Shame
There’s nothing left to say. No recitation of the death counts, of the tonnage of munitions dropped on Gaza, of the numbers of people displaced. No analysis, no argument, no pleading. No threats, no demands, no warnings. It’s been two months. The dead are dead. The state of Israel has shown what it is, what it has always been: A brutal occupier that imagines Arabs as vermin. The leaders of the American Jewish community have shown who they are, too: Bloodthirsty nationalists with minds clouded by fantasies of Jewish power, or moral cowards who watched quietly through two months of unthinkable carnage in Gaza, before gently suggesting that they might be about to begin thinking about maybe, perhaps criticizing the conduct of the war.
For the rest of us, as we put our menorah in the window this week and consider the flames, what’s left is shame. Shame in an American Judaism that stands for nothing but its own perpetuation. Shame in Jewish institutions that shrug their shoulders at massacre upon massacre. And shame in ourselves. Shame that we believed “peoplehood” was anything but a guilt trip to keep us quiet about the idiocy and immorality of the Jewish nationalists. Shame that we believed the liberal Zionists when they talked about justice, and that we believed the political caution they demanded was a tactic to build power, and not an end in itself. Shame that we didn’t see through the gray old men who wielded the fear of anti-Semitism as a tool of ideological discipline, and who, in these past weeks, have shown themselves to believe in nothing but power and violence.
I cannot conceive of any action I might take at this point that would change the course of events in Gaza. I can, however, conceive of what I might have done differently in the years leading up to this point.
American Jews have been co-opted into a system that supports and enables Israeli state violence through a sprawling, multifaceted influence campaign. That system is virtually coterminous with the institutions of the American Jewish mainstream; the network of advocacy groups and community organizations built around the system of local Jewish federations. Those institutions exist as a bulwark against assimilation, which poses an existential threat to their corporate existence. To keep American Jews engaged in Jewish life, they sponsor summer camps, preschools, community centers, cultural institutions, student organizations, and so on. At the same time, they devote themselves ideologically and politically to Israel and the Zionist idea, in the hopes that the thrill of Jewish power might provide enough emotional and spiritual fodder to sustain another few generations of American Judaism.
The result is that living a Jewish life in America embeds you within a system of support for Israeli violence. The strategy of engagement works: The summer camps are good. So are the schools, the community centers, the museums. These programs make up the fabric of American Jewish life; they are, in no small part, what it means to be Jewish in the U.S. in 2023. They are also aspects of a system that has abetted the destruction of Gaza.
Individual Jewish summer camps and cultural institutions are not culpable for the Israeli bombardment. But the American Jews who choose to participate in the programs of this network of American Jewish institutions form a constituency, and it’s that constituency that the leaders of the American Jewish mainstream purport to represent when they organize a pro-war rally on the National Mall, or put out a statement opposing a ceasefire. We can trace the lines of our own complicity: They run through the local Jewish institutions to which we pay tuitions and membership dues, through the city’s Jewish federation, through national umbrella groups like the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, into the ears of the White House and Congress, and out in the form of tank shells and bunker busters loaded onto ships in some East Coast harbor.
We can’t do anything about it now. It’s too late for us to strike our names from the list. That’s our shame.
Now that our consent has been co-opted in support of a campaign of indiscriminate bombing, however, we can’t go back to how we were. Last year, the Zionist commitments of the mainstream Jewish community’s summer camps and schools and cultural institutions seemed an irrelevance, a slight misalignment of values. Now, we need to look again at the ideological concessions we make when we affiliate with the institutions of the mainstream Jewish community. We need to be clear-eyed about what they believe, and what we believe, and what the consequences might be when we put aside our beliefs because the summer camp actually is really good.
The events of the past two months have uncovered a moral and intellectual rot at the center of American Judaism. The leaders of the mainstream American Jewish community may choose to let that rot spread, but we don’t need to sit inside and wait for the house to collapse.