Which Divides Are Worth Bridging?
Limmud's strategy touches a nerve.
Last weekend, Greater Seattle’s annual Limmud conference took place with a new focus: the communal divide over Israel.
The in-person, day-long learning festival at Mercer Island Community Center on February 16th was the culmination of online and in-home “salon” discussions along the theme of “Bridging Divides, Shaping Tomorrow.”
“This year what we heard from board members [is] there are divides in families and communities in this time,” says Limmud board president Lior Caspi, who is Israeli. “We as a Jewish people, we all feel the pain since October 7th and everything that Israel is going through. At the same time, we have young Jewish members that are struggling.”
While the festival still hosted traditional learning sessions around religion, music, gender, and history, the majority of the programming revolved around the issues dividing the Jewish community and Jewish families around Israel, with sessions like “Israel/Palestine: Grieving, Listening, and Compassion” and “Jews, Palestinians, and Israelis: Dilemmas in History” and “Talking Israel/Palestine Across Generations.” Presenters at both the online and in-person events ran the gamut of Jewish and Zionist affiliations.
Despite some opposition to the theme and concern that the festival could go off the rails, the programming ended on Sunday night without incident.
“It worked out really well,” says Karen Treiger, who has been involved with Limmud since it started in Seattle eight years ago and serves on the board as secretary. “I went to all the sessions on Israel. Everyone was really respectful. People were worried about anti-Zionists. I didn’t hear a single word about anti-Zionism. It was extremely respectful, and there wasn’t any negative talk about Israel or even the Israeli government.”
The program saw around 265 total attendees, Treiger says, which is up from the last couple of years as Limmud continues to come back from Covid.
“I am shocked with the number of people that signed up for the e-festival,” Caspi says. “You are setting up a party, and you never know how many people will actually come.”
Sunday morning’s opening panel set the tone for the day. “Bridging Divides: Why It’s Hard, Why It Matters, and How We Move Forward” brought together Rabbi Yohanna Kinberg of Congregation Kol Ami; clinical psychologist Dr. Lynn Fainsilber Katz; Elisheva Goldberg, who works for New Israel Fund (and who is Treiger’s daughter); and Isabel Mata, who worked with the Washington State Jewish Historical Society during the Wing Luke fiasco. The four women, guided by moderator Diane Douglas, shared profound personal experiences of conflict and coping mechanisms.
Fainsilber Katz offered advice on how to breathe to calm down the fight or flight response to conflict. Mata recommended never to get into a debate over text message. Kinberg, however, was the only one to admit to burning bridges and not looking back.
“We’re not required to have a relationship with everyone,” she said. Prioritizing relationships with her family members is where she puts the investment, including with her own young adult son who has struggled since October 7th, despite her years of advocacy for both Israeli and Palestinian self-determination.
“He didn’t do this to rebel,” Kinberg told me in a followup conversation. “He was a philosophy major at UW, so he wants to talk philosophy. It’s not philosophy for me. A lot of the people who are anti-Zionist, it’s really like head in the sky…it’s not actually thinking about real people and real borders. Like, it’s really fun to read books.”
Kinberg also sees her relationship with her son, who is not an anti-Zionist but more of a product of his progressive upbringing, as a model for community. “There are certain attributes of my child that people could learn from,” she says. “He doesn’t want to separate himself from the family, and that could be connected to [the maxim] ‘don’t separate yourself from the community.’”
But how far can the bridge extend before the cables give out and the whole thing collapses into the water like the Tacoma Narrows?
This question has been on full display this week with the return of the Bibas children’s bodies to Israel. Shock, every day an impossibly new feeling, reverberated through Jews who watched the macabre spectacle of masked, armed terrorists parading locked black coffins through a crowd of healthy, celebratory civilians in Gaza. Even human rights organizations stood aghast. Who does this?
It’s led some of us to hard answers, including support for Trump’s Gaza relocation plan or something possibly far more violent. For many Jews whose grief has ossified into crisp anger, the mere idea of hearing out a family member who equivocates on Hamas is a non-starter.
But what about when it’s your own child, Treiger sometimes asks people. Would you cut them out of your life?
“How do you manage in a family, in a community, where we have differences of opinion?” she asks. “How can you work with that both emotionally and communally?”
Kinberg found herself cutting out leftist thinkers she had long looked up to after they started conflating their social justice values with support for Hamas and withholding their votes from Kamala Harris, while she doubled down on her family.
“It’s OK to be in tension as long as it’s healthy, productive tension,” she says.
That’s what she found valuable about Limmud. “I think Jewish education should always push the envelop in different ways,” she says. “People are trying things. Let’s do something different.”
In her own educational world, Kinberg has already shifted her approach with the b’nai mitzvah students at her synagogue to focus more on Jewish peoplehood. “I don’t say religion,” she says. “As a rabbi, it’s about shifting my language about who we are as a Jewish people.”
Perhaps one of the lessons to take from Limmud 2025 is how to think about how we will pass Jewish values down in a post-October 7th world without losing our minds — and without getting into fights over text message.
“It was a lot of love and warmth that was felt,” Treiger says of the festival. “I had a lot of people thanking me not just for organizing Limmud but for giving people an opportunity to talk about these challenging issues.”
Cover photo: Rabbi Yohanna Kinberg (left) and Dr. Lynn Fainsilber Katz. Courtesy Margot Kravette
Guest letter
The 24th Legislative District has a new face in Olympia: Representative Adam Bernbaum. His voice at the State Capitol will be impactful, as decisions made there have a much larger comparative impact on our lives than those made in the “other Washington.”
Rep. Bernbaum is also the newest member of the Legislature’s Jewish Caucus. With the still-rising tide of antisemitism enveloping our state, the caucus and its work remain essential to the fight against antisemitism cloaked in both blue and red. And a bipartisan problem requires a bipartisan response.
To challenge hatred of Jews, one must first understand the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s Working Definition of Antisemitism – the gold standard tool for this fight, according to a clear majority of Jewish communities. It reads, in part: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.” But there is more to the story of such an ancient hatred.
I am grateful to Rep. Bernbaum for recognizing, as the IHRA definition does, that “anti-Zionism…often manifests as antisemitism because it conflates criticisms of the policies or actions of the Israeli government with [Israel’s] right to exist.” I hope his colleagues will work, as he has, to fully understand the IHRA definition so that misinformation about it and attacks on the right of Jews to define hatred against us can be clearly and consistently rejected.
—Jackson Pincus, AJC Seattle assistant director
Community Announcements
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Candlelighting in Seattle is at 5:24 p.m. The parasha is Mishpatim.
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When we establish and strengthen our Jewish funeral traditions, we bring compassion to our mourners, honor to those who have passed on, and stronger relationships in our Jewish communities.
Today, even as many Jews feel a disconnect, a renaissance of Jewish community centered funeral care is reconnecting them. What's more, the Green Burial movement is teaching us all about how burial itself can become a lasting environmental good, rich with Jewish tradition.
When we bring together these two paths, we bring a renewed spirituality to all kinds of Jews, and we make our whole world better and imbued with meaning.
This talk will take place at Hillel at the University of Washington Center for Jewish Life. Light refreshments will be served. If you are so inspired, you will have the opportunity to support JADE in Seattle. RSVP HERE
Shoutouts
Shoutout to Ari Sulkin Atkins for always speaking up on behalf of Jewish families in our community, especially when she spots antisemitism. Beyond just raising the alarm, Ari leans in and helps show how things can be better, giving people the opportunity to leverage the great resources in our region, like AJC, Stand With Us, and Federation. —Andrew and Jennifer Rosenthal
Shoutout to David Solovy for his commitment to our community and our family in Israel. —Melissa Rivkin