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About halfway through this year’s Passover seder, I experienced something like a crisis of faith. It wasn’t the fault of the seder itself. So many of my dear ones were there—Jews committed to Palestinian liberation, all doing their best to snatch this ritual from the jaws of a Zionist Leviathan that seeks to swallow Judaism whole. We asked the question of the simple child—What is this?—with the weariness of those who know full well what it is, how it’s been used. Someone brought up Operation Biur Chametz—the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Haifa, executed on the eve of Passover and named for the pre-holiday ritual of ridding the house of leaven. I thought of the settlers performing the seder hours earlier at the border with Gaza, a show of their will to permanent invasion.

There have been many other historical circumstances, some of them dire, in which Jews told this origin myth about victimhood, violent triumph, and the specter of a promised land. Even when the ritual was performed in powerlessness, we asked, was it always leading here? What does it mean to repeat it now, in unison with the Israelis perched at the Gaza border like vultures, in a reality that bends toward their desire? In another moment, this discussion would have been enough: the pat point of the seder, to ask questions. But for me, this year, it wasn’t. When the Israelites of the story have become Pharaoh’s army, every symbol and ritual act is inverted; a story of liberation becomes a technology of enduring oppression.

For a long while I have been so focused on the strategic argument for filling the husk of our inheritance with new meaning that I had not stopped to actually feel the emptiness. Now I was sodden with it. As the seder fell out of focus around me, it suddenly seemed that the only way to rescue it (and here I scoff at myself for thinking that the seder is what needs rescuing in a moment like this) would be to treat it like a sunken wreck: Only once we dove into its depths, learning every room and drawer and cubby, could we return to the surface with treasure, changed enough by the circumstances of its demise and the process of retrieval to set us on another path. In the face of this multigenerational task, the exhaustion hit hard and all at once: Did I care enough to do this work, useful but still tangential to Palestinian liberation? Am I committed to being there to receive the divers’ Torah? In an essay published in the fall of 2021, scarcely two years before the genocide began, I wrote: “Jewishness must mean justice for the Palestinian people or nothing at all. If it is to be drained of meaning, then I will be, too, for a time, and will have to rebuild myself on sand.” Here I am, wandering the desert.

The timing of this onset of exhaustion is as much personal as political: After eight years at Jewish Currents, this is my last issue as editor-in-chief. The conventional wisdom is that there is never a good time to leave. And still, this moment feels particularly ominous, an ever-deeper nadir in the past two and a half years of relentless Israeli and US death-dealing. There is death in Gaza and the West Bank; death in Tehran and Qom and Isfahan and Minab; death in southern Lebanon and Dahiye and the Bekaa Valley. In the heart of empire, the left barely marches against war for fear the only outcome is our own sore feet.

Into despair’s void, demagogues of the right, newly energized against Israel, take up residence, ricocheting across predatory platforms designed for misery. To some in the Palestine movement, the anger of these newfound “America First” advocates comes as a relief; perhaps they can do what we on the left could not. Meanwhile, their nonstop chatter drips hatred into the cultural bloodstream—of women, trans people, immigrants. And Jews, of course, though this lands differently after the genocide, the Epstein files, the Iran war. As Israel kills with impunity and diaspora Jews wave its flag, as gas prices rise and American troops die in a war only Netanyahu and AIPAC seem to want, I can feel the world growing tired of us. And perhaps tired, too, of distinguishing between “us-es”; why should they fight for a distinction between Jews and Zionists that our so-called Jewish leaders have all but vanquished?

After October 7th, I wrote about the ways that relationships between left Jews and Palestinians were being tested by sometimes differing emotional responses to the Hamas-led attacks. In the US, leftist Jews overwhelmingly held their ground, channeling any ambivalence into action against the genocide. But there were also some defections (including a very public one from this magazine), aggrieved by a sense of the left’s callousness toward Israeli death, and, beneath that, by the apparent confirmation that Jews were, in some familiar and fundamental way, alone.

It seems to me the Jewish left is facing another hard and delicate moment. While we must not confuse the discourse on the internet with the conversation in our organizing spaces—and though we cannot trust that what Elon Musk and his ilk want us to see is reality—monitoring Jewish Currents’ social media lately does provide a window into some concerning trends. There are days when the Groypers find us, hose us with their flip malice. But mostly, it’s an exercise in sorting projections, as people with diverse backgrounds and politics shadowbox with Jewishness after genocide. Sometimes, they don’t even register, despite strong context clues, that we’re on the left, that we oppose the horrors described in our headlines; it is worse when they do, when the critiques, mostly in bad faith, nonetheless cut to the heart of what we’re trying to do.

Logging on to the magazine’s account—and, I imagine, to any account concerned with Palestine—means seeing what the tech overlords have sanctioned in this arena. Divestment campaigns and calls to action are suppressed, replaced by bombast with no other outlet. To spend a few minutes a day scrolling there is to learn, from a variety of sources that can no longer be charted on any settled political spectrum, that Jews are responsible not just for this American war, but for all the American wars going back more than a century. It is to read about the unique evil embedded in the Jewish religion, one intertwined with pedophilia, chattel slavery, the murder of Christian children and indeed the Christian god. It is to become party to debates about the extent to which those killed at a Hanukkah event on a beach in Australia had it coming. The impression—and it is just that, an impression, squishy and diffuse—is that Jewish identification itself has become suspect, evidence of latent Zionist loyalties. To discuss any of this in the frame of “antisemitism” is to validate the suspicion; all too predictably, decades of anti-antisemitism initiatives concerned only with crushing those who tell the truth about Israel have left few avenues for credibly intervening in a spoiled discourse.

To be clear, right now this phenomenon mainly consists of a bunch of social media posts. Touch grass and it vanishes. And still, I know what it’s like to swallow this sludge day in and day out, to try to locate yourself within it, to test it against reality, to look for evidence of its marginality and find it boosted by someone you respect or thought you did. It is not lost on me that my alienation from the seder comes after months of consuming a portrait of Judaism—a tradition that has produced countless worlds and lifeways we can scarcely imagine—fixed to the present depravity of its most powerful emissaries, themselves adherents of a Jewish supremacist ideology that co-opted the antisemitism it sought to counter. Months spent seeing the faces of Tucker and Owens and Fuentes plastered to my timeline like wallpaper, beamed in by an ugly algorithm. It’s lonely. And I worry about that loneliness, because it is a Zionist victory in itself, evidence of their forcible claim on us and the solidarities suffocated by their grip. I worry about the Jewish left’s ability to capitalize on mainstream Jews’ intensifying ambivalence about Zionism in an online environment that manufactures this loneliness; I worry even more about the resilience of our broader movements if (when?) it leaps offline. Disavowal of Jewishness, of the Jewish dimension of the struggle, begins to look more and more attractive in light of these pressures. But the desire for disavowal is a desire for purification antithetical to the messy business of organizing, infused with risk and compromise. This is especially true if one seeks to organize against Zionism as a Jew, a prospect predicated on a modicum of relation, however attenuated.