From Gaza to New York’s Mayoral Race, Jewish Identity Splits Over Israel’s Future

For Leah Robbins, growing up in rural Florida meant that Saturday morning synagogue services were followed by lunch at Bono’s Pit Bar-B-Q.

Ms. Robbins lived mostly around non-Jews, so her family members were proud and precise about the way they expressed their Jewish identity. To her parents, part of being Jewish meant donating to the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC, and encouraging Ms. Robbins when she chose to sing the Israeli national anthem while her classmates recited the Pledge of Allegiance.

But during college and in the years after, as Ms. Robbins met friends who challenged her understanding of Israel’s history, its treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and its conduct in wars in Gaza, her beliefs about Israel shifted far from those of her Zionist upbringing. She now argues that young Jews who are critical of Israel, like herself, need to build new communities — new spiritual congregations, new schools — that don’t emphasize Zionism.

Watching with flooding relief and trepidation the news of an Israel-Hamas cease-fire, as well as the hostage and prisoner releases, she has asked herself, “When we’re on the other side of this devastation, what’s going to be left of Judaism if the Jewish left isn’t building it right now?”

For years, there had been a sticky and prevailing narrative about the role left-wing Jews played in the broader Jewish community, according to some Jewish leaders and rabbis. The story went like this: young progressive Jews might push their communities to be more critical of Israel, but as they became older they would send their children to the same Jewish day schools they had attended, where those children would sing pioneer songs and eat falafel on Israeli independence day.

In other words, young Jews who criticized Israel would simply come to accept the organizations and institutions they grew up in — or, maybe, leave them.

But that is not what is happening today, at least in some Jewish families.

Across scattered corners of the United States are glimpses of how much progressive Jewish communities have grown or gained wider recognition over the last two years, especially those that don’t identify as Zionist.

Ms. Robbins is raising money with the goal of starting a “diasporist” Jewish day school in Boston, one that puts its emphasis on Judaism outside Israel and teaches Israel’s history with a non-Zionist approach. Three Jewish friends who met in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and now live in Brooklyn, recently went door knocking for a Muslim mayoral candidate who pledged to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he steps foot in New York.

A rabbi in Chicago gathered 400 families for high holiday services in a congregation that is pro-Palestinian and won’t raise the Israeli flag. Most of these groups acknowledge the horror of the attacks by Hamas militants on Oct 7. 2023; they also condemn the Israeli government’s response and the war in Gaza, as well as Israel’s occupation of the West Bank that long predated the war.

Institutional leaders recognize the uncertainty swirling around this. “Your responsibility as a Jewish leader is to be concerned about the people within your movement,” said Rabbi Rick Jacobs, who leads the largest movement of American Jewry, the Reform movement. “We’re at a critical moment. I don’t think at this moment we have a clear sense of where it’s going.”

This critical moment, since Oct. 7, 2023, has been a painful one for so many, prompting questions within families and communities about morality, safety and identity. What was already a stark generational divide on Israel in the American Jewish community has deepened. Pew polling released in 2024 found that younger Jews expressed more negative feelings toward Israel than older Jews did. A Washington Post poll last month found that 56 percent of Jewish Americans felt an emotional attachment to Israel, but that figure fell to 36 percent among those ages 18 to 34.

The number of dues-paying members in IfNotNow, an American Jewish group that opposes Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, has grown more than 500 percent since Oct. 7, 2023, reaching over 6,000 people. Rabbis for Ceasefire, which formed after Oct. 7, now has some 430 rabbis. Jewish Voice for Peace said it increased its annual budget from $5 million to $9 million and its chapters from 45 to more than 100 in the past two years.

In absolute numbers, these communities are small, though fast expanding. Arielle Angel, the editor in chief of the left-wing magazine Jewish Currents, called for more of these groups in a recent editorial. “We need new Jewish institutions,” she wrote.

The views of these left-wing Jews could keep shifting, Mr. Jacobs said. “If this war is in fact ending, what is the possibility that there could be in the coming months a new government in Israel, a reconnecting of young Jews who had been confused or pained by the war?” he added.

A majority of Jews remain emotionally and politically attached to Israel and to supporting its continued existence as a Jewish state. American Jews also support “Israel’s actions in Gaza” in greater shares than overall Americans do, according to Washington Post and Gallup polling.

But in interviews, some younger Jews say they’ve become increasingly unwilling to join or attend synagogues, schools, camps and nonprofits that don’t share their views on the recent war in Gaza.

“Four in 10 American Jews believe Israel has committed a genocide,” said Daniel May, the publisher of Jewish Currents, citing Washington Post polling. “There’s a disconnect between that number, and the view of American Jewish institutions, where even the most liberal places have leaders that have refrained from calling this a genocide. People who feel committed to Jewish life have no choice but to create new Jewish communities.”

That is what Ms. Robbins is doing in trying to start a Jewish day school that doesn’t put Zionism at the core of its Jewish belief system. The school will be called Achvat Olam, meaning universal solidarity, and she plans for it to open in the fall of 2029. “There is a real hunger to save the soul of Judaism,” she said, “and see it decoupled from nationalism.”

Breaking Tradition

In September, Jews for Racial & Economic Justice, a progressive New York-based organizing group, filled a Sunset Park sports center for its gala, the Mazals, with some 1,000 attendees. Dressed in a high-low mix of sequins and clogs, attendees bumped into childhood friends from summer camp, while a speaker shouted, “Mazel tov and free Palestine!”

Milling around the crowd were three women who had all, at one point, felt strongly enough about their connection to Israel, and responsibility for its actions, that they went to live there. They became friends while living in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Now, none of them identify as Zionists.

One of them is Simone Zimmerman, 34, a longtime left-wing Jewish activist, who is the co-founder of IfNotNow and focus of the 2023 film “Israelism.” That documentary tells the story of how Ms. Zimmerman came to question her support for Israel, starting when she was a student at Berkeley.

Her friend Liya Rechtman, 33, grew up in Brooklyn and spent her teenage years signing up for every pro-Israel activity she could find. She did a weeklong training program affiliated with the Israel Defense Forces and recruited college classmates to Birthright Israel, which provides young Jews with all-expenses paid trips there. Ms. Rechtman said she grew more critical of Israel while living there in 2016 and 2017, especially seeing the violent attacks that Palestinians in the West Bank faced from settlers.

She visited Germany shortly after Oct. 7, participating in a Jewish leadership program, and told the room she felt ashamed to be Jewish because of Israel’s actions in Gaza.

There was an audible gasp. “It was upsetting for some people to hear that,” Ms. Rechtman recalled.

Natasha Westheimer, 35, was the last of the trio to leave Israel, remaining until well after the start of the war. Ms. Westheimer said she broke her hand when Israeli soldiers cracked down on an anti-occupation demonstration in the West Bank in 2021. Over time, she grew more concerned about going to these demonstrations, as the risks rose and advocacy opportunities shrank— but she also didn’t feel comfortable living there without joining activism and civil disobedience led by her Palestinian neighbors. She moved back to the United States in 2024.

Ms. Westheimer was struck by just how many anti-occupation activists she met in Israel had since become anti-Zionist activists living in New York.

Ms. Rechtman echoed this. “There is a broad network of people,” she said, “that I see myself as part of, who have intimacy with Israeli culture and who have my left-wing politics and my understanding of the stakes.”

No Middle Ground

The author Benjamin Moser has been at the New York Public Library, in recent months, writing a book about anti-Zionist Jews. His research traces the opposition these rabbis, lawyers, poets and scholars have faced, from Britain to Brazil and Amsterdam to Houston.

“My book tells a pretty unbroken story from the 19th century to the present,” said Mr. Moser, “Of anti-Zionist Jews being exiled and killed, being fired from their jobs, families splitting up.”

Parts of that are what Jewish groups on the left are still experiencing, even as their numbers grow. Lex Rofeberg, 34, a non-Zionist rabbi who lives in Providence, R.I., was targeted by Canary Mission, a group that says it exposes critics of Israel, for his political views. When he was invited to speak at a Reform synagogue in Milwaukee, his hometown, his mother, Ruth Lebed, was surprised to hear “through the grapevine” that some locals were uncomfortable with Mr. Rofeberg’s visit.

When she posted in a Facebook group about his involvement with the film “Israelism,” which explores anti-Zionism, online acquaintances blocked her.

“There are people out there who think that his views on Israel make him antisemitic,” said Ms. Lebed, 67. “Which is ridiculous. The guy is a rabbi.”

An anti-Zionist rabbi in the Chicago area, Brant Rosen, 62, said he was thrown out of his local rabbinical network because of his beliefs. He left the congregation in Evanston, where he had worked for 16 years, because of tensions within the community about his activism. Mr. Rosen decided to start his own anti-Zionist congregation, called Tzedek Chicago (Tzedek means justice in Hebrew), which has more than doubled in size since the Israel-Hamas War began, growing to more than 400 dues-paying households.

Mr. Rosen has felt, since the start of the recent war, that Jews who support and oppose Israel’s policies cannot be together in communities.. “I think the middle ground has become untenable,” he said.

Still, there are many organizations on the Jewish left that identify as Zionist and want to make space for people who are profoundly, wholeheartedly critical of Israel.

“You have a lot of young people saying, ‘This is important to me, but it’s not, as I’ve been told, a simple yes or no, do I support Israel or not?’” said Hadar Susskind, chief executive of New Jewish Narrative, a progressive Zionist group.

Young people he talks to say they care about Israel but are also deeply opposed to the current government.

“So many people, were taught that it’s ‘You support Israel, period,’” he continued. “Many people are not willing to have that be the end of the discussion.”

Generation to Generation

Vivian Russell, 17, was walking in Park Slope in September when she bumped into Ms. Rechtman, Ms. Zimmerman and Ms. Westheimer canvassing with Jews for Racial & Economic Justice. She stopped to introduce herself.

Ms. Russell, a high school student who lives in Washington Heights, told them that she found herself at odds with her public school classmates during conversations about the Israel-Hamas War. She didn’t agree with the Jewish Student Union at her school, so she joined the Muslim Student Union instead.

Back uptown in Washington Heights, two days before the recent Oct. 7 anniversary, Ms. Russell sat with her mother, Dara Herman. Ms. Russell calls herself an anti-Zionist. Ms. Herman, 52, is “more sympathetic to Israel’s plight.”

“If I have kids, I’ll be raising my kids Jewish and celebrating Jewish holidays and stuff,” said Ms. Russell, as she sat with her mother at a neighborhood coffee shop. “But I don’t think that I’ll tell them, ‘Oh Israel is the place of our people.’”

Her mother replied: “But how do you square that with the ancient history that I’ve been taught — that Jews were from Israel, that all those years we wandered in the desert and then finally came back to Israel. Is all of that false?”

“That was many, many years ago!” her daughter said.

“I’m only one generation from the Holocaust,” Ms. Herman said. “It feels very real to me that less than 100 years ago there were millions of Jews being killed and those who survived needed somewhere to go.”

But Ms. Herman, watching her daughter’s evolution, realizes that the Jewish community is transforming as it absorbs a new generation.

It also seems possible, some activists say, that those groups will recede and the new groups that a younger generation on the left is building — like the school Ms. Robbins hopes to start or Mr. Rosen’s congregation — will become some form of establishment.

Ms. Russell, whose father is Irish American, declared that she felt confident in the set of ideas about Judaism she wanted to pass on to her future children.

“I’ll teach them about how my people — both Jews and Irish people — have been rebels,” Ms. Russell said. “Both are a group of people that have struggled, and cared about each other, and cared about freedom.”