How Oct. 7 is forcing Jews to reckon with Israel - WaPo (This is a Jewish Group, respect) [View all]

Last edited Fri Mar 8, 2024, 10:16 PM - Edit history (1)

Since the 2023 Hamas-Israel war broke out, almost no subject has garnered more global attention than Israel. For many Jews, both outside and inside Israel, the Gaza conflict feels pivotal. Since Oct. 7, Jews everywhere, whether sympathetic to Israel or critical or some combination, have found they have no choice but to deal with Israel’s impact and significance on their lives and feelings — whether they want to or not. This experience calls for a new account of what Israel means for being a Jew today.

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The Zionists wanted the Jews to be a sovereign nation, not a feuding family. For them, a Jewish state was not supposed to be an event in Jewish history. It was supposed to be the end of Jewish history, understood as a tale of suffering in the diaspora. Israel was meant to transcend and replace religious Jewishness and begin a new national era — picking up where Israelite sovereignty had ended at the hands of Rome, 2,000 years before.

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Some Gen Z progressive Jews participate in campus organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine, a “collective of organizers that supports over 200 Palestine solidarity organizations on college campuses across occupied Turtle Island (U.S. and Canada).” On Oct. 12, as Israel began its response to Hamas’s attack on Israeli civilians, SJP’s national office posted on social media “condemning the Zionist project and their latest genocidal attack on the Palestinian people.”

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But so would embracing simultaneously a God of loving social justice and a state that rejects liberal democracy. Israel will not change just because progressive American Jews want it to. They will have to find their own answers to the looming crisis facing them — and soon, before a new generation finds itself alienated from a Jewishness whose inner contradictions it cannot reconcile.

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At the individual level, Jews who want to think less about Israel also face serious challenges because Jewishness is a collective identity. If most Jews self-define in relation to Israel, positively or negatively, it is hard for any Jews to choose not to do so. Yet a turn to a Jewishness that is more personal, familial and spiritual and less national-political may be the inevitable result, even if no formal movement within Jewish life consciously adopts such a policy. If this happens, Jews will have to draw more than ever on their rich traditions of faith, doubt, struggle and love — and do so as families, rather than as a nation.

A lot more..

https://wapo.st/3Vf2Kgp

(free)

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Noah Feldman is a professor of law at Harvard University, a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion and the author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People,” from which the following is excerpted.

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The way I look at it, criticizing Israel will not shield them from antisemitic attack. As happened to many Jews who converted to Christianity during the Nazi regime.