What Do We Do Now (Jewishly)?

Reflections on opposing the current conflict 'as a Jew'

What should we do? The question looms large right now, in the wake of the carnage in Gaza. As ordinary westerners the answer is straightforward; we should march, hold vigils, lobby our politicians and do all we can to lobby for an immediate ceasefire, a negotiated hostage/prisoner exchange, a full Israeli military withdrawal from Gaza, and its inhabitants allowed to return to whatever remains of their homes. There will be much to do after that, but none of that can begin without these fundamental initial steps.

But there is a more specific question that some of us find ourselves wrestling with right now. What should those of us who are Jewish do right now? And particularly; what should we do as Jews? There are a couple of popular options. The first is that promoted by the major Jewish diaspora institutions: stand solidly behind Israel, mourn its losses, support its narrative. Such a position is based largely around remaining in a perpetual October 7^th paradigm, almost in denial of the Israeli army’s action’s in Gaza, seeing global protests against those actions as motivated by antisemitism. It will be no surprise to anyone reading this that I do not see this option as remotely sustainable or ethical. The other option, less widespread but still quite common, is to explicitly protest Israel’s military action as Jews, largely by attending the Palestine Solidarity demonstrations as part of the Jewish bloc, perhaps with Jewish specific banners and t-shirts, and/or attending some of the specifically Jewish-led vigils organised by Na’amod. While I have attended some of these and have great sympathy with others that have on a more regular basis, I have some reservations. More specifically I don’t think this is the whole answer to our dilemma.

The complicating factor is that the war, and the conflict is general, is not our fault. In most cases, diaspora Jews have little influence on Israel. It claims to act on our behalf but does not ask our permission before doing so. We have no vote in Israeli elections. We may not even support the existence of the state of Israel. It is thus a problem to suggest that diaspora Jews have any obligation to condemn Israel’s actions. We would normally consider that a form of antisemitism – blaming Jews around the world for what Israel does, it’s a version of blaming a whole group of people for the behaviour of certain individuals within it. So any external demand for Jews to condemn Israel is problematic. Of course, it’s a different matter if Jews choose themselves to do this, making individual choices about how to represent themselves. But as someone who has sometimes, done this, spoken as a Jew at a pro-Palestinian event, there is something strange, even uncomfortable about the experience. Firstly there’s a danger of being fetishized, as a token Jew, and also a danger of being asked to represent a group which has never elected you its representative. And there’s always a doubt about what to say – you may wish to present yourself simply as a concerned humanitarian, like the ordinary demonstrators mentioned above. But you have been invited ‘as a Jew’ – to say something that is somehow ‘Jewish’ – probably that Judaism and Zionism are not synonymous and that the Palestine Solidarity movement is not essentially antisemitic. ‘Asajews’ has become a term of abuse, coined I think, by the novelist Howard Jacobson, and now an insult hurled by the Jewish right at any Jew who uses their identity to speak out, with the implication that the person only identifies as Jewish for the purpose of criticising Israel. But the sting of the insult is felt due to the uncertainty we feel over what we are really doing in representing ourselves in this way.

My approach when speaking at such events has been to make the content of my speech deeply Jewish – quoting many Jewish religious texts: Tanach, Midrash, certain pacifistic Rabbis. I try to build what Christians call a ‘liberation theology’ – showing that our canonical texts can be read against empire, nationalism and war.  I’m not sure if all the demonstrators appreciate this – they are mostly looking for straightforward slogans, solidarity with Palestinians and some kind of hope for change. But it seems important to me, if I am being asked to speak ‘as a Jew’ to deeply ground my contribution in Jewishness and Jewish texts.

This connects to what I think is the deeper, more holistic way for Jews to respond to current events. To reach it I think we can look to how diaspora Jewishness is currently being redefined, mostly by Israeli-led organisations, but with the support of some diaspora leaders too. Since 1948, and since 1967 in earnest there has a been attempt by Israel to ‘nationalise the diaspora’ – to turn a hitherto global ethno-religious people into long-distance citizens or expats of the Israeli state. This process has taken many forms; reshaping the Jewish festival calendar, playing up certain aspects of the tradition and playing down others, through the way we think about Jewish history, to the choice of which Jewish languages we do and don’t use, and how we use them. To give one example of the latter, in Britain, prior to 1948 most of the community spoke Ashkenazi-accented Hebrew; from the 1950s this was consciously replaced by ‘Ivrit’ – the form spoken in Israel which is to some degree based on Western Sephardic pronunciation but is also a modern construction. Our Hebrew, like our Jewishness, was remade in the image of the new nationalist paradigm.

This process of diaspora nation building has increased since October 7^th. On the fast of Esther recently, there was a ‘Global Shema’ for the hostages, centred on the Kotel, the Western Wall, in Jerusalem. Inevitably, Purim involved the villainous Haman being linked to Hamas, and to Amalek, the tribe from which Haman is supposed to spring. We are asked to leave an empty place at our Passover seder for a hostage. It’s already being suggested that the typically joyful Simchat Torah – the festival on which the Hamas attack occurred – should be marked this year as a day of mourning. It’s an attempt to turn our festivals into days of national memory – trying to get Jews to mark them like Israelis.

If the Israeli state, and associated bodies ideally want diaspora Jews to nationalise their Jewishness and tie it all to Israel, there’s another option which is less ideal but tolerable to it. That is for diaspora Jews to walk away; to give up their Jewish identity, seeing it too bound up with oppression, apartheid and genocide. Jews who take such an understandable move believe that the enveloping of Judaism by Zionism is too far gone to be undone, that Jewishness is now wholly synonymous with the Israeli state and its actions, and want no part of that. Israel can live with this option because it acknowledges its hegemony over Judaism/Jewishness, and hands it a victory on a plate.

Instead of walking away I think we need to become more Jewish. Not by practicing the ersatz impoverished ‘nationalised Judaism’ that Zionism has built. But by practicing something like actual, historical and religious Judaism as it was practiced in diverse communities across the world for almost two millennia. Not subjugating all our festivals and traditions to the narrow themes of persecution, resistance and Jewish continuity – ‘they tried us to kill us, we won, let’s eat’ is a joke created by US Jewish comedian Alan King in the 1950s, not a summation of our tradition. But rather exploring the rich seam of Jewish philosophy that is (or was) threaded through our tradition; issues of liberation, responsibility, ‘difficult freedom’, transience, the sanctification of time, the ephemerality of existence, the marking of the seasons, ethical monotheism, repentance and forgiveness, collective welfare, how to lead a full life, and so much more. We need to immerse ourselves more in our classic texts – Talmud, Midrash and commentaries, sources of abundant richness in which profound ideas and absurd details of ritual practices lie side by side. We need to (re)learn, read and speak Jewish languages; both the diaspora languages of Yiddish, Ladino, Judaeo-Arabic and the many other local tongues – but also Hebrew, rejecting the hegemony of Ivrit in favour of the classical version of the language, preserving our particular diasporic forms of pronunciation.

We also need to engage with our history – not the curtailed history that ceases after the destruction of the temple in 70CE and picks up (if you are lucky) with the Eastern European pogroms and the associated mass migration of the 1880s. If you get to learn about anything in-between, it will be stories of unending persecution and expulsions – the lachrymose view of Jewish history as the historian Salo Baron put it. But there is so much more than that – the rich tapestry of Jewish life, textuality and culture that emerged in diverse locations such as Baghdad, Cordoba, Cyprus, Constantinople, Troyes, Lublin, Salonika, Worms, Marrakesh, Bombay and so many other places. Rarely as a wholly separate entity but also rarely fully under the control of others, Jews built quasi-autonomous communities, always in dialogue with the other communities around them and with the rest of the Jewish world. Long before hybrid identities became popularised in twentieth century America there were hybridised forms of Judaism practiced across the globe, with regional Jewish languages adding aspects of classical Hebrew and Aramaic to the local dialect.

I suggest such an approach, being deeply committed to Judaism whilst rejecting the centrality of Israel and distancing ourselves from its actions, will prove the most effective challenge to Zionism and to Israel. It won’t know how to deal with us – it will be hard to write us off as self-haters, or ‘un-Jews’, and the wider world will be similarly confused, so hegemonic has been the conflation of Jews and Israel. This confusion is exactly what we should be aiming at - to undermine the sense that the Jewish diaspora is a quasi-national community which supports (and can thus be blamed for) the actions of its ‘mother country’. I think in the long term this approach will help the Palestinians – weakening Israel’s alibi that its actions are necessary to protect the global Jewish population from its enemies. To the extent that we agree to say ‘not in our name’ we say ‘do not use concerns over our safety as an excuse to persecute others’. But solidarity is most effective when both sides have something to gain from working together. And I think this move will also help us, as diaspora Jews and we needn’t be embarrassed about that fact. A Jewish identity based around solidarity with Israel is utterly precarious and cannot provide a secure foundation for the future. A Jewish identity based around genuine historic Judaism, diasporic culture and prophetic ethics could actually endure.