I’m Not Being Weird, You Are

During the first few months after October 7th, 2023, I volunteered to help coordinate media coverage of Jewish anti-war activism in Los Angeles, which at times included speaking publicly myself. It was an intense time and a lot of things were hard, but one thing among many that bothered me then has been on my mind again, more than a year later: the media’s interest in “intergenerational dialogue.”

We were in a moment of profound crisis and had an urgent message to deliver. When we were the most successful, it sounded something like this: “No one deserves to die. No one's violence is justified. All of this violence has occurred in the context of Israeli occupation and apartheid. The Jewish people have been told these measures are necessary to keep us safe, but the truth has never been clearer - military rule over the Palestinian people does not ensure our safety, and it never has. Jews and Palestinians will continue to lose their lives paying for this falsehood. Real safety will only come through the co-liberation of our peoples, whose fates are now inextricably bound together. We work to free both the oppressed and the oppressor, because we understand that both roles steal our humanity from us.”

but… many journalists we were in touch with were unwilling or unable to engage with this message on its own terms; instead, they wanted, or their editors wanted them, to sit down with “a millennial Jewish activist and their parents,” to be a fly on the wall for these “hard conversations.” The New York Times ran a few of these kinds of stories in the past year, and I’m sure there are more out there. They generally resolve with a generic aphorism about the value of productive disagreement and the importance of family.¹

Ok fine, I have been in a lot of psychotherapy, and I admit had a transformational experience in a Nonviolent Communication workshop in the mid 2010s. I like respectful arguments, interpersonal disagreements that produce new understandings, and the resilience of familial relationships through turbulent political moments too, but…at the time, thousands of people in Gaza were (and still are) dying in horrible ways; hundreds of people in Israel had died in horrible ways; there is literally an unprecedented campaign of messianic mass murder, ethnic cleansing, and what I, and many leading Jewish academics² and international human rights organizations consider to be a genocide–and they wanted to run a story about me arguing with my mom :-/

This fixation on drama at the American Jewish dinner table really rubbed me the wrong way. It felt like what I was trying to say (“killing people is bad”) was made out to be equally as valid as the range of opposing views (“killing people is sad but justified / maybe OK / OK / good”). It implied that everyone on my “side” are children (or adult children), though dissenting views about the war on Gaza have been widespread among Americans and American Jews of all ages. It totally sidelines the rich and lengthy history of Jewish movements, ideas, and leaders who have rejected ethnic nationalism (including, for many years, the Reform movement,) and protested the oppression of Palestinians in the name of Jewish safety. It made it seem like the stance we were protesting is an eternal one, but in truth, the “unanimous” American Jewish instutional pro-Israel consensus we take for granted today only coalesced in its present form in the 1970s, largely in response to the wars of 1967 and 1973.

The Jewish establishment institutions that enforce this consensus already have a platform—they claim to speak on behalf of all Jews, and governments listen to them! The Jews speaking out in the wake of October 7th were fighting for our voices to be heard and legitimized, and it felt like I was being told that to give the progressive Jewish narrative a moment in the spotlight, they also needed to spotlight a counternarrative that is already so politically dominant that it’s like, literally the sun.

I hate fighting with my mom. It feels bad, and it hurts both of us. I hate it even when she and I are the only witnesses, so why should this be broadcast to the public, and to what end? There was something so invasive about all of this… but over the past few months, I’ve started to feel differently.

I am fortunate to come from family that even raised me with an awareness of what the West Bank is—my Jewish day school certainly did not include the green line on any map of Israel I was presented with. Even though I vaguely knew something was not right, the culture of communal fear and victimhood that emerged during the second intifada, fused with the general post-9/11 vibes of the early 2000s, basically left me vague sense of unease around the issue of Palestine. I began my political journey in college, where I became close with fellow Jewish students who were, A) more observant and Jewishly literate than I was, and B) saying words like “occupation,” which was startling and unsettling to hear.

A lot has changed for me since 2012. The views I hold, the words use, and the organizations I feel an allegiance to have all changed since then, but one thing that has remained constant has been my interest in a project I think of as “normalization.” Normalization, in the context of Israel and Palestine, often means the normalization of hafrada,³ a normalization that makes endless military occupation just a part of everyday life for Jews in Israel and the diaspora, when it’s even noticed at all.⁴ I’m talking about a different normalization: the normalization of American Jewish dissent.

In his book Tablets Shattered, Joshua Leifer describes the political gap between the general American Jewish public, who lean generally to the left, and the leaders of American Jewish institutions, who typically hold an opportunistic form of right-wing politics that finds its grounding not in any coherent value system or defined political theory, but in a simple litmus test. Full-throated institutional support for whoever claims they will provide unconditional material and political support for the Israeli government, regardless of who actually comprises that government. Even, as we’ve learned, violent extremists and far-right, anti-democratic religious fundamentalists, mirror images of the Islamophobia-inflected phantoms they conjure to justify their actions. These kinds of actors used to be beyond the pale, but the truth is, they’ve always been a part of Israeli political history— now they’ve ascended to absolute power, and are emboldened to speak and take action in a way that the previous generation of their ideological camp did not.

Still, when you step into a Jewish communal spaces in the United States, people are often uncomfortable expressing even ambivalent views about Israel. In my experience, even in environments where I am confident that the majority of people in the room share politics generally aligned with mine, people just won’t speak openly. The violence of the Jewish state lurks in the background, referenced indirectly, if at all. This is especially true when one person in the room has, or seems to have, more traditionally pro-Israel politics: when we feel the presence of the establishment’s moral authority, even when it’s the minority opinion in the room, everyone clams up. When I, or someone I know, has spoken up, they are often thanked later, privately, with comments like: “you said exactly what I was feeling.”

If that’s what you feel, say it! This is crazy—for American Jews, statistically, feeling ambivalent, even critical, of Israel is normal, but expressing those feelings isn’t. Whose sensibilities are we protecting here? Why do we behave in a way that makes it seem like these views, ranging from ambivalence to outrage and held by a plurality of laypeople, are so transgressive that we can’t speak them publicly?

I reject this, and I try to take every opportunity to make my opposition known–not in an argumentative way or dramatic way, but in a plainspoken, matter-of-fact tone. I want my parent’s friends, and my friends’ parents, to know that I think this is wrong, and that it’s not a big deal for me to say that. I’m not trying to get into a debate, or persuade anyone. I just want you to know that I’m here, and that I’m not being weird, you are. I have watched this make people uncomfortable, sometimes because they disagree, other times because they agree but are part of a community where speaking directly like that is just not the norm.

This kind of normalization work is even possible is only because of a relatively recent cultural shift, which Leifer attributes to the advent of J Street in the late Obama years.⁵ As a (relatively) mainstream institutional actor, J Street re-opened the door to public dissent over policy. Still, I’ve come to feel that what is going to be necessary to realize the kind of transformation we desparately need is a cultural shift, as much as a political one—maybe, when it comes to American Jewry today, making a distinction between culture and politics is not even really meaningful. Whatever—the point is that intra-familial or intra-communal conversations, as sites of intimacy, friction, and (hopefully) transformation, might be the crucible where a new American Judaism is forged. Maybe making these conversations more public is actually important, not for indulging the voyeuristic impulses of others, but because these stories are stories of the culture changing.

I’m lucky–I would not describe the politics of my immediate family as being in direct opposition to mine. I actually think this makes our conversations more interesting. This is not a collision of intractable worldviews, the question is not about how to maintain personal connection in the face of irreconcilable difference. It’s more of a negotiation of identity and meaning. It often seems to me that my parents feel like I’m asking them to give something up—in one recent conversation, my mom told me, “I know you’re right about a lot of this, but I just wish you could have experienced Israel in the 1970s, it was so progressive, earthy, and artistic.” I’m trying to offer her a way of understanding that we can still be progressive, earthy, and artistic, and even be in Israel—we just can’t abide the fantasy that our hegemony in that land is moral. The things important to her are not compatible⁶ with the country she’s talking about—and I’m not talking about Netanyahu and his cronies, I’m talking about the fundamental premise of a religious ethno-state, the essential impossibility of democracy based on principles of exclusion and Jewish supremacy. Donald’s Trump’s vision of a Christian nation, so objectionable to American Jewish liberals, should prompt a close, careful look in the mirror. Nostalgia is a lens that distorts truth; there is no past to return to that is not implicated in the catastrophic, morally corrupting violence of the nation’s founding.

Maybe this can be an outlet for me to reflect on these conversations–maybe it can be an outlet for others to talk about their own experiences. In “A Note to My Former Friend,” the forward to Peter Beinart’s new book Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza, Beinart frames his writing as an appeal to fellow Jews on the other side: “While I hope to persuade you of my views, our tradition insists that I have obligations to you whether I convince you or not […] I know you grapple with the terror of [October 7th]. I worry that you don’t grapple sufficiently with the terror of the days that followed and preceded it, as well.” If these conversations are a kind of grappling too, I’m up for it—when you squint, a grapple can even look like a hug.

1. Spoiler alert: I will end this piece in a similar way… oh well…

2. Not that people need to be Jewish in order to make determinations like this—in fact, the Jewish community’s cultural “ownership” over what does or does not constitute genocide is part of the problem here—but it’s meaningful when they are.

3. Hafrada is the Hebrew word for separation, used within Israel to refer to the suite of political and military policies and systems that constitute Israel’s analog to apartheid.

4. Obviously, October 7 changed this, but an “out of sight, out of mind” situation was the status quo for many years prior, and has been the situation, on and off, for decades.

5. I was surprised to learn that J Street only came into being in 2007-2008—for a milennial anti-occupation Jew, it feels like it’s part of a previous generation, which maybe is an indication of how much the 2014 Gaza War shaped the Jewish leftist culture that came after.

6. At least that’s not compatible with progressivism. I’ve learned, after spending a substantial amount of time browsing Etsy for Judaica to put on my wedding registry, that a lot of really nice contemporary Jewish textile and ceramic art is produced in remote West Bank settlements, suggesting that the artistic and earthy qualities my Mom values are actually not at all incompatible with right-wing religious fundamentalism.