Is the Left Going to Lose the Jews?
Jews have long held liberal positions, identifying with other minorities and the oppressed. But as ideology shifts to the extremes, some of them are feeling left out in the cold.
Over the summer of 2020 it became clear to me that Trump, if he didn’t win the election, would come damn close. Despite a popular narrative that Trump would go down in a ball of flames due to his role stoking racial tension, enabling white supremacy, and generally making bad and unintelligent decisions, I saw from my personal interactions that his support hadn’t waned. In fact, it was stronger.
Most of this support was thanks to the right-wing media machine, but some of it, honestly, was due to messages coming out of the far-left end of the Democratic party. In Seattle, we saw the center of the city taken over by protestors, an initially noble effort that ended up with an abandoned police precinct, vandalism, and murder. After butting heads with the city council, our Black, female police chief stepped down, and our liberal, lesbian mayor decided not to run for reelection.
It made me wonder: Will classically liberal Jews, Jews who generally support Israel’s existence, social safety nets, and expansive civil rights, be gradually forced to choose between the far left activist class and the far right party of Trump? If the center bottoms out, where do we fall?
“What I hear very often from people is that they are very torn,” Regina Sassoon Friedland, director of AJC Seattle, told me. “‘I’m a lifelong liberal Democrat, but I don’t feel like I fit in.’ It’s amazing how many people I hear this from.”
There are a few things to work through here.
First, liberalism is changing. “Progressive” politics fall to the left of mainstream liberal politics, leaving traditional liberals out of sync and sometimes (often?) afraid to say anything for fear of backlash. This fear shouldn’t be underestimated. In the worst case scenarios, people are getting “canceled” and losing their jobs over comments. Literally, people are losing their livelihoods over words.
Second, while most Jews remain staunchly liberal, many think that Trump did some good things. While many of his policies were abhorrent, depending on where you stand, his administration finally moved the embassy to Jerusalem and nailed down diplomatic relations with countries that will likely contribute to Israel’s stability in the volatile region.
Which brings us to Zionism and the role it plays on the left. This has been an issue for a long time, and while initiatives to isolate Israel socially, politically, and economically have mostly failed in this country, mainstream liberal Jews generally walk on eggshells when it comes to this topic in the liberal town square, whether that’s within media, arts, higher education, or obviously any social justice arena. Movements like BDS may not achieve much policy-wise, but its supporters do have a good handle on left-leaning public opinion.
American Judaism is a unique phenomenon. Its main narrative is “do not oppress the stranger, since we were strangers in a strange land.” (Fun fact: this dictum appears in this week’s parasha, Mishpatim.) Our liberation is bound up with everyone’s. This is partly a survival strategy. It helped us assimilate and also maintain a sense of community. It has succeeded all too well.
“Peter Beinart, in 2010, said the mainstream leadership needs to be conscious of the fact that the generation coming up, when asked to choose between their universal values and Jewish values, are going to choose their universal values,” says Rabbi Daniel Weiner of Temple De Hirsch Sinai. “We are seeing that now.”
When I was in college in the early 2000s, young Jewish culture was hitting its stride as an expression of social justice. I organized and led two trips to Central America with American Jewish World Service and spent a summer in Honduras and Ukraine. I worked for a short time with an organization that aimed to make service experiences a part of every Jewish young adult’s life. “Tikkun olam” became a buzzword that described basically any kind of volunteer project. At the time, I equated social justice work with Judaism. They were one and the same.
Social justice looks a lot different now. The country’s reckoning with diversity and inequity are far deeper than the lessons garnered from alternative spring break. Jewish values easily adapt to these new calls, and we see organizations and congregations stepping up to address everything from climate change to immigration to homelessness to racism.
“As a Reform rabbi, in many ways this is the ultimate realization of our efforts for decades,” says Rabbi Daniel Weiner of Temple De Hirsch Sinai. “We have pushed this notion of tikkun olam, of Jewish values as context for works in the world, as the ultimate expression of Jewish identity. So what happens when the positions of Israel or some leaders run against the definition of Jewish identity we’ve taught?”
Like many American Jews, Kayla Higgins grew up with some basic elements of Jewish identity. Her interfaith family was part of a Reconstructionist synagogue, and she had a bat mitzvah, but it wasn’t until college, in Chicago, that she got more connected. She went on a Birthright trip to Israel, then went back to study in Jerusalem at Pardes. While in Chicago, she participated in a queer Talmud study group.
“I identified as queer and it was a great fit for me,” she says. “I loved studying Talmud once a week with a hevruta.”
After graduating from law school and moving to Seattle, she started volunteering with a liberal Jewish advocacy group on immigration reform during the height of the Trump years. It was meaningful work. But Higgins felt that their activism was resolved too quickly. There was more to do. “We had done some workshopping about what our next steps should be as an organization and what local chapters would like to do next,” she says. “They had thrown out a couple ideas. The one that was voted on was fighting white supremacy. Quickly, white supremacy became police.”
This was a problem, not just because it was a whole new topic from what she had signed on to. By this point, she was engaged to a Seattle police officer.
“I want immigration reform, more pathways to citizenship, but I always want immigration enforcement,” her fiance, David Warnock, explains. After the organization decided to tackle white supremacy, he says, “I was like, uh-oh, police are next. I knew it in my soul that the cops are next.”
And they were. Warnock is disturbed by calls to defund the police, obviously. He’s also troubled by the abolitionist tendencies of activism that he sees creeping into Jewish spaces. The Jewish community relies on a good relationship with law enforcement. Joining progressive calls to defund it seems anathema to Jewish safety.
“The police issue is a perfect example of where this conflict emerges,” Weiner says. “Jews were supportive of a police presence in our community that is far more far and equitable, but by the same token, the police have really been there for us when we have felt threatened and attacked. Again, that’s not a binary thing, one can hold two things at the same time.”
“Before Jews rush to abandon something, I would like them to think about the officers who were shot rushing to save the lives in Pittsburgh,” Warnock says. “There’s not many countries or situations in human history where the institutional police will die for the Jewish community.”
Even before the calls to defund police, Warnock says, he was starting to feel disillusioned at synagogues where “politics took precedence over any Jewish learning. ‘This is why Trump is a pharaoh, the end.’ It felt very hollow. ‘Everyone in this minyan hates Trump, am I right? OK.’ There was nothing Jewish about saying Trump sucks on Shabbat. It was this weird mimicry of this political zeitgeist.”
“I feel like a lot of Jews we know our age would much rather have their Jewish community be a small group of maybe 15 to 50 people who are exactly like them,” says Higgins. “They don’t want to join a big synagogue; it’s too big, they don’t want to pay for membership, they would rather have their Jewish community be a small group of their friends. The problem with that is that we no longer have synagogues or Jewish communities that are diverse or have people with diverse viewpoints. I think so many liberal Jews are siloed in these Jewish communities where they think everyone thinks they way they do.”
Madeline Bergman, like Higgins, is a young lawyer in Seattle who got in touch with her Jewish identity as a young adult. She has grown uncomfortable with liberal spaces that seem to hold Jews to a different standard.
“I’m liberal because I believe gay people can marry who they want and women can control their bodies,” she says. But she bristles at the lack of awareness people in her circles have around Judaism. After Ilhan Omar’s “All about the Benjamins” tweet fiasco, one of Bergman’s non-Jewish classmates declared on Facebook that the comment was not anti-Semitic. Bergman took them to task. Someone responded: “‘How is equating Jewish influence and wealth anti-Semitic?’” she says. “I just told them to Wikipedia Nazi propaganda…. These people claim to be the most woke, progressive, accepting people in society, and yet would they tell a person of color that something is not racist? Would they tell a trans person something’s not transphobic, or tell a gay person that something isn’t homophobic?”
In other words, why are Jews treated differently, and does it amount to a version of anti-Semitism on the left? This is an issue taken up by the likes of Bari Weiss and James Lindsey and others who argue that critical race theory and social justice activism are flattening Jewish history and experience and feeding it into a power matrix that ends up framing Jews as oppressors. Jews are white and privileged. Except when they’re not. One is a leftwing narrative; the other is the right.
“A lot of it comes down to people not understanding that Judaism isn’t just a religion,” Bergman says. “People then don’t really think about Jews as being able to be targeted. ‘Jews are white and rich; what do they have to worry about?’”
We need to normalize Zionism and take pride in our positions, she suggests.
“The Democratic party is so diverse right now,” she says. “You have the socialists and moderates. [For] the majority of Democrats, the majority of their life is not affected by pronouns. To be able to separate the Democratic party so it is not defined by these loud voices is a way for Jews to be more comfortable being Democrats.”
“We have to do a better job as Democrats and liberals to call out the extremes,” says Rabbi Weiner. “It’s ironic. I used to be considered way on the left of things. I’m much more center. It’s not that I have changed, but the spectrum itself has shifted.”
I imagine this statement will resonate with people. But calling out extremes can be daunting—particularly when the extremes are in your own camp. It’s hard to even recognize them sometimes.
I don’t have a conclusion, so I’m going to throw it back to you. Are you feeling politically alienated or worried about the direction of our two-party system as it relates to Jewish identity?
Share your questions, dissents, or thoughts here in the comments or send them confidentially to thecholentseattle@gmail.com.
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You have crystalized the importance of this issue. For many observant Jews, the rightward shift is unsettling. One manifestation of this is the increasing movement to isolate ourselves by building high walls and security fences. A number of years ago, I volunteered as a greeter for a Seward Park shul. The man who instructed me did nothing but show me what to do WHEN THEY ATTACK. Protection for ourselves is important, but it cannot be the only way we interact with our neighbors. At the same time that we make ourselves safer through protective measures, we must also reach out to others in welcoming gestures. It is up to us as individuals and as congregations to find ways to achieve these ends. I hope that this is the beginning of an ongoind search for solutions.
Thank you for covering this topic. As a Jew who supports progressive policies, I find myself more to the center on social issues, specifically cancel culture and intersectionality. When writing an article for Jewish in Seattle in 2016 (https://mag.jewishinseattle.org/community/2016/08/quiet-riot), I learned that more and more Jewish students were eschewing campus social justice gatherings, like Black Lives Matter, because they included other causes - under the intersectionality umbrella - like Israeli oppression of Palestinians. Some protestors brandished anti-Israel banners; others equated American Jews with Israelis (in a black-and-white ignorance, conflating all Israelis with the Israeli government). I've argued with some of my progressive friends about Ilan Omar's troubling anti-Semitic statements; fortunately, getting them to shift their perspectives.
It seems that there is only space for so many minorities, and nuance is overlooked in the name of woke righteousness.