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In recent times, keeping up with the news has become an emotionally charged experience for many within the U.S. Jewish community. This is largely due to a dual struggle: the anger over a rising tide of attacks targeting Jewish communities, and the internal discord about whether to back or challenge Israel’s policies in the conflict-ridden Middle East.
A recent incident underscored this tension when a man drove his pickup truck into a synagogue near Detroit, where over 100 children were attending a preschool program. The driver, who had reportedly lost family members in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon, engaged in a gunfight with a security guard before taking his own life, according to FBI reports. This act was met with widespread condemnation from all corners.
Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, addressed the incident, emphasizing, “To hold American Jews, particularly children in a preschool, accountable for the actions of a foreign government is a dangerous double standard that isn’t applied to any other group today. One can be deeply critical of the policies of the State of Israel and still recognize that targeting synagogues or Jewish institutions with violence is not political protest; it is antisemitism, plain and simple.”
Adding to this sentiment, Jewish author and commentator Peter Beinart also condemned the attack, while maintaining his critical stance on Israeli actions in areas like Gaza and the West Bank. He expressed on his podcast, “No matter what Israel does, no matter how immoral or brutal or horrifying, it doesn’t justify attacking a synagogue or American Jews in any way. Americans are not responsible for the actions of foreign governments or organizations merely because they share a religion, ethnic national ancestry, or race.”
“No matter what Israel does, no matter how immoral or brutal or horrifying, it doesn’t justify attacking a synagogue or justifying attacking American Jews in any way,” he said this week on his podcast. “Americans are not responsible for the actions of foreign governments or foreign organizations, just because they share a religion, an ethnic national ancestry, a race.”
A debate over displaying pro-Israel signs
Beinart added, however, that U.S. synagogues displaying “We stand with Israel” signs should take them down “because those signs make the congregants less safe and because they’re immoral.”
Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, has numerous policy differences with Israeli government, yet said she wouldn’t ask that “We stand with Israel” signs be taken down.
“We live in a country where people are entitled to their beliefs,” she said. “No one should have to risk violence because they’re expressing them.”
It’s important, Spitalnick said, for Jews to acknowledge that these interrelated issues are nuanced.
“I believe deeply in the need for a Jewish homeland,” she said. “And I have fundamental disagreements with this government, the humanitarian crisis it created in Gaza.”
Beth Kissileff, a journalist whose husband survived the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue attack that claimed 11 lives, agrees the issues are complex.
“On the one hand, I do feel the fates of Jews the world over are linked,” she said. “On the other hand, I don’t feel it’s fair for Jews the world over to be the proxies for the actions of the government of Israel.”
She noted that she and many others strongly disagree with various actions of Israel’s current government. She faulted its failure to curb Israeli settlers who are attacking West Bank Palestinians and its policies favoring Orthodox over non-Orthodox expressions of Judaism.
But scapegoating Jews because of Israel is unacceptable, she said.
“It’s outrageous to take anything out on anyone,” she said. “It’s outrageous that Iranian schoolgirls were killed,” she added, referring to the apparent U.S. missile strike based on faulty intelligence, which killed many children, both boys and girls. “I’m outraged when any innocent life is taken.”
Outrage over blaming Jews for the Israeli government’s actions
Even so, Kissileff said, antisemites will find any excuse — whether Israel or something else — to attack Jews.
Her husband, Jonathan Perlman, is rabbi of New Light Congregation. It was one of three Pittsburgh congregations to lose members in the 2018 synagogue attack, the deadliest antisemitic massacre in U.S. history. The gunman, now on federal death row, claimed to be outraged by Jewish support for refugee resettlement.
At Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, Nicole Guzik serves jointly as senior rabbi along with her husband, Erez Sherman. While they try to avoid broaching politics from the pulpit, they have convened events designed so congregants hear diverse views.
Like many rabbis nationwide, they are dismayed by the high cost of security for their Conservative synagogue — more than $1 million a year. A surge in criticism of Israel and anti-Israel protests, triggered by its war in Gaza following Hamas’ deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attack, have at times spilled over into violence, prompting synagogues and Jewish institutions to beef up security.
“But we are going to live as Jews as proudly as possible,” Guzik said. “There’s no reason Jews should not be able to express their love for their homeland. … A love for Israel is intrinsic to Jewish belief.”
Motti Seligson, director of public relations for Chabad-Lubavitch, an Orthodox Jewish movement, also lamented the need for stringent security measures. But he welcomed another trend, saying many Jews are strengthening ties to their religion and other Jews worldwide following the Hamas attack.
“This is something that we’ve been seeing from Oct. 7, just a tremendous amount of people who want to connect with their faith and connect with their people,” Seligson said.
Conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism challenges Jewish communities
Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove of Park Avenue Synagogue, a large Conservative congregation in New York, said Jews have “grown uncomfortably accustomed to this new reality,” including the recent attacks in Michigan and Australia.
It shows, he said, “the blurred line between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, the frightening manner by which violent rhetoric becomes violent action, and the enabling that occurs when people in authority refuse to draw clear moral lines.”
Cosgrove, author of “For Such a Time as This: On Being Jewish Today,” said Jews have an ancient connection to the land of Israel, even while many are critical of specific actions of its leaders.
“As a proud Zionist, an expression of that love of Israel can come and oftentimes does come in the form of dissent with the Israeli government,” Cosgrove said. “Love of Israel … is different from love of the Israeli government. And the problem of this moment is that it’s all being conflated into one.”
He was grateful that New York Gov. Kathy Hochul visited the congregation last week, advocating for proposed legislation requiring a buffer zone where demonstrations would be prohibited near houses of worship. It followed recent anti-Israel protests outside New York synagogues.
“I urged my community that, shocked as we were, we need to be mobilized, not paralyzed,” Cosgrove said.
Israel’s historical role figures in the debate
Israel was founded 1948 as a homeland and refuge for the world’s Jews in the wake of the Holocaust. Its leaders consider themselves representatives, partners and defenders of Jewish communities around the world.
Mark Mazower, a history professor at Columbia University, last year published “On Antisemitism: A Word in History,” tracing how the meaning of “antisemitism” had evolved since the word was coined in the 19th century. He asserts that gradually, after Israel’s founding in 1948, antisemitism was applied with increasing frequency to hostility to Israel.
Over the same period, Mazower notes, many U.S. Jews and the major organizations that served them closely embraced Israel — a trend that now has fueled divisions within the U.S. Jewish community over whether to support or criticize various Israeli policies in the Middle East.
“It’s obviously wrong to blame all Jews everywhere for what Israel does,” Mazower said. “Yet large American Jewish organizations have wrapped themselves in the Israeli flag and said it’s the duty of American Jews to stand with Israel.”
Among those organizations is the Anti-Defamation League, which last year reported that incidents related to Israel constituted — for the first time — more than half of the antisemitic incidents in its annual tally.
“We will not apologize for our love and support for the Jewish state of Israel. Not now, not ever,” the ADL’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, told the organization’s national conference this week.
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