Anti-Zionist Jews? Why Young Americans Are Turning on Israel

Watch and Listen

We're all familiar with the narrative by now, a young Jew, typically between 18

and 35 years of age, often a day school or Jewish summer camp grad announces

themselves as a member of the anti-Israel crowd via social media posts or through

conversations with family or friends.

Perhaps they don't even fully announce it.

Cognizant of the backlash they'll receive from their childhood communities.

More often than not, these are not the people wearing masks and kafis

and harassing Jews on the streets.

More often than not, they strongly identify as Jewish, but

without any connection to Israel.

Which sounds like a contradiction to us, but isn't to them.

Usually this specific kind of anti-Israel Jew is of Ashkenazi descent.

They're at least second generation American.

Usually third or more, they were raised conservative or reform and

are not particularly observant.

Now they are not meaningfully connected to Jewish life and

their day-to-day activities.

They don't go to Temple.

They are not involved in any communal programs or on any Jewish boards or

connected to legacy Jewish organizations.

They don't have children.

They do have strong Jewish roots.

They are Jewishly literate.

They know the holidays, the prayers, the songs, the customs.

They were bar Bat mitzvah, had Jewish wedding ceremonies.

They've likely never been to Israel or have only been with family or as a

student, and usually not very recently.

To categorize these folks as anti-Jewish or self hating, is to misunderstand

them entirely to participate in the same binary polarized thinking, being

weaponized so effectively against a mainstream Jews by our enemies.

You're either pro Israel or a self hating antisemite.

As usual.

The truth is much more nuanced.

Allow me to illustrate the reality with a concrete example, the 2022 hit song,

pink Pony Club by Avowed anti-Israel Recording Artist Chapel Rone, both because

it's an app parallel and because it's been stuck in my head for three years.

I. It tells the story of a young, free spirited queer Genzer who leaves behind

her traditional Tennessee upbringing, which she still openly loves and thinks

of all the time to join the world of the Pink Pony Club, a special place where

everyone's a queen every single day.

It's where she belongs.

In this scenario, Tennessee is the childhood Jewish community

of our young anti-ISIS Israels.

It represents their parents, teachers, synagogues, family, friends.

This is a community with whom they share bonds of love and history, but also when

they left some time ago, and no longer have any engagement with on a day-to-day

basis, not out of shame or spite or any fault of the hometown, but simply

because it's not the Pink Pony Club, it's no longer their core community.

It's no longer where they belong, and there's nothing inherently

wrong or malicious about that.

The Pink Pony Club represents the leftist progressive community in which they

have been building their adult lives.

We love to use the term echo chamber with its decidedly negative

connotation to describe folks who surround themselves entirely with

people who act and think as they do.

But in practice, if we're being real, another way to say echo chamber

is friend, group or community.

Most of society functions this way.

You're not a sheep or an idiot because you and your friends have the same

values, priorities, ideas or approaches.

If your friends are going out to a restaurant, are you a sheep for

also going there because you enjoy doing what your friends do and

trust, they picked somewhere good.

That takes into account your likes and dislikes as usual, when there's discord

and misunderstanding, it means we aren't talking to each other, we aren't asking

questions and listening to the answers.

Instead, we're making assumptions from our own viewpoint rather than

discovering the truth of theirs.

And the truth is that though anti-Israel Jews are obviously viewed as an extreme

fringe minority within the mainstream Jewish world, AKA Tennessee, that

world is not of great importance to the Pink Pony clubbers anymore.

Who matters to them are the girls and boys inside the club, their true community.

And within this circle, they're actually the majority.

So when mainstream Jews wonder how these young folks are standing against their

own community, remember they aren't.

Your community is not their community anymore.

And herein lies the actual problem.

One that it's too late to solve at scale for this current crop of kiddos, but must

be urgently corrected for the generation just behind them and forevermore, other

than the profile I've already outlined.

Two other things need to be true for these specific kinds

of anti-Israel Jews to exist.

The first is that they must already be estranged from the day-to-day life

of the mainstream Jewish community.

If there's nothing Jewish about you except the way you were raised,

that's basically the same as being born in Oklahoma and living in Japan.

It's where you came from.

It's a part of you and it always will be, but it has very little to do with

how you spend your time, prioritize your life, or move throughout the world.

I. The second condition, and in a way these two are linked, is that to

be an anti-Israel Jew, you must by default be uneducated about what Jews

are, what Israel means to Jews, and the reality of life on the ground.

In Israel, any person of any stripe who is well educated in these three

areas cannot possibly be anti-Israel.

They can be anti the current government as a huge number of both Diaspora

and Israeli Jews certainly are.

But when you have all the facts, you cannot possibly remain anti the entire

country in the face of them unless you truly are an anti Jew racist who wants

to see us destroyed, which as we've already established, it's not usually

the MO for this particular group of Jews.

Now you might be wondering if these Jews are not actively connected to

the community and only know about this conflict through cherry picked facts

and the privileged lens of assimilated American Jewish culture, why are they

saying anything on this topic at all?

And it's the right question to ask.

And the answer is exactly what I discussed in my monologue two episodes ago.

Contemporary society and the pervasiveness of social media have given people

the false notion that they are both obligated and entitled to weigh in on

the topics of the day, regardless of their capacity to meaningfully do so.

In other words, people who, as we've established know little about Israel

and are not actively connected to the mainstream Jewish community, feel a

social responsibility to weigh in on the former as representatives of the latter.

And with this microphone thrust upon them and no ability to engage on the

topic in a deep or nuanced way, they find themselves backed into a corner, pick

a side they know they can't possibly be on the side of the group that's killing

GA and children on their TikTok feeds.

So that must mean they're on the other side.

It's the binary trap.

Even if they believe as many of these anti-Zionists do that Israel actually

does deserve its own sovereign state.

Which would in fact make them Zionists, but tomato.

Tomato, they still consider themselves part of the anti-Israel camp

because they can't possibly be pro.

If pro means being on the side of the army.

That's bombing babies.

We've talked about this a hundred times on the show.

People with no grip of the subject dumping their low information

opinions into the public sphere with seemingly no desire to get it right,

which is precisely the case here.

These are folks with no skin in the game.

So there's no incentive for them to take the time and effort required to

actually get it right in their circles.

They're already right, and to do the extra homework takes intention and effort that

they simply don't care enough to put in.

If they did, they would've already done it in the first place.

A year ago I met with some folks from Search for Common Ground, a global

conflict resolution organization actually on the ground with key stakeholders

working on geopolitical stalemate like this all around the world.

The idea that stuck with me from that meeting was that it's always the people

who are the least involved, the least touched by a conflict, who formed the most

rigid opinions and are the least helpful in bringing the conflict to an end.

Think about that.

Those are our well-meaning, but woefully misguided anti-Israel Jews, they remind me

of Tom and Daisy Buchanan from the classic novel, the Great Gatsby Careless People.

Careless people who smash things and then retreat into their carelessness

and let other people clean up the mess they made, it's maddening, it's

dangerous, it's irresponsible, it's shameful, but it isn't nefarious.

It isn't Jew hatred.

It isn't self hatred, and it honestly isn't that difficult to understand.

These are disconnected, uneducated people surrounded by like-minded

peers, all reinforcing one another in their disconnected, uneducated

worldviews that they're not all that concerned with anyway, and are

only focused on because Progressive society says they're supposed to be.

So what do we do about it?

Well, we deal with the present and we deal with the future for the present.

We need to stop being hypocrites.

You don't wanna be painted as a baby killer just because you're

a Jew who supports Israel.

Don't paint every anti-Israel Jew as a self hating Hamas supporter because

they don't like seeing children starve or get crushed by buildings.

We need to talk to the anti-Israel Jews in our lives.

I. Using my four C's of difficult conversation, of course, which you can

find in episode six if you're new here.

Communication leads to understanding and with understanding there's at

least room to breathe, to be connected.

Room for love and respect.

The changing of the minds part, if it happens at all, can only

happen once there is mutual respect, trust and understanding.

You need to pave the road first before anybody can meet you on it.

As for the future.

We need to deal with this problem.

A few clicks upstream.

The problem isn't that disconnected.

Uneducated Jews are turning against Israel.

The problem is that we're failing to stop our children from becoming disconnected.

Uneducated Jews, the onus falls on both the parents and our Jewish institutions.

Jewish children must understand that we are a people, an ancient

tribe for whom religion is, but one facet of always share.

It's much harder to disconnect from your family than it is from your soul.

Jewish children must know that Jews are not rich white Europeans, but

that the world is full of Jews of all colors and countries and socioeconomic

backgrounds, and even the ones who present as white do so conditionally.

Jewish teens must know the history of our people, not just the

Bible and not just the Holocaust, but everything else in between.

They must understand that they live on a point on a long line of resilience

in the face of Unceasing persecution.

They must know what happened to us in England and France and Spain

and Russia and North America.

They must know the ins and outs of 48 and 67 and the fall of the Shah and the

far and the ins and every other pivotal moment in Israeli history from all angles.

If all we're teaching them is holidays, songs, and tikkun olam,

we can't be surprised when the only things they know about being Jewish

are holidays, songs and tikkun ola.

We can fix this.

We have to fix this, and we will.

If there's one thing Jews know how to do, it's endure.

So we beat on oats against the current, but we always find a way.

This is the 35th episode of being Jewish with me, Jonah Platt.