Benjamin Kerstein and Sarah Hurwitz have each had a moment of reckoning.
For Hurwitz, a former speechwriter for the Obamas who later became an author and commentator, it happened during the 2021 Israel-Gaza war, when she began to notice antisemitism flooding the discourse in social media and on college campuses.
For Kerstein, a writer, editor and Z3 Institute fellow, the reckoning happened long before. Once a progressive student at Boston University, he decided to drop out and move to Israel after his professor argued that Israel was “the cause” of 9/11 the day after the World Trade Center attacks.
The Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel’s ensuing war both on the ground in Gaza and in the international media landscape, only helped crystallize each writer’s understanding that Jews, particularly in America, must find ways to call out antisemitism couched in anti-Israel statements.
At the Z3 conference in Palo Alto on Nov. 9, they joined Z3 institute director David Hazony for a panel discussion on how American Jews need to redefine what it means to be a Jew who identifies with Israel. If they don’t, the panelists argued, they run the risk of letting anti-Zionists define Jewishness for them.
Both panelists shared insights from their new books published in September: Kerstein’s “Self Defense: A Jewish Manifesto,” published via the Z3 project, and Hurwitz’s “As a Jew: Reclaiming Our Story from Those Who Blame, Shame, and Try to Erase Us,” her second book following “Here All Along” in 2019.
Both of Hurwitz’s books draw from her Jewish rediscovery after taking an introduction to Judaism class when she was 36. Until that point, Hurwitz said, her Jewish identity was “contentless.”
“My Jewish identity, for most of my life, was this humiliating series of caveats and apologies: ‘I’m just a cultural Jew,’” she said, building on her remarks at Z3’s opening plenary. “I went around telling people ‘I’m Jewish, but not that Jewish, you know? I really just like ‘Seinfeld,’ and I’m kind of anxious.’”
Hurwitz connected the desire of her parents’ generation to assimilate to today’s young Jews who have adopted a kind of “conversion narrative” to avoid getting singled out by their peers.
The understanding back then was that “if you don’t ‘convert’ to being a WASP, change your nose, your last name, don’t be so Jewish, maybe you can join the country club,” Hurwitz said. In the post-Oct. 7 world, she said, the need among young people to fit in is fed by a dominant narrative around Israel as evil, as colonial, as racist.
During her appearances on college campuses throughout the country, Hurwitz heard Jewish students follow similar scripts, along the lines of: “Growing up, my rabbi told me Israel was amazing, and so did my parents. Then I got to campus, and I learned that it was this racist, genocidal state, and I had an epiphany.”
Kerstein is all too familiar with that narrative. To counteract it, he suggested Jews follow the ideals of the Black American struggle for civil rights.
“One of the ways Jews have to defend themselves is by making what [the late civil rights activist] John Lewis called good trouble,” Kerstein said. And Jewish college students, when confronted with demonizing claims about Israel, should “stand up and look at their professors and fellow students and say, ‘That is a lie.’”