We Need New Jewish Institutions

The Gaza genocide has made plain what many leftist Jews have long feared: that virtually the entire enterprise of Judaism—and nearly every organization charged with stewarding it—is infected with a voracious rot. Over the past 20 months, there is no sacred Jewish ritual that has not been performed by Israeli soldiers in Gaza, in the ruins of someone’s home or school, right before or after a slaughter. In the US, Jewish day schools bus children to war rallies, and concerned parents identify campus activists for deportation. Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) primes Donald Trump’s attorneys general to regard pro-Palestine activists as akin to ISIS, while other mainstream Jewish institutions dither about the arrival of authoritarianism so as not to disturb their donor base. Amid a torrent of images of children under rubble and desperate families gunned down while waiting for flour, Jewish leaders insist that we are the primary victims. They respond to recent attacks on Zionist gatherings with incoherence, affirming the fusion of Zionism and Judaism while repudiating the violent result of such a conflation. And it is not just the religious and institutional trappings of Jewish life that are implicated, but even those cultural calling cards that once seemed nonaligned. A shop in Boca Raton sells blue and white bagels to support war relief efforts in Israel; the Seinfeld sitcom fortune bankrolls a Jumbotron at UCLA broadcasting scenes of Jewish death from October 7th to students just trying to get to class.

Might this catastrophic failure of Zionist Judaism mark an opening for anti-Zionist Jews, a moment for us to step into greater influence, make our case for something new? Our ranks swell in response to the endless carnage: In May 2024, roughly 30% of American Jews—and nearly 40% of those under 44—said they would apply the word “genocide” to Israel’s actions, a term whose usage roughly corresponds with non- and anti-Zionist identity. And yet even some erstwhile sympathizers express doubt that we have anything to offer besides refusal. Quoted in a New Republic article about the breakdown of the Zionist consensus last year, the author Joshua Cohen—whose 2021 novel The Netanyahus seemed to exhibit discomfort with the moral compromises of Jewish nationalism—delivered a cranky dismissal of our ilk:

Most anti-Zionists are not going to be Jews in a generation. The vast majority of these Jews don’t speak any of the Jewish languages. They don’t know the Jewish texts or live in Israel. And if they’re going to have children, there’s nearly a 50% chance they’re not going to have them with Jews or raise them as Jews. For these Jews to oppose Zionism, for these Jews to have reserved for themselves as the final expression of their Jewishness the condemnation of Israel—I have to salute them, I might even bow down to them. That’s ultimate chutzpah.

It would be convenient to simply brush off Cohen’s chauvinistic rant, not least for its identification of anti-Zionism as uniquely empty, when it is contemporary Judaism itself that has been hollowed out in favor of a blunt nationalism. Any provision of blame must account for the fact that it is the Zionists who have been the primary actors over much of the last century of Jewish history, who have strangled our diasporic languages and disinvested from our cultural and spiritual life, who have made ignorance of Judaism the norm for Zionists and anti-Zionists alike. Even if, as Cohen suggests, this Zionism-as-Judaism reliably correlates with continuity, it would be fair to ask, amid unchecked slaughter and starvation in Gaza: Continuity of what?

And yet, perhaps surprisingly, Cohen’s critique of the Jewish left resonates with one that surfaces regularly and with a particular passion among a segment of our readership. These critics object not to the excoriation of Israel, but rather to our single-minded focus on it, to the neglect of other facets of Jewish life. Some of them were readers of the previous iteration of Jewish Currents, which regularly published Yiddish translations and sent out a daily email featuring important moments in left Jewish history. How reductive, they tsk, to pull from the great tapestry of our cultural-historical-political life, a single, sad thread. In this form, we are nothing but a mirror of the Zionist mainstream: Israel is still at the center of our Jewishness, only in photonegative, defined by renunciation rather than embrace.

I cannot deny the charge that our Judaism has been primarily one of rebellion. Indeed, even among those who insist on the principled separation of Jewishness and Zionism, I’ve noticed a tendency to cede ever more territory, to declare more and more of Jewish life contaminated or at least suspicious, with suspicion reason enough for withdrawal. I’ve seen some friends and comrades become increasingly skittish about Jewish left politics, out of discomfort with the way that even adamantly anti-Zionist formations remain responsive to a seemingly compromised Jewish subjectivity. But we do not have the luxury of withdrawal. If there was a sunny half-century where we could dissolve into Americanness—settle into disavowal, or not, with little imposition of meaning—it is definitively over. Our self-appointed leaders collude with the state to define our identities in service of fascism and genocide; in this context, abdication becomes indistinguishable from acquiescence.

But to effectively claim Jewishness toward the aim of liberation, we must develop an understanding of what exactly we’re claiming. This question is not, as irritated comrades sometimes allege, merely an expression of an idle, narcissistic identity crisis, but a material organizing problem, faced anew in the crafting of every collective statement or action. To know how to adequately respond, say, to the attack in Boulder on Jews at a march for Israeli hostages, to do so in ways that advance a new self-awareness in Jewish life and direct it toward just ends, we need clear answers to complex questions about who we are, who we are speaking to, and in what language. At present, we often find ourselves cobbling together responses from the desiccated Judaism we’ve fled and the broader anti-colonial movement we’ve joined, both of them useful, but insufficient in articulating a distinctively Jewish, left politic. The ability to synthesize these streams and others into something that feels rooted and right will derive from an investment in the content of radical Jewish life. In a reality where Zionists hoard the claim on authenticity, it is an uphill battle for recognition. Which means that to credibly wield political power as Jews, we will need the confidence to assert that what we are doing now is, in fact, Judaism.

All of this speaks to the need for new spaces, new containers for the exploration of anti-fascist Jewish life. The development of such spaces will make us stronger political partners, from the vantage of both strategy and sustainability: As Black activist, singer, and historian Bernice Johnson Reagon discusses in a 1981 lecture on coalition politics, in order to endure the dangerous, taxing work of coalition, it’s important to have a home, “a nurturing space where you sift out what people are saying about you and decide who you really are,” where “you take the time to try to construct within yourself and within your community who you would be if you were running society.” Johnson Reagon acknowledges the risk of ethnic nationalism in all home spaces—precisely the worry that puts many Jews off this work today—and warns that it requires vigilance to dispel. But, she insists, the risk doesn’t negate the necessity.

To be full participants in coalition work, it seems, we need—and deserve—a communal and spiritual life: to find our forebears in Jewish history, given and chosen, and forge connections with one another in the present—not at the exclusion of other comrades and friends, but as one form of relation among many. While we remain accountable to partners in this work—and to Palestinians in particular—we cannot outsource our approach to it to a broader movement that has neither a unified view of its use, nor an insider’s insight into its contours. If we mean to fight the weaponization of our identities, we will have to create a version of them we can fully inhabit. If we hope to weaken Zionism within Jewish communities, we will need to develop a substantial vision for contemporary Judaism; we will need to meet those who want an exit from the rot with something beautiful and real. We cannot ask them to jump and decline to catch them.

Where to start? Even for those who actively desire communities of practice, there is no clear answer. Last spring, Jewish Currents put out a survey asking people about their experiences leaving or being ejected from Jewish institutions over Zionism. A portrait emerges from the hundreds of responses collected in a matter of days: an anguished exodus from synagogues, summer camps, campus Hillels, and day schools; a brain drain of Jewish professionals—rabbis, educators, and administrators—afflicting every stream of Judaism from Chabad to Reconstructionism. The respondents speak reliably of loneliness, heartbreak, and a pervasive sense of dislocation. I feel ostracized and rejected by a community I’ve depended on for most of my life. Having a Jewish community grounded me; I feel adrift. I miss the singing; I practice alone now or occasionally with a few friends. It meant so much to me to sit in the synagogue where my grandmother sat. There is a spiritual void in my life. The alienation is felt most acutely by the already-marginalized: Jews in rural areas, Jews by choice, LGBT Jews, and Jews of color. It’s painful to not have a community to celebrate holidays with, to raise our children with, to study with. I miss it every day.

Where will they go now? In a November 2023 article in The Forward, Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the nominally pluralist Shalom Hartman Institute, could hardly contain his glee at the establishment’s opportunity to “unburden” themselves from the need to engage with the Jewish left, whose opposition to Israel’s brutal, collective punishment in Gaza put them definitively outside the tent. As Kurtzer wrote, they “will have no seats at any tables besides the ones they set for themselves.”

He’s right. We need new Jewish institutions. We need them to carry our politics, and also the other facets of our lives. We need them to discover who we are, and to put this discovery to use in the world. We need them not to exit Jewish community, but to join it in earnest, on our own terms. To transition from pockets of rebellion to poles of power.

No doubt, the imperative to create rival institutions is a tall order. As the historian Lila Corwin Berman details in her 2020 book, The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex, our current institutional landscape is the product of a vast consolidation of wealth after World War II and co-constitutive with the runaway capitalism of the neoliberal era. This has insulated Jewish institutions from the crisis of legitimacy wrought by intracommunal turbulence; they are rich enough to continue on without us—without anyone, save a few powerful donors—for a very long time. Fledgling left institutions, on the other hand, are coming up in a moment of economic decline, often led by younger Jews who lack their parents’ earning potential. They will not be able to build from the spoils of oligarchy—nor should they want to, given the anti-democratic implications of such a strategy.

But despite these limitations, a newer crop of institutions is emerging out of necessity. These formations are building on the power of the Jewish left’s one institutional asset, our essential political action organizations—both national, Palestine-focused ones, like Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and IfNotNow, and local base-building groups, like New York City’s Jews for Racial and Economic Justice and the Twin Cities’ Jewish Community Action—while starting to relieve them of the burden they’ve carried for too long, to be all things spiritual, cultural, and political to the wandering leftist Jew. Diaspora Alliance, a several-year-old organization dedicated to fighting antisemitism and its weaponization, may in time provide the intellectual basis for a replacement to the fascist-friendly ADL. Jewish Liberation Fund, now in its eighth year, is providing a new philanthropic model for the donor class, educating and reorienting funders to give Jewish social justice organizations the support they need. Meanwhile, last year saw the release of various flag-planting mission statements, from the revival of the international Jewish Labor Bund (“We believe the future belongs to a 21st-century socialism, not a 19th-century nationalism”) to a blueprint for a “diasporist community day school” called Achvat Olam, “rooted in love, diasporism, and the Torah of justice.”

Rabbis of the Jewish left have turned toward the pressing question of spiritual life. At almost 400 members, Rabbis for Ceasefire—created after October 7th to protest the genocide in Gaza—moonlights as an ad-hoc network connecting people to like-minded rabbis for pastoral support. (The nondenominational organization presently boasts more rabbis than the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association.) After limping along for the last several decades, American Council for Judaism, the 80-year-old anti-Zionist organ formed in reaction to the Reform movement’s drift toward Zionism, has been taken over by a new generation of leaders, many of them the children of Zionist Reform leadership. A recent course offered guidance in building your own Jewish community, to support the explosion of these efforts across the country. The 10-year-old Tzedek Chicago—one of only two explicitly anti-Zionist congregations in the country, along with Makom in North Carolina—doubled in size after October 7th, and has had to innovate to meet demand. Since they began moving services online during Covid, they’ve drawn members from all over the world; affiliated communities now meet locally in New Zealand and the UK while continuing to maintain their relationship with the Chicago congregation.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, dozens of anti-Zionist rabbis and other Jewish leaders have begun meeting under the loose auspices of a “Jewish Diaspora Movement,” aiming to support existing and emerging alternative communities. The questions to answer are formidable, as nearly every aspect of Jewish life requires rethinking: What forms of liturgy, practice, and theology do we inherit from the hollow husks of the various denominations in which many of us were raised? What is our relationship to Jewish languages—particularly Hebrew, but also the diasporic languages displaced by its modern development? How do we orient around myriad, vexed conceptions of peoplehood and the biblical relationship to the land of Israel?

The uncertainty extends even to the terms we’re uniting under. As I’ve learned in conversations with affiliated rabbis, there seems to be some consensus that “anti-Zionist,” while sufficient as a political identification, is wanting as a communal one, in that it describes us only in the negative without articulating what we are for. But there are also concerns about self-defining as “diasporist,” which some see as inadvertently reaffirming a “center” in the land of Israel. When I spoke recently to Providence-based rabbi Lex Rofeberg, he advocated for eschewing any such markers and claiming Jewish authority without qualification. “Instead of becoming the University Anti-Zionist Coalition or the Diaspora Collective or Jews for Doikayt, just call yourselves the Jewish Student Union,” he quipped. “Grab the reins.”

The urgency of such questions dramatizes the lack of resources or real estate with which to begin a reply. Perhaps we might eventually pay dues to a left Jewish “federation”—run through membership, not coercive patronage—which could redistribute funds to a network of communal projects according to need and demand. But for now, we will have to be open to working in imperfect scenarios, with what already exists. Though it seems clear that large legacy institutions like the existing local federations or Jewish Community Relations Councils cannot be infiltrated or reformed, it does not mean there are no communal resources ripe for the taking. Not surprisingly, younger anti-Zionist Jews have found the greatest success moving into aligned but diminished organizations ready for a generational handover, like the aforementioned American Council for Judaism or the current iteration of Jewish Currents. But we might also look to Zionist-coded spaces, synagogues chief among them, that are struggling to pass what they have to the next generation precisely because their version of Judaism has hit a wall. Can an inventory be made of such vulnerable institutions, and can we support aligned individuals and families—open to the discomfort and frustration of working across difference, and in it for the long haul—who would be willing to join up and make their way into leadership? Meanwhile, even new ventures may not require “new” resources. When we spoke, Lila Corwin Berman stressed cooperation with other communities as a potential answer to our present predicament. If we cannot buy a building, we can rent or borrow space in churches or rec centers. Berman also expressed hope that getting some of these ventures off the ground in a provisional way will spur a virtuous cycle: Once there’s proof of concept of this afterschool program or that minyan, some of the people currently patronizing existing institutions for lack of options will move their money.

Whether we’re speaking of reviving something old or creating something new, we’re inevitably talking about the provision of services, spiritual and otherwise. People need help educating children, navigating ritual, and burying their dead. Our small minyanim and chavurot cannot provide this lifecycle support, which means people will exit them at the moment they need them most, constraining their potential for growth without solving our original problem. But again, there are some available models. I’ve been imagining what it would look like to draw on the example of the International Workers Order (IWO), a federation of Jewish Communists that flourished from the 1930s until its demise by McCarthyism in 1954. The IWO offered mutual aid in the form of health insurance and medical clinics and created cultural mainstays like newspapers, singing groups, and social clubs—and, crucially, was open not only to Jews but to everyone. In fact, despite the Jewish character of the IWO, visible in its investment in the Yiddish press and Jewish schools and summer camps, at the federation’s peak in the postwar period, only a quarter of its nearly 200,000 members were Jewish. This mix of communal grounding and porousness was part and parcel of the Communist Party’s broader aim to harness the organizational capacity of identity-based communities—the trust and togetherness and affiliative structures—to serve a broader universalist politics. It is a powerful reminder that diasporic organizing untethered to a nationalist project need not be scattered or decentralized; indeed, in its most ambitious form, it won’t be.

Needless to say, any attempt to replicate this model, to offer services on a broad scale both within and beyond the Jewish community, would require an enormous amount of coordinated effort and expertise. Perhaps one present-day analogue—in terms of organization, if not aims—might be Chabad, whose emissaries around the world are taught to chart their course to indispensability, and thus self-sufficiency, in direct relation to a given constituency’s needs: A young community may need a preschool; an old one, a burial society. This analogy may also suggest, in a different way, the difficulty of bringing these models to bear on the work of the present-day Jewish left. The success of Chabadniks and 20th-century Communists alike appear inseparable from their full-time, sometimes messianic integration of life and purpose and organization; their steadfast fealty to “party discipline.” But the IWO, of course, had an actual party, and Chabad has its own messiah. There is nothing that provides this sort of anchor for the contemporary Jewish left, nothing that even aspires to. But if we commit to the incremental work of building institutions in our own image—to gathering our people and focusing them on communal tasks—we might become more anchored than we expect.

That commitment will require confronting a resistance to formal organization long pervasive on the US left. For instance, at JVP’s national members’ meeting in early May, I heard prominent guest speakers on various panels argue passionately and convincingly for a decentralized horizontalism. They spoke about how institutional hierarchies pervert social relations; how the need for capital makes organizations accountable to funders rather than communities; how nonprofits drain energy from movements and co-opt radical action while working mostly to maintain themselves. However astute these critiques of the “non-profit industrial complex,” I fear that this orientation is warding people off of the prospect of building infrastructure we can’t do without. Indeed, I only heard these speakers in the first place because a formal, hierarchical organization had the firepower to manage the logistical, programmatic, and security feat of a 2,000-person gathering in a moment of left retreat and escalating repression.

In his 2020 book A Time to Build, conservative political analyst Yuval Levin offers a useful defense of institutions, which he defines as the “durable forms of our common life . . . the frameworks and structures of what we do together.” I like this definition for how it clears away negative connotations and gets right to what is important about an institution: that it is structured, built to last, and aimed at some material, collective task. This last point is key: The problem with being a perpetual “outsider”—which Levin argues is the favored position in today’s political landscape—is that it delivers the moral high ground at the cost of any communal structure. People with political commitments are thereby isolated from the means of advancing these commitments into material aims, creating “an unusual and unhelpful distance between theory and practice in American life.” The void is often filled by the “anti-institution” of social media, which exacerbates the problem by incentivizing performative, individualistic modes over formative, communal ones. We outsiders remain pure, but powerless. We favor short-term thinking over slower and more deliberate strategies, since that is the only timescale our atomized or provisional formations can hold; this leaves us constantly reinventing the wheel and perpetually vulnerable to collapse, most often through interpersonal conflict and burnout.

While Levin’s case isn’t entirely assimilable to leftist ends—it’s clear that for him, institutions’ role as a moderating force is a virtue, not a flaw—I hear his prescription echoed on the other side of the political spectrum by abolitionist scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, hardly an advocate for the status quo. In a 2022 interview with Teen Vogue, Gilmore lamented that in the absence of “large-scale institutions” (with the noted exception of unions and the Democratic Socialists of America) “it’s hard for people to figure out, ‘Well, what can I do?’” Her advice: “Go into something that already exists, and do that work towards . . . helping to tip it away from reinforcing the system towards weakening the system. That’s infiltrating. Or innovate. If something doesn’t exist, make it.” In her recent introduction to Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin’s Imperialism and the National Question, she elaborates on the kinds of institutions we might look to as models, pointing to organizations like Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement, a land reform group that boasts 1.5 million members across the country, or National Nurses United, an American union of 225,000 that routinely steps beyond its supposed remit to connect the dots between workplace exploitation on the one hand and deportations, police budgets, and the colonization of Palestine on the other.

Like the new Jewish institutions I am envisioning, these examples are not political parties, but Gilmore seems to think of them as “proto-parties,” just as essential to the practice of world-making. They are the tributaries that feed the party form (think of Black churches’ relationship to the Democratic machine). And they are themselves venues for the practice of politics at its most grounded: the tedious maintenance of systems and relationships, the repeated collapse and coming to agreement—or else not, picking up the pieces and moving ahead. By entreating us to study these resolute, but flexible models, characterized by “constant political education and debate,” Gilmore offers us a way of seeing institutions not as timid, rigid bureaucracies nor as constraints on political possibility. On the contrary, the aim of such organizations is to “make big things,” to reorder the world on the level of land and resources and social relations. In this context, our shrinking from organizational ambition is a self-defeating form of erasure. “History’s protagonists,” she writes, are the ones who “revise social reality. Therefore, part of the struggle is defining—becoming—history’s protagonists, repeatedly.”

In our quest to become such protagonists, the left has relied disproportionately on its street movements. But such efforts—noble but scattered—have failed to translate into real power. In If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, journalist Vincent Bevins spoke with veterans of protest movements around the world, from Egypt to Ukraine to Brazil to Korea. He reports that organizers across locations and contexts came out of their various revolutionary attempts—defined by “horizontally structured, digitally coordinated, leaderless mass protest”—convinced of the need for greater hierarchy, structure, and formal representation. Without this orientation, even when popular uprisings of the last decades were able to create a power vacuum, it largely benefitted “the groups that had already formed coherent, disciplined organizations before the uprising began.” Toward the end of his book, Bevins quotes an unnamed Egyptian revolutionary who lamented the consequence of importing the Western left’s disdain for structure in protest movements around the globe. “In New York or Paris, if you do a horizontal, leaderless, and post-ideological uprising, and it doesn’t work out, you just get a media or academic career afterward,” he said. “Out here in the real world, if a revolution fails, all your friends go to jail or end up dead.”

Perhaps the American left was insulated; it’s not anymore. The intentions of the Trump administration are plain. At the time of writing, Andry Hernández Romero and Neri José Alvarado Borges are in a concentration camp in El Salvador. Mahmoud Khalil and Leqaa Kordia remain in concentration camps stateside. American mayors and judges and congressional aides have been apprehended by federal officers. The National Guard is on the streets of LA. In many of the most meaningful ways, we are already too late to stop what’s coming, the building being slow. Never mind, let’s begin.