Transcript

Mari Cohen 00:00

Hello everyone. Mari Cohen, Jewish Currents associate editor here. Back in February, we hosted a virtual conversation between me and Rabbi Andrue Kahn, executive director of the American Council for Judaism, and we talked about the one-time anti-nationalist politics of the Reform Jewish Movement in the US and about what it might look like to revive their spirit today. We’re sharing it this week for our podcast listeners. Please enjoy, and thanks for bearing with us on the real-time Zoom audio.

MC 00:36

Thank you all so much for joining. My name is Mari Cohen. I am associate editor at Jewish Currents, and I’m really excited for this event about the history of Reform and anti-Zionism and the American Council for Judaism. So roughly two centuries ago, the Jewish Reform Movement first took root in the United States, carried over from Germany by new Jewish immigrants. Shaped by the context of the Enlightenment, increased European Jewish emancipation, and soon the revolutionary fervor of Europe in 1948, the founding American Reform rabbis grappled with how to fashion a Jewish practice responsive to modernity, one that would allow practitioners to be both Jews and full American citizens. This project included an embrace of universalism and anti-nationalism, which led the early Reform movement to adopt a strong anti-Zionist position. As more Reform rabbis came around to Zionism in the 1930s, those who remained anti-Zionist held tight to their position and would go on to found the American Council for Judaism in 1942, which would, for a time, be the country’s most influential Jewish anti-Zionist organization.

MC 01:46

Today, it’s clear that the Reform movement has profoundly shaped American Jewish life. Not only is Reform currently the largest American denomination, but by encouraging Jews to have autonomy in choosing which parts of the tradition to adopt, Early Reform was also responsible for influencing conservatism and reconstructionism to become the movements we know today. Yet Reform’s early anti-nationalism and anti-Zionism are less present. Most of today’s Reform leaders and congregations say prayers for the State of Israel on the bimah, encourage American political support for the state, and marginalized pro-Palestine views. Currently, however, the American Council for Judaism is undergoing a renewal process attempting to re-institute Reform’s anti-nationalist tradition in American Jewish life.

MC 02:28

Today, I’m very happy to be joined by Rabbi Andrue Kahn to talk about this. Rabbi Andrue Kahn is the executive director of the American Council for Judaism. He received rabbinic semikhah in 2018 after five years of study at Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion. After ordination, they served as associate rabbi at Congregation Emanuel of the City of New York until 2023, then served as the associate director of YAHAD in adult education at Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope, Brooklyn. His edited volume, the Sacred Earth: Jewish Perspectives on Our Planet was published in June 2023 by CCAR Press. So I’m going to start by giving Andy a very easy, not at all broad question, which is: It would be great if you can tell us a little bit about the founding of the Reform Movement in the 19th century in Germany and then in the US, including a little bit about the historical and cultural context that shaped its creation. Why did Reform take root at that moment? And why was Reform so influential for early American Jews? And what were some of the distinctive features of its American iteration?

Andrue Kahn 03:35

First of all, thank you so much, Mari, and everyone at Currents, for having me tonight. I’m really excited to be here. And the thing that I think is most important to understand about the roots of where Jewish Reform came from is the experience of emancipation. And you don’t have the experience of emancipation unless you have not been emancipated. So the response in what is today Germany that led to Reform was a desire to be integrated into society as co-equal citizens of the cities they were living in and the towns they were living in. It really started with Moses Mendelssohn, who was an incredibly brilliant philosopher, and especially as a Jewish person in his time, the level of esteem he gained at that time was kind of unheard of. And he was the first to really make the argument that Judaism is a religion alongside Christianity and has the same positive impacts on citizens as Christianity. It develops their moral core and teaches Jews what it means to be a good citizen. This was during the time when all of these new forms of democracy and trying to understand what a good society could look like or were coming to be. And his argument was integral, really, to a sense that Jews could be co-equal citizens.

AK 04:56

After him, in Germany, came Abraham Geiger, who took what Mendelssohn started—Mendelssohn lived his life as what we would view today as an Orthodox Jew. Abraham Geiger grew up that way but was part of that first wave of German Jews that started realizing, “Maybe I can make more decisions for myself.” Prior to emancipation, you have to remember, rabbis really controlled a whole lot of what a Jewish person’s life looked like—not just the ritual stuff we think of today but all aspects of life. And emancipation gave Jews the opportunity to choose really what they wanted to do Jewishly. There was some backlash to that, and Orthodoxy started really going right. Reform tried to do the opposite thing. It tried to create a form of Judaism that people who wanted to be fully integrated into society could adopt and enjoy as fully integrated Germans.

AK 05:49

This then moved over to America. America was a very different setting, though. American European Jews never really faced the kind of discrimination in America that their ancestors faced in Europe, and the way in which religion functioned in America was quite different than it did in Europe. Things were much more centralized around the state, and the volunteerism of American Jewish religion was core to what led to the incredible creativity of Reform Judaism in America. There’s lots of markers of what that was, including changing the language of prayer from Hebrew to German, and then eventually to English in America; beginning to use instrumentation, particularly the organ during services as a way of speaking to the aesthetic needs of the Jews of the time; and mixed seating. It was very early on that genders were integrated in seating as a way of showing a complete adoption of modernity.

MC 06:47

And one of the early hallmarks of this American Reform that was a big manifesto or expression of these ideas came in 1887, when American Reform rabbis laid out the tenets of American Reform ideology in the Pittsburgh Platform. What kind of vision did this platform promote, and what was the historical importance of what was laid out in it?

AK 07:08

It was really a revolutionary document. It changed the shape of what all forms of Judaism in America would look like, whether it was in adopting aspects of it, viewing it as a norm to push against, or giving a sense of possibility to people that they can be creative about what their Judaism could look like. So what was happening here was taking what started with Abraham Geiger in Germany and codifying it, sort of, into a set of—I wouldn’t really say prescriptions, but values that were core to what it meant to be in this process of reform, to be bringing Judaism into modernity as an option that would be attractive and interesting and valuable in the individual’s life. Prior to, again, emancipation, you didn’t really have a choice. You were a Jew and you lived by Halacha. When folks came to America, they really did have a choice. The volunteerism of American religion allowed people to shift religions or have no religion if they wanted.

AK 08:12

One thing that I think is just kind of a little snippet that I think is very funny is we tend to think that synagogue attendance for Shabbat has dropped off over time. But the volunteerism of American religion has always made rabbis—especially in the more progressive movements— from the beginning need to try to figure out how to capture the attention of the Jews in their community because there are so many options for people here. And the Pittsburgh Platform was the kind of clarion call for this new attempt at making a very attractive, ecumenical, humanist Judaism.

AK 08:47

One thing to really think about is, as I said before, Mendelssohn was the first to talk about Judaism as a religion. This conception was core to the Pittsburgh Platform, but it’s kind of a double sided idea. So one, it’s that it makes it understandable to your non-Jewish neighbors what you’re doing. Judaism, in some ways, becomes akin to Christianity, and so the Christians will understand, “Oh, when they go into the synagogue, they’re doing something similar to what we’re doing in the church,” which makes Jews seem less different. This was a big part of it. Another big part of it though, is again, that volunteerism piece that’s codified into the constitution. If Jews are voluntarily Jews based on religion, that means if things go wrong here, you can opt out. That kind of optionality in America around religion made Judaism as a religion kind of a safety valve for American Jews. This was part of why, in the Pittsburgh Platform, they said very explicitly that Jews are no longer a nation; Jews are a religion.

AK 09:52

Another thing that I think is really interesting in the Pittsburgh Platform is that God plays a major role, but when they talk about God, they talk about a God idea. So even at that point in time, they were already playing with these different conceptions of what God could or should mean, as opposed to this very kind of paternalistic or patriarchal idea of the man in the sky revealing the Torah. There was a much greater spirituality to it, even at this point. They were also putting forward full acceptability of biblical criticism, which even today might seem kind of radical. The idea that you can pick apart the Bible, find the different authors within it, understand that it’s a human text, not something that was revealed fully on high. So that’s something that’s really important.

AK 10:38

I think the final piece—and this is the thing that I think most people think of when they think of Reform Judaism, is that the mitzvot—the sacred acts of Judaism—the only ones that were seen as binding anymore, according to the Pittsburgh Platform, were the moral ones or the ethical ones, the things that govern our behavior around how we interact with other people and interact with the world. The more aesthetic rituals became no longer binding. They were only binding insofar as they inspired people to behave properly, to embody those moral mitzvot. And so people often take that to mean that all of those mitzvot were thrown out—tefillin was thrown out, tallit was thrown out, Kashrut was thrown out. But they were very careful how they phrased it. That was true, like they stopped doing those things, but the way they phrased it was they are only binding if they are meaningful to the people and the age that people are in, which keeps the option open for readopting them. If we, in a later era, find meaning in them, then we’re free to do them. I think this is a piece that gets missed a lot. But yeah, this document was Reform as a philosophy as opposed to Reform movement. The movement was a very nascent thing at this point. Its institutions were just starting, and this was a statement that really spread far beyond just one movement.

MC 12:00

We have a couple questions that are just clarifying that maybe we can quickly touch on. There is a question about what it meant that Jews were emancipated in Europe.

AK 12:10

So Jews just didn’t have equal rights. Jews as Jews were still governed by the law of the land to a certain degree, but it was mostly put in the hands of the rabbinic authorities to oversee all aspects of life from a legal framework as well. Emancipation meant that was no longer the case. Emancipation meant that Jews were co-equal citizens to their Christian neighbors, which meant they had an option as to how they were going to practice their Judaism or if they were going to even practice it at all.

MC 12:40

Great. Second question is just about if this document kind of defined Jews as a religion, what were they before?

AK 12:45

Yeah, I mean, that’s a really good question. I don’t even know what the language would have been because I don’t think race was quite developed yet in that way, but ethnicity certainly wasn’t. So they were just seen as a different people. And at the time too, this was during the major empires of Europe, right? So tons of different peoples were living together under the same empire and that was normal. Nation states didn’t exist as we think of them today. So yeah, there probably seen as a “volk,” right? Like just a different kind of people.

MC 13:13

I think maybe then what we can get into is the Pittsburgh Platform and the early Reform movement. How did it relate to the burgeoning Zionist movement?

AK 13:23

It’s really hard to imagine from our perspective today. The Zionist movement at that time was like nothing. It was seen as kind of this weird little idea that they didn’t even have to address. So when we think of the Pittsburgh Platform saying they no longer seek a return to Palestine, it wasn’t even actually particularly reactionary. They didn’t really care about Zionism because it seemed like a weird and kind of crazy idea. Their concern in America was primarily being a part of this new project that it was America and what it would mean to be fitting into this new project as Jews, because they were still working on defining what it meant to exist in America as a Jew when we don’t even really know how to define ourselves. This is what the Reform movement, I would say, is still trying to figure out. But Zionism wasn’t a major force, and even into the 20th century, once it started becoming a little bit more popular as Eastern European Jews began to make their way to America, it was banned at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, the main school that trained Reform rabbis. Professors got fired for espousing Zionism. So there weren’t a ton of them that were trying to do it, but early on,it was first just kind of looked askance at as a weird idea, and then actively banned.

MC 14:45

Maybe you can talk a little bit more about what motivated this anti-Zionism or suspicion of Zionism.

AK 14:51

So again, people weren’t even really thinking that much about Zionism in the 1910s. Louis Brandeis was a Supreme Court Justice, Jewish Supreme Court Justice, and he attempted to be a major mover for Zionism in America and famously said that to be a good American Jew, one must be a Zionist. At that time, a number of different groups who today we easily consider white, like the Irish, the Greeks, Italians, were starting to come more into American whiteness. And for Brandeis, one of the things that was allowing these groups to become white in America—he was positing that them having a homeland that they were interested in maintaining connection to and felt pride in was core to their ability to become white. And so, that was part of what was going on with Zionism.

AK 15:46

The German Jews who were the first that came over with Reform didn’t think any of that was necessary and wanted nothing to do with a nation state outside of America. They wanted to be fully American and fully Jewish, and they had some hint of pride at German culture. For instance, when they first came over, the services were all in German. But by the time Zionism started coming to America in full force, that was kind of done. And the primary reason that they didn’t want anything to do with Zionism or the idea of Jews as a nation was they felt that the privilege that they had been able to attain here in America—because they had done very well here—was, in part, because there was no sense that they were anything other than American. They practiced a different religion, but there were so many different kinds of Protestants, and so Judaism was just like that. And the idea of adding on this national piece was very troubling to them.

MC 16:45

I think today there is a common historical narrative that is often quite critical of these early Reformers with the idea that they were elites, German elites, who embraced this anti-nationalism and the anti-Zionism, not out of a sense of justice but because they wanted to promote this assimilation and that they wanted to end distinctive cultural practices, including those of the less-well-off incoming European immigrants who they might have been scared made them look more different to their neighbors. Just an example of this kind of thing. You’ve got turn of the century Chicago-based Reform Rabbi Emil Hirsch’s controversial promotion of Sunday rather than Saturday services for Jews. And I’m wondering how you respond to this characterization of that early Reform anti-nationalism and anti-Zionism.

AK 17:37

So actually, I think it misses a lot. The word assimilation itself, I think, needs to be troubled a little bit. Assimilation implies a complete melding into something and losing any level of distinctiveness whatsoever, I think. And that was never, ever the point of Reform Judaism. There was never a goal of just completely losing all aspects of being Jewish. That’s also why the Society for Ethical Culture was created. Some of you may be familiar with this organization that has schools still in some places like New York and, I think, in Chicago. It was created by the son of a very famous Reform rabbi who went to rabbinical school and decided, “Actually, I’m just going to get rid of all of the Jewish stuff, take the ethical culture piece, and start my own new movement.” So really, in some ways, the Society for Ethical Culture was truly assimilationist, but the Reform movement never went that far.

AK 18:36

I like the language of integration a little bit more than assimilation. So Emil Hirsch, who you mentioned—and it wasn’t just him. There were a number of people that were promoting a move of services to Sunday. But this wasn’t just to make us look Christian. It was for a few different reasons. One: Functionally, in American society, it was easier to get people to come to services on Sunday because of how society was organized around the Christian week. And another part of it was the advent of Sunday schools. So when I was growing up at a Reform synagogue, we had religious school on Sundays and Hebrew school on Thursdays. And so, Sunday school became a cornerstone of Reform synagogues. Again, not just to ape the Christians, but because it was the day in which kids could be free to go to school and parents were already coming on that day to take their kids, so you’d have services on that day. Another thing that I think is really important to recall about this is that in a more traditional setting, you have services every day. It’s not that having services on Sunday is weird, it’s just that not doing it on Shabbat becomes weird when your Reform has already led to people only praying on Shabbat. So it’s this interesting movement of continuing to try to shift around the pieces to figure out what will match the needs of the Jewish community that you’re serving best. That was one of the primary underlying values of Reform going back to Germany. So it was less about necessarily trying to look like Christians just in order to look like Christians, but more trying to meet the people where they were and with what they needed as they needed it.

AK 20:23

Another piece that I want to add to this with regard to the kind of American nationalism that is associated with this move is the last piece of the Pittsburgh Platform. It was very controversial. A lot of the rabbis didn’t want to put it in, but it was Emil G. Hirsch that got it in. It’s a commitment to participating in solving the problems presented by the contrasts and evils of the present organization of society, striving to regulate the relations between rich and poor. So even if, to a certain degree, there is an integrationist sense within the Reform movement at this time, there’s still this idea that society needs to be improved, society needs to be challenged, there are evils within it that it’s actually our role to work to fix. It’s almost like paleo-liberal patriotism of being able to very easily acknowledge the problems in society as part of feeling a part of it.

MC 21:19

Yeah, that’s a really interesting reframe. I want to move us a little bit farther into the 20th century and talk about how some of this stuff evolved over time. So by the 1937 Columbus Platform, it’s clear that the Reform movement had warmed to Zionism. They said, “We affirm the obligation of all Jewry to aid in Israel’s upbuilding as a Jewish homeland by endeavoring to make it not only a haven of refuge for the oppressed but also a center of Jewish cultural and spiritual life.” And so why this change at that time, and what were some of its big consequences for Reform?

AK 21:57

Yeah, that’s a really good question. And it’s an interesting history because still, at this time, Zionism was a minority opinion throughout American Jewry and throughout the Reform rabbinate. But a small number of Zionist rabbis had come into positions of power, both within the Reform movement as it was and in a—I don’t really want to call it an offshoot, but I don’t quite know what to call it. There was a Reform rabbi named Stephen S. Wise that started his own school in New York called the Jewish Institute for Religion. It, over time, joined with HUC, and now all of the Reform campuses are called Hebrew Union College/Jewish Institute of Religion. But he started it as a reaction, to a certain degree, to HUC’s really adamant stance on being anti-Zionist and began to try to normalize Zionism in a more pluralistic sense.

It also was a school that was pluralistic writ large. He wanted it to not just be for people who had accepted the Pittsburgh Platform as it was but people that might identify as Orthodox but wanted to go to a school that was more pluralistic.

AK 23:10

And that helped start moving the movement in that direction, along with, again, a handful of rabbis who came into seats of power in the Central Conference of American Rabbis, which is the union for Reform rabbis and elsewhere. Steven S. Wise was a very powerful voice in his time, and there was another rabbi, Abba Hillel Silver, and then I believe the rabbi that was the president of the CCAR at this time was Joseph Heller. And they really pushed to make an opening for people who were Zionist. The language itself is very vague, if you look at it. An obligation of all Jewry to aid in the upbuilding of a Jewish homeland. So this doesn’t say state. It doesn’t say to move there. It doesn’t mention Zionism. But this was a concession in hopes that it would help stop what felt like might be a coming schism. And one thing that became very clear in this era was that once you started making those concessions towards Zionism, it was a very short matter of time until that organization would become Zionist—if not in name, in governance. And that’s ultimately what happened.

AK 24:28

One other thing that’s really important to note about this time period: There was an argument going on in the Jewish world, not just the Reform world, as to whether to support the creation of a specifically Jewish military in British mandate Palestine that would have its own Jewish flag and all of that. The anti-Zionists and even the non-Zionists were very uncomfortable with this because once you have a Jewish military and mandate Palestine that has its own flag, the idea that Jews are not a nation becomes harder to maintain. That’s the first sign of building a nationalism that, as everybody knows, in the ’30s, was really rising up all over. And a conference was called in 1942 around this issue and other issues called the Biltmore Conference. So just five years later, in which what was once a significantly more moderate Zionist leadership under Chaim Weizmann shifted to the kind of Zionism that David Ben-Gurion was undertaking, which was much more intensive. He really believed that it was a responsibility to bring all Jews to Palestine to establish a Jewish homeland and what the Biltmore Conference referred to as a Jewish Commonwealth, which really meant that Jews would have certain rights that non-Jews wouldn’t. And that point, in 1942, is what really led to the breaking point in the Reform movement around Zionism.

MC 25:56

A clear, important part of that breaking point is the founding of the American Council for Judaism. Can you talk a little bit about that moment and what the ACJ’s role and approach was?

AK 26:07

Yeah, so there was a handful of rabbis who were really, really committed to the values of the Pittsburgh Platform, not just from an integrationist standpoint but from a true sense of belief in the moral values that are inherent to that platform and the idea of Judaism as a religion and absolutely not a nation. Again, not just from an integration standpoint, but because of this wider Reform philosophy, this philosophical tradition was very important to these folks because it’s this very rich, beautiful understanding of Jews having been purposefully, by God, moved all over the world in order to bring about justice wherever they live through ethical monotheism. And they believed in this. They didn’t want to let go of it, and the Columbus Platform was asking them to let go of it.

AK 26:56

Then after the Reform leadership went along with the Biltmore Conference, these rabbis hit a breaking point and said, “This is the end of the Reform Judaism we believe in if we allow this to continue.” So they had a conference where they met and decided they needed to build their own organization to try to stave off the tide of Zionism that was very clearly taking over the Reform movement. A big part of their platform, too, was that at this time, the American Jewish Committee had been nominally non-Zionist and had been committed to maintaining that as well. And as they started heading toward accepting Zionism—not even necessarily becoming Zionists themselves, but making room for it—these rabbis saw what happened around the Columbus Platform and knew that it was just a matter of time before it would become an overtly Zionist organization and decided to create an organization that would confuse everybody by using a very similar acronym, the ACJ versus the AJC that was explicitly anti-Zionist.

AK 28:00

As they move forward, there’s a little bit of differentiation between the rabbinic leadership and the lay leadership. Much of the lay leadership was really driven by a desire to maintain the self understanding of being Americans of Jewish faith, that voluntaristic idea that I was talking about before, for various reasons. One: I think it’s just what they were comfortable with, what they liked and what they knew. And two: because they were very concerned with the issue of dual loyalty; that if there became a new Jewish nation state, an ethnostate that purported to speak on behalf of Jews worldwide, that they would be seen as loyal to that state alongside, or even maybe more so, than to America. And they really feared this from their perches of having been able to integrate so well into American society.

AK 28:52

The rabbis, particularly Elmer Berger and Morris Lazerow, for them, it was partially theological, but they also saw what the Zionist movement was attempting to do to the Palestinian people. And they were very clear on that. They knew, at that moment, that what was being fought in World War II was about to be undertaken in Palestine—this idea that a certain group should have rights in a state because of their nationality and that people who didn’t have it would not have those same rights, and they were fighting that tooth and nail in the early ’40s. They weren’t even particularly against Jews going to Palestine as long as what was going to be established there was going to be a fully democratic state where all people, regardless of their nationality or religion, would have equal rights. Obviously, that’s not what happened, but if you look back at their writing from that time, it really does feel prophetic. They really saw the direction that was being taken and were trying to fight it based in their belief in a need for human rights for all people.

MC 29:59

Super interesting, and I think this next question is going to get a little bit at that rabbinic/lay distinction in the ACJ. But first, I just want to get to this question about the racial component of the Reform relationship to American-ness and to Zionism. There’s a sense, I think, that some opposition to seeing Jews as a separate race or a separate people came from this desire to protect Jews against racism, but that also meant ensuring their incorporation into white America, as you talked about earlier. And indeed, the political scientist Matthew Berkman has written about how certain American Council for Judaism chapters and officials in the mid-20th century embraced what he called a racial conservatism. So they wouldn’t get involved in American civil rights struggles or support Black liberation because they didn’t want to accentuate Jewish separateness. And so, how did these Reformers in the early era and also around that mid-century time relate to American whiteness? And what was the relationship between that position and their position on Zionism?

AK 31:02

So it was quite varied. For instance, if you go back to the beginning of the Reform movement in America, you had Isaac Mayer Wise, who was a major rabbinic figure that founded Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. He founded what is today the URJ, and he founded the CCAR. He was a major mover in building up what has become the primary institutions of the Reform movement. And he was not an anti-slavery. I don’t know that one would call him pro-slavery, but he was very much a moderate in attempting to maintain the respectability that you’re describing. At the same time, there was another rabbi on the East Coast, David Einhorn, who was deeply seated in the radical reform of Abraham Geiger in a way that Isaac Mayer Wise was not, and he was an ardent abolitionist, so much so that there’s tales of him—because he would not stop preaching anti-slavery in Baltimore, he got chased out of town and had to move north to New York.

AK 32:03

This is true all over the Jewish world. We love to really talk about Abraham Joshua Heschel marching with Martin Luther King, and the head of the Reform movement was at that march too, which we never talk about strangely—Maurice Eisendrath. But there were lots of Reform rabbis, Zionist and not, all over the country who were uncomfortable with allying in the civil rights movement. This happened again with the Vietnam War and with the reinvigoration of a socialist ideal that Martin Luther King was undertaking and that, frankly, Abraham Joshua Heschel was undertaking. So it’s always been a very complex calculus, and one of the things that I think is important to understand about the American Council for Judaism—and this isn’t to absolve any of that—but one of the things that was integral to the American Council for Judaism’s platform was the idea that no single individual or organization can speak on behalf of American Jews, which speaks, to a certain degree, to its decentralization and allowing these different chapters to make these choices on their own.

MC 33:11

We obviously don’t have a ton of time to go through 70 years of history, but how did we get here? I know I was raised Reform in the late 20th and early 21st century, and I definitely did not get the kind of Reform, anti-nationalist education. Instead, I think I got a pretty typical Zionist education—you know, making passports to Israel in Hebrew school, that kind of thing. Why aren’t we really talking about this history and Reform anymore? Why don’t we have that orientation towards Zionism?

AK 33:41

Yeah, it’s a complex question, and people have written large books, like Jeffrey Levin and Marjorie Feld, on how we got here. So there are two major things. One: There was the establishment of the state. Right. The ACJ continued to push for greater acknowledgment and need for human rights or Palestinians after the establishment of the state, but that kind of made them pariahs, and the movement overall decided once that fact on the ground was created, there’s no point in arguing against it anymore. And so, there was this move by many people toward a kind of soft non-Zionism. Rather than think about it as a live question, just kind of accept it as it is. Know that you individually aren’t particularly interested in it, and you’re not going to move to Israel, and that’s that.

AK 34:28

But I think all forms of nationalism are totalizing, right? Like, if you believe in Jewish nationalism, you need everyone to believe that that’s true, and if they don’t, they are an enemy. We see that playing out constantly, and I think that that’s inherent to all forms of nationalism. You have to believe the mythos of that nation or you’re denying that nation’s reality. So because of that push within the Jewish world, along with the way in which a new narrative was drawn of the Holocaust leading to the necessity of the state of Israel—even though we all know that Zionism began well before the Holocaust and the settlement of the land began well before it—that new historiography really took hold in the Reform movement, of this history in which the Second Temple was destroyed, the Jews were forcibly displaced, which is also unclear historically, and then thousands of years pass, the Holocaust happens, and then Israel happens, right? That was the narrative I was brought up with. I think that that’s what was taught in many, many Reform synagogues. That took hold because of the way in which that totalizing Jewish nationalism was made to overtake the classical Reform stance.

AK 35:49

The last piece was what happened in the ’50s and ’60s, which was the American relationship with Israel shifted enormously because of the Cold War. Labor Zionism was the norm in Israel. It wasn’t clear in the Cold War whether Israel was going to go Russia or America. After the Suez Crisis and then particularly after the Six Day War, it became very clear that Israel was a functionary for America in the region. And that’s another piece of the integrationist factor for Zionist Reform Judaism—and this is also part of what led to the downfall of the ACJ—was that Rabbi Elmer Berger didn’t stop speaking out. After the Six Day War, he denounced what Israel had done, said that it was an act of aggression on their part, and that they had taken land that was not theirs. And he also perhaps made the mistake of saying that the people on his board, some of whom were very powerful business people in America, agreed with him. And some of them didn’t like that. It created a big rift in the organization and he left. And after that, the ACJ’s north star started moving a little bit.

MC 37:01

What is this vision for reviving the ACJ today? What might that look like in this current moment, and how might that compare to other anti-Zionist organizations that do exist, like Jewish Voice for Peace?

AK 37:12

So Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow—there are other organizations like JFREJ, too, in New York—have done a really good job of creating political activism and community around political activism for Jews who are dissenting from the mainstream of American Jewish institutional life. But no one’s really helping to provide those same Jews with resources to build their Jewish practice, whether they phrase it as spiritual or religious or cultural. There aren’t any organizations out there trying to help people build these alternative structures for Jewish life that center the same values as the political commitments they have and may be enacting through JVP, or IfNotNow, or other organizations, and give them the tools to have control over their own Jewish ritual life, whether that’s building a Shabbat community for themselves and their friends, building a Torah study practice, just trying to figure out how to organize their own Jewish communal life alongside political activism. This is really the beginning of what we’re trying to do with the new ACJ. I’m hoping that there will be Reform synagogues and Reconstructionist synagogues and other denominational, non-denominational synagogues who want to partner to help provide space and resources to folks looking to build this kind of anti-nationalist Judaism and that we will be able to help provide the training, resources, and education for people who do want that control over their own Jewish life.

AK 38:45

Another angle that we’re taking is trying to help revise the narrative of what it means to be Jewish at all. There is a ton of really excellent scholarship out there by people like Matt Berkman to help give Jews a different view on their history and what it means to be Jewish in America in this day and age that isn’t fully colored by the Zionist bent of our mainstream institutions. So that’s another angle. And then,we’re hoping to figure out how to best meet this gap we’ve really discovered for these folks that are feeling completely alienated from their synagogues—whether they be Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, or other—due to their synagogues’ nationalism and help them find and build this new layer of American Jewish life.

MC 39:32

Yeah, I think this is quite exciting given that we know that there’s a real void of, I think, options for a lot of people who want Jewish community and want ritual and don’t identify with the Zionism at their synagogues. I’m wondering if maybe you could—this relates to a question that we got about why root this in the Reform tradition or, obviously, ACJ was originally Reform, is ACJ Reform now? Maybe you could talk a little bit and clarify about how the project will and won’t interact with the Reform tradition. How much of this is oriented toward people who have Reform practice versus people who are Conservative, Reconstructionist, non-denominational, Orthodox, who also want that kind of support.

AK 40:10

So the way that I’m thinking about it is that it’s really about rooting in the Pittsburgh Platform as inspiration. And this platform wasn’t just a Reform document; it was an American Jewish document that led to the creation of all of these different denominations. So my goal isn’t necessarily for people to be Reform, to identify as Reform, but what I am reaching toward for inspiration for this new moment are these versions—and it is versions, right? Like these different philosophers and theologians presented it differently—of a Jewish self-conception that predates Zionism and that gives us something to root into that doesn’t require us to adopt the assumptions core to Zionism, of a sense of peoplehood rooted in nationalism—the idea of a singular Jewish nation that we all belong to. These earlier forms of understanding what it means to be Jewish and practice Judaism don’t fall in line with that, and I think that that is something that people are looking for: a new way to understand how to be Jewish and what it means to be Jewish today that doesn’t rely on these same kind of nationalist tropes, even if you are anti-Zionist.

MC 41:21

I guess one question is: How does this relate to the problem of our larger institutions, or rabbinic institutions, being run by Zionists, which is the same thing that happened earlier in history? There’s obviously a fight, I think, at most of these rabbinical schools over Zionism, where a lot of the students coming in aren’t Zionist. We just published an article on the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, but how would a movement like this grapple with that problem of the rabbinical institutions not really being on board?

AK 41:55

I think one of the things that is being lost sometimes in this discussion—and this is true all across the board in the Jewish institutional world, especially the liberal Jewish institutional world—is that, to a certain degree, these institutions are beholden to the people that choose to go to them. All of the rabbinical schools are struggling to get enough students, and so being able to support people who are interested in going to rabbinical school, are interested in gaining leadership positions, with ways to articulate and understand what it means to do and be Jewish in this day and age without Zionism and without nationalism is the real mission of this new step in in the ACJ’s history. So it’s not necessarily to make more trouble, but it is to help people be able to articulate what they are rather than just articulating themselves in opposition to Zionism. And I think that will also help with the transformation that I think is inevitable within these institutions because the vast majority of people, the kinds of people that I see deeply committed to the future of Jewish life in America—the kinds of people that want to be involved in their communities on a religious level—tend away from Zionism, in my experience, especially in the younger generation. And having a place to learn the skills that isn’t going to require you to give lip service to Zionism, having a place to get resources to help you understand different ways to be Jewish that don’t revolve around Zionism, I think, is really important in this moment, and that’s what we’re trying to do.

MC 43:30

I think that’s a great place to end and it’s also, perhaps, a hopeful vision, which is important right now. So I really appreciate that. Thank you for being here, Andy. I think this conversation is going to continue. Obviously, you can check out the ACJ website and get involved there, and obviously, we’re going to continue covering these issues as Jewish Currents.

AK 43:47

Thank you, Mari, so much for your questions and being in conversation. Thank you, Jewish Currents, for hosting us and thank you all for spending this time on your Thursday night with us. I appreciate it.

MC 44:08

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of On the Nose. If you like our podcast, please give us a rating or review. And to access events like my conversation with Andy in real time, become a Jewish Currents member at JewishCurrents.org/membership. Thanks, and see you next time.