Six months after the horrific terrorist attack on Israel, domestic levels of antisemitism have skyrocketed, anti-Zionist activism has become mainstream and unprecedented critiques are being leveled against Israel from its most stalwart defenders.
Something else is happening simultaneously, though. We are also replaying, with dramatic intensity, the deep and longstanding tensions within American Jewry itself. To understand our current moment, we must look back across the past six months — and across decades.
College campuses faced the post-Oct. 7 onslaught first, with verbal and even physical attacks against Jewish students. The presidents of three of the nation’s most elite universities told Congress that calls for the genocide of Jews did not necessarily violate campus policy. In this climate, my own university, San Francisco State, emerged as a model for the Eastern elites: Hire presidents who understand the complexities of campus antisemitism, train administrators in the fight against antisemitism and center campus Jews in the process.
Since at least the 1960s, universities across the country have fought over competing notions of higher education. Should the campus be a place of dispassionate, critical inquiry free of politics, or should it be a place of justice-seeking activism, where, for example, anti-Zionist work is seen as an example of anti-racist advocacy? In the last six months, more and more college students have embraced the latter, linking themselves with their grandparents’ generation of campus activism by embracing aggressive protest tactics as well.
A generational divide among American Jews also has seen more and more young people breaking from their parents and grandparents in regard to internalized assumptions about the Jewish state. Since Oct. 7, a series of public statements and participation in cease-fire protests have amplified the anti-Israel, if not anti-Zionist, voices among American Jewish youth raised within the Jewish organizational structures intended to instill love of Israel.
Differing generational experiences have informed attitudes toward Israel and Zionism since the Jewish state’s creation in 1948. Those who lived through the Holocaust understood the need for a Jewish state, and their children bore witness to Israel’s vulnerability in its 1967 and 1973 wars. However, today’s Jewish youth have experienced only the rise of right-wing militarism and uber-nationalism in Israel’s halls of power. Oct. 7 merely exacerbated these pre-existing tensions between and among American Jews.
Intergroup relations have suffered, too. As the old social justice alliances between Jews and other marginalized groups have broken down, many American Jews now lament the strong pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel posturing of their one-time allies. Israel, once viewed as a model socialist utopia by the American left, has been recast as a colonial enterprise akin to the worst racists in the 1950s and 1960s American South.
Post-Oct. 7 pushback from leading Democrats, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, has alarmed American Jews who fear a breakdown in the strong historic alliance between the United States and Israel. Yet these differences have been at play since at least 1977, when the right-wing Likud bloc first took power from Israel’s founding Labor Party. Today, with a Netanyahu-led government granting unprecedented power to the most troubling of Israeli politicians, it’s no wonder Democratic Party leaders would flinch, just as a quarter-million Israelis did in their pre-Oct. 7 weekly protests.
Perhaps least explored, Oct. 7 has revealed long-held divisions between American Jews and Israeli Jews, evidenced in opposing assumptions about the war itself. While American Jewry prides itself on an inclusive, pluralist approach to Judaism that celebrates religious difference, Israeli Jews tend to claim either secular nationalism or religious Orthodoxy as their norm.
With that, the entire framing of the war against Hamas breaks from normative American Jewish standards. In public discourse, many American Jewish leaders seek a Jewish state whose leaders follow a pluralist democratic vision, in both domestic politics and their prosecution of the war. Yet Israeli Jews by and large reject that liberal American idealism. Israel, like the United States, remains hopelessly split between competing political factions. But in terms of the war against Hamas, an overwhelming majority of Israelis across the political spectrum recognize the need to continue fighting, as difficult and painful as it is.
As Israeli thought leader Barak Loozon reflected, his sons are fighting his grandparents’ war. In this mindset, like the 1948 War of Independence, this is a war for Israel’s very survival. While American Jews receive news feeds that focus on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and accusations of Israeli genocide, complicating their perception of Israel’s handling of the war, an overwhelming majority of Israeli Jews across the political spectrum back the military effort as a necessity. In a multifront war led by the proxies of a nuclear Iran, Israeli Jews know that without establishing deterrence through their operation in Gaza, they face even more severe threats from Hezbollah in the north and Iran itself to the east.
This realpolitik reflects foundational differences between American and Israeli Jews, born not only from Israel’s creation but also from the U.S. Constitution’s separation of church and state. American Jews have always claimed U.S.-based patriotic nationalism. In this country, “Judaism” connotes a religious rather than a national category. Not so for Israeli secular Jews, who embrace their Jewish nationalist military needs whether or not they adhere to Judaism’s religious tenets. Here, the post-Oct. 7 world simply reinforces the fundamental differences between American Jewish history and Israeli Jewish history.
These last six months alarm us all. Within national politics, Jewish communal debates and even around our own dinner tables, we experience divisions and fractures that cause deep and persistent pain. We must look back to Oct. 7 to understand this moment, to be sure. Perhaps with a longer historical view, we can better address, or even solve, the challenges we face.