Read the full article in the Jacobin
It may be hard to recall the mood in the United States immediately after October 7. Major Jewish institutions assumed that there would be a resurgence of global Jewish unity. President Joe Biden and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum described Hamas’s attack as the greatest act of violence against Jews since the Holocaust. The unexpressed hope among many leaders of American Jewish organizations was that October 7 would spur support for the State of Israel among a new generation of Americans, particularly American Jews.
“Frankly, we don’t know how long it’s going to last, but across American Jewry is a reawakening of identity,“ said Elliot Cosgrove, the rabbi for one of New York City’s largest and wealthiest Conservative synagogues. The slogan “Everything Changed After October 7” became a justification for Israel’s relentless — still ongoing — assault on the Palestinian people, but also a call for the emergence of a new Jewish subject, one united under a single flag of the Jewish nation, unapologetic, proud, and assertive.
Yet only a few weeks after October 7, long before major human rights organizations such as Amnesty International named Israel’s invasion of Gaza a genocide, thousands of Jewish activists who had organized with Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) occupied Grand Central Station in New York City and dropped a banner reading “Never Again for Anyone.”
The message was unmistakable. Against the prevailing narrative that October 7 was a “pogrom,” a link in a chain of endless violence against Jews that culminated in the Holocaust, the banner suggested a different interpretation of past and present. For these activists, the lesson to draw from Jewish history was one of solidarity with the Palestinians, who have been for a century now rendered stateless and rightless at the hands of a powerful, militaristic nation.
The sit-in at Grand Central Station was followed by JVP sit-ins at the Capitol Rotunda, the Israeli embassy in Chicago, and Senator Chuck Schumer’s office. These demonstrations were also carried out in support of the wave of student encampments that swept through campuses that spring — together these actions amounted to the largest set of Jewish protests in solidarity with Palestine in US history.
Cold War Origins
At least since the late 1960s, an institutional American Jewish consensus had formed around the idea that support for Israel is the most important singular task for the organized American Jewish world. As many Jewish studies scholars have pointed out, including Geoffrey Levin, Marjorie Feld, and Matt Berkman, prior to the Six-Day War and a larger American pivot toward Israel even mainstream US Jewish institutions, such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) or American Jewish Committee (AJC), were more accurately described as “non-Zionist.” While they supported Israel, this was not the central aim of their politics, and open criticism of it was often seen as acceptable, even laudable.
But in the last several decades, organizations such as AJC and ADL, which once focused on civil rights, American religious and cultural pluralism, and support for US liberal democracy against the far right, have increasingly closed ranks around Zionism. These groups have muted their criticism of Israel, purged their organizations of members who refuse to do so, and created a significant educational, cultural, and political apparatus whose sole purpose is to conflate the interests of Israel with American Jewish life.
It was against this backdrop that groups such as JVP, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ), IfNotNow (INN), Diaspora Alliance, temples and religious organizations such as Tzedek Chicago, Halachic Left, and Kolot Chayeinu, as well as magazines such as Jewish Currents and Der Spektor have begun the long process of creating new Jewish institutional spaces. These groups are far from acting as a counterweight to the ADL or Jewish Federations, which have deep pockets and strong connections to Israel and the American state. But they have started the long process of grounding an anti-Zionist Jewish identity in a growing network of organizations that collectively represent many tens of thousands of people.
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As the left-wing 1970s Jewish socialist organization Chutzpah Collective’s cofounder Myron Perlman put it, their goal was to be “Jews among leftists, and leftists among Jews.” Organizing against fascists and the Jewish right as well as fostering dialogue with the Israeli and Palestinian socialist left, such groups were the first Jewish-identified organizations since the 1940s to place left internationalism and Jewish identity at the center. While short-lived, they proved a training ground for activists who organized progressive Jewish organizations such as New Jewish Agenda (NJA) and JFREJ. While JVP’s intense and often laser-like focus on Palestine is in some ways new, it is crucial to point out how much JVP is part of a longer trajectory of American Jewish leftists acting in coalition with other left-identity organizations, from Black Lives Matter, to NoDAPL, to the New York City Desi organization Desis Rising Up & Moving, to the Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR), to the US Palestinian Community Network (USPCN).