I think one way of understanding our situation is to recognize that "thinking without solutions" is the only possible response to the much larger poly crisis of which the crisis in Judaism is just one part; a complex of intersecting crises so complex that our minds cannot encompass it, rendering solution seeking ultimately futile. All the ideologies of the past 2 or 300 years are failing, or have failed. Our attempts to realize these failed dreams of human betterment--communism, capitalism, socialism, liberalism, conservatism, Zionism--have so disrupted the bio-geo-sphere that the poly crisis is in the final analysis a crisis in the history of life on this planet. This is so immense that it is impossible to say what the world will be like in 100 years--the future we are heading into is unimaginable. But leaders, political or civic, cannot think this way. They will always look for solutions, near term plans and policies, that is their self-conceived role. In a world where every choice is, increasingly, a bad choice, their solutions are becoming more and more desperate, even nihilistic. Our concern as Jews is that this manifests most clearly in Israel's current regime's growing determination to eliminate perceived threats to its existence--the Palestinians, Iran, etc-with extreme prejudice. This end times belief that final solutions are the only solutions throws the Zionist project itself into question for some, while for others it is its inevitable realization. (Trump shares this same impulse--to cut all the Gordian knots of recent history, and be done with it... As if that "solves" anything...)
In Shaul's essay, he refers to Judaism as a wisdom tradition. At the risk of sounding naive, why can't we make that central to our identities as Jews? Why all this contention over Zionism, Israel, and the state of American Jewry, when the convulsions of the coming decades make it highly uncertain that in the end Zionism, Israel, and America will even exist a century from now? If anything gets the Jews through what's coming, it will be our long history of making and remaking ourselves within the framework of 3000 years of thinking and rethinking our place in the world. A fortress state in the middle east will not save us, nor will fortress mentalities in the Diaspora. I see the gathering in Manhattan as a valuable attempt to find the common ground that binds us together. Endless contention on that common ground, yes, schism, excommunication, no...
There is a time for remaking; and there is a time for renunciation. The time for renunciation is now. Judaism is not a "wisdom tradition"; it is a midrash tradition. It is a good time for honest "liberal Jews" to find a new tradition, or be just content with being "liberals."
Not much time to respond. Bringing in Shabbat in Israel after some last minute time in a bomb shelter. You and your cohorts are the ones who will end up in the dust bin of Jewish history. No wonder you start off with a quote from Arendt, who worshiped her own intellect and saw herself above identifying with a people or nation. The nerve of your getting together to mourn the demise of Zionism while half of the Jewish people are threatened by Iranian missiles. What a sorry lot you are.
I helped get Nomex tanker suits to Israeli troops after October 7. Now I'm asking: when does it stop?
My friend, I remember just after October 7 when there was a shortage of nomex tanker suits for tank crews. A group of us veterans worked through formal and informal channels to make sure Israeli troops had what they needed. Bibi's lust for war is like a clock telling the same time all day long. There are other alternatives. Killing our way to a solution must stop. We are Jewish History those of us who seek peace through holiness and not gentile armies. Some of us have seen decades of war. We are tired of what we see. We want to look for peaceful solutions and not the broken record answer of more war. I remember shooting artillery after being injured with a crushed face not yet healed. I could feel my face shift every time the cannon was fired. I have buried soldier after soldier. One recently from the demons of war long after his service.......just this month......I remember being so cold I crawled in a sleeping bag with another man so we didn't lose body heat. Two members of my boxing team did not come home. Dario Lorenzetti, was a green on blue incident in 2012. Spencer Dodge never made it out of training. He froze to death in swamp at night in Ranger school in 1995 with 3 others. Both are well documented. My philosophy professor took his own life in Iraq in 2005 Col. Ted Westhusing. I remember laying a minefield of foogas mines wired and primed with an electrical blasting cap.......meanwhile hoping for the best that there was no static electricity so I didn't incinerate myself in a field of DIY napalm. It is curious I don't see Bibi's or Trump's sons leading any war with Iran.
Well, letting your feelings guide you is fine for Star Wars but it’s terrible for responsible action in the real world. And your post is littered with evidence that my comment here is apt.
While you seek to chart a future for Judaism “post-genocide” please attend to and answer the voices here who are sure Judaism itself is genocidal.
This is the kind of rhetoric which imperils the physical survival of Jews in America. The golden age of Jewish prosperity and cultural flourishing in the diaspora is ending before our eyes.
I’ve devoted much of my free time and energy to enriching the quality of Jewish life in my own Conservative congregation for a decade now, as I’ve worked on deepening my own engagement with our traditional texts and rabbinical thinking.
But like many people among my friends and family, there is a growing sense that “Er kumt”. This life will no longer be possible here because Jews are being “exposed” as monsters. Someone is going to come and burn down whatever we have built.
I can understand the concern. However the rhetoric taken by hasbara that seeks to prevent that outcome in my view actually cultivates it. Teshuva is a central motif in our tradition. Israel apologists seem yo have forgotten that.
I'm struggling with your framing on many levels. Most fundamentally, you seem to be stuck on this concept of avoiding a schism among this mythical idea of Judaism and Jews. That boat has sailed, even before October 7th. And it has been killed by Israelis as a society and the American Jewish establishment for the last generation. They have been saying, in effect, "Judaism is not a democracy. You're too ignorant to get a vote. What matters is what we think, and you are not only wrong but we don't care because your version of Judaism is doomed to disappear." So this consensus that you speak of only existed as of late because there was/is a steady (self- and ZIonist-imposed) excommunication from Judaism, so that what remained was a a self-selected group. (Think I'm wrong? Take a look at the programming at elite universities' Hillels over the last two decades. Religious (ortho / Halakhic) groups, and Birthright. That's it.)
2000 years ago our Sages OBM created a radical theological concept called Exile. It gave our People the strength to create something that we call Judaism. Today, many of us live in Exile not from the Land but from the concept of a People. We can still daven that someday Hakodesh Baruchu Hoo will gather us together from the four corners of the earth, but we can interpret it that Bayom ha-hoo we will all come together again based not on Land, nor blood, nor practice, but on values, ethics and morality. But in the meantime, we need to go our different ways. Gey gazunt!
These non- and anti-Zionists minyanim need to do some better branding. It's not that they are non- or anti- (though they may be). It's that they/we are right. The Zios are wrong and their version of Judaism will disappear as it will no longer be anything resembling Judaism. I'm not a marketing guy, but how about we call the nons/antis "American Judaism"? (And how about we focusing on convincing our fellow Americans that although Christians have a vested theological/political interest in maintaining that there is only one Judaism and only one Jewish people, today the Jewish people are in Exile from each other, and our fellow citizens have to stop trying to save us from the anti-Semites and start allowing us to believe differently... just like Christians do!)
Ben Gvir resembles Moses more than Shaul Magid, to Shaul's credit. The Zionist version of Judaism is more similar to foundational Judaism than yours I am sure. You are welcome to believe differently than Zionists, and I encourage you to, but I don't think you should be under the erroneous belief that your Judaism is more valid than theirs, anymore than Unitarian Universalists should be under the erroneous belief that UU is more valid Christianity than Catholicism.
As always Shaul, thx for this meditation. As scholar in black studies trained in the study of religion, for whom thinking blackness in adjacency with Jewishness (in all its varieties including non-white and Arabo-Jewishness) and with Gaza/Palestine, I’m so appreciative of your work.
PS: What you’re calling “Thinking without Solutions” I call “thinking without guarantee” or without guaranteeing a world. “Solution” thinking is actually a procedure of political theology. It’s a protocol of (Christian) empire, most especially when it’s collapsing and needs to shore itself up.
Thanks to the three of you for framing a way forward. As you seem to suggest, Let's stop talking so much only about "Zionism" and Israel and more about "Judaism" and focus up to "What Is Judaism" i look forward to better understanding the answers distinguishing Israeli Judaism vs American Judaism in the 21st Century post Gaza. Both, not either or. Live and let live. Depth of relationship TBD.
Judaism is a religion founded on the Torah, a text that sanctifies the enslavement of all people outside the House of Israel and sanctifies the genocidal conquest of Palestine insofar as the House of Israel is obedient to the character Yahweh. It is a religion that up until the legal abolition of slavery only 150ish years ago by primarily people outside of the House of Israel, its leaders advocated chattel slavery using the Torah as the primary authority.
Clearly the State of Israel is the golden calf of many Jews. Moreover the obsession with the violence undergone has mutated into an obsession with inflicting violence on others, of which that golden calf is the idol. Maybe Judaism to survive will have to redefine its relationship to the Jewish people, if that is even possible. I don’t think that Judaism has any future if it doesn’t disentangle itself from the state of Israel. Even the spirituality of the Bronze Age cannot survive in the acid bath of ethnic nationalism.
"Ethnic Nationalism" is foundational to Judaism. Without it, Judaism won't thrive. Imagine if Jews stopped believing the myth that they belong to some kind of superior biological lineage and stopped devoting themselves to other people who they believed to be part of that mythological lineage. It may survive in the obscure orthodox sects that still believe in Yahweh, but every other sect would dissolve, and the House of Israel would empty itself. Jews don't primarily worship the "state of Israel", from what I observe Jews primarily worship the mythological "people of Israel" -- that is, the *nation of Israel* -- that is "ethnic nationalism." The "golden calf" is the "holy seed" of Israel.
Mate, I'm against this goyish discourse. Yes I used the word goyish as the focus is antithetical to the Jewish people (who are a nation before we are a religion)
I have no idea what you're trying to say here. I happen to agree that we are a nation before we are a religion. With a homeland, like other nations, and a connection to that homeland reinforced consistently and ritually without stop in our traditions since we were (basically) forced into the diaspora. Anyhow we seem to be roughly allied against this blog and its even more awful commenters so I'm not sure who you're referring to
Your essay sounds reflective, but it rests on a fatal confusion.
You pair October 7 with Gaza as if they occupy the same moral category. They do not. One was a deliberate massacre of Jews. The other is a war, tragic and brutal, launched against the forces that carried out that massacre. Blur that distinction and you have not deepened Jewish thought. You have weakened it.
You declare the Zionist consensus dead. No. What has collapsed is a certain liberal comfort with Zionism. Zionism itself was not created to keep American Jewish salons morally comfortable. It was created because Jews learned, at unbearable cost, what happens when they rely on other people’s permission to survive.
Your call to “understand” has become an elegant escape hatch from judgment. Jews do not need more clever disorientation. They need moral clarity. October 7 was not a metaphor for rupture. It was the reason Zionism exists.
And the claim that Zionism must make room for anti-Zionism is not pluralism. It is nonsense. A people cannot build its future around self-determination and its negation.
This is not renewal. It is surrender with footnotes.
There can be no progress while there is killing. Hence, we either go for a North Korea style ceasefire or even better some peacekeepers followed by ceasefire and negotiation. Right now the status quo is just masquerading as an Armenian Genocide 2.0.
I enjoy your writing and analysis but I find it distasteful that you feel the need to condemn October 7th—sometimes even seeming to imply a moral equivalence to the genocide in Gaza—whenever you bring it up.
I’m also not sure why you always talk around the word “genocide” the way you do. Is it an attempt to remain in conversation with people who are to your right? Does it hurt too much to say? Do you not feel comfortable making a judgement, despite the huge amount of expert testimony to its being genocide?
I sometimes have the same reaction when a writer condemns October 7 as a prelude to condemning the genocide (and a similar reaction when they avoid that word).
I read R. Magid as trying to generate a discourse in which Jews in the grey space, so to speak, feel like they have room to breathe.
I don’t think it’s on all of us to do that — I call it a genocide and I generally don’t relate it to October 7th unless I have a specific reason to do so — but I can understand why R.Magid and others would want to.
I understand that and have taken the same approach in the past but I worry that avoiding the hard words creates a permission structure to remain complacent, because I feel that for many people who consider themselves to be moderate, words like “genocide “ and”apartheid “ have come to signify red lines. Everything up to that is regrettable or even evil but it isn’t systemic in the same way, or it doesn’t cast doubt on the possibility of some kind of redemption of the national project. Those are the places where they think “if it ever comes to that…”
I hear you, and I agree. That dynamic (“creating a permission structure to remain complacent” is a nice way to put it) is definitely real.
To some extent, I feel like this maps onto a short term/long term problem: in the short term, it’s critical that we prioritize the need to end the genocide, and that can include using the right language for the job.
In the long term, we need to break out of the crisis R. Magid is describing — both for the sake of Jews and Judaism, but also as a way of undermining the connection between the name of Jews (which has a lot of social power) and the state of Israel, to make it harder for the latter to maintain the status quo.
Appropriately enough for the essay, I don’t know what the solutions to this might be. But in the last few weeks in particular, I’ve been feeling like it’s hard even to speak; like no matter what I say, it’s going to be too much or not enough for somebody. So I appreciate the effort to make some space — but still, I’m totally with you on the importance of using the right words.
The not naming, the lack of acknowledgment, is a sign that this is an attempt at delineating the acceptable discourse formula Magid is willing to allow, to “move on” from this pivotal “event.” Event is in quotes because genocide is not an event, but a structure. The structure is still standing and the genocide is ongoing. It will be ongoing to the extent that people, especially those in whose name the structure is promoted, refuse to name it, much less dismantle it. Interjecting nuance into this issue and hand wringing about the “community,” rings so hollow having read this article, more than before I read it. There is no attempt to identify the ideological elasticity, or the propaganda,
that allowed the sacred center of the community, to include and materially integrate with a genocidal, colonial endeavor
What gathering? I live in Manhattan and would have liked to be there to hear these remarks. Or to understand their implications, or merely to understand what's going on in our Jewish world. Not my world of secular Judaism, the IPF, Nexus, JFS, or even my New Shul congregation.
Your "consensus" was as doomed to fail as Liberal American Judaism in the first place. Read Daniel Gordis' book "we stand divided " where he lays out the basterdized version of Zionism trumpeted by American Liberal Jewry.
When I read this article over Yom Tov it struck me that those outside the 'mainstream' consensus need to develop their own frames of reference outside the terminology of the left.
Jews who feel uncomfortable with the course israel takes can unroll in different ways. Usually it is the language of the left snd the colonial settler discourse that the country was and is illegitimate so always would have had to use apartheid and then genocide.
But the legal case against Israel is week. Read the legal test in Bosnia v Serbia. Where as the ideological case is strong (if you adopt certain starting points).
But progressive politics is not a Jewish discourse. You can't marry two worlds where one seeks the annihilation of the other. Israel is not born in sin, no more than Pakistan, Jordan, Poland etc.
What I am saying is that you can reject the falacious term of genocide but still be against war, the consistent use of f35 and Bibi.
But nuance should be able to distinguish between alleged bad or misguided strategy that Israel is taking and but not adopting the coinage of left.
I think one way of understanding our situation is to recognize that "thinking without solutions" is the only possible response to the much larger poly crisis of which the crisis in Judaism is just one part; a complex of intersecting crises so complex that our minds cannot encompass it, rendering solution seeking ultimately futile. All the ideologies of the past 2 or 300 years are failing, or have failed. Our attempts to realize these failed dreams of human betterment--communism, capitalism, socialism, liberalism, conservatism, Zionism--have so disrupted the bio-geo-sphere that the poly crisis is in the final analysis a crisis in the history of life on this planet. This is so immense that it is impossible to say what the world will be like in 100 years--the future we are heading into is unimaginable. But leaders, political or civic, cannot think this way. They will always look for solutions, near term plans and policies, that is their self-conceived role. In a world where every choice is, increasingly, a bad choice, their solutions are becoming more and more desperate, even nihilistic. Our concern as Jews is that this manifests most clearly in Israel's current regime's growing determination to eliminate perceived threats to its existence--the Palestinians, Iran, etc-with extreme prejudice. This end times belief that final solutions are the only solutions throws the Zionist project itself into question for some, while for others it is its inevitable realization. (Trump shares this same impulse--to cut all the Gordian knots of recent history, and be done with it... As if that "solves" anything...)
In Shaul's essay, he refers to Judaism as a wisdom tradition. At the risk of sounding naive, why can't we make that central to our identities as Jews? Why all this contention over Zionism, Israel, and the state of American Jewry, when the convulsions of the coming decades make it highly uncertain that in the end Zionism, Israel, and America will even exist a century from now? If anything gets the Jews through what's coming, it will be our long history of making and remaking ourselves within the framework of 3000 years of thinking and rethinking our place in the world. A fortress state in the middle east will not save us, nor will fortress mentalities in the Diaspora. I see the gathering in Manhattan as a valuable attempt to find the common ground that binds us together. Endless contention on that common ground, yes, schism, excommunication, no...
There is a time for remaking; and there is a time for renunciation. The time for renunciation is now. Judaism is not a "wisdom tradition"; it is a midrash tradition. It is a good time for honest "liberal Jews" to find a new tradition, or be just content with being "liberals."
Not much time to respond. Bringing in Shabbat in Israel after some last minute time in a bomb shelter. You and your cohorts are the ones who will end up in the dust bin of Jewish history. No wonder you start off with a quote from Arendt, who worshiped her own intellect and saw herself above identifying with a people or nation. The nerve of your getting together to mourn the demise of Zionism while half of the Jewish people are threatened by Iranian missiles. What a sorry lot you are.
I helped get Nomex tanker suits to Israeli troops after October 7. Now I'm asking: when does it stop?
My friend, I remember just after October 7 when there was a shortage of nomex tanker suits for tank crews. A group of us veterans worked through formal and informal channels to make sure Israeli troops had what they needed. Bibi's lust for war is like a clock telling the same time all day long. There are other alternatives. Killing our way to a solution must stop. We are Jewish History those of us who seek peace through holiness and not gentile armies. Some of us have seen decades of war. We are tired of what we see. We want to look for peaceful solutions and not the broken record answer of more war. I remember shooting artillery after being injured with a crushed face not yet healed. I could feel my face shift every time the cannon was fired. I have buried soldier after soldier. One recently from the demons of war long after his service.......just this month......I remember being so cold I crawled in a sleeping bag with another man so we didn't lose body heat. Two members of my boxing team did not come home. Dario Lorenzetti, was a green on blue incident in 2012. Spencer Dodge never made it out of training. He froze to death in swamp at night in Ranger school in 1995 with 3 others. Both are well documented. My philosophy professor took his own life in Iraq in 2005 Col. Ted Westhusing. I remember laying a minefield of foogas mines wired and primed with an electrical blasting cap.......meanwhile hoping for the best that there was no static electricity so I didn't incinerate myself in a field of DIY napalm. It is curious I don't see Bibi's or Trump's sons leading any war with Iran.
Well, letting your feelings guide you is fine for Star Wars but it’s terrible for responsible action in the real world. And your post is littered with evidence that my comment here is apt.
While you seek to chart a future for Judaism “post-genocide” please attend to and answer the voices here who are sure Judaism itself is genocidal.
This is the kind of rhetoric which imperils the physical survival of Jews in America. The golden age of Jewish prosperity and cultural flourishing in the diaspora is ending before our eyes.
I’ve devoted much of my free time and energy to enriching the quality of Jewish life in my own Conservative congregation for a decade now, as I’ve worked on deepening my own engagement with our traditional texts and rabbinical thinking.
But like many people among my friends and family, there is a growing sense that “Er kumt”. This life will no longer be possible here because Jews are being “exposed” as monsters. Someone is going to come and burn down whatever we have built.
I can understand the concern. However the rhetoric taken by hasbara that seeks to prevent that outcome in my view actually cultivates it. Teshuva is a central motif in our tradition. Israel apologists seem yo have forgotten that.
I'm struggling with your framing on many levels. Most fundamentally, you seem to be stuck on this concept of avoiding a schism among this mythical idea of Judaism and Jews. That boat has sailed, even before October 7th. And it has been killed by Israelis as a society and the American Jewish establishment for the last generation. They have been saying, in effect, "Judaism is not a democracy. You're too ignorant to get a vote. What matters is what we think, and you are not only wrong but we don't care because your version of Judaism is doomed to disappear." So this consensus that you speak of only existed as of late because there was/is a steady (self- and ZIonist-imposed) excommunication from Judaism, so that what remained was a a self-selected group. (Think I'm wrong? Take a look at the programming at elite universities' Hillels over the last two decades. Religious (ortho / Halakhic) groups, and Birthright. That's it.)
2000 years ago our Sages OBM created a radical theological concept called Exile. It gave our People the strength to create something that we call Judaism. Today, many of us live in Exile not from the Land but from the concept of a People. We can still daven that someday Hakodesh Baruchu Hoo will gather us together from the four corners of the earth, but we can interpret it that Bayom ha-hoo we will all come together again based not on Land, nor blood, nor practice, but on values, ethics and morality. But in the meantime, we need to go our different ways. Gey gazunt!
These non- and anti-Zionists minyanim need to do some better branding. It's not that they are non- or anti- (though they may be). It's that they/we are right. The Zios are wrong and their version of Judaism will disappear as it will no longer be anything resembling Judaism. I'm not a marketing guy, but how about we call the nons/antis "American Judaism"? (And how about we focusing on convincing our fellow Americans that although Christians have a vested theological/political interest in maintaining that there is only one Judaism and only one Jewish people, today the Jewish people are in Exile from each other, and our fellow citizens have to stop trying to save us from the anti-Semites and start allowing us to believe differently... just like Christians do!)
Just rename yourselves Tikunnists. A de-indigenized Judaism is as Jewish as Jews for Jesus is.
Ben Gvir resembles Moses more than Shaul Magid, to Shaul's credit. The Zionist version of Judaism is more similar to foundational Judaism than yours I am sure. You are welcome to believe differently than Zionists, and I encourage you to, but I don't think you should be under the erroneous belief that your Judaism is more valid than theirs, anymore than Unitarian Universalists should be under the erroneous belief that UU is more valid Christianity than Catholicism.
As always Shaul, thx for this meditation. As scholar in black studies trained in the study of religion, for whom thinking blackness in adjacency with Jewishness (in all its varieties including non-white and Arabo-Jewishness) and with Gaza/Palestine, I’m so appreciative of your work.
PS: What you’re calling “Thinking without Solutions” I call “thinking without guarantee” or without guaranteeing a world. “Solution” thinking is actually a procedure of political theology. It’s a protocol of (Christian) empire, most especially when it’s collapsing and needs to shore itself up.
Thanks to the three of you for framing a way forward. As you seem to suggest, Let's stop talking so much only about "Zionism" and Israel and more about "Judaism" and focus up to "What Is Judaism" i look forward to better understanding the answers distinguishing Israeli Judaism vs American Judaism in the 21st Century post Gaza. Both, not either or. Live and let live. Depth of relationship TBD.
Judaism is a religion founded on the Torah, a text that sanctifies the enslavement of all people outside the House of Israel and sanctifies the genocidal conquest of Palestine insofar as the House of Israel is obedient to the character Yahweh. It is a religion that up until the legal abolition of slavery only 150ish years ago by primarily people outside of the House of Israel, its leaders advocated chattel slavery using the Torah as the primary authority.
Clearly the State of Israel is the golden calf of many Jews. Moreover the obsession with the violence undergone has mutated into an obsession with inflicting violence on others, of which that golden calf is the idol. Maybe Judaism to survive will have to redefine its relationship to the Jewish people, if that is even possible. I don’t think that Judaism has any future if it doesn’t disentangle itself from the state of Israel. Even the spirituality of the Bronze Age cannot survive in the acid bath of ethnic nationalism.
Clearly the state of Greece and Japan and Italy and most other countries on earth are golden calves for their respective peoples. Fucking stop
Is the “fucking” supposed to turn a clear falsehood into a truth? Because it does not work.
You don't care about truth and we both know it.
Gnashy indeed, are we?
"Ethnic Nationalism" is foundational to Judaism. Without it, Judaism won't thrive. Imagine if Jews stopped believing the myth that they belong to some kind of superior biological lineage and stopped devoting themselves to other people who they believed to be part of that mythological lineage. It may survive in the obscure orthodox sects that still believe in Yahweh, but every other sect would dissolve, and the House of Israel would empty itself. Jews don't primarily worship the "state of Israel", from what I observe Jews primarily worship the mythological "people of Israel" -- that is, the *nation of Israel* -- that is "ethnic nationalism." The "golden calf" is the "holy seed" of Israel.
Thank you for your opinion. Shabbat shalom
just call yourselves Tikunnists. Leave Judaism to the Jews. Thank you.
Mate, I'm against this goyish discourse. Yes I used the word goyish as the focus is antithetical to the Jewish people (who are a nation before we are a religion)
I have no idea what you're trying to say here. I happen to agree that we are a nation before we are a religion. With a homeland, like other nations, and a connection to that homeland reinforced consistently and ritually without stop in our traditions since we were (basically) forced into the diaspora. Anyhow we seem to be roughly allied against this blog and its even more awful commenters so I'm not sure who you're referring to
To any of you idiots who are “pro-Magid”, he is a Jew hating, Israel hating anti-Zionist Jew. He wants to see Israel destroyed.
Shakioach.
Your essay sounds reflective, but it rests on a fatal confusion.
You pair October 7 with Gaza as if they occupy the same moral category. They do not. One was a deliberate massacre of Jews. The other is a war, tragic and brutal, launched against the forces that carried out that massacre. Blur that distinction and you have not deepened Jewish thought. You have weakened it.
You declare the Zionist consensus dead. No. What has collapsed is a certain liberal comfort with Zionism. Zionism itself was not created to keep American Jewish salons morally comfortable. It was created because Jews learned, at unbearable cost, what happens when they rely on other people’s permission to survive.
Your call to “understand” has become an elegant escape hatch from judgment. Jews do not need more clever disorientation. They need moral clarity. October 7 was not a metaphor for rupture. It was the reason Zionism exists.
And the claim that Zionism must make room for anti-Zionism is not pluralism. It is nonsense. A people cannot build its future around self-determination and its negation.
This is not renewal. It is surrender with footnotes.
You write as if October 7 fell from the sky. Israel was simply living its life and….boom. That is sadly self serving and deeply misinformed.
FYI, I’m an Arab Christian from Judea, Beit Jala. I believe I know about the situation more than you’ll ever do.
There can be no progress while there is killing. Hence, we either go for a North Korea style ceasefire or even better some peacekeepers followed by ceasefire and negotiation. Right now the status quo is just masquerading as an Armenian Genocide 2.0.
I enjoy your writing and analysis but I find it distasteful that you feel the need to condemn October 7th—sometimes even seeming to imply a moral equivalence to the genocide in Gaza—whenever you bring it up.
I’m also not sure why you always talk around the word “genocide” the way you do. Is it an attempt to remain in conversation with people who are to your right? Does it hurt too much to say? Do you not feel comfortable making a judgement, despite the huge amount of expert testimony to its being genocide?
I sometimes have the same reaction when a writer condemns October 7 as a prelude to condemning the genocide (and a similar reaction when they avoid that word).
I read R. Magid as trying to generate a discourse in which Jews in the grey space, so to speak, feel like they have room to breathe.
I don’t think it’s on all of us to do that — I call it a genocide and I generally don’t relate it to October 7th unless I have a specific reason to do so — but I can understand why R.Magid and others would want to.
I understand that and have taken the same approach in the past but I worry that avoiding the hard words creates a permission structure to remain complacent, because I feel that for many people who consider themselves to be moderate, words like “genocide “ and”apartheid “ have come to signify red lines. Everything up to that is regrettable or even evil but it isn’t systemic in the same way, or it doesn’t cast doubt on the possibility of some kind of redemption of the national project. Those are the places where they think “if it ever comes to that…”
I hear you, and I agree. That dynamic (“creating a permission structure to remain complacent” is a nice way to put it) is definitely real.
To some extent, I feel like this maps onto a short term/long term problem: in the short term, it’s critical that we prioritize the need to end the genocide, and that can include using the right language for the job.
In the long term, we need to break out of the crisis R. Magid is describing — both for the sake of Jews and Judaism, but also as a way of undermining the connection between the name of Jews (which has a lot of social power) and the state of Israel, to make it harder for the latter to maintain the status quo.
Appropriately enough for the essay, I don’t know what the solutions to this might be. But in the last few weeks in particular, I’ve been feeling like it’s hard even to speak; like no matter what I say, it’s going to be too much or not enough for somebody. So I appreciate the effort to make some space — but still, I’m totally with you on the importance of using the right words.
Because the genocide libel is the Dreyfus affair on steroids.
The not naming, the lack of acknowledgment, is a sign that this is an attempt at delineating the acceptable discourse formula Magid is willing to allow, to “move on” from this pivotal “event.” Event is in quotes because genocide is not an event, but a structure. The structure is still standing and the genocide is ongoing. It will be ongoing to the extent that people, especially those in whose name the structure is promoted, refuse to name it, much less dismantle it. Interjecting nuance into this issue and hand wringing about the “community,” rings so hollow having read this article, more than before I read it. There is no attempt to identify the ideological elasticity, or the propaganda,
that allowed the sacred center of the community, to include and materially integrate with a genocidal, colonial endeavor
What gathering? I live in Manhattan and would have liked to be there to hear these remarks. Or to understand their implications, or merely to understand what's going on in our Jewish world. Not my world of secular Judaism, the IPF, Nexus, JFS, or even my New Shul congregation.
Your "consensus" was as doomed to fail as Liberal American Judaism in the first place. Read Daniel Gordis' book "we stand divided " where he lays out the basterdized version of Zionism trumpeted by American Liberal Jewry.
When I read this article over Yom Tov it struck me that those outside the 'mainstream' consensus need to develop their own frames of reference outside the terminology of the left.
Can you elaborate?
Jews who feel uncomfortable with the course israel takes can unroll in different ways. Usually it is the language of the left snd the colonial settler discourse that the country was and is illegitimate so always would have had to use apartheid and then genocide.
But the legal case against Israel is week. Read the legal test in Bosnia v Serbia. Where as the ideological case is strong (if you adopt certain starting points).
But progressive politics is not a Jewish discourse. You can't marry two worlds where one seeks the annihilation of the other. Israel is not born in sin, no more than Pakistan, Jordan, Poland etc.
What I am saying is that you can reject the falacious term of genocide but still be against war, the consistent use of f35 and Bibi.
But nuance should be able to distinguish between alleged bad or misguided strategy that Israel is taking and but not adopting the coinage of left.