragmatic analysis of who is providing the most significant material support for genocide and occupation. However, I take issue with the claim (which was also repeated on the On the Nose episode discussing the article) that Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) is one of the leading groups organizing direct action in solidarity with Palestine. As a current sophomore at Barnard College, I have witnessed the dynamics between many groups in the Palestine solidarity movement over the past year. While Jewish students are certainly part of campus movements, the vast majority of direct actions on campuses have been led by Students for Justice in Palestine and other Palestinian-led organizations; focusing only on JVP thus wrongly marginalizes the work of Palestinian-led groups.

At Columbia University, we’ve seen the administration target and penalize our Black, brown, and Palestinian comrades the most harshly, often utilizing the flimsy justification of “combating antisemitism.” Given this reality, white Jews on campus absolutely should use our privilege to participate in riskier actions. But this does not mean that we must turn to Jewish-centered organizing; those who have US citizenship or those who aren’t reliant on financial aid are also in a position to take risks. Identity politics are often shallow; it’s more important to identify the broadest base of people who can exploit their positionality and act together to shift the balance of power.

Hannah C.
New York, NY

We at Halachic Left, a grassroots organization of halachically-observant Jews working against the occupation, don’t disagree with Jon Danforth-Appell’s claim that a main axis of our complicity in the ongoing genocide in Gaza is our Americanness, not our Judaism. But we believe that deep cultural shifts are crucial for creating long-term change and that this work is most impactful when done within a communal framework. We know that our schools send graduates to the Israeli military, that politicians are often afraid to alienate Jewish voting blocs over Israel, and that American Jewish organizing under the banner of opposing antisemitism has helped the current administration in its campaign of repression on university campuses. Our religious communities are also intricately connected to the Israeli Religious Zionist community, which is at the forefront of the settler movement and a crucial constituency in the right-wing, Jewish supremacist political coalition in Israel. As the Talmud teaches, “Kol Yisrael arevim zeh b’zeh” (“All Jews are responsible for one another”). We organize as religious Jews because we see ourselves as responsible for helping to facilitate political transformation in all Jewish communities, and hope that this ethos will maximize our impact.

Eliana Padwa
Jerusalem

The letter writer is a co-founder of Halachic Left.

In his recent piece, Jon Danforth-Appell writes that “the Jewish left as a whole has yet to articulate a project that is not just the negation of Zionism.” But in searching for the positive content of anti-Zionist Judaism, might we consider . . . Judaism? Our traditions of dialectic argumentation and empathy for the vulnerable, to give just two examples, ought to be rich enough to furnish the positive content we seek.

Isaac Congedo
Silver Spring, MD

As Jon Danforth-Appell rightly notes, anti-Zionism, perhaps counterintuitively, still centers Israel. As if to dramatize the “realism” Danforth-Appell describes, in my view, even the article itself (and the podcast discussing it) reproduce terms and concepts common to both Zionism and anti-Zionism, which feel so embedded that it’s hard to imagine it any other way.

For example, Danforth-Appell writes: “The mobilization of American Jews around a conception of our unique responsibility to oppose the Israeli government entangles the anti-Zionist Jewish left in an overbroad definition of Jewish peoplehood that necessarily centers the state of Israel.” But I am not sure that there is any conception of Jewish peoplehood that exists absent Israel. As my colleague Noam Pianko argues in his book Jewish Peoplehood: An American Innovation, the term “Jewish peoplehood” only emerged in the 20th century and was coined by rabbis like Stephen Wise and Mordecai Kaplan who had strong Zionist commitments.

Indeed, historically, there was no consensus on the idea of a single Jewish people or nation—a concept deeply connected to the emergence of highly dubious “racial science” discourses. Arthur Ruppin, a founder of the city of Tel Aviv and of the sociology department at Hebrew University, argued that Sephardic and Middle Eastern Jews were closer to Arabs and Muslims than to Ashkenazi Jews, the latter of whom he saw as the real Jews. In response to experiences of discrimination that Jews from the Ottoman Empire endured at the hands of Eastern and Central European Jews in early 20th-century New York, Salonican-born intellectual Henry Besso argued in 1939 that Ashkenazi and Sepharadi Jews are as far apart from each other “ethnologically” as a “German Catholic and a Spanish Catholic.” The implication was that although both groups ostensibly shared a religion, they constituted different peoples. He thus opened up the possibility that there could be multiple Jewish nations, just as there were multiple Catholic ones. Likewise, some Ladino newspapers in New York as far back as the early 20th century argued for the existence of “puevlos djudios” (“Jewish peoples,” in the plural).

Both Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews tend to use other terms uncritically as well, such as the oft-repeated category of “diaspora Jews.” The term implies that “diaspora” is always in relation to Israel; that, as I discussed with editor-in-chief Arielle Angel back in 2020, “Israel is the center and we are dispersed from the center—even as we attempt to assert that that former periphery is a new center.” I worry that our correctives to Zionism sometimes reinforce the same binary. Take, for example, the idea of “doikayt,” often translated as “hereness.” As I explained then, I worry about the dichotomy it sets up between “here” and “there.” I continue to advocate for the idea of “multi-rootedness” to help shift our frameworks away from Zionist realism. We need concepts that allow for pluralities, for multiple diasporas, and for multiple nodes of connection. I hope this concept can also help provide the “positive” aspect of anti-Zionism—what the movement is for—that Danforth-Appell provocatively suggests is needed.

If one wants to challenge Zionist realism, one has to challenge the underlying nationalist logic encoded in our everyday language, which shapes our structures of thought. Maybe rethinking peoplehood and diaspora is a place to start.

Devin Naar
Seattle, WA

The letter writer is an associate professor of history and Jewish studies and the Isaac Alhadeff Professor in Sephardic Studies at the University of Washington. He serves on the Jewish Currents advisory board.

On “The Tangled Knot of Anti-Zionist Violence”

You are not likely to read a more thoughtful or historically sensitive reflection on how to respond morally and politically to the recent incidents of anti-Zionist violence than Daniel May’s latest essay, “The Tangled Knot of Anti-Zionist Violence.” May teaches us that Zionism catalyzed a transvaluation of Jewishness that makes prying the two apart a more burdensome ordeal than the average Currents subscriber might care to admit. At the same time, May cannot but conclude with an appeal to “recogniz[e] recent attacks not as evidence of an eternal hatred but as destructive responses to an unconscionable war.” Here he falls back into the lap of his readers, sapping the essay of its critical voltage.

In my view, the non/anti/post-Zionist left needs a working definition of antisemitism that goes beyond its comfort zone, in which antisemitism is only an annex in the palace of white supremacy. What is needed is a better theory of how it has happened that, in May’s view, American Jews in Boulder and Israeli embassy workers in Washington have ended up Zionism’s most recent victims. Recall that the Zionism of Leon Pinsker, Theodor Herzl, Max Nordau, and even Ahad Ha’am was not merely a transvaluation of Jewishness (as May rightly points out), but a transvaluation by way of the antisemite’s image of the Jew. For most early Zionists, diaspora Jews really were weak, effeminate, middle class, geist-less parasites. And so Zionism sought to defang antisemitism by taking seriously antisemitism’s view of Jewish deficiencies. This national exercise, understandable in its context, has borne strange fruit, and today, the world doesn’t like the new, strong, bullying Jews it helped create.

If a thinker as sharp as May doesn’t have a blade fine enough to cut the distinction between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, then it’s time to consider the question anew. No one will understand contemporary antisemitism until its profound entanglement with Zionism—and thus anti-Zionism—is taken seriously.

Judah Isseroff
St. Louis, MO

I was disappointed to read Daniel May’s recent piece, which in the face of targeted violence against Jews, only lectures us once again on the importance of distinguishing between Judaism and Zionism. In doing so, he suggests it’s a lesser crime to murder Jews if accompanied by the phrase “free Palestine!”

At one point, May notes that the two low-level Israeli embassy employees were killed at an event put on by the American Jewish Committee, an organization he describes as a “staunch supporter of the Jewish state”; so, in May’s view, the attack was simply anti-Zionist, rather than antisemitic, in nature. That standard is an impossible one to use for distinguishing antisemitism from anti-Zionism. Though I wish it were otherwise, nearly every Jewish institution is a “staunch supporter of the Jewish state” by some definition. Given that, is it safe to attend synagogue? A Jewish community center? A Jewish summer camp? At what point can we say that killing Jews at Jewish events and in Jewish spaces is, in fact, antisemitic? Even if done in the name of a perverse anti-Zionism, this is a genre of violence against the Jewish community as a whole.

At a certain point, violence directed against Jews must be condemnable as antisemitism or else the term loses its usefulness. Judaism and Zionism are not the same, and anti-Zionism is not necessarily antisemitism, but neither is anti-Zionism a free pass to engage in antisemitic violence.

Noah Baron
Washington, DC

On “Zionism: A People Reborn”

While I agree wholeheartedly with the underlying sentiment in Eli Valley’s cartoon “Zionism: A People Reborn”—that the accusations of antisemitism against Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani are false, malicious, Islamophobic, and racist—I found the representation of the Zionist accusers unsettling. The decision to depict them as mentally ill, stuffed in a straitjacket, sweating and drooling, implies that Mamdani’s critics are driven by derangement rather than racism and Islamophobia, while simultaneously trivializing the dark history of mental health hospitals. Such institutions were long interwoven with the prison industrial complex, with patterns of abuse of intellectually disabled people and people with severe persistent mental illness, as well as Black Americans, women, and queer people. In this context, the straitjacket is not just a tool of restraint, but also of punishment and torture. It has a place alongside the noose as an object that symbolizes a shameful and violent history. Though I reject the racist remarks being made about Mamdani, I fear that the use of this imagery to refute political points we disagree with creates a slippery slope, reifying a desire for pathologization and punishment in ways that primarily redound to the detriment of marginalized people.

Ben Faulding
New York, NY

On the 2024 Winter Gift

As our 2024 Winter Gift, we sent our subscribers a print by artist Liora Ostroff, in the style of a traditional Jewish amulet containing text from Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s anti-war writing. Since we sent this piece of art, it has become the subject of controversy in a school district in the Chicago suburbs. Andrew Ginsberg, a Jewish high school teacher in Evanston, Illinois, was censured by Evanston Township High School (ETHS) for displaying the print on the door of his classroom. The district claimed that the print was offensive to Jewish students with “mainstream views.” The Evanston community showed overwhelming support for Ginsberg: Fifty people, including students, spoke out against his censure at the school board’s June 9th meeting, and another 500 sent letters to the school board expressing support.

However, the ETHS school board upheld the censure, issuing Ginsberg a formal disciplinary letter and maintaining the censorship of the print in his classroom. Many saw this as a capitulation to the right-wing organizations that brought the complaint: the Chicago Jewish Alliance (CJA) and the North American Values Institute (NAVI), an organization committed to combating “radical DEI & extreme social justice ideology.” Josh Weiner, a representative of both organizations who spoke at the June board meeting, admitted that “maybe on its own, [Ostroff’s] art is not problematic”; the problem is “what it implies to [Andrew Ginsberg].” Ginsberg said he plans to file a federal complaint for religious discrimination.

The letters below are about another matter entirely; some readers took issue with Ostroff’s use of the amulet form in what they called a secularized context. Below we include a few such letters as well as a response from the artist.

I am writing to register my disapproval at the 2024 Winter Gift. While I understand that there is a Jewish tradition of secularizing religious art, the shiviti amulet print fails on multiple fronts. A shiviti is an extremely sacred object, filled with holy names and psalms. As someone engaged in a Hasidic movement, the explicit replacement of the divine name with a mundane English word is quite off-putting. The piece uses the aesthetics of mystical practice without engaging meaningfully with it. The use of a faux Hebrew font for the English only adds to a sense of uncomfortable dissonance.

Your audience of leftist, metropolitan Yidn are increasingly rediscovering their spiritual tradition and finding ways to synthesize it with radical politics. Our mystical tradition is inherently radical and liberatory, but when stripped of its spiritual nature, that liberatory power also takes leave. In this moment of generational spiritual renewal, it would benefit your magazine to avoid pieces that remove divinity from our people’s sacred tools.

Atira Chaya Wiechmann
Brooklyn, NY

I’m writing to complain about the art you curated for this year’s winter gift: a secularized and sanitized spin on a shiviti amulet. In replacing liturgical verses and the names of Hashem with (frankly, boring) English text by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Liora Ostroff has de-Judaized the art form.

I appreciate that Jewish Currents is a historically secular magazine with a proud secular readership. However, this art isn’t just secular; it’s secularizing—and profaning—a sacred art form without speaking substantively to that interplay. Worse, it suggests that Judaism needs to be secularized in order to be sufficiently radical. The sad undercurrent here is that many radical Jews want to connect to our mystical traditions but have no idea where to start. Art like this severs, rather than fosters, that connection.

Misha Holleb
Brooklyn, NY

A response from the artist:

Shiviti amulets have a short and controversial history, just like the Sabbatean—not Hasidic—movement from which they arose. Religious authorities originally considered them profane and idolatrous, which speaks to the way questions of authenticity, blasphemy, and holiness are already inherent in the form.

Even if these amulets have now been enshrined in sacred tradition, the letter writers’ rubric for assessing their authenticity seems hazy. They take issue with the aesthetics of the “Hebrew”-style font. But to me, the font is a conscious nod to kitsch, which is often acknowledged as a hallmark of earnest, sentimental religious art. Similarly, the objection to the use of English words seems strange. Kaddish is recited in Aramaic because it was the spoken language of the time, and the rabbis insisted that daveners should understand their own prayer. I am reminded of a story told by the Ba’al Shem Tov, founder of Hasidism, about a child who does not know how to pray and instead recites the aleph-bet; his prayer is holy because it is sincere, and his earnestness is rewarded directly by God.

These letters also nod to the long history of Jewish artistic renewal, but do not engage with it. Others have found fertile ground in the shiviti: In “The Cult of Synthesis in American Jewish Culture,” Jonathan D. Sarna explores syncretism in Jewish folk art, offering the example of an 1861 papercut shiviti by Phillip Cohen that sets two American flags atop the traditional texts and motifs. As Jewish Currents contributing editor Maia Ipp writes in her essay “Kaddish for an Unborn Avant-Garde,” “At the very center of both Judaism and experimental art-making is a generative tension between modernity and tradition, between a commitment to the lineage that formed us, and the desire to see and represent the world anew.”

Finally, the letters’ accusation of “profaning” reminds me of tiresome controversies in the world of modern art, including debates around Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, featuring a crucifix submerged in the artist’s urine, or Chris Ofili’s 1996 painting The Holy Virgin Mary, which incorporates pieces of elephant dung. In response to accusations that he was profaning the image of the Virgin Mary, Ofili, a Roman Catholic with an earnest investment in honoring his own religious background, said, “I’m interested in ideas of beauty . . . and elephant dung in itself is quite a beautiful object.” While I do not feel that using the prophetic speech of a notable rabbi in a mystical format is profanation, even if it were, that would sit well within hallowed traditions of both Jewish and contemporary art.

Liora Ostroff
Baltimore, MD