Transcript

Arielle Angel 00:00

Hello, and welcome back to On the Nose, the Jewish Currents podcast. I’m Arielle Angel, editor in chief of Jewish Currents, and I’ll be your host for today. A few weeks ago, there was a Conference on the Jewish Left at Boston University, and I was surprised by a thread that came up again and again, over the course of the day, about the words Zionism and anti-Zionism and whether these words were the best words to organize around, considering that so few Jews seem to actually mean the same thing when they say these words. For me, I use the word anti-Zionism to describe myself. Obviously, the magazine is very comfortable using these words, and defining them, and defining them at different moments in history and also in the present. But that is not a shared experience among the Jewish community as a whole, and so what does it mean to organize the Jewish community in light of that?

AA 01:05

So today, to talk about that, I have three guests who were also at the conference and who spoke in some capacity or another about this topic, either as part of their presentations or in response to questions. Ari Lev Fornari is a senior rabbi at Kol Tzedek in Philly. Ari Lev, thanks for being here.

Ari Lev Fornari 01:24

Thanks for having me.

AA 01:25

Dove Kent is a longtime organizer of the Jewish left, former executive director of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice and currently the interim executive director of Diaspora Alliance. Hi, Dove.

Dove Kent 01:36

Hi, Arielle. Thanks for having me here.

AA 01:38

And Fadi Quran is a strategist and organizer. He’s a senior director at Avaaz, a global civic movement with 69 million members, and he’s been arrested multiple times by Israel and the PA for organizing civil disobedience to disrupt the occupation.

Fadi Quran 01:52

Hey, it’s great to be with all of you today.

AA 01:56

And we have Fadi visiting from Ramallah right now. So let me just set the stage here. There’s been a lot of polling that just came out—and in fact, it’s very interesting because Jewish institutional polling used to never ask about the question: Are you a Zionist? Are you an anti-Zionist? And so, we used to have to infer from different questions that were added to different polls where people were. I think it’s just a sign of the times at all that these polls have started to ask. So a Jewish Federations of North America poll from last year—that they only just released—came out with some very interesting (but I would say very confusing, in some ways) data. Basically, 88% of Jews believe Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish democratic state (and we’ll talk about that statement in a second). 6% said they’re not sure, they don’t know, and 7% said no. At the same time, only 37% identified as Zionist. This is across all age groups. 18% were not sure, 30% said “none of these,” 8% said non-Zionist, and 7% said anti-Zionist.

AA 03:06

So obviously, this is a very confusing set of data. I mean, on the one hand you have all a large percentage of Jews—almost nine in 10—saying they believe in a Jewish and democratic state. On the other hand, you have a minority of Jews actually identifying with the term “Zionist.” There are other polls that came out around the same time. Actually, somebody at the conference—Noam Shoresh, who is a scientist at the Broad Institute—sent me the 2025 Greater Boston Jewish Community Study from the Combined Jewish Philanthropies, and basically under half in that study identify as Zionists, one-fifth identify as anti-Zionist (18%), and the remaining 37% are uncommitted to identifying with either ideology. Just to say, in both of these studies, the numbers for Gen Z go up significantly. So, in the Boston study, you have 38% identifying as anti-Zionist.

AA 04:08

Something crazy from the Combined Jewish Philanthropies study is that 35% of anti-Zionists said that it’s important for Israel to be the nation-state of the Jewish people. Like, what is going on there? 35% of the anti-Zionists surveyed in the Combined Jewish Philanthropies from Boston said that they think it’s important for Israel to be the nation-state of the Jewish people. Like, I don’t know what being an anti-Zionist means if it doesn’t mean being against the nation-state in particular—the political Jewish entity in the land. So a lot of really weird things going on. You have the JFNA, the Federation, panicked about the fact that so few people are identifying as Zionists and leaning on the fact that nine in 10 say they support a Jewish and democratic state. They’re basically saying: Jews don’t really know what this means. And also that the Jews who are uncomfortable with the term Zionist also report believing that Zionism means a number of different things, including that Jews are superior to Palestinians, that Palestinians don’t exist as a people, and also that Israel should include Gaza and the West Bank. Oh, and also that Zionism includes supporting what the Israeli government says or does. And the Federation chief impact officer, Mimi Kravitz, writing in JTA, basically is like: Of course that’s not what Zionism means. And then says: For us, Zionism means supporting the state of Israel, and the Israeli people, and uniting the Jewish people behind this shared commitment. If you can split those hairs, let me know.

AA 05:48

So I want to start, Ari Lev, by going to you because you did a similar kind of polling of your congregation. So I wanted you to tell us a little bit about your congregation in particular and how that might add to these studies.

ALF 06:04

As Arielle said, I’ve been the senior rabbi of Kol Tzedek, which is a Reconstructionist congregation in West Philadelphia, and I’m in my 10th year here. For the first five years, I would say, I minimally talked about Israel/Palestine and that was because my hire was controversial. I was very out to the congregation as a member of the Jewish Voice for Peace rabbinical council and myself identified as an anti-Zionist, and I understood that the congregation wanted to be sure that I wasn’t coming here to politically manipulate and turn Kol Tzedek into an anti-Zionist congregation—whatever that might mean. But starting in 2021, I felt that my censorship was irresponsible and actually publicly apologized to the congregation for censoring myself in talking about the injustices and the occupation of Palestine. Since then, we’ve been doing some data-driven work to try to understand who we are as a congregation so that we can responsibly speak and understand how we can collectively learn (and also unlearn) Zionism as a congregation.

ALF 07:08

And so, I’m very grateful to some of the board members who are themselves data scientists. Sam Shane and Abby McCartney are two among many who have been conducting community surveys every other spring. In the spring of 2025, we surveyed the congregation, and to give you a sense, we have 420 households, which represents a little over 800 people, and around 600 of them are adults over the age of 13. And so, we allowed anyone over the age of 13—anyone B’nai Mitzvah age—to respond to the survey, and we had over 200 respondents to the survey, so about 30% of congregations. So we consider that to be statistically significant and kind of representative of the congregation.

ALF 07:51

What we found is, in some ways, similar to what the JFNA, the Jewish Federation survey found, which is that the way people identify and what they believe are not necessarily obvious or consistent. Some interesting things: 90% or more agreed with the statement: We call for democracy and self-determination for all people who live in Israel/Palestine. What was interesting to us about that is, I don’t know how that squares with the idea of a Jewish democratic state. I don’t know if that’s the same thing, statistically, or different. What does it mean to call for democracy and self-determination for everyone? Are people imagining that as one state, as two state? And we intentionally didn’t ask about that because we’re not trying to make political policy. Now, 90% or more of Kol Tzedek has never agreed on anything, so this was fascinating to us. We gave them the chance to answer these questions: Do you identify as a Zionist? 4% of our congregation clicked “Zionist.” Do you identify as a liberal Zionist? 13% of the congregation clicked that. Non-Zionist: 25%. Anti Zionist: 42%. “I’ve been active in the ceasefire movement”: 50% of the congregation checked that—so more than any individual identity label.

ALF 09:06

“Labels are hard, I can’t put myself in a box”: 27% of people checked that. “I’m interested in learning more”: 47% of people checked that. “I have family or personal connections in Israel”: 41%. When we broke down the demographic, we cross-referenced ideas with the identities, and we thought we might learn like: People who have family or personal connections in Israel, maybe they’re more likely to be liberal Zionist or Zionist. We thought: Oh, maybe people in the older generations—maybe people over 50 or 60 are more likely to identify as Zionist or liberal Zionist. That’s actually not what we found. We couldn’t find a single demographic way to make sense of the data. We also found that people checked conflicting boxes. Some people checked “Zionist” and “anti-Zionist.” And one person actually wrote this incredible thing because there was a comments box. Someone wrote: Yes, I really do feel like both a Zionist and an anti-Zionist. I am a Zionist due to childhood conditioning and fear of what might happen to Jews worldwide without a Jewish homeland, and I’m an anti-Zionist due to my desire for justice for Palestinians. Another quote that comes: I’m one of the liberal Zionists, but also, these words have no agreed-upon meanings, so I also checked “labels are hard,” and I’m one of the people who also checked “active in the ceasefire movement” and a member of IfNotNow. And I appreciated the ability to express that nuance in the survey.

AA 10:29

I mean, look, in all of the studies, the categories that are winning are the “don’t know, not sure.” That’s a very important metric for what we’re looking at. I just want to pull out two things in what you said and then bring it to Fadi and Dove. I mean, first of all, obviously because you are an anti-Zionist rabbi, and it’s West Philly, your congregation leans left. So this isn’t a demographic of the entire Jewish world, but it is also almost like a way of looking at the left-leaning side of the spectrum and showing, actually, how much diversity there is, which is interesting. And then also, you pulled out—and I think it’s so important—the Jewish and democratic state question.

AA 11:14

Mira Sukcharov did a study and asked, in Haaretz in 2022: Do American Jews really know what Zionist means? And she says: When I asked in my survey of American Jews whether respondents identified as Zionist, a majority, 58%, did. Only 10% identified as anti-Zionist and another 12% as non-Zionist. When she said, “Zionism means a feeling of attachment to Israel,” you get similar numbers. But when she said, “Zionism means the belief in privileging Jewish rights over non-Jewish rights in Israel,” respondents’ support for Zionism plummeted. Only 10% of respondents said they were definitely or probably Zionists. A full 69% said that they were probably not or definitely not a Zionist, according to this definition. Obviously, the question on my end is like: Is it just embarrassing to answer a question saying that that’s what you want? Like, are you prioritizing, again, your understanding of Zionism over the reality of Zionism willfully, at this point? I think, basically, people are probably answering these questions on the JFNA study because they don’t have that many available options. If you say “Jewish and democratic state,” you could project all kinds of things onto that, and it’s the only option for saying, “Should Jews live there?” or “Should Jews stay?”

ALF 12:36

But it’s also the only option for saying democratic. Like, there isn’t another option to say: I think it should be a democratic state.

AA 12:41

Totally. I want to bring Fadi and Dove into this. Now we’ve set the stage with a lot of polling, a lot of information. What the fuck does all of this mean about what we do? What do you hear in it? Fadi, I’m going to start with you.

FQ 12:55

This explains a lot, to be frank, in terms of the confusion over the term, and also in terms of the different positions that have been developing and evolving. The way I view Zionism—and I think for many Palestinians—it’s not about how the term is defined academically, it’s about the behaviors that it leads to. I think this is where I think we need to begin, which is: Regardless of how Zionism has been understood, how it’s been defined, how it’s been branded in many places, what it has led to is a genocide on the ground. What it has led to is the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. What it has led to is a system of apartheid, and a system of apartheid and ethnic cleansing that has only gotten more and more extreme as people’s—especially Israelis, in this case—definition of Zionism and defense of Zionism has increased. And so, if we are to define this term by the behaviors, it’s a completely different conversation than the one we’re having here. And I wanted to start by naming that.

FQ 14:03

The second piece, also, as someone who deeply believes that we need to understand how the Jewish community relates to this definition and engages with it, from both a strategic perspective but also because oftentimes, we need to change narratives and stories in order to change the status quo on the ground—I think at the core, it feels like Zionism is largely now defined as this triangle of fear. This triangle begins with the factual truth—that Jewish people have been persecuted, that Jewish people continue to be persecuted in many different spaces—and it argues from that: that this will continue, that the world will always persecute the Jewish people. Antisemitism will always be there. From that tip of the triangle, it goes to the argument that the only way for the Jewish people to be safe is for there to be a nation-state for the Jewish people, where they are the supreme group. That state can be democratic, etc., etc., but they need to be the supreme ethnic group in that state: demographically, legally, by all means, the supreme group in that state. And that’s the only way for Jewish people to be safe.

FQ 15:21

And then, it tells every Jewish person—this is the argument that Zionism makes politically now—that your role, if you don’t want to be persecuted, if you don’t want to be attacked, if you want to be against antisemitism, etc., your role is to always defend this state. That comes above all else. It comes above your religious values as a Jew. It comes above your social values as a Jewish person. It comes above your individual values as an individual. It comes above any type of other lesson from Jewish history—that’s secondary to your responsibility to defending Israel. If you don’t do that—if you don’t send your kids to the army, if you don’t send your kids to AIPAC trips to Congress, or you don’t go yourself, or if you don’t donate to Israel and your synagogue, etc. If you don’t do any of the things expected of you to serve this nation-state, then you are not only betraying Israel per se, you’re betraying your own people, and you’re putting them back at risk.

FQ 16:25

At the core. I think that’s how Zionism functions today. I call it a triangle of fear because forget what it has led to in terms of us, the Palestinian people. It requires every Jewish person to feel always afraid, to feel that any type of critique of Israel is an attack on their existence, to feel that they will always be persecuted, and this state is the only thing that can defend them. Which is just a fallacy. I mean, we’ll talk about this later, but there are a million ways to create a safer world, a better world for all people than the belief in an ethnic supremacist state. But in the imagination of many Jewish people, this is kind of the triangle that they live in, and it’s very terrifying to leave that triangle. It’s also made very costly. It’s terrifying, internally because you’re acclimated so that leaving that triangle means you’re putting your people at risk, but it’s also that you’re made to pay a cost if you step outside of it. I think all the numbers that were mentioned by all of you indicate to me that Jewish people of all ages, of all groups, of all congregations, are trying to escape this triangle of fear. They’ve seen the behavior Zionism led to, and they’ve seen how Zionism has made them feel themselves—made them feel more fearful and more isolated—and they’re searching for ways to escape it, but they haven’t been given a very clear escape route.

AA 17:46

Well, I mean, I was not heartened by these numbers. First of all, I’ve been saying, most everywhere, that I think that we have 30% of the community, maybe as many as 50% of the younger generations of the community. Just because you have a JEI poll that 30% of Jews believe it’s apartheid; 25% call it genocide. This was before the genocide in Gaza. So I was really estimating that we have 30% of the community, when actually, the numbers are much lower. What I do think is very clearly shown is that the word Zionist has been problematized—that people are less likely to identify with it, which is a win. But the belief systems that underlie Zionism don’t seem to have been dismantled. Just the sense of “I’m not sure.” And obviously, there’s a lot to exploit in that space, but that work has not been done, as you say. Dove, I want to ask you: What does that mean for our strategy?

DK 18:51

Yeah, I think that when we are talking about who’s on our side, I don’t think that the dividing line in a coalition for Palestinian rights should be between anti-Zionists and liberal or progressive Zionists, who, as these surveys are showing, as Rabbi Ari Lev was saying, these groups altogether share about 80% of their values, if not more. So, I think that the dividing line should be between people who believe in the political rights and human thriving of Palestinian people and those who don’t. That’s actually the primary political wedge that should exist in the Jewish community on this. Speaking to the point you were just making about what shifts are happening, I think that if anti-Zionists want to bring liberal Zionists into coalition, the polling is showing that every way you cut it, there is increasing openness to wrestling with the struggle of the realities on the ground and that the organizing challenge is to get people to talk about those material issues and out of what could be called the feelings conversation. So in general, I think that we need to avoid getting dragged into endless debates about what Zionism could, or should, or might have been. If we are going to have this conversation—as Fadi, you were saying—we need to ground our discussion in the material realities rather than contingencies.

ALF 20:25

I think it’s important to say that I think most Jews and most Israeli Jews are actually unaware of what you’re calling, Fadi, the behaviors of Zionism, or the lived reality. I think it’s systematically hidden. You can spend Shabbat in Jerusalem and have no idea what the occupation in Bethlehem looks like. It’s only recently that people are beginning to question—I think somewhat because of social media and somewhat because of the genocide in Gaza—if Israel’s actions actually really are undemocratic. And so, I have a lot of empathy, as someone who was socialized Zionist and went through the propaganda machine. I mean, I became B’nai Mitzvah on Masada, and I went on March the Living in high school, and I went on Birthright in college. Like, I really feel like I’ve been through the machine, and it’s important to me that Kol Tzedek, as a congregation, be a place where people can hopefully unlearn Zionism because there aren’t a lot of places where American Jews can actually ask questions and unlearn Zionism. One of the things I think the ceasefire movement did is it actually offered new language for a new kind of organizing that supports what Dove’s saying about moving that wedge. When we did our own survey data, what was really interesting is that a lot more people volunteered in ceasefire than identified with any either political affiliation, organization, or identity. It was a way to say: The movement is bigger than these particular words. And if we’re going to be powerful enough to end the occupation and to make material change for Palestinians, what we need is a movement that’s bigger, I think, than these ideologies. And I think it exists. I think we’re in a moment of tectonic shift, where it’s actually really possible.

AA 22:07

I do find this challenging, and I’ll tell you why. First of all, our liberal Zionist leaders, I call them 30k-nicks. Like they waited until 30,000 Palestinians were dead to call for ceasefire. It’s not because they didn’t know it was happening. They weren’t ignorant to this. Obviously, I think we need to distinguish the leaders from the congregants, but these are also people who are getting tours of Area C and the West Bank every year, going on delegations with J Street, etc. They’ve walked on the segregated streets in Hebron. They know what is going on. Their priorities seem to continually break with the priority of a Jewish state with a Jewish demographic majority as opposed to Palestinian human rights. Do they also want Palestinian human rights? Yes. Is there a willingness to confront this in any real way or give anything up for it? No. That’s what it looks like when I’m looking at leadership.

AA 23:06

Are people in the same place? I don’t know. Can we say the same thing about what they do and don’t know over the last two years of genocide? I don’t think we can. I do believe that these polls show that they are low information. The ignorance is deep and manufactured, but also not exonerating on some level. And so, the question for me is what it actually would mean to wage a minoritarian struggle in this community. If we look at what Donald Trump did in the Republican party with roughly 30% support—now, that is the dominant mainstream. If we look at what the settler movement was able to do in Israel with less than 30% support—I mean, these are obviously extremist movements that we don’t think are awesome, but what it says to me is that a small group of committed people who know what they believe and who are going for it can actually win quite a lot of power. And for me, when I use the term anti-Zionist in organizing, I may not be able to draw the biggest amount of Jewish partnership, but I can, first of all, draw some partnership from outside the Jewish community. It’s definitely a signal to Palestinians and other people of what the politics are and whether we are coalitional partners. But also, it signals to the people who already know where they are. I mean, it sounds like the people who are answering that they’re anti-Zionist are somewhat committed because that’s why there’s a smaller number there than people who identify what’s happening as genocide, or apartheid, or etc., in those polls.

AA 24:46

So, I just want to like push back that there’s like an all-openness because some of what we’re seeing is emotional. Like not wanting to say, “I actually don’t care about Palestinians,” but not wanting to give up certain kinds of belief systems. And we have to also recognize there’s more going on in these polls than just the confusion. There’s also priorities happening.

FQ 25:10

Yeah, I totally agree, especially about the need for defining a new pathway forward, and organizing others, and giving clarity to others to join that front. Especially that you have the younger generation kind of grasping for. I, as a Palestinian—the amount of young Jewish Americans and Jews from other diasporas reaching out to me consistently, saying, “We’re done with the system, and we want to move forward.” Don’t get me wrong, there are many great organizations that are working in this space that we can push people to, but it hasn’t fully solidified with a clear ideological framework, with a clear organizing method, going beyond non-violent community organizing into something more political, more institutional. So, I think the opportunity there is huge.

FQ 26:05

I would love to have a study that asks the question: What led those who were liberal Zionists—those who were committed to this and shifted over the last few years—what was that process for them? What was the logic that went through their minds? Especially those who are of the younger generation. When we look at former oppressive ideologies that existed, it actually didn’t require that the individuals who had those, let’s say oppressive or harmful ideologies, all let go of them. They just had to dislike them enough to not feel like they had to defend them anymore. And that’s actually a big signifier. If you study liberation movements, one of the biggest signifiers that your oppressor is weakening is how many people within the society of the oppressor—even if they don’t stop being racist—feel like racism is not worth fighting for anymore, feel like it’s not worth defending. I didn’t see anything looking at that polling. But what I imagine that polling is telling us is maybe people haven’t shifted ideologically, but they’re definitely losing their will, their belief that they need to fight for Zionism, and what Israel stands for today, and so forth, the way they would have three years ago, or the way they would have 10 years ago. That’s where I get my hope from, Arielle, is these numbers definitely show that there’s a loss of excitement in defending this ideology, and that’s a crucial change.

ALF 27:37

That feels significant to me, and one of the things I imagine—I’m curious if you can speak to this—is when I think about the end of apartheid in South Africa or the end of slavery in the US, it’s my sense that white South Africans and white slaveholders had to, in some ways, have a change of heart and be part of that—be part of the dismantling, ultimately. And so, when I think about the movement to free Palestine or to develop a free and democratic Israel/Palestine, I’m thinking it’s going to also require Zionists. And those Zionists can either—maybe it’s because they no longer are defending the ideology, or come to understand its limits, or come to disidentify with it. But I’m curious, I’m like: We want to create a movement big enough in my mind for Zionists and anti-Zionists. And I’m wondering if in your study of social movements, if that’s true because that’s a hypothesis I’ve been holding.

FQ 28:27

That’s a great question, and I think you definitely need a subset of those societies to have a change of heart and to join the liberation struggles, whether that’s in the civil rights movement, the slavery movement, etc. You do need a subset to have that spiritual awakening of values. At the same time, just to be frank here, you don’t need everybody to have that spiritual awakening, but you need everyone to move from this mindset of: I’m willing to fight for this ideology, I’m willing to like fight for racism, or I’m willing to fight for the continuation of colonization to this. You know what? I was so convinced of this idea. I don’t think I’m that convinced right now. My ego’s too big to say I’m against it, or that I was wrong, and so forth, but I’m going to shift my life. And crucially—and I think this is where the transformation comes from—that they understand that not fighting for this oppressive ideology is going to get them into a life and a situation that isn’t massively risking them—that they’re not losing everything. And I think one of the things that Zionism actually consistently tries to convince many Jewish people is the counter of that, which is: If you give up on Zionism, you are going back to the Holocaust. So, you are right that we need the spiritual transformation, value transformation. It’s also like, we’re never going to get everyone, and it still works in liberation struggle if you don’t get everyone.

AA 29:58

Yeah. Ari Lev, I think one of the uncomfortable things here is that you have one example of South Africa without force, but in a lot of other examples, they were beaten in wars. I mean, that’s just the fact. In Israeli public opinion right now, you have a very hardened public opinion in one direction, and I think the idea that the way that this is going to get fixed is that Palestinians need to wait until even a critical mass of Israelis see them as human beings. Like yeah, at that rate, they’re going to be doing land acknowledgments and apologizing for the genocides and the ethnic cleansing. There has to be some way of also saying: We are fighting this.

DK 30:39

I wanted to actually go back for a moment. The question of: Do people who belong to the dominant group need to have a change of heart for the overturn of an oppressive system? Again, there’s different histories on this, but for the most part, the answer is no. It is part of different stories of liberation, but by and large, the people in power do not have to have a change of heart for the overturn of colonialism or another oppressive system. So, I think that this is actually where it gets into a question about what a Jewish future is going to look like in the world. And that’s where I think some of these questions around what is happening within the Jewish community, around the understanding of Zionism and anti-Zionism, and our understanding of values is critically important. Because I think what we all have been saying—and what we’re seeing not just on the left, but very much on the right—is that anti-Zionism is increasingly the position that is being taken in the US, and there are two different ways in which this can happen. One of the ways is an anti-Zionism that supports Palestinian liberation as part of the struggle for the dignity and the well-being of all people (and includes Jews in that vision), and one that uses antipathy toward Israel to stoke antisemitism as part of a racist, authoritarian, and ethnonationalist worldbuilding.

DK 32:04

Those are the two different visions of anti-Zionism that are rapidly increasing in the U.S. today, and so, I think that it is necessary for the American Jewish community to get on board with an anti-Zionism—or with whatever we’re going to call a Palestine liberation politics—that is for the human rights of all people—Palestinians included, Jews included—to make sure that that is the vein that actually takes hold in the American psyche instead of the vein of anti-Zionism that is also deeply, deeply antisemitic and that puts American Jews in danger. And then, the question about: What portion—if there is one—of the Israeli population needs to be on board with Palestinian liberation in order for that to occur?. I think that is a very different question. And so, I think that we need to be thinking about: When are we trying to enact change for what’s happening here in the US? When are we trying to enact change for the lived reality of Palestinians? Those may be two very different political trajectories and decisions.

AA 33:10

Yeah, I think that is true. And to be frank, I’m not talking about Israelis in this conversation or in this podcast. What happens with Israelis is a completely different question. They are in a different place. If these polls that I read in the beginning were done with Israelis—I mean, they have been done. They’re terrifying. You have a super majority who want to ethnically cleanse Palestinians, period. So, there is still a level of cognitive dissonance happening in the American conversation that is not happening in the Israeli conversation. And again, I’m not certain that that cognitive dissonance is actually real. I think it is real for some people, and for other people, it’s a cover. It’s trying to maintain the liberalness at the same time as the Zionism and choosing the Zionism, but not being able to say so. In some cases. Now, I don’t think we can approach our organizing in a way that is as miserly, I guess, as my feelings about that—and they are feelings. This is my hunch based on what I’ve seen. I think, especially, for example, if you’re a rabbi but also if you’re an organizer, that there needs to be a way of allowing people the space to grow. Otherwise, what are we doing here? If we’re not allowing people the space to grow, literally, what is the point?

ALF 34:29

And someone allowed me that space.

AA 34:30

Me too. I did all the things you did, and I was 30 years old before I stopped being a Zionist. It took a long time.

ALF 34:36

And a lot of grief. Part of how we need to disentangle ourselves from what Fadi’s describing as the triangle of fear is giving people spaces to grieve. It was honestly devastating for me to unlearn Zionism because I understood, first of all, the depth of the lie that I had been told—the kind of spiritual betrayal I felt. What I had contributed to, what I had been complicit in. I was also grieving my relationship to the entire Jewish institutional world. I mean, I had wanted to be a rabbi since I was a little kid, and it was not lost on me that unlearning Zionism would create a very deep fracture with the Jewish world. And it has. It changed the whole course of my life. I think that was more possible in some ways because I was queer and trans—because I think I had already learned to make choices that would cause rupture and to encounter a kind of profound loss that I knew I could heal from and, on the other side, experience a more authentic, integrated sense of myself. But to choose that kind of loss, it takes a tremendous amount of resilience and support because the loss of relationships, loss of story. I think that what we’re seeing is that there’s need to use the word anti-Zionist to have a shared clarity, but I also think when we don’t use the word anti-Zionism, but we invite people to act on their moral clarity rather than identity or affiliation, there’s actually a huge amount of courage, and I think there’s a huge potential to grow our numbers and our membership if we appeal to these values.

AA 36:11

And look, that’s why I think that IfNotNow was important. And it was important for me, but as soon as I moved out of IfNotNow, I moved out of it. I think that’s the challenge of that entire organization, is that people need the space that is without the labels to get through, and then, all of those people flush out of the organization. You have an organization basically run by anti-Zionists who are in an organization that’s not explicitly anti-Zionist, but it’s a hard role to hold because when the scales fall, they really fall from your eyes. I want to ask Fadi and Dove a question. Fadi, you were asked directly at the Conference about—somebody said: Zionism means a lot of things to a lot of people. Should we use it? Should we not? And you basically answered: It depends what you’re trying to do. And I want to ask, basically: Could we get concrete about what it means to say it depends what you’re trying to do?

FQ 37:08

Yeah, I want to go back and put it in the context of liberation struggles and the larger strategies of liberation struggles, because it’s important to step out—and I think, especially for those listening—to be very clear that if we’re talking about liberation, there are pillars of work that are necessary and that we need to dismantle. You need to engage the economic pillar. You need to make oppression too costly to continue, and you need to make those oppressed economically sustainable enough so that they’re not paying high costs. You need to dismantle or challenge the military oppression, the securitized system. You need to build the cohesiveness of the oppressed societies. You need to build alliances. There’s a lot of work that happens. And what we’re talking about here, this whole conversation is one block of work under one pillar of a huge puzzle of work that needs to happen. So I don’t want anyone, as we’re having this conversation, to say that the Zionism issue that we’re speaking to is what’s going to solve everything. It isn’t. It’s an important piece of a much broader puzzle.

FQ 38:16

Now, I believe we’ve entered the age of the decomposition of Zionism. Zionism as an ideology is decomposing, and we’re seeing that in the numbers—and by the way, not just within the Jewish community, but even within the Christian Zionist community. It is something that I think began unfolding even before October 7th, but what we’ve seen through the genocide is that this decomposition is speeding up. Now, how we engage in this moment—again, we need to be deep strategists, and there are certain spaces where we’re actually being pulled to have this conversation on Zionism, and how to define it, and using that term as a way to limit our efficacy in creating, let’s say, fractures in other pillars of work. Let’s say you’re targeting a pension fund or an entity for divestment in Norway, and you want to engage on actually getting them to divest $2 billion from the Israeli military infrastructure and so forth. And you know that bringing in this whole conversation around Zionism and this language is going to slow that work down, whereas engaging in a narrative of like, legal theory of change—and you have, let’s say, the pro-Israeli apartheid groups trying to frame all of your work as antisemitic and creating this confusion around antisemitism and anti-Zionism—Do you fall into that trap, or do you not even have that conversation in that space?

FQ 39:43

My argument is: Mission is the metric. In certain spaces, having this conversation as clearly as we’re all speaking to it today is necessary. Tactical, strategic, core. In other places, it’s a distraction, and excellent organizers and people who are great in political work become very good at noticing when this is the time to have this conversation and when it’s not time to have that conversation. If you’re bringing members of the Jewish community up the ladder, in terms of moving toward anti-Zionism, sometimes, it’s important to challenge directly and to say: You’ve been part of an institution and ideologies that have caused significant harm, and your ideology, xyz. Sometimes, it may not be the best space for that, but my main call is if we want to take liberation seriously, that means thinking strategically about how we engage on this issue. Not giving up on this issue. I’m not saying to step back from the language and definitions. I’m saying to choose the right spaces to have these battles and in other spaces, not to fall into that trap.

FQ 40:51

The last thing I want to say, especially if there are Palestinian listeners: I understand it is frustrating and actually heart-wrenching. Palestinians and those working on Palestinian liberation are asked to hold Zionism—this ideology that caused so much harm—and people expect us not only to hold it with soft gloves but, in fact, to come to a Palestinian and say, “Don’t use that term in a certain space” is very frustrating. And actually, I would argue, reaches the level of being immoral in some places. It’s just not fair to tell people who are victims to care about the feelings of those who very likely, whether intentionally or not, were complicit in their victimhood. But if we want to take liberation seriously, sometimes, in liberation struggles, one needs to face unfairness and swallow it. There’s a story I shared at the Conference. When I was at Stanford, and we were running the divestment campaign, and I had just come back from Palestine from winter break after the period of the Gaza war of 2008, and we were launching this campaign. I was volunteering, listening to people in Gaza, taking the numbers of those killed, talking to the families. I had been beaten up by soldiers, and I get back to campus after being beaten up, after seeing all this bloodshed, and we’re running this campaign to get the university to divest.

FQ 42:18

I get called into the president’s office on campus and get reprimanded because a number of Jewish students, Jewish American students on campus, went and spoke to the president and told him that I was making them feel unsafe—that I was putting them in danger because of this divestment campaign. And they really—again, because of this triangle of fear. It’s psychological warfare against the Jewish mind, quite literally being led by Zionist institutions to make them fear anything and everything—they really felt that fear. But to me, it was so ironic that I just been beaten up, potentially almost killed by Israeli soldiers. I had been talking to families who lost their kids, and I was the person who was the danger in this equation. I could have let all my emotions out on the president. We could have had this battle. I could have gone after Zionism and so forth. And I really wanted to. This emotional unleashing when you feel this level of unfairness is a human feeling that I think we all feel. But what was more strategic? Going in that direction, or speaking directly to: Your university is invested in companies that are killing innocent people and children? We want to ensure that you are not part of this. And not falling into the conversation about Zionism, and safety, and language and how you define this word, and how you define that word, and apartheid, and so forth. And so, that’s kind of my main ask to people, is: Be strategic about this. Don’t step back from the battle, but don’t fall into it in the wrong places.

AA 43:56

But Fadi, it also sounds like part of what you’re talking about is an environment where Jewish feelings and Jewish sense of what Zionism is becomes determinative of reality. On a certain level, I just want to make sure in this conversation, that when we talk about making space, we’re not talking about coddling; we’re talking about challenging. And so, what does it look like to challenge and not to coddle? What does it look like to be welcoming in an environment where people are actually wrong? It’s not a “both sides.” I’m really listening for the feelings and for the content, but I’m not listening to learn from them about what’s happening on the ground and what it really means. And so, there’s a different kind of exchange.

DK 44:45

Yeah. On this issue, I do think the organizing on this outside of Jewish space is very different than the organizing of it within Jewish space. I don’t think that it’s about coddling. I do think, though, that—going back to what you were also saying, Fadi—that it is about speaking to the fear. I want to name that it’s very challenging, as organizers, that there are multiple issues happening here simultaneously. So, there is the ongoing apartheid and genocide in Palestine, there is increasing authoritarianism around the globe, there is increasing antisemitism globally, and there is the increased use of distorted antisemitism to support authoritarianism and to support genocide. All of those things are happening simultaneously. That makes for a very messy and complicated terrain that we’re working on. And so, I think that in whatever ways that we are trying to move people, I think being able to assess which of these global movements are impacting the group that I am talking to, and how do I speak to that fear, and also speak to them about the shared fear in this moment, and the stakes that we’re all at in this moment—I think that that is a piece. That forward-facing conversation is the one I think we need to be in more actively.

AA 46:10

Part of what you talked about at the Conference was also about the left-liberal coalition and how we need to fight authoritarianism in this moment. I certainly don’t think that if you are organizing a mutual aid campaign for your immigrant and undocumented neighbors, that there should be a litmus test for who’s a liberal Zionist or whatever. Organize the mutual aid campaign, and actually like being in that community, hopefully, also does its own work of moving people, helping them understand a global context. And the way that what is happening in Minneapolis, maybe if they’re being trained by people who were doing protective presence in the West Bank, they start to understand, or they start to make some connections there. But the other side of what you’re saying is like, for me, when I think about the strategic project that I’m engaged in, I want to be able to build anti-Zionist space that normalizes anti-Zionism—in Jewish life and in American life—to be able to draw people over, not just because they’ve been convinced but so that there’s an example, and so that they also are able to say, once they do start to move, there’s somewhere for them to go. That’s also an important, strategic thing to hold down.

AA 47:26

I had somebody come up to me after the presentation that I gave at the Conference being like: Do you have to use the word anti-Zionist? On a certain level, I think people are talking about using the word “diasporist,” and maybe that’s better anyway, in terms of not defining by the negative but defining in the positive—what are we for as opposed to what we are against? But I do still think the position on Zionism needs to be clear in order for us to build these communities in a way that feels authentic. The point of it is being able to be public and to be out on some level. But then again, that isn’t the same work as divestment work, necessarily. That isn’t the same work as building a synagogue. That isn’t the same work as getting a bill passed. like a block the bombs bill or whatever. You don’t need a resolution on Zionism to make a resolution on American weapons.

ALF 48:16

But you do need to destigmatize and decriminalize anti-Zionism and nonviolent resistance through boycott. I think some of what you’re talking about, Arielle, is cultural change that destigmatizes and decriminalizes the idea of being anti-Zionist. And that part is really resonant for me.

FQ 48:32

No, I mean, I’m loving this conversation. I just want to name that. I feel like we’re beginning to get to the key fruit that we want to reach, because I think these are the types of strategic thoughts and discussions that should be happening at a much faster pace in order to get to the right answers that lead us to the most strategic action. Because we’re all pointing in the right direction. Now, a few things I wanted to just add to the points that Dove and Arielle made. I think defining the spaces we’re in will help us define where to have those conversations. And in the Conference, I was asked this question about Jewish activists who are coming to Palestinian organizing space, and then became very sensitive because the Palestinians in the room were speaking about anti-Zionism and so forth. For me, that’s a space where you don’t want to silence Palestinians who are facing genocide because someone’s uncomfortable about speaking about anti-Zionism. Even the notion of that just shows you the power imbalance that exists between both communities. I think we need to protect and defend those types of spaces where Palestinians and Jews who are anti-Zionist can speak to anti-Zionism very clearly, very effectively. They’re not censored in doing that within those organizing spaces.

FQ 49:50

Then we have other spaces that we are engaging in. Synagogues—and there are different types of synagogues. How do you engage in this conversation in the different types of synagogues? How do you engage in this conversation within religious orthodox communities, within communities on the Jewish left, or maybe apolitical Jewish communities? I think each group will have a different way and access point because these conversations need to be had. I think what is crucial in how we define this and point this forward—and this is what I think is the strategy, regardless of the space—is we need to be helping move Jewish community members from the triangle of fear to the triangle of dignity. I’m not going to question—and it’s wrong to question—the fact that Jewish people have been persecuted and that there still is antisemitism in the world today. So, we start from that same point of recognizing this persecution and recognizing that it exists. But then, the answer to that isn’t an ethnosupremacist state. The answer to that is building a world where human dignity is respected for all. So, building societies that respect the dignity of all people, whether they’re Jewish or Muslim, regardless of their race, regardless of their religious background.

FQ 51:12

If we build those societies, if we build those systems that protect human dignity, then we will all be safe. And therefore, the responsibility in this triangle, for the Jewish community, is to be invested in building this institutional framework and social framework of human dignity. Not only will it benefit us as Palestinians, who are suffering from this triangle of fear for close to a century now, but it will also benefit the Jewish people, because I think the amount of emotional cost, and fear, and stress, and sometimes isolationism, and so forth, that this ideology creates has a huge cost and is leading to a lot of harm. On that front, Zionism has created very self-efficient, well-functioning, consistent, sustainable organizations, and institutions, and narratives to recruit people and keep them in this grind. We haven’t built that yet, and I think we need to build that engine. I think the moment we crack it, the change is going to happen faster than any of us can imagine, and I think it will be a key player in seeing liberation in our lifetimes.

AA 52:28

I love what you’re saying, just about thinking about tailoring your message, basically, and having a strategy that works for different communities. I think that the thing that feels crucial, looking at these polls, is that there has to be a way of pulling away the security blanket or whatever—however you want to say it. I’ve had a lot of arguments with people who would consider themselves liberal Zionists that would basically say: I agree with you if what you’re saying is happening is happening, but it’s not really happening. Like, this willful ignorance—the ability to say, “A Jewish and democratic state is a possibility, and in fact, we have one right now, it just isn’t working that well” or whatever—a kind of ignorance of a long history of incompatibility between the idea of an ethnostate, and the idea of democracy, and, in fact, the reality of Israel and its history.

AA 53:26

And this is an education issue. There has to be a way of educating people in the Jewish community in such a way that they can’t say anymore: We don’t know. We’re confused. The problem is that the polls also show that Jews have a high level of believing that they are educated about this issue and believing that they’re paying attention, even when many of them, I think, are responding mostly emotionally or kind of repeating thought-terminating cliches from Jewish institutional life. So, I wanted to go to you first, Ari Lev, and I know we’re almost done here, to talk about what that education might look like inside an institution. And Dove, maybe it’s like the same but related question for the work that you’re doing now.

ALF 54:11

I’m super grateful to the board of Kol Tzedek for hiring me 10 years ago and for supporting my leadership for the past 10 years. There’s a phrase that we were able to land on in our statement of purpose that I think most captures how I imagine synagogues can do the work Fadi is describing of creating cultures rooted in dignity, which is that we are trying to transmit a liberatory Judaism for the next generation. I think a lot of the education work you’re describing—it can happen with people unlearning, but it can actually happen at the root. We have 100 kids between the ages of five and 13 right in our Torah school that meets on Sundays, and they are being raised to take for granted a liberatory Judaism that values the dignity of all people as inseparable from their Jewish identity. A few years ago, we just published our own prayer book, and there were many motivations for that. We wanted it to be more ritually accessible. It’s fully transliterated. But I also wanted to change the words. I wanted words in there—I wanted Palestinian poetry. I wanted, when we pray for peace, I wanted us to say “v’al kol Yisrael,” for all Israel, and “v’al kol Yishmael,” for all the descendants of Ishmael, and “V’al kol yoshvei tevel,” and for all who dwell on Earth. That’s essential to the theology that we’re building here, is a theology of shared dignity, and shared safety, and shared liberation. And I think our children at Kol Tzedek take this for granted. They take for granted a Judaism built in dignity, and we need more congregations and more institutions raising up a generation of Jews where this is in the spiritual breast milk, as they say.

AA 55:45

That is not a phrase I ever thought I would hear on the podcast: spiritual breast milk. But anyway, go on.

ALF 55:52

Synagogues Rising is a growing network of congregations around the country who are devoted to this vision of shared liberation without exception—without the exception of Palestinians, which is much more common. I was raised to believe in tikkun olam and this idea of repairing the world, but with the exception of our relationship to Palestine and Palestinians. But I want to share—there’s a delicacy, I think, in my role as a rabbi, and as a spiritual leader, and as a pulpit rabbi that I want to just touch on, which is: We’re living in a world, I think, of indoctrination. We see this on the religious right. We see this in the rise of authoritarianism. And it’s not uncommon that a young anti-Zionist congregant will come to me frustrated and feel that I am myself coddling Zionists. And let me be clear: I don’t feel I am coddling Zionists, and I don’t think the Zionists at Kol Tzedek feel coddled. But it is important to me that I am not perpetuating a kind of reverse indoctrination. I don’t want to be telling people what to think. I want people to learn critical thinking skills, and I want them to see that as inseparable from their Jewish identities. What I’ve really been intentional about is not to create a bully pulpit, because I think we see that on the far right. The religious right bullies its membership into agreeing with its leaders. And so, I think it can be confusing to see an anti-Zionist rabbi encouraging critical thinking, but it feels really important to me that people come to this on their own, because I think otherwise, there’s a kind of religious and spiritual manipulation that just repeats the pattern that I was raised in, where I was just taught what to think.

ALF 57:25

And maybe I’ll just add, the most unbelievably gratifying moment—in addition to getting to connect with the three of you from the Conference of the Jewish Left at BU—was that I had young people whose Bat Mitzvah I had done at Kol Tzedek, some eight years prior, who are now college students, who came to the conference with their Jewish peers from their colleges that they’re organizing into lefty Jewish groups on their campuses. To me, that’s the cultural work: How do we raise up a new generation who understand their own safety and their own story as inseparable from the story of all people and all who dwell on Earth to lead us forward?

AA 58:00

Maybe what we actually need is some good cop, bad cop. Like we need to push them from one side and pull them in from the other, and different people have different roles in that. I mean, it seems like, as a strategy, that’s not bad. Like they feel on the ropes, they need somewhere to go and process it, and then somebody’s there to catch them on the other side of that.

DK 58:19

Yeah. I feel like what’s important for people to really internalize in this moment is that there are two models we have right now for security. One model is that everyone has their own ethnostate that is armed to the teeth. The other model is multiracial, inclusive, participatory democracy everywhere. The two cannot and will not coexist for that long, and it is my assessment that every people has actually done best in multiracial, inclusive, participatory democracy. So, when we are organizing within the Jewish community, we aren’t asking Jewish people to choose between security for Jews or security for other people. That is what the right is trying to tell people. We can actually choose to struggle for everyone’s well-being simultaneously. My teacher and friend, Aurora Levins Morales, says that anytime what we’re fighting for brings us into conflict with the legitimate needs of another group of people, it’s a sure sign that the picture is too small. So, the example she gives is that there’s no inherent conflict between the preservation of forests and the employment of loggers. We just need to devise a sustainable form of forestry and an economy that’s built to sustain people and trees with equal care. It’s a much bigger job but has a much better chance of working than letting people be pitted against each other. The right has told us a story that it’s us or them, and I think that we have to fight against that and tell the story that it’s all of us or none of us.

AA 59:56

Yeah, and if there’s anything I hope that people take out of this podcast, it’s that that looks very different in different spaces and that there needs to be a strategic assessment of how big or small that story is to fit the goals. Thank you guys so much for joining me. It was really nice to spend time with you at the Conference and now here again. And it is true, Fadi, that it’s rare to have some sense of investment in the Jewish strategy. Even though I think it’s not the most important strategy—it’s one pillar, as you said—but it is really appreciated to do this strategic thinking together. So, this has been another episode of On the Nose. Hope you enjoyed it. If you did, share it, or like it, or leave us a review. Thank you to Jesse Brenneman, our editor, and thank you to our guests once again. Subscribe to Jewish Currents: JewishCurrents.org. See you next time, everyone.