Remembering Who You Are

To my fellow Jews who have found a great purpose in anti-Israel activism, who have in recent months voted for stridently anti-Israel politicians or plan to vote for others whose opposition to Israel has become central to their politics, I wish to exercise a privilege our sages reserved for those who have reached the age of 50: the privilege of offering advice. I am years past that threshold, so please allow me to share a few thoughts.

Over the years, and especially since Oct. 7, 2023, I have made it a point to speak with people who share your point of view. It has never been my way to argue or to lecture, to excoriate or even cajole. Rather, I have had a sincere desire to listen. I don’t pretend that listening has settled the argument between us – only that it has earned me the standing to make one.

What I have found is not that you are a “self-hating Jew,” an expression I don’t use because I don’t believe it is true. I think something more complicated has happened. I may have your story wrong – you know your own heart better than I ever could, and I offer this only as the story I have heard most often, from people who arrived at your convictions honestly. I think you grew up hearing the origin story of the nascent Jewish state, the one proffered in books like Leon Uris’ “Exodus,” where heroic young Jews, outnumbered and outgunned, reclaimed their ancestral land after some 2,700 years of exile – and did so in a manner unparalleled in its morality.

You may have gone to Jewish day school and heard the same themes. You heard them again around the Shabbat table in your home. And then you heard another story. You may have read “1948,” by the Israeli historian Benny Morris, with its factual accounts drawn from recently unsealed documents of those years, which contradicted some of the stories of your youth. And no doubt you went to college, as nearly all young Jews do, and read the stories of the Palestinians themselves – similar in ways to the Leon Uris book, but portraying the Nakba, the violence, the treachery, the perfidy of the Zionists as they craftily stole the lands of the blameless Arabs of Ottoman Palestine.

You also learned that there is a power dynamic at play across the globe – oppressor versus oppressed – and that the former, in every case, is bad, and the latter, good. You see yourself as good, and you are perhaps ashamed that you clung so easily, so guilelessly, to what you were taught as a child. Now you seek to rectify that wrong. And you will do it by declaring: Not In My Name.

I’m not going to try to argue you out of what you’ve concluded about the settlements, how Israel came into being, or about particular Israeli policies, in the space of one letter. I won’t pretend that a single essay can undo years of reading, feeling and reasoning that brought you to where you are — in part because that reading is not unfamiliar to me. I too have sat with Edward Said, Rashid Khalidi, and Mahmoud Darwish, and with Jewish critics of Israel such as Peter Beinart, Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein, trying to understand their arguments on their own terms rather than through the eyes of those who oppose them.

What I want to offer instead is something beneath (or beyond) that argument – a different frame for thinking about what’s at stake, one that I hope you’ll test against your own conclusions rather than receive as a verdict upon them.

Judaism is widely thought of as a religion. But that isn’t an accurate description. It is, in the main, a peoplehood. A family. A civilization. A tribe to which I belong, and to which you belong. I keep Shabbat. I keep a strict kosher diet. I daven three times a day and put on tefillin every weekday. Those things are both fundamentals of Jewish faith, precious to me, and yet, even I know that they are not what ultimately binds me to another Jew. What binds one Jew to another is that we belong to the same people.

So do you.

Whether you are observant or secular. Whether you vote left or right. Whether you believe in God or doubt God’s existence altogether. I am not asking you to abandon your politics. I am asking you to weigh something alongside your politics that I don’t think it fully accounts for. Judaism has never asked us to love only our own. But neither has it asked us to pretend that our obligations are identical to everyone’s. It teaches concentric circles of responsibility.

We begin with those entrusted to us and from there extend our concern outward.

The world has, for millennia, told the Jews to become like everyone else: to assimilate, to dissolve into the larger culture, to relinquish our sense of peoplehood. The Jew, “stiff-necked” – even the Torah describes us that way – has refused. We are, in many ways, a nation of No. No to idolatry. No to forced conversion. No to surrendering ourselves entirely to whatever civilization happened to dominate a particular age.

Most ancient peoples disappeared into larger civilizations. Their languages faded. Their customs dissolved. Their identities became the concern of archaeologists. The Jews remained. Not because we imagined ourselves superior to anyone else, but because we insisted on belonging to one another, generation after generation, even when we possessed no country, no army and, too often, very few rights.

Today there are roughly 15 million Jews in a world of more than 8 billion people. Half of those Jews live in Israel. That is one-half of your family.

Whatever you conclude about any specific government’s conduct, here is what I wish you to consider: there is a difference between criticizing a policy and declining to affirm that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state. And what strikes me hardest about that second position is that it never comes with a coherent proposal for what would happen next to the 7 million Jews who live there, to the country’s borders, to who would govern it and how. It is one thing to oppose a policy. It is another to withhold recognition of a state’s right to exist while offering no account of what should take its place in any practical sense.

Some politicians embraced by parts of the progressive movement have blurred that line, or refused to draw it. Take Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Socialist who won the New York mayoral race. Asked repeatedly whether he’d condemn the slogan “Globalize the Intifada” – a phrase Jewish organizations across the spectrum, and even some on the left, have called an incitement to violence – he has consistently declined. On “Meet the Press,” pressed a third time, he said only: “I don’t believe that the role of the mayor is to police speech.” He may be sincere about that principle. But I’d ask you to notice what it costs: a refusal to say, plainly, that a phrase invoking praise for two intifadas marked by bombings and mass murder of civilians – and more recently the pogrom of Oct. 7, 2023 – should not be chanted in the street. That is not the same as debating a checkpoint or a settlement.

I raise this not to tell you how to vote, but to ask you to look closely at what you’re actually endorsing when you support a politician, and to separate that from the broader moral story you’ve told yourself about being on the right side of history.

Sometimes those two things point the same way. Sometimes they don’t.

I won’t be vague. This was a war – a terrible one, with the destruction and civilian death that war always brings, and it began when Hamas terrorists crossed a border from tunnels they had spent years building and committed atrocities against families, children and the elderly. I do not believe what followed was a genocide, and I say that plainly rather than declining to take a side. I know human rights organizations, the International Court of Justice and some scholars have used that word, and that others reject it just as forcefully; I’m not going to relitigate that whole dispute here.

But here is something that isn’t in dispute: the word has traveled far past the courtroom and the academic debate. It has landed on a Hassidic man walking home in Brooklyn. On an Israeli couple turned away from a hotel in Italy because the manager decided all Israelis stood accused. On Jewish students told to leave their own campuses. On synagogues vandalized, firebombed, shot at, and on Jews gathered for a Hanukkah celebration, murdered on Bondi Beach. Whatever you conclude about the word itself, I ask only that you notice how easily it travels once it leaves the register of legal argument and becomes a chant or a slur — how it starts being aimed at anyone visibly Jewish.

If it is truly your wish to see Israel disappear as a Jewish state, and half of our people — your people — become homeless, stateless, or overwhelmed by those who openly wish them harm, then there is probably little more I can say. But if that possibility gives you even a moment’s pause, ask yourself whether the satisfaction that comes from believing yourself to be on the right side of history is worth that risk.

You are safe here in America. I pray that continues. But you are also, very likely, well-read. You know the history of the Shoah. You know the history of the pogroms. You know what has happened to Jews when the societies in which they lived began to unravel, when institutions weakened, when old prejudices found new language and respected voices gave them new respectability. The names change. The slogans change. The rationales change. The vulnerability of the Jewish people does not.

For 2,000 years the Jewish people contributed enormously to the civilizations in which we lived. We became physicians, merchants, philosophers, scientists, musicians, poets, teachers and loyal citizens. Yet one thing remained beyond our control: our own security. The idea of a Jewish state did not arise because Jews abandoned concern for humanity. It arose because enough Jews concluded that the goodwill of others had never proved sufficient to guarantee Jewish survival. Many times in that history, as you well know, “goodwill” was in very short supply.

For 2,000 years the Jewish people contributed enormously to the civilizations in which we lived. We became physicians, merchants, philosophers, scientists, musicians, poets, teachers and loyal citizens. Yet one thing remained beyond our control: our own security.

You may think I lean too heavily on fear. Perhaps I do. But memory and fear are not the same thing. A people that has survived centuries of exile, persecution, expulsions, massacres and attempted annihilation carries memories that shape its judgment. Those memories have been purchased at an unbearable price.

My brother. My sister. I wish you well. I hope you prosper in health and happiness and grow in wisdom —as we all must.

I ask only this: before you decide that the Jewish state is the great moral error of the age, remember something far older than political Zionism. Remember who we are. Remember that before Israel became a modern state, the Jewish people had already survived for thousands of years by remembering that we belong to one another.

Governments come and go. Policies change. Political movements rise and fall. Family endures.

My hope is that ours will too.

Peter Himmelman is a Grammy and Emmy nominated performer, songwriter, film composer, visual artist and award-winning author.