Why American Jews No Longer Understand One Another

Opinion|Why American Jews No Longer Understand One Another

It’s a tense time in the Jewish family group chats. The consensus that held American Jewry together for generations is breaking down. That consensus, roughly, was this: What is good for Israel is good for the Jews. Anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism. And there will, someday soon, be a two-state solution that reconciles Zionism and liberalism.

Every component of that consensus has cracked.

Zohran Mamdani’s triumph in New York City’s Democratic primary for mayor has forced, among many Jews, a reckoning with how far they have drifted from one another. Mamdani does not use the slogan “globalize the intifada,” but he does not condemn those who do. He has said that if he were mayor, Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, would face arrest on war crimes charges if he set foot in New York City. Israel has a right to exist, he says, but “as a state with equal rights.”

Many older Jews I know are shocked and scared by Mamdani’s victory. Israel, to them, is the world’s only reliable refuge for the Jewish people. They see opposition to Israel as a cloak for antisemitism. They believe that if the United States abandons Israel then Israel will, sooner or later, cease to exist. To them, Mamdani is a harbinger. If he can win in New York City — a city with more Jews than any save Tel Aviv — then nowhere is safe.

Many younger Jews I know voted for Mamdani. They are not afraid of him. What they fear is a future in which Israel is an apartheid state ruling over ruins in Gaza and Bantustans in the West Bank. They fear what that means for anti-Jewish violence all over the world. They fear what that will do — what it has already done — to the meaning of Jewishness. Their commitment to the basic ideals of liberalism is stronger than their commitment to what Israel has become.

To call Mamdani an anti-Zionist is accurate, but the power of his position is that it is thoroughly, even banally, liberal. “I’m not comfortable supporting any state that has a hierarchy of citizenship on the basis of religion or anything else,” he said. There are ethnonationalists who might object to that sentiment. But the flourishing of American Jews is built atop that foundation.

“ It really points to what I think is the fundamental contradiction of American liberal Zionism,” Daniel May, the publisher of Jewish Currents, a leftist journal of Jewish thought, told me. “American Jews tend to think that our success in the United States is a product of the fact that the country does not define belonging according to ethnicity or religion. And Israel is, of course, based on the idea of a state representing a particular ethnic religious group.”