A vocal segment of the political left trained their attention on Zionists with heightened intensity during 2024. Linking Zionism with colonialism, white supremacy, apartheid and genocide, they sought to ostracize pro-Israel Jews from polite society and progressive institutions. In some striking instances, they succeeded.
The trend has gained particular momentum in the Bay Area, impacting not only college campuses but museums, summer camps and even a hot springs resort.
“They’re targeting me and they’re canceling me, and they’re not even open to conversation,” said Mikey Pauker, a Jewish religious rock musician who said he has been disinvited from New Age music festivals and boycotted by other musicians because he is a Zionist. “I just feel like there are a lot of artists in the New Age world who don’t understand what they’re doing.”
The potency of this anti-Zionist movement, which has on numerous occasions spilled over into overt antisemitism, has left many liberal Jews, historically aligned with the American left on issues from economic policy to immigration to abortion rights, feeling betrayed and abandoned by individuals and groups they once considered allies.
The situation has put pro-Israel Jews into what feels to them like an impossible bind: Either fully disavow Israel as the Jewish national homeland and embrace the politics of anti-Zionism — “from the river to the sea” — or face wrath and ostracization.
Just before Hanukkah, the cancel campaign came to a New Age hot springs resort north of Calistoga. There, a Dec. 26 concert of Jewish music was scrubbed after a shadowy online campaign targeted Pauker as a genocide supporter and a “terrorist.” The resort, Harbin Hot Springs, which is clothing optional and describes itself as the “practical, living embodiment of Oneness,” cited “escalating concerns regarding the event” in a response to J.’s inquiry about the cancellation.
The incident came as little surprise to those who have been following the anti-Zionist movement closely.
This past summer at a music camp in a redwood forest in San Mateo County, a group of musicians threatened a boycott because of Adam Flam, a young Jewish acoustic guitar player who had served, in accordance with the laws of his country, in the Israel Defense Forces. Flam’s employment offer was rescinded, though the camp blamed administrative issues.
Earlier in the year, the CEO of San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, a contemporary arts museum and performance center, resigned her position. Sara Fenske Bahat, who is Jewish, said she found herself on the receiving end of “vitriolic and antisemitic backlash” from activists who demanded that the museum remove Zionists from its board and support a boycott of Israel.
The list goes on.
The tendency to oppose Israel by targeting Zionists did not originate with the current war against Hamas in Gaza. In summer 2022, for example, several law student groups at UC Berkeley pledged not to invite Zionists to speaking engagements.
Anti-Zionist politics have formidable roots in the Bay Area, where influential groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine were born. But incidents in Northern California, in particular, have accelerated, impacting spheres of life well beyond college campuses.
The pro-Palestinian movement has long borrowed rhetoric and tactics from the global anti-apartheid movement against South Africa. That movement, which peaked in the 1980s, successfully took aim at the country through academic, cultural and artistic boycotts. Many refused to do business with or perform in South Africa because of its legally enforced racial segregation.
Israel has no such laws. It does enforce a military occupation of the West Bank, where Jewish settlers enjoy the benefit of Israeli citizenship while Palestinians do not.
Many progressive American Jews oppose the occupation of the West Bank even as they recognize the immense security threats Israel faces, epitomized by the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas invasion and massacre.
But in the case of today’s anti-Israel movement, activists target both Israel and individual Jews, and rather than citing specific Israeli policies, they often name Zionism — the millennia-old theological yearning that became a political movement in the late 19th century, calling for the establishment of a modern Jewish state in some portion of the land between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea.
Similar to the anti-apartheid movement, the anti-Zionist strategy seeks to isolate and alienate Israel and its supporters. This accelerating protest tactic leaves little room for — and often has no interest in — political nuance.
For Bari Goldojarb, a social worker who worked as a mental health clinician for a progressive nonprofit in Silicon Valley, the animosity of her colleagues toward Zionists and Zionism became too much to bear. She wrote in a December op-ed for J. that after Oct. 7, her organization released a statement condemning Israeli “occupation” without mentioning the Hamas terrorist attack or the brutalization of civilians, including women.
“It was then I realized that I not only needed a new job,” Goldojarb wrote. “I needed to find a new community altogether.”
It’s important to note that this attitude toward Zionists does not have much purchase in mainstream political institutions. In state legislatures and in Congress, support for Israel as a Jewish, democratic country remains strong. Nor is anti-Zionism reflected in surveys of American voters, who largely support Israel.
But opinions are shifting among younger voters. And the trend is experienced most poignantly at eye level, on the ground — by Jews living in progressive enclaves like the Bay Area and working, learning and volunteering in progressive institutions.
Anyone who has visited a bar in Oakland or San Francisco knows how common it is to see messages scrawled on bathroom walls saying something to the effect of “F— Zionists.” On dating apps, politically conscious young people routinely declare “No Zionists” wanted in their love life.
Dan Kalb, a longtime member of the Oakland City Council whose term ended this week, is an environmentalist who supports progressive policies like single-payer healthcare. He describes what it’s like to get caught in the middle.
In late 2023, Kalb was boycotted by undergraduate students at UC Berkeley because he is a Zionist. A lecture he planned to deliver on environmental advocacy was canceled. Kalb said the students should be “embarrassed” about what they did, but he was also indignant about the idea that their behavior would impact his own political orientation.
To Kalb, his views define American progressive politics more than theirs.
“I would never cede the word ‘progressive,’ or the progressive philosophy, to a bunch of anti-Israel zealots,” he told J. at the end of 2024. “My position on single-payer, or Medicare for All — my position to protect renters, my position for strong environmental policies — those are not changing.”
We are now entering a new political era under a second Donald Trump administration. The president-elect has pledged to take a hardline approach to anti-Zionist speech and activism in American institutions, including on college campuses.
This approach risks further painting pro-Israel Jews into a political corner, as allied with right-wing politics whether they like it or not.
Based on surveys of young voters and the tenor of political activism in progressive parts of the country, anti-Zionism appears to be gaining steam in cities, institutions and movements that American Jews have long embraced. This trend, if not reversed, could prod Zionists to make difficult, if not impossible, choices.