Podcast Audio Trigger Warnings for profanity & graphic mentions of sexual violence.

I invited my friend Destiny—raised Catholic with zero background in Judaism, Zionism, or the politics of Israel and or Palestine discourse—to sit with me and ask questions she couldn’t voice aloud anywhere else. This conversation is for anyone who has quietly thought, “Why is “Palestine” such a big issue? What even is Zionism? When did antisemitism happen? Why do people care so much?” but has been too intimidated by jargon, politics, or the threat of ‘saying it wrong’ to begin. We start exactly where most people start: at zero.

What unfolded was one of the most honest, grounded, and human conversations I’ve ever had on record.

We moved from biblical Zion to Theodor Herzl, from antisemitism across eras to how Christian theology shaped racial hierarchies, to why Jews have historically been blamed for everything from the Black Plague to global finance. Destiny asked the kinds of questions people are actually thinking—including, “What does antisemitism mean?” and “Wait…people really believed Jews killed Jesus?” And because she asked openly and without judgment, we were able to walk through these ideas with clarity instead of defensiveness. The episode models what it looks like to dismantle misunderstandings that come from story-based religious education, inherited cultural narratives, and the lack of a shared starting point.

We talk about how antizionism functions as a modern repackaging of older anti-Jewish tropes, how Jews of color and Mizrahi/Sephardi communities are erased in so many conversations, and how Christian Europe’s historical logic of “non-Christian = savage” shaped both Jewish marginalization and global racial structures. None of this is about talking political points or evading hard, confusing debates; I wanted to equip Destiny (and y’all) with enough intellectual footing to defend Jews and talk about Israel with a sense of self-efficacy and confidence in her own knowledge.

Compassion for Palestinians and an honest, respectful understanding of Jewish historical realities are not mutually exclusive; they can sit together. My hope is that this conversation gives people a way in—a place to start—without shame, without gatekeeping, and without the paralysis that keeps too many people silent on issues that matter, specifically: antisemitism from the left. This episode is an invitation: to learn, to ask, to listen, and to understand. To be curious. Rigorous. Righteous.

Editor’s notes: This conversation was recorded in real-time with just the knowledge in my head. No notes, not references. The following clarifications are included here just to ensure a full picture where some ideas could use further specificity.

* I referred in the recording to an early 20th century ultra-Orthodox belief that Zionism was potentially heretical in the sense of taking God’s will of redemption and return into human hands. I want to clarify that while this belief still exists among small cohorts of the Jewish religious right, today there are also countless ultra-Orthodox Jews who believe quite the opposite and engage in forms of deeply felt religious Zionism.

* The Talmud describes that until 40 days, a fetus is “mere” water. Even once the fetus has a soul, however, it is not until the child has begun to leave the birth canal in a meaningful way that the lives of the fetus and the birthing parent are “considered on equal standing.”

* Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 explicitly prohibited discrimination on the bases of: “race, color, and national origin.” The 21st century additions include religious identities when they can be understood as “national” origins with shared religious identities. Today, Civil Right law is anti-discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, and age.

* I misspoke that Herzl "believed in labor Zionism.” Herzl was a political Zionist, whereas labor Zionism developed later.

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Every time I am asked, “Are you a Zionist?” I respond, “What do you mean by Zionism?” Most of the time, my inquisitor is not so sure. Often, however, after an uncomfortable shifting of weight between their feet, they’ll clarify:

“Well, do you support genocide?”

Today we live in a world where people are morally informed by ignorance. The people who ask me this question, often absolute strangers, hold steadfast antizionist positions without knowing Jewish history, much less the nuances of the Zionist movement.

These signatories to a social justice movement against Jewish nationalism rarely know that a return to Zion has been documented in Jewish prayer and liturgy for ages. Neither are these agitators and moderators of my solidarity informed enough to differentiate between labor, religious, cultural, and revisionist Zionism. They rarely know much about a partition, a war, or multiple attempts for peace.

In their ignorance, they are unaware the term diaspora came about originally to describe a Jewish condition: the expulsion of Jews from the Jewish ancestral homeland. Even less do they seem to care that Jews were and are indigenous to a place. I am not convinced they care to know.

The question is a trap.

“Well, do you support genocide?”

No, I do not. I am a Jew.

My place in progressive spaces depends on my answer: Am I willing to denounce Zionism? Or am I “that Jew,” who dares to feel connected to my peoples’ story? But inside American Jewish spaces, it can mean something just as alienating: Are you one of us, or are you a traitor?

The question functions as a litmus test. To progressive allies, too much attachment to Zionism makes you suspect. To Jewish institutions, too little makes you dangerous. We even cast judgement and call you “self-hating.” Either way, the conflicted or questioning Jew is left standing outside the circle.

This is what it means to be a Jew negotiating identity in a world obsessed with binary categories. We are pushed to choose between belonging in activist spaces or in Jewish spaces, between being accepted as moral or accepted as Jewish. And increasingly, we are told we cannot be both.

I used to hope that if I could explain my history, share the prayers I grew up reciting—“Next year in Jerusalem”—then maybe my peers in progressive spaces would understand. Maybe they would see that Jewish yearning for Zion was not born in 1897 or 1948, but woven into centuries of exile, whispered by our ancestors in Spain, Poland, Iraq, Ethiopia.

But the more I try to explain, the more apparent it becomes that the question—Are you a Zionist?—is not about understanding. It is about deciphering belonging, and belonging is always conditional.

In progressive spaces, Jewish belonging requires renouncing Zionism, or at least hiding any attachment to it. The Holocaust becomes over-used, something to relativize or dismiss. Pogroms and expulsions are universalized. Jewish indigeneity is denied. Our survival is read as privilege. We are told that if we want solidarity, we must first erase our memory.

In Jewish spaces, belonging is conditional in the opposite direction. One can be queer, feminist, critical of tradition—but question Zionism, and suddenly the community door slams shut. Jobs are lost, fellowships denied, friendships strained. The assumption is that to be Jewish is to be Zionist, and anything else is betrayal. Where progressives make Zionism the ultimate evil, establishment American Jewish life makes it the ultimate loyalty test.

The irony is that the rhetoric of solidarity is everywhere. Progressive movements promise “nobody’s free until all of us are free.” Jewish institutions insist “all Jews are responsible for one another.” And yet, in practice, these promises come with caveats. Jews are included only if we denounce Zionism. Jews are included only if we affirm Zionism. Either way, the “all of us” shrinks, until only the ideologically pure remain.

And so many young Jews find themselves doubly exiled. On campus, students hide their Jewish identity to be accepted by faculty and activist peers. In Jewish spaces, they hide their political views to be accepted by their rabbis, parents, or classmates. American Jews are learning quickly that silence is safer than honesty and that survival means compartmentalizing identity depending on the room.

This is what it means to be Jewish under the reign of the litmus test.

In progressive movements, replacement memory means turning Jewish trauma into privilege, exile into colonialism, survival into oppression. It casts Jews as symbols of power, not as a people marked for centuries as outsiders. It elevates Palestinian narratives by suppressing Jewish ones, as if the two cannot coexist.

In Jewish institutions, replacement memory means narrowing Jewishness to a single political stance. It forgets the wide diversity of Jewish voices—Mizrahi and Ashkenazi, religious and secular, Zionist and non-Zionist—and replaces them with a single definition of belonging. It rewrites our peoplehood as though there has never been dissent or debate.

In both cases, memory is not shared but weaponized.

I want to live in a world where the struggles of one people are bound up with the struggles of another, where our traumas do not compete but coexist, where remembering the Shoah does not diminish the Nakba and acknowledging Palestinian displacement does not erase Jewish exile.

The scholar Michael Rothberg calls this “multidirectional memory.” It is the idea that histories of suffering can reinforce one another, that memory is not a zero-sum game. The opposite of competitive memory, it invites us to see our stories as interconnected, not mutually exclusive.

That is what real solidarity would look like—for Jews to be included in progressive spaces without having to renounce our history, and for Jewish institutions to include dissenting voices without branding them “self-hating.” It would mean ending the culture of litmus tests that forces members of the Jewish community to choose between their Jewishness and their politics, between solidarity and survival.

It would mean admitting that Jewish history is complicated, that Jewish identity cannot be reduced to a single stance on statehood. It would mean listening when Jews say: our privilege is conditional, our belonging precarious, our memory nonnegotiable. It would mean recognizing that Jews can be both oppressed and privileged, both victims and survivors, both insiders and outsiders.

Most of all, it would mean letting Jews speak for ourselves—without demanding that we first declare which kind of Jew we are.

I am a Jew. I come from a people who were expelled from Spain, who were massacred in Europe, who were displaced from Arab lands, who prayed for centuries facing east, towards Zion. I also come from a people who argue, dissent, and debate endlessly. There has never been one way to be Jewish, and there never will be.

If solidarity means anything, it must mean that Jews do not have to choose between our memory and our community, between our survival and our belonging. If collective liberation means anything, it must mean that all of us are free—not just the Jews who pass the test.

Anything less is not liberation. It is just another form of exile.

And I refuse that kind of galut.

Some will say here: If you are not a Zionist, you are not a good Jew. I’ve heard that accusation more times than I care to count, and I know it will be thrown at this very article. But to me, that argument misses the essence of what it means to be Jewish.

Judaism has never been one thing. We are a people who have argued for centuries—about God, about law, about practice, about politics, about agency. The Talmud itself is a record of disagreements, of dissent preserved as part of our sacred canon. Zionism is a chapter in that long story, but it is not the whole book. Even today, there are deeply committed Jews who define their Jewishness without Zionism at its center.

To declare that anti-Zionist Jews are not Jews, or that they hate Jews, is not only cruel; it is historically false. It erases the diversity of Jewish life and betrays our tradition of debate. One may disagree, passionately, with an anti-Zionist stance. One may argue that Zionism was and remains essential to Jewish survival. But to excommunicate fellow Jews over this disagreement—to refuse to hear them—is to do what our enemies have always done: decide who counts as part of our people, and who does not.

If Jewishness depends on ideological conformity, then we have lost the very essence of our peoplehood.

Everything I publish is designed to stay accessible — but if you believe in building Jewish literacy and justice through education, consider becoming a paid subscriber. It keeps the work sustainable and lets me share more free content with teachers, students, and readers everywhere.

This lesson represents the unique research, pedagogy and interests of the lecturer and creator. I developed this lesson as part of an asynchronous Introduction to Religion course—Judaism, Week 2—taught at a state university in the American South.

Zahava Feldstein, M.A. (Stanford Education, UChicago Divinity), Ph.D. Candidate in Antisemitism Studies (Gratz College), is a scholar-practitioner specializing in Jewish identity, Israel education, and antisemitism in progressive spaces. Her career spans university teaching, curriculum design, and public scholarship in venues from Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism to Times of Israel to Moment Magazine. Her academic pedigree and public commentary make her a voice to take seriously.

The YouTube videos embedded in parts of this Zoom lecture (in PowerPoint presentation) are also accessible in better quality online:

* “Trailer,” Spiritual Audacity, Heschel Documentary

* Superbowl Ad, “#StopJewishHate: Tony”

* Rabbi Dr. Abraham Joshua Heschel, “God in Search of Man Interview,” NBC (1972)

Should you have any questions about implementing/exploring the materials or ideas introduced in this project, reach out to Zahava Feldstein at Rabbi’s Daughter Rebellion. I am available for teaching trainings, workshops, featured speaking, and individualized guidance at a specified rate.

Further learning resources:

* 152: The Second Ku Klux Klan: Racism, Anti-Semitism, & Anti-Catholicism in the 1920s (content warning: graphic retelling of the lynching of Leo Frank)

* From Witness to Wreckage | Jews as “problem,” not partner (traces changes in Jewish ethno-racial assignment between the Civil War and Civil Rights)

* The History We Don’t Teach About American Jews (discusses central moments in American Jewish history, including Leo Frank and the 1885 Pittsburgh Platform)

* The Enduring Lyricism of W.E.B. Du Bois’ ‘The Souls of Black Folk’: NPR

* Billie Holiday - “Strange Fruit” Live 1959 [Reelin’ in The Years Archives] (lyrics by a Jewish composer - Abel Meeropol/Lewis Allen)

* Heschel & Prinz student viewing + synthesis worksheet

* Nina Simone: Mississippi Goddam

* Leo Frank Case Archive

* Why We Went: A Joint Letter from the Rabbis Arrested in St. Augustine | Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism

* Terrorism_Violent_Extremism_Letter_from_Birmingham_Jail.pdf

* The Enduring Lyricism of W.E.B. Du Bois’ ‘The Souls of Black Folk’ : NPR

* From Swastika to Jim Crow - Alexander Street, a ProQuest Company

* NAACP Papers - History Vault

Should you have any questions about implementing/exploring the materials or ideas introduced in this project, reach out to Zahava Feldstein at Rabbi’s Daughter Rebellion. I am available for teaching trainings, workshops, featured speaking, and individualized guidance at a specified rate.

Rabbi's Daughter Rebellion: And other featured stories is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

“American Jewish exceptionalism—the belief that Jews in the United States have enjoyed a uniquely safe, integrated, and influential existence—once seemed undeniable […] Now, as antisemitism reenters the mainstream—not as fringe vitriol but as normalized discourse—the insulation that once protected us is keeping us isolated. The house is sealed. The air is getting thin.” - Dr. Ayal Feinberg

Today, I discuss three primary and competing definitions on antisemitism among scholars in the U.S. Vitally, one solution to the definition question is no definition. There exists immense debate over what a definition does or how it can even help us.

The IHRA definition is very popular right now and I concede that it makes the best legal argument under American federal law for Jews as a protected class under Title VI and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But just because IHRA works for legal purposes does not mean it works for theoretical purposes.

The three definitions discussed here (IHRA, JDA, Nexus) were all written or published before the end of 2021. The fundamental argument at stake is that their authors were theorizing about an antisemitism that most of them THOUGHT didn’t exist anymore.

Let me requote Dr. Feinberg: “the insulation that once protected us is keeping us isolated. The house is sealed. The air is getting thin.”

Post October 7th, it is so clear that our understanding of antisemitism was outright wrong, and it's time for a new explanation. These academics and lawyers who wrote definitions—on all sides—failed college students.

Four years ago, a spokesperson for the United States Department of State declared:

“An essential part of solving any problem is defining it […] We will examine the absolute sea change in understanding exactly what antisemitism is and what antisemitism looks like that has come as a result of the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism by nations and by institutions […] the US Dept of State has been using the IHRA definition since 2010, and President Donald Trump’s Executive Order combating antisemitism of December 2019 adopted the IHRA definition for all U.S. executive agencies as well.” – Nov. 3, 2020

When the U.S. Department of State uses a bad definition, Jews lose. When the American government declares that “understanding exactly what antisemitism is and what antisemitism looks like” has come from IHRA definition’s adoption, they forget that’s impossible. The IHRA’s authors were describing antisemitism in a different historical moment. That moment has changed.

“All children deserve to be treated with humanity,” my Stanford classmate appealed during a graduate seminar.

Out of nowhere, another classmate responded: that’s why she couldn’t stop thinking about how Israel doesn’t care about Gazan schoolchildren. I interrupted. “Israel doesn’t fund Gazan schools. Mostly, the UNRWA does.” She clarified: Israel had manipulated UN member states into cutting funding from UNRWA—timing its announcement that agency employees participated in the October 7 massacre to weaponize antisemitism and punish Palestinians.

But Israeli intelligence was right: In August 2024, following an internal investigation, UNRWA fired nine employees who actively participated in the October 7 border infiltration, capturing of hostages, and murdering of Israelis.

In seconds, a conversation about American schools transformed into a full-blown conspiracy theory: Jews control global institutions and bend the wills of Western powers. And nowhere in there was sympathy for Jews murdered, raped, pillaged, or traumatized; not even for the Jew sitting in front of them (me). I clocked what was happening, and I alone stated her bias.

That moment captures something we lack the language to describe right now. Campus antisemitism today is not just an extension of classical tropes. It’s not just antizionism. It’s a hybrid form: antisemitic ideas repackaged through social justice discourse and performative morality. And we lack the vocabulary (and often even willingness) to name it.

The moment I challenged my classmate’s logic, I was cast as the enemy—not because I was wrong factually, but because I refused to perform the expected conspiracy about Jews puppeteering global affairs. Because no one came to my defense. The teaching team ended class early.

Today’s campuses prize moral performance over factual literacy. So how do we build a framework capable of naming conspiratorial hatred from the far right, the scapegoating impulses of progressive politics, the ritualized bias of academic culture, and the moral appeals of pro-Palestinian rhetoric?

This is where the current definition wars come in: IHRA, JDA, and Nexus. All three of these definitions on antisemitism were written by faculty, trying to name what antisemitism looks like in the 21st century. All three have strengths. All three have limitations. They’re responding to an internal academic argument. And all three fundamentally disagree on one critical question: Where to draw the line between antisemitism and antizionism?

* IHRA: basically says antizionism is almost always antisemitism.

* JDA: says antizionism is “free speech” and not always or inherently antisemitic.

* Nexus: sits moderately between the two extremes.

You have a right to a strong opinion here, but disagreement on this one axis should not prevent us from engaging these ideas. We need all three to understand campus antisemitism. Each reveal something essential:

* IHRA names obsessive fixation on Israel as hatred of Jews.

* JDA captures public shaming and performative denunciation.

* Nexus explains how antisemitism becomes a way for marginalized communities to blame Jews for their oppression.

Together, these three definitions give us words for a modern antisemitism that hijacks Jewish memory, repackages ancient conspiracies in social justice language, and demonizes Jews as a-liberal if they push back.

IHRA is the most widely adopted globally. Its strength: it affirms the visceral Jewish sense that hatred of Israel proxies hatred of you, the Jew. In the U.S., it also provides the strongest legal footing for civil rights protections on campus.

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act states:

“No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.” (X)

Most universities receive such federal assistance. In 2010, the DOJ clarified this to include Jews (and others) as protected groups when discrimination is based on “actual or perceived shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics.” They wrote:

“Although Title VI does not prohibit discrimination on the basis of religion, discrimination against Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, and members of other religious groups violates Title VI when that discrimination is based on the group's actual or perceived shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics, rather than its members' religious practice. Title VI further prohibits discrimination against an individual where it is based on actual or perceived citizenship or residency in a country whose residents share a dominant religion or a distinct religious identity.” (X)

This clarification gave Jewish students new protections. But IHRA, which responds to these legal precedents, confuses law for theory. IHRA doesn’t describe the shaming rituals, the pressure to disavow Zionism, the assumption that Jews are complicit in oppression, or the reading assignments that structured my classroom.

The JDA, often dismissed by IHRA supporters because it was created by, primarily Jewish, anti-Zionists, academics. It names something IHRA leaves implicit: the demand that Jews perform public denunciations of Zionism to be morally legitimate.

Guideline #8 warns against:

“Requiring people, because they are Jewish, publicly to condemn Israel or Zionism.”

This loyalty test is familiar. It’s not specifically about criticizing Israel; it’s about singling out Jews for symbolic self-renunciation. At Stanford, when I said it felt unfair that I was not “allowed” to feel the violence of exclusionary rhetoric, one Latina student told me:

“You need to realize the optics of you, as a white woman, saying that six women of color wearing keffiyehs felt violent to you. We are the ones oppressed by this institution.”

But history tells a different story.

Ashkenazi Jews for so long were an existential threat to white supremacy. The Holocaust was not an aberration. A hatred of Jews so deep an entire society wanted to exterminate Jews and Judaism did not just ‘appear’ one day sometime in the 1930s. The genocide of European Jewry was the culmination of centuries of antisemitic belief that Jews could (and should) never belong.

Critical race theory (CRT), a politico-academic framework—which my classmate alluded to when accusing me of white privilege—highlights how racism is embedded in Western systems. It says: “When European colonizers built a racial hierarchy into the law, they created modern understandings of race. They wrote American racism.”

But this theory overlooks how antisemitism (and anti-Judaism) operated before colonial conquest—and continues to shape Jewish experience in ways that defy neat, binary ideas about race and power. A hatred of Jews was built into dominant Western ideas about the world and structures of power well before either 1492 (when “Columbus sailed the ocean blue”) or 1619, so CRT, which is situated in a specific place and a specific time period, does not account for the vast majority of Jewish history.

CRT highlights Western racism, but it overlooks how antisemitism pre-dates colonial conquest and defies binary ideas of race and power. Demanding Jews accept anti-Jewish depictions of our identity through critical framework theories to “prove” belonging is antisemitism.

JDA helps us understand this, but it still does not reckon with how social justice frameworks themselves can repackage classical antisemitic tropes.

The Nexus Document fills this gap. Nexus situates antisemitism within a broader social function:

“Antisemitism fulfills a social function: It provides an explanation for social disorders…while fomenting division between Jews and other minorities.” (Nexus White Paper)

On campuses, real grievances about racism, capitalism, and colonialism get redirected toward Jews.

In October 2024, for example, the Palestinian group “Queers in Palestine” called Zionism a global threat, tying it to capitalism, colonialism, and fragmentation. They described Jewish nationalism as:

“an instrument of the systems of (neo)liberalism, racial capitalism and colonialism. [Zionism] is designed to destroy our collectives and community practices through fragmentation and separation — from each other, the land, the planet and universe, and from ourselves. The illusion of separation denies our autonomy, our sovereignty over our bodies and land. We resist this colonial myth of individualism that serves oppressive systems. We are interdependent and our struggles are interconnected and intersectional — there is no such thing as individual liberation. No one is free, until we are all free” (X).

Unfortunately, in the radical dream of collective liberation—wherein nobody is free until everybody is—Jews do not count.

Since collective liberation entails the end of empire, the end of racism, hegemony, patriarchy, or any other form of structural power, depicting Zionism as “an instrument of [...] racial capitalism and colonialism” necessarily means that Jews are required to denounce Zionism before they can belong to the movement that is against embedded systems of power.

At the same time, Jewish nationalism, in many ways a successful Indigenous emancipation movement, is characterized as the ultimate formulation of the societal evils collective liberation seeks to dismantle. Many of my classmates and students across college campuses today parody these ideas because they’re not unique to “Queers in Palestine.”

By framing Zionism as inherently oppressive, they erase Jewish history: Jewish return becomes colonialism, defense becomes genocide, nationalism becomes white supremacy.

This isn’t solidarity. It’s selective liberation. And it leaves Jews with an impossible choice: renounce our story or be written out.

Nexus names this moral alchemy—when Jewish suffering is villainized unless abstracted or repurposed. It gives us language for what happens when Jewish students are cast as oppressors, even while mourning fresh dead. For why Jews are depicted as symbols of Western imperial, racial, capitalistic dominance by the dispossessed and marginalized, rather than focusing that anger onto the people who are actually responsible for ICE raids, police brutality, and the dissolution of Roe v. Wade.

IHRA, JDA, and Nexus are all imperfect. But taken together, they begin to explain the hybrid, performative, conspiratorial antisemitism reshaping campus life after October 7. None alone is enough. But none can be discarded.

Everything I publish is designed to stay accessible — but if you believe in building Jewish literacy and justice through education, consider becoming a paid subscriber. It keeps the work sustainable and lets me share more free content with teachers, students, and readers everywhere.

Jewish identity has never been just a matter of history. It is lived memory, woven into the melodies of our prayers, the gestures of our rituals, and the stories we retell. This intangible heritage—the traditions we inherit, the narratives we pass down, the silences we accept or resist—teaches us not only who we are, but also how to see the world around us.

For eighteen years, I lived inside that inheritance. I wrapped tefillin, studied Torah, argued Talmud with Yentl’s zeal. My Jewish education was expansive, and it gave me pride. But when I stepped onto a college campus, that pride collapsed. Hell, it got trampled on.

There, for the first time, I heard Zionism explained, very convincingly, not as liberation but as colonization. My professors called it an instrument of Western dominance, a settler-colonial project built on the displacement of Palestinians. The gap between what I had been taught and what I was now uncovering was not incidental. It was pedagogical.

That same pattern—the telling and the omission, the pride and the silence—emerged again decades later, not in a classroom but in Central Park.

On October 7, 2024, one year after Hamas’s brutal assault on Israeli communities, tens of thousands of Jews gathered in New York and online for a public memorial. Survivor of the Nova festival massacre Natalie Sanandaji, an Iranian American Jew, was the MC for the night. She stood before the crowd and declared: “In the words of Hatikvah, we are a free nation in our own land.” Nearly six thousand miles from Jerusalem, her words landed with the force of a meticulously crafted shared memory.

The commemoration lasted two hours. Rabbis from across denominations recited the Mourner’s Kaddish on stage together. Cantors chanted El Malei Rachamim and Avinu Shebashamayim. Teenagers sang in a joint choir spanning schools across three denominations. Yellow ribbons screamed against dark blazers and even darker clouds. Politicians lit candles in the shape of a menorah; Chuck Schumer among them. Regina Spektor sang Avinu Malkeinu—the most beautiful rendition I’ve heard to this day—and Hannah Senesh’s Eli, Eli to an audience that swayed and wept alongside her.

Everything about the memorial signaled continuity and pain: the inheritance of Jews, resilient survivors, bound by prayer, music, and story. But if heritage teaches us who we are, it also teaches us who we are not. Who, then, was absent from the story told at our October 7th memorials?

In over two hours of speeches and music, the words “Palestine” and “Palestinian” never appeared. Speakers condemned Hamas, invoked “terrorists,” and only once referred to “Gaza citizens.” The past president of the UJA-Federation of New York insisted that the conflict “began because Hamas terrorists launched an unprovoked attack on the Israeli people.”

The silence was striking, but not surprising. Like my own Jewish education, the event was not only an act of mourning. It was a lesson. By both subtraction and tradition, it became pedagogy.

Scholars call this intangible heritage: the transmission of culture through practices like language, song, ritual, and collective memory. Unlike monuments or textbooks, intangible heritage is dynamic and embodied—it lives in gestures, melodies, and myths. It does not just commemorate; it teaches.

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has argued that intangible heritage provides “living communities with a sense of continuity with previous generations.” In practice, this means a memorial, a parade, a pavilion, or a prayer—that all of these can serve as a curriculum, teaching not only who we are but who we are not.

The October 7 memorial was one such curriculum. It taught Zionism by uplifting heritage forms on one hand and turning away from Palestinians at the same time.

Jewish day schools or yeshivas are important sites of engagement with formal curricula and assessments, but the majority of today’s American Jews do not attend these schools. In a 2020 Pew research study, only one in four American Jewish respondents reported having attended a full-time Jewish day school or yeshiva. However, in this same Pew study, 80 percent of respondents reported that “caring about Israel is an essential or important part of what being Jewish means to them.”

If most American Jews do not learn Zionist ideas through formal schooling, how do they en masse develop a Jewish consciousness so deeply structured by Zionist perspectives?

Eighty-five years ago, New Yorkers encountered a similar lesson in Zionist pedagogy—this time in the form of spectacle. At the 1939–40 World’s Fair, visitors walked through the Jewish Palestine Pavilion, a carefully constructed exhibit that presented “Jewish Palestine” not as a distant territory but as a state-in-the-making.

Organizers persuaded Fair officials to treat the pavilion as if it represented a state. It was included in the Book of Nations, granted rent-free space, and its flags flew alongside those of sovereign states. On opening night, the Jewish celebrity of celebrities, Albert Einstein, gave the address.

The pavilion’s designers debated “the manner in which the Arab community should be depicted, if at all” in an amorphous historical period of British, Arab, and Zionist engagement on the eve of decolonization. When Arabs did appear, they were shown as “brigands,” while the land itself was described as “dead” and “desolate” (Gelvin 2000). The narrative emphasized Jewish pioneering and renewal, presenting Zionism as the force that animated the land—while simultaneously rendering Arab Palestinian presence marginal or threatening.

The designers intentionally used architecture to convey an idea about Yishuv Zionists that drew on imagery familiar to American audiences: the colonial period in North America and the figure of the cowboy in the “Wild West.” In the hotly contested debate about the Jewish Palestine pavilion’s purposes and messaging, the pavilion’s creators designed the central components of the display to resonate specifically with an American audience. They used architectural models with the imagery of a Western settlement defending itself from “savage” natives, a message the designer’s believed Americans of all sorts would relate to and embrace.

According to James Gelvin:

“The pavilion’s organizers understood that the myth of the intrepid pioneer confronting a barren land and the savage ‘other’ would strike a familiar chord with many of the Americans they hoped to reach” (48).

Describing the watchtower structure in the pavilion, Gelvin continues:

“the ‘tower and stockade’ came to encapsulate two myths central to the Yishuv and its supporters: Jewish Palestine as an outpost of civilization in a savage land, and the Zionist settler—with rifle in one hand and plough in the other—as heroic ideal” (47-48).

For the two seasons the pavilion was open for public visitation, the site also functioned as an event space. It hosted 135 programs in just the first year, including “lectures, conferences, dramatic performances, luncheons, film shows, and dinners” (60). Therefore, the Jewish Palestine pavilion was simultaneously a site of ritual, community gathering, knowledge production, and performance. It disseminated intentional narratives about Jewish identity, history and the project of Zionism which endure in prominent Jewish-American cultural identity today.

The pavilion was not only an architectural display. It was a teacher. Through stone and song, pageantry and myth, it offered an informal curriculum in Jewish nationalism—one that instilled pride and continuity in Jewish identity, even as it tied Zionist aspirations to familiar American settler-colonial imagery.

Both events—The Jewish Palestine Pavilion in 1939 and the October 7th memorial in Central Park in 2024—used intangible heritage to narrate a single arc of Jewish history:

From victimhood to heroism.

At the World’s Fair, Jews were cast as pioneers who transformed desolation into a homeland. In Central Park, survivors of the massacre were hailed as modern Maccabees. Israeli musicians urged a “change in our narrative from victimhood to heroism.” Nova survivors were celebrated as proof of Jewish sovereignty and strength.

The message, across generations, was consistent: Zionism consummates Jewish history by turning weakness into power.

But if that story taught pride, it also teaches silence. And here is the trap: given the state of antisemitism today, I don’t know that I believe we’re not victims just because Israel exists. Yes, we may have an easier path towards acting heroic with a military and a country, but we’re still being attacked.

The pavilion, the memorial, and my own story all reveal the same truth: when Zionism is taught through selective memory, pride risks turning into betrayal. What uplifts can also obscure, and what inspires can also silence.

Students who never hear the word “Palestinian” from rabbis or teachers will eventually learn it from professors and activists who frame it in opposition to Zionism and Jewish consciousness. The discovery does not just challenge what they know—it undermines their trust in the very community that raised them.

If Jewish education is to endure, it must be honest enough to hold contradiction. Young Jews deserve to learn about Palestine from within their own communities, not as a litmus test hurled at them in classrooms or at protests. They deserve an education that prepares them for complexity, not one that leaves them defenseless against narratives of betrayal.

The pavilion and the memorial demonstrate how intangible heritage—ritual, song, architecture, story—has long served as pedagogy. But the problem is not heritage itself. The problem is what we choose to transmit. Intangible heritage is dynamic, alive, embodied. If song and ritual can erase, then song and ritual can also repair. If selective memory can breed fragility, then courageous memory can cultivate resilience.

The task is not to abandon intangible heritage, but to use it better—to weave into our prayers, melodies, and stories the fuller truth that includes Palestinians as part of the world we inhabit.

We have a choice. Intangible heritage is dynamic and alive. We can continue to transmit a story written eighty-five years ago, or we can tell one capacious enough to hold the fullness of our histories. If we do not, we risk raising another generation of Jews who will feel that they were lied to—and walk away not just from Zionism, but from Jewish community organizations themselves.

Editor’s Note: Regina Spektor’s performance, along with the entire October 7th memorial livestream can be found here.

🎧 A WEEKLY DRASH 7 | From Jewish Witness to Wreckage“Silence, Scripture, and the Long Road to 1963”

The opening clip in this podcast is a speech given by Rabbi Dr. Joachim Prinz at the March on Washington in 1963, right before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream.” It is available here.

In 1963, at the March on Washington, Rabbi Joachim Prinz spoke just before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered “I Have a Dream.” Drawing on his years as a rabbi in Nazi Germany, Prinz pleaded:

“The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful and the most tragic problem is silence.”

A century earlier, on the eve of the Civil War, Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise had counseled the opposite. As editor of The Israelite and founder of Hebrew Union College, he instructed American Jews:

“Silence is our policy.”

Why this gap? Why do we find so little evidence of robust Jewish abolitionism in the mid-nineteenth century, and then such visible Jewish participation in the Civil Rights movement a hundred years later?

This essay explores that tension: the fights over scripture that shaped political debates about American slavery, the antisemitic tropes that circulated even within abolitionist rhetoric, and the ways that demography, vulnerability, and Holocaust memory rearranged what Jews could risk—and what they could say—in public.

Jewish educators often celebrate the Civil Rights era as this moment of moral clarity: rabbis marching beside Dr. King, Jewish donors funding the NAACP, Prinz naming silence itself as harm.

So why is there no parallel narrative of Jewish presence and leadership in the anti-slavery movement a century earlier? The absence forces harder questions:

* How did early Jewish migrants understand their own vulnerability in relation to Black enslavement?

* How did antisemitic currents in abolitionist discourse narrow Jewish participation?

* And what changed by the 1960s that made Jewish presence in racial struggles more visible?

During the height of the pro- and anti-slavery debates in the United States, Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise declared in The Israelite:

“We can not, not only because we abhor the idea of war, but also we have dear friends and near relatives, beloved brethren and kinsmen in either section of the country [...] Therefore silence must be our policy [...] we shall be obliged to abstain entirely from all and every commentary on the odd occurrences of the day.” (X)

Rabbi Wise went further, branding abolitionists “fanatics” and “demagogues.” His aim was not to defend slavery directly but to prevent the fracturing of a community likely less than 250/200,000 strong in a nation of more than 30 million. Silence from political conversations about slavery, across the community, could be the price of Jewish survival in America.

Yet this very silence meant Jewish leaders forfeited a place in the most urgent moral struggle of their century. By prioritizing communal unity or safety, Rabbi Wise may have reinforced the impression that Jews had little to say about slavery.

The irony is that slavery’s legitimacy was being debated in politics and on pulpits through the language of Jewish scripture. Christian preachers and lawmakers clashed over Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy. Where were Jewish voices speaking publicly, and with authority, on their own texts? Jewish learning is premised on interpretation of sacred texts, yet in this moment of national crisis Jewish commentary remained largely uninvolved. Despite the small population size, it remains striking that no enduring historical memory of Jewish moral clarity during the antebellum period has taken hold like what we see in the Civil Rights movement.

Those who did speak divided sharply. Rabbi Morris J. Raphall’s 1861 sermon, “The Bible View of Slavery,” defended the institution on biblical grounds, and it pissed off other community leaders. Michael Heilprin publicly condemned the sermon as “sacrilegious,” and said it risked setting off a “spark of Hebrew pro-slavery rhetoric [...] hailed as a new lightning from Sinai.” Rabbi David Einhorn called Raphall’s stance “counter-factual and un-Jewish,” insisting that Jews, as descendants of slaves, had a moral duty to reject inherited bondage.

These arguments show that Jews were drawn not into abolitionist leadership in so much as defensive disputes over reputation. The question was less how to end slavery than how not to lose credibility in a Christian-majority society.

If Jewish voices were hesitant, some abolitionist voices were openly upsetting. Sarah and Angelina Grimké, sisters from a wealthy South Carolina slaveholding family, converted to Quakerism and became leading abolitionists. They distinguished between biblical servitude and American slavery by analyzing the Hebrew word עבד (eved), which legitimately carries both “slave” and “servant.”

Sarah wrote in “An Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States” (1836):

“The Hebrews had no word in their language equivalent to slave in the West Indian use of the term … [עבד] is applied to both bond servants and hired, to kings and prophets, and even to the Savior of the world. It was a general designation for any person who rendered service of any kind to God or man.”

Angelina added in “An Appeal to Christian Women of the South” (1836):

“I have carefully avoided using the term slavery when speaking of Jewish servitude; and simply for this reason, that no such thing existed among that people; the word translated servant does not mean slave.”

They contrasted this with American slavery, which relied on inherited bondage—what Angelina called “the only excuse for holding Southern slaves, is, that they were born in slavery.”

Unlike biblical servitude, the institution of American slavery offered no manumission, no Jubilee release (shmita), no end to inherited chains. Yet their rhetoric leaned on antisemitic tropes. The sisters’ anti-slavery case foundationally relied upon portraying Jews as history’s ultimate sinners. Sarah warned:

“Appeal to prophecy! As well might the Jews who by wicked hands crucified the Messiah claim to themselves the sanction of prophecy [...] Contemplate the history of the Jews since the crucifixion of Christ! Behold even in this world the awfully retributive justice which is so accurately portrayed by the pen of Moses.”

Angelina likewise charged:

“The Prophets were stoned, imprisoned, and killed by the Jews. And why? Because they exposed and openly rebuked public sins; they opposed public opinion; had they held their peace, they all might have lived in ease and died in favor with a wicked generation. Why were the Apostles persecuted [...]? Because they dared to speak the truth; to tell the Jews, boldly and fearlessly, that they were the murderers of the Lord of Glory.”

Thus, the sisters condemned slavery while casting Jews as divine cautionary tales. They constructed slavery as a sin comparable only to the crucifixion of Christ — which Jews were not actually responsible for. Their rhetoric necessarily excluded Jewish participation, even as it relied heavily on Hebrew scripture. In this way, abolitionist rhetoric simultaneously valorized Jewish scripture and vilified the people who preserved it.

By the end of the 19th century, Jewish demographics in the US shifted dramatically: millions arrived from Eastern Europe between 1880 and 1924. With larger numbers came new visibility, economic mobility, and complex forms of assimilation. Still, the decisive transformation that allows Prinz to call out silence was more than that.

Most scholars of Holocaust memory would agree that, for roughly fifteen years after 1945, the Holocaust was not yet a central, public component of Jewish identity in the United States. Peter Novick describes this as a period of “silence” in which survivor stories remained largely private, overshadowed by narratives of immigration, Zionism, and Cold War politics. Scholars have long noted that Holocaust memory did not immediately occupy the center of American Jewish public identity after the end of WWII; its prominence grew over time, with pivotal accelerants such as the Eichmann trial (1961), during which publicity over Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (a result of the project you conducted as a paid journalist at the trial for The New Yorker) likely accelerated the conversation even more.

Michael Rothberg argues that this shift unfolded alongside other memory projects — anticolonial and civil rights struggles — rather than in isolation. Reading Chronicle of a Summer (1961), he argues that the cinéma vérité staging of Marceline Loridan’s testimony helped crystallize the Holocaust survivor as a recognizable public subject, precisely at the moment when testimony became thinkable as a political act across movements. The Eichmann trial did this as well by leaning on internationally televised witness testimony.

It is my view that, in this conjuncture, Jewish leaders in the U.S. gained new moral standing as witnesses, not in the same formulation as the Grimke’s witness theology. It was a secularized, humanitarian witness. By 1963, Rabbis Joachim Prinz and Abraham Joshua Heschel could speak in Washington not only rabbi and refugee but as a figures legible within the broader culture of testimony. That emergent survivor identity — forged in courtrooms, newspapers, and on screens — helped make it possible for Jews to speak, act, and sometimes lead in civil-rights spaces in ways unavailable a century earlier.

The Eichmann trial in 1961 marked a crucial turning point. Survivors testified publicly in ways that transformed them into a recognizable archetype: the Holocaust survivor, bearer of both trauma and moral witness. This identity quickly entered collective Jewish and American memory, turning individual histories into a shared story with public resonance.

That shift created new possibilities. When Jewish leaders stood beside Dr. King, they spoke not only as rabbis, Americans, or allies, but as representatives of a people newly defined by survival and moral witness. The Holocaust survivor archetype lent Jews a moral authority that could be mobilized in U.S. politics in the 1960s — a moral capital unimaginable for Rabbi Wise a century earlier.

In a sense, the Civil Rights movement gave Jews a stage on which to do for others what they had not been able to do for themselves: to speak, to testify, and to lead in the name of justice and survival. They recast silence as complicity.

It was in this context that Rabbi Prinz, himself a refugee from Nazi Germany, declared in 1963 at the culmination of the March on Washington:

“When I was the rabbi of the Jewish community in Berlin under the Hitler regime, I learned many things […] the most important thing that I learned under those tragic circumstances was that bigotry and hatred are not the most urgent problem. The most urgent […] is silence” (X).

Prinz reversed Wise’s logic. Silence was no longer protection—it was betrayal. Immoral. Sinful.

The lack of a Jewish abolitionist narrative does not prove indifference. It reveals a community navigating fragility, antisemitism, and survival in a divided America. By the 1960s a hundred years later, with new demographic strength and the searing memory of genocide, Jews could risk speaking more loudly and they could be embraced while doing it. Jewish participation in American racial struggles is thus best understood not as a linear arc of moral progress but as a dialectic: silence and speech, exclusion and belonging, vulnerability and platform.

By the Civil Rights era, conditions had shifted enough for Jews to appear on the national stage not only as allies, but as symbols. The earlier absence still remains instructive because it reminds us that solidarity is never simple, that survival shapes moral witness, and that silence itself carries meaning.

But it is not we who have forgotten. Liberal American Jews still want to be allies, but in the present moment many on the left, including many BIPOC campus activists, no longer see Jews as oppressed. Instead, we’ve become symbols of power, privilege, and oppression itself. The historical irony is stark: a community once silenced into absence now risks being silenced again, not by fragility or fear, but by a refusal to recognize Jewish vulnerability at all.

To recover the full arc—from Wise’s silence in 1861 to Prinz’s speech in 1963, from absence to presence—is not to claim moral innocence. It is to insist that Jewish voices have long wrestled with survival and solidarity, and that the meaning of silence has never been simple.

In the space of one hundred years lies a complicated story of Jewish belonging in America; not a tale of steady progress, but of wrestling—over scripture, over survival, and over what it means to speak.

The rise of Holocaust survivor identity gave Jews the moral vocabulary to speak, act, and sometimes lead in racial struggles—what they would not have been able to risk or achieve in earlier generations. Holocaust memory is not merely a backdrop; it created the moral capital that made Prinz and Heschel legible on the national stage. That legacy should remind us of Jewish capacity for solidarity because today, in a world of rising antisemitism and genocidal forms of antizionism, many on the left have stripped us from that role. They recast Jews as the oppressor rather than the oppressed, as the problem rather than the partner. Naming that shift is not grievance; it is historical continuity.

Editor’s note: The text below offers a compilation of excerpts from this week’s audio-essay podcast. To experience the text in full as designed, press “play.”

Jewish life did not end in Auschwitz. The Holocaust was meant to be the climax of Jewish history, its erasure. But Jewish life sustained in refugee camps, in the creation of Israel, and in the flourishing of American Jewish life.

The words “Final Solution” summon one of the darkest chapters in Jewish history: Hitler’s plan to annihilate Jewish life altogether. I use the phrase deliberately, and with defiance. If there was once a Final Solution to destroy us, today we need a solution of a different kind: a solution to keep American Judaism whole.

Through schools, synagogues, and the broader intangible heritage I call “Jewish learning experiences” (more on this in a forthcoming podcast), our kids learn a version of identity built on antiquity, Holocaust, and Israel. They hear Biblical stories and rabbinic names, Jewish holidays and Holocaust testimonies, the founding of the State of Israel and its triumphs. They can sing Hebrew songs, point to Israel on a map, tell you about Masada and Herzl, Golda Meir and cherry tomatoes.

But they know almost nothing about American Jewish history.

They don’t learn that Jews first arrived in New Amsterdam in 1654 as refugees from Portuguese Brazil the inheritors of two Inquisitions—or that Governor Peter Stuyvesant called them “hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ” and tried to expel them.

They don’t learn that the lynching of Leo Frank in Georgia shaped both the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan and the founding mission of the Anti-Defamation League. They don’t learn that Julius Rosenwald built more than five thousand schools for Black children across the Jim Crow South. Or that the American Reform movement’s 1885 Pittsburgh Platform, their founding document, declared Jews a religious community—not a nation, not Zionist.

This imbalance leaves our kids defenseless. When they reach college and encounter critical race theory, postcolonial critique, or anti-racism discourse, they hear Jews cast as white oppressors, as colonial proxies, as part of the power structure. And because they were never taught the complexities of American Jewish history—how we have been both racialized outsiders and successful insiders—they cannot resist the mischaracterization.

By “defenselessness,” I mean the inability of students to articulate historically grounded counter-narratives when their identity is challenged in educational or social settings. In practical terms, this defenselessness appears when a student can describe the relationship of Masada or the Six-Day War to their Jewish identity, but not the history of when, how, or why their own ancestors likely came to America. They cannot name Jewish leaders in U.S. labor struggles, civil rights coalitions, or episodes of exclusion (Temple bombing; Leo Frank; Grant’s Order #11; “freedom of religion” and the Dobbs Act).

Educational theorists have shown that counter-narrative competence—having facts, cases, and interpretive frames at hand—is essential to resisting reductive identity framings. Without access to this fuller inheritance, students may know that they are misrepresented but lack the tools to explain why.

They won’t have the ballast to say: that is not the whole story of who Jews are.

So here’s my question: What if Jewish education taught American Jewish history as seriously as it teaches Holocaust, Israel, Tanach, and antiquity? What if our kids inherited not only biblical characters and Zionist triumphs, but the lived story of Jews in America—migrations and exclusions, privileges and persecutions, coalitions and contradictions?

Wouldn’t that prepare them differently? Instead of being unprepared, they could say: I know our history. I know our place in America. I am not an oppressor caricature—I am the heir to a complex, contested, resilient story.

A Note on Scope

This telling relies heavily on Ashkenazi Jewish history. That’s not because Jews of color, Sephardi, Mizrahi, Black, Indian, or other Jewish communities don’t matter. They do. But because Ashkenazi Jews make up about 70 percent of the U.S. Jewish community today, historically they’ve been the most visible group in American institutions, migrations, and cultural conflicts. Their story is not the only Jewish story here, but it is central to how Jewishness has been imagined in America by outsiders.

By 1880, it has been estimated that around 200,000 Jews lived in the United States (Germanic wave). The Pittsburgh Platform of 1885, the American Reform Movement’s foundational document, declared Jews a religion only: not a nation, not Zionist. In item number five:

“We recognize, in the modern era of universal culture of heart and intellect, the approaching of the realization of Israel’s great Messianic hope for the establishment of the kingdom of truth, justice, and peace among all men. We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.” (X)

This document did many things:

* It rejected ritual law and provided a very generous interpretation of halacha to modern circumstance: “the Bible reflecting the primitive ideas of its own age.”

* It embraced modern science: “We hold that the modern discoveries of scientific researches in the domain of nature and history are not antagonistic to the doctrines of Judaism.”

* It emphasized social justice activist as a core Jewish ethical principle: “We deem it our duty to participate in the great task of modern times, to solve, on the basis of justice and righteousness, the problems presented by the contrasts and evils of the present organization of society.”

You may notice that these three ideas still shape a large part of American Jewish culture today. But you’ll also note that its anti-Zionist component, that we “expect neither a return to Palestine […] nor any restoration of the laws concerning the Jewish state” is rarely taught; it didn’t stick. That matters because when our kids hear anti-Zionist arguments today, they should know these debates are not unprecedented. They are echoes of our own contested history and it means that even though Zionism “won” in the Jewish community, it is not the whole story.

Jewish life in America was shaped not only by debates inside our institutions, but by the brutal realities of American racism.

The largest wave of Jewish immigration to the U.S. came overwhelmingly from the Pale of Settlement. Between 1881 and 1924, more than two million Jews fled pogroms, poverty, and conscription. They settled mostly in cities—New York’s Lower East Side, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago—where tenements were crowded and sweatshops brutal. They carried Yiddish, socialism, Bundism, Zionism, Marxism, and a hunger for freedom.

But in 1924, the Johnson-Reed Act shut America’s doors with quotas designed to block Southern and Eastern Europeans. It was a devastating closure, just as European antisemitism accelerated toward catastrophe.

American exceptionalism was real at that time because compared to the Pale, the U.S. offered unprecedented freedom and mobility. Historian Karen Brodkin argued that full inclusion came much later. Jews were still excluded from neighborhoods, clubs, and universities (Let’s talk about the Catskills!). True integration into the white mainstream came largely after World War II, when, she argues, the GI Bill opened higher education and suburban housing for Jewish, Irish, and Italian veterans—benefits that were systematically denied to Black veterans.

So exceptionalism was never absolute. Jews here were both insiders and outsiders—privileged compared to Europe, yet racialized as Other.

Nothing illustrates this more than the lynching of Leo Frank in 1915. Frank, a Jewish factory superintendent in Atlanta, was convicted on thin evidence by an all-white jury in Fulton County. The prosecutor, Hugh Dorsey, built a political career on the case. The judge himself admitted doubts about the verdict, but let it stand.

When Governor John Slaton commuted Frank’s death sentence to life imprisonment, a mob calling itself the “Knights of Mary Phagan” broke into the prison, kidnapped Frank, and hanged him from an oak tree in Marietta. They mutilated his body, posed for photographs, sold postcards, even brought children to view the corpse.

It was not just murder. It was a ritual of racial terror. Frank’s lynching helped revive the Ku Klux Klan and it galvanized the mission of the Anti-Defamation League.

To teach this story is to show that Ashkenazi or Sephardi Jews were not simply safe or white in America. We were vulnerable, racialized outsiders.

Another potential turning point was 1961, with the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Jewish Holocaust survivors testified in ways never spotlighted publicly before. The trial gave voice to individual suffering, broadcast internationally. As Hannah Arendt noted, the trial staged not only Eichmann’s crimes but the Jewish people’s memory itself.

For American Jews, Eichmann’s trial was a cultural jolt. It forced the Holocaust out of private grief and into public discourse. And just as Holocaust memory was solidifying, the 1967 Six-Day War unfolded. Nineteen-year-old Israel defended itself against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, with Iraq and other Arab forces in support. American Jews watched in terror, then in stunned rejoicing, as the state survived and triumphed in six days.

For Jews, it was David against Goliath, a miracle of survival. For Palestinians, it was the Naksa—the setback. In six days, Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, Sinai, and Golan. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced, many for the second time since 1948. What Jews called reunification of Jerusalem, Palestinians mourned as loss and occupation.

And yes, students need to know both stories. Not to collapse one into the other, but to understand how different memories live side by side in the same history. By the 1970s and 80s, most historians would agree that Holocaust memory and Zionism had become central pillars of American Jewish identity.

Here’s the problem: Holocaust education on its own is not enough. Zionism education on its own is not enough. And both together? Are still not enough.

When Jewish identity is anchored only in catastrophe—and then extended directly into Israel’s survival—it creates a brittle inheritance. The narrative becomes: Hitler tried to kill us, everyone hates us, it repeats again and again throughout history, and therefore we need Israel.

That story may feel urgent, but it does not endure. It ties Jewishness only to trauma and survival, not to creativity, resilience, or the richness of Jewish life across historical periods. And it leaves students vulnerable. Because when Israel’s legitimacy is challenged, or when Holocaust memory is dismissed as “white history,” their entire Zionist counter-argument collapses with it. We owe them a fuller inheritance that gives them the strength to hold their story in a contested world.

That American Jews fought for rights when freedom was threatened and continue to fight today. That we endured quotas and expulsions, built schools, suffered lynchings, and gained platforms through testimony of both exclusion and inclusion. That Zionism was once suppressed in our institutions and later embraced. That Holocaust memory is powerful, but not the only anchor.

To me, Zionism is not the question: Does Israel have a right to exist? The real Jewish question is: Does Israel have a need to exist?

If our students don’t know our full history, they may be able to answer “yes” in class, but without the later ability to articulate why when facing rebuke.

Don’t raise the children who do not know how to ask. There are three other sons. And only truth—the whole of it—will keep our family whole.

The need for American Jewish history isn’t only about strengthening Jewish education. It is also about our place in Ethnic Studies—the academic and curricular movement that now shapes both universities and K–12 classrooms.

I have been engaged in this controversy since my undergraduate thesis. What I’ve learned is this: there is very little high-quality content to help educators integrate American Jewish history into ethnic studies or CRT frameworks. Jews are a diasporic people, shaped by migration and racialization, by both cultural flourishing and systemic discrimination. I know the frameworks of ethnic studies as deeply as I know the narratives of American Jewish history.

When California released its first draft of a statewide Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum in 2019, which we can think of as DEI in education, Jews were not included among the ~350 pages of lesson plans. The draft explicitly centered antizionism, supported the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction (BDS) movement, and centered Palestinian voices as part of a larger story about solidarity across marginalized communities.

The draft’s authors made it clear: Jews were not included on that side of the story (i.e. the “oppressed”).

Following the work of many Jewish community organizations, lobbyists, and politicians, a brief section on Jewish Middle Eastern Americans was added to the 2022 version, along with scattered “drop-in” mentions of individuals with racially complex Jewish identity (e.g., “a transgender Latina or a Jewish African American”). These revisions, among others—delaying and reshaping the final draft—frustrated many of the curriculum’s original authors (ethnic studies scholars and public educators). That rupture sparked a split and the creation of what is now called “Liberated Ethnic Studies.”

Ethnic Studies itself was born out of struggle. In the late 1960s, amid rising ethnic pride movements and student strikes across the country, the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) at San Francisco State led the longest student strike in U.S. history (1968–69). California Governor Ronald Reagan even called in the National Guard in Berkeley to confront those protests. The students demanded courses and departments that reflect the histories of communities of color, as part of an accountability measure for repairing the harm of generations of Eurocentric curricula on non-white students.

Out of this struggle came the first Black, Chicanx/Latinx, Indigenous, and Asian American & Pacific Islander studies programs—fields that spread rapidly across U.S. higher education. Today, there are over 275 ethnic studies departments nationwide, alongside related disciplines like American Studies, anthropology, sociology, comparative literature (home to Edward Said), and Middle Eastern Studies.

Fifty years later, ethnic studies paradigms have shaped not only universities but also K–12 curricula, state courtrooms, and even public debates. What much of the news now labels as “CRT in schools” is, in truth, a debate about whether ethnic studies belongs in public education.

This debate made something clear: without serious content, Jewish history will always be treated as either absent or only polemical in Ethnic Studies frameworks.

That is the gap I am stepping into.

Launching a New Curriculum!

When I say there is a scarcity of “high-quality content,” I mean curricular resources that meet established frameworks of ethnic studies without foreclosing or eroding authentic Jewish identity self-expressions. Most either resist the premise of ethnic studies to promote American liberalism and multiculturalist narratives, or they focus on Jews of color as a way of more seamlessly integrating Jews into the ethnic studies framework.

My point is that all Jews belong in ethnic studies.

People ask all the time: Are Jews a race? A religion? An ethnicity? Let me answer how I see it:

We are a tribe. We are a people who all descend from the same people in ancient Israel, whose expulsion and most somber day of the calendar commemorates the destruction of our Temple. We don’t fit neatly in modern categories of race because our diaspora happened too long ago. Our skin colors changed, modified into our new host regions. But Judaism is a tribal religion, rooted to land – a specific land – with a cycle of holidays all related to the seasons of that land.

We are an indigenous, diasporic spiritually and ancestrally related tribe.

Holocaust-centered, Israel-centered, or anecdotal lesson plans are not, in my opinion, “high quality content.” The story of Jews is so much more vast, far more beautiful than disjointed snapshots lacking in coherent narrative of who we are.

What is Ethnic Studies?

As defined in the California Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, Ethnic Studies is the interdisciplinary study of the histories, cultures, struggles, and contributions of communities of color and marginalized groups in the United States. Its purpose is to help students:

* Recognize how identity shapes lived experience.

* Analyze systems of power and inequality.

* Explore histories of resistance, solidarity, and creativity.

* Imagine more equitable futures.

Jewish Americans belong in this field. All of us.

We are a diasporic people shaped by migration and racialization, by both cultural flourishing and systemic discrimination. To omit that story is to distort both Jewish experience and American history itself.

This series highlights how Jewish immigrants and their descendants contributed to and critiqued American culture through music, satire, film, literature, and popular culture. By analyzing these works, students engage with themes central to Ethnic Studies: identity, assimilation and resistance, cultural expression as survival, and the ongoing negotiation of belonging in the United States.

++ Please Listen to the Audio-Essay Podcast to Access the Full Episode ++

📢 Announcement

This podcast is only the beginning. “The History We Don’t Teach About American Jews” inspired a larger project: building the first comprehensive Jewish Ethnic Studies curriculum in the US.

My pledge:

* Publish 20+ classroom-ready lesson plans across three strands — Jewish American Cultural Productions, Black–Jewish Alliances, and Jewish Migration to the U.S.

* Release A Liberatory Guide to Difficult Conversations — a ~100-page workbook on Jewish identity, antisemitism, and campus readiness (Israel-Palestine for high school students, curious parents, and educators).

* Host training programs for educators who plan to adopt the lesson plans — both online and in person.

* Pilot the curriculum in Jewish and public high schools.

* Expand to reach schools nationwide, with professional development, teacher networks, and national dissemination.

Download

Sample Lecture Clips:

Rabbi Dr. Abraham Joshua Heschel (1972, NBC)

The “Edict of Expulsion” (1492, Spain) | Teacher’s Deep-Reading Annotation Model

Free subscribers will continue to get new podcast episodes every month — stories, reflections, and commentary. Paid subscribers unlock the deeper syllabus: the lectures, lesson plans, and full curricular resources that turn listening into learning.

As a paid subscriber, you’ll gain serialized access to:

* Full classroom lectures from my university-level courses.

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* Early access to training opportunities and new curriculum materials.

Beyond the subscriber tier, I’m also available for:

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👉 Subscribe and join me in building the curriculum, training, and movement that will reshape how Jewish history is taught in America.

I once pledged that if Israel ever went to war, I would fight. I wrote those words as a teenager, uniform still warm from Gadna drills, convinced the Jewish people’s survival depended on me. A few years later, I was crying in a college classroom, realizing everything I’d been taught about Israel—and about Palestinians—was a lie, an omission.

This is my confession.

“The primary purpose of prayer is not to make requests. The primary purpose of prayer is to praise, to sing, to chant. Because the essence of prayer is a song and Man cannot live without a song. Prayer may not save us, but prayer may make us worthy of being saved.” - Rabbi Dr. Abraham Joshua Heschel, 1972 on NBC.

For so long, Israel educators in North America have treated Zionism like an archival document: climate-controlled, carefully catalogued, guarded against disturbance. Students are invited to look, but not to touch. We hand down fixed narratives—heroic victories, sacred symbols—expecting them to remain intact when carried into adulthood. But education is not an archive. It is a garden. It needs tending, pruning, sometimes even re-planting. If we continue presenting Zionism as something to preserve rather than something to wrestle with, we risk raising a generation of Jews who can admire the records but feel no living connection to the roots.

Israel was the background music of my childhood. I am an American Jewess, raised in American Jewish life: sixteen years in Jewish day schools, both Masorti and non-denominational. My father, a Reform rabbi; my mother, an atheist. Along with three brothers, I sat in the third row of the synagogue, close enough to my father’s pulpit for respectability but far enough to make jokes.

In that liminal space between education and practice—classroom and congregation—I learned the rhythms of Jewish prayer, but never the intimacy of speaking to God. My Jewish day school education made me a passionate Zionist, but not a passionate Jew. At least not in the way Heschel would have described Judaism: perhaps mystically, in search of God. I could sing niggunim and Havdalah or lead the Shacharit service and gabbai for my classmates during Torah reading, but I never learned how to cultivate a relationship with any Divine. Rabbi Heschel’s words were lost on me. My Judaism was ritual without intimacy, pride without anchor.

And when my Zionism collapsed, my Judaism collapsed with it. I had nothing left to fall back on. When university professors convinced me that Zionism is a settler-colonial project, and that Israel is a proxy for Western imperialism, I valorized them for finally teaching me the meaning of these words. When college classmates assured me Jewish history itself is fabrication, I cheered them on! To belong in the progressive space of a historically women’s liberal arts college in Southern California, I shed my complicity in this evil thing called “Zionism”—because I learned a collective framework for the world to dismantle power and achieve justice in the world, and Zionism was the clear symbol of all injustice.

The unraveling was not immediate. At first, I did not even realize I was losing. But eventually the tools I carried proved laughably insufficient. Armed with slogans about Israel inventing drip irrigation and instant messaging, my Jewish education implied innovation could counter claims of dispossession. It offered me cherry tomatoes when what I needed more were olive groves. When college professors spoke of checkpoints and displacement, I was truly dumbfounded. In sixteen years of Jewish school, going to Jewish sleepaway camp, and attending Jewish youth groups – I’d never heard those ideas. When professors invoked colonialism, I didn’t stammer. I agreed. No one in the Jewish community had ever taught me how to think about Jews as both oppressed and powerful, vulnerable and sovereign. In that vacuum, I embraced the new narrative offered to me. It was totalizing, coherent, morally compelling – and it left no room for my Jewish story.

It took years – and a painful reckoning in a Stanford doctoral classroom full of keffiyehs – to realize that I hadn’t outgrown my Jewish education. I had been left unprepared. My Jewish teachers failed to provide me with the tools to withstand competing, seductive narratives. They taught me to love Israel, but not to understand why others hated it. They gave me slogans, not a history lesson, and comebacks, not complexity.

This is not just my story. It is the story of thousands of Jewish students today who are abandoning Zionism not because they do not feel Jewish, but because they feel betrayed. They likely sense, as Seth Rogen so provocatively put it in 2020, that they were “fed a bunch of lies about Israel.” In young adult Jewish communities across America, we are seeing the fallout: students walking off Birthright buses, joining anti-Zionist groups, even rationalizing antisemitic conspiracy theories if it secures them belonging. One Jewish Voice for Peace leader I spoke with admitted tolerating the claim that “Jews created Covid-19” because dismantling Israel mattered more than who their allies were. The pressure runs so deep that even antisemitism itself is excused, or even embraced.

Research confirms the pattern. Dr. Sivan Zakai’s longitudinal study found that Jewish elementary students knew an “enemy” was trying to destroy Israel and the Jewish people but they could not name who that enemy was. Israel educators taught them to adore their “second favorite country” but not why so many others despised it. When they grow older and encounter competing narratives, they will feel duped. And honestly? They will be right.

Meanwhile, antisemitism is exploding on U.S. college campuses. The American Jewish Committee reports that 35 percent of Jewish college students have personally experienced antisemitism, and 32 percent have felt unsafe at campus events because of their Jewish identity. Hillel tracked more than 2,300 antisemitic incidents on campuses in a single year – that’s a tenfold increase in just two years. ADL reports that campus incidents rose 84 percent in 2024 alone. And we are still sending our kids into this environment profoundly unprepared.

Our educational institutions failed them. We taught songs, rituals, and maps without Occupation lines. We gave them heroes, but not history. We avoided the word “Palestinian” altogether, leaving them to learn its meaning from others who framed it against us. By refusing to tell the full story, we handed our children fragile identities that shattered upon first contact with critique.

Consider this analogy offered to me by a renowned scholar in Jewish history: Imagine being raised to adore an uncle named Chaim. Your parents describe him as generous, brave, beloved. Only later do you learn from others that Uncle Chaim has a criminal record, that he is reviled outside your home. If your parents never mentioned it, you would feel deceived. You might even stop trusting them altogether. The omission would not necessarily erase your love for Uncle Chaim—but it would corrode your trust in those who raised you. This is how many Jewish students feel when they encounter the Palestinian narrative for the first time from outsiders. They do not stop loving Israel – they stop trusting it.

Jewish tradition, ironically, gives us tools for a more honest education. The Talmud preserves minority opinions even when rejected. Midrash delights in contradiction. The Torah itself records the failings of our ancestors as faithfully as their triumphs. Omission is not our inheritance; wrestling is. And yet, when it comes to Israel education, we have abandoned that legacy of complexity. We curate, we sanitize, we preserve, and in doing so we leave our children defenseless.

The question, then, is not merely: How do we make Israel central to Jewish education? It is: How do we teach Israel in a way that equips students to face hostility, absorb complexity, and still hold fast to their Jewish story? The answer cannot be more hasbara. It must be radical honesty. Our students deserve to hear the hard stories— about Occupation, about Palestinian suffering, about global hostility—in spaces of psychological safety, within their Jewish communities. They need to learn how to wrestle with those stories without losing themselves.

What might this look like in practice? First, curricula must acknowledge Palestinian existence directly, rather than erasing it. Jewish students should know the history of 1948 not only as miraculous statehood but as catastrophe for another people. Second, educators must teach the intellectual frameworks they will encounter: settler-colonial theory, postcolonial critique, anti-racism discourse. Students should learn these arguments inside Jewish classrooms before they face them on the quad. Third, Jewish education must ground Zionism not only in politics but in theology, peoplehood. Without a God-idea or spiritual foundation, Zionism is brittle, easily collapsed into nationalism alone. And finally, we must model disagreement – creating communities where students can question, argue, and doubt without fear of excommunication.

Jewish education that hides cannot endure. But Jewish education that wrestles– that teaches students to argue with integrity, to hold complexity, to remain anchored in their own story – can cultivate resilience. This is the garden model: tending to the soil, pruning when necessary, allowing growth even when it is messy. An archive may preserve with precision, but only a garden can sustain life.

If Jewish education continues to present a one-dimensional Israel—an untouchable record instead of a living, breathing inheritance—we will keep losing our kids. Not because they don’t care about being Jewish, but because we didn’t give them the full truth when it mattered most.

I know, because I was one of them.

Leftist activists on American college campuses do not understand that Jews are also oppressed by the racial structures endemic to Western society. Such students and faculty fail to appreciate how their radical, liberatory movements reproduce white supremacy’s own hatred of Jews by articulating ideas about collective liberation that do not include us. “Collective liberation,” the radical dream of an end to all forms of supremacy and hierarchy, does not include Jews because it in fact blames Jews and reproduces antisemitic behaviors.

My activist-intellectual, radically leftist classmates at Stanford University acted in ways that projected their rage at the state of Israel directly onto me, as the only Jew in their periphery. The Nexus Document, written by scholars in 2021, offers a nuanced definition of antisemitism responsive to the limitations of the IHRA’s. The Nexus Document authors articulate in their White Paper:

“Antisemitism fulfills a social function: It provides an explanation for social disorders. People use it to demonize and fuel the oppression of any minority and all minorities, while fomenting division between Jews and other minorities.”

Antisemitism “fomented division” between myself, a Jew, and my classmates— predominantly students with Latina/o, Southeast Asian, Black, and/or Asian heritage—when I became the target for their anti-Zionist activism.

I need these campus activists to appreciate that I am part of a marginalized minority. I come from a people the world has hated for so long. I deserve trauma-informed pedagogy, too, because I can neither learn nor feel safe in a classroom that regards me as a white oppressor absent any effort to consider Jewish heritage, history, literature, or lived experiences.

White supremacy has never accepted Jews, and never will. European racial antisemitism climaxed with the Shoah (Holocaust), but a hatred of Jews so deep an entire society wanted to kill us did not just ‘appear’ one day sometime in the 1930s. The industrialized extermination of six million Jews in Europe was a genocide that grew from a deep-seated, historically violent belief that Jews could never assimilate and constituted a plague on society so villainous we needed to be eradicated.

Antisemitism predates modern racism. The European white supremacy from which Nazism arose solidified its deep-seated, core antisemitic restrictions on identity and belonging in Western society hundreds of years, if not thousands, before it invented modern racism with colonialism and globalized racial capitalism.

Scholars of critical race theory (CRT) accept that differences in skin color existed for a very long time. However, they argue the ‘hierarchy of races’ as a system of privileges and ascriptions of human worth built into a country’s legal code (to uphold the ideological system of racism), came about with European colonialism: the mass theft, enslavement, and forced labor of Black bodies, and the mass theft of land and genocides of Indigenous peoples.

The founding scholars of critical race theory articulate an idea that contemporary racism was developed the moment a legal system was drawn and upheld that specifically enabled oppressing non-white people by writing a racial code into law. According to their framework, the residue of European racial capitalism during the era of conquest persists in the social structures and institutions of the United States today: in our carceral, judicial, educational, housing, and healthcare systems; that BIPOC, especially in the U.S., are specifically and prejudicially biased against in white society. But a hatred of Jews and state-sponsored antisemitism was built into dominant European ideas about power well before either 1492 or 1619.

The form of Christianity that invented the Doctrine of Discovery and enabled territorial conquest (through colonialism) and the monopolization of capital gains for one group (through enslavement) has been antisemitic since its advent. Early Christianity originally rooted itself in a theological accusation of Jewish deicide: that the Jewish people killed Jesus and are responsible for committing the ultimate sin of history. Under the doctrine of ‘witness theology,’ Jewish communities should be ‘preserved’ in Christendom only insofar as their existence in Diaspora serves as the evidence of their punishment from God.

Many Ashkenazi Jews have assimilated into white America, yeah. I will not get pulled over for driving because of the color of my skin. But this country is not my home; I am in Diaspora. My whiteness is conditional; I did not choose it, and I do not control it. My privileges exist only so long as a given society allows my assimilation. As a student of Jewish history and antisemitism studies, I know for a fact that Jews have tried in nearly every place and time that we have lived to assimilate into our host societies, to achieve belonging and equal rights in nations that forever understood us as ‘foreigners,’ no matter how many hundreds or thousands of generations living there passed.

Now Israel exists on this international stage and is a globalized proxy for the understanding that Jews are ‘foreigners.’ Just as individual Jews were forbidden to own private land or live beyond the Pale of Settlement, so too are the Jewish people characterized as not allowed to own land on any part of the globe as a Jewish entity.

And what is more, even if a Jewish person does not agree with the actions of the Israeli government—and openly critiques the mechanisms of violence in Zionist political and military practices—activists and scholars on the radical left still perceive it as evil for a Jew to want a Jewish state to continue existing. They do not recognize the fear, pain, trauma, or eternal loneliness of my people, Am Yisrael. Apparently, the Jewish state’s existence, not its actions, is the true ‘crime against humanity.’

The air was thick with cigar smoke, the kind that lingers on your hands long after you leave. Perched on a barstool, I made small talk with a Black man in his forties, an IT professional, who’d struck up a conversation. It began with harmless flirtation—playful, ordinary, human.

Then he asked what I do.

I hesitated. I told him I am a scholar, a researcher. He pressed: What do you research?

I knew what might happen if I answered, but I couldn’t dodge forever without leaving. Finally, I admitted it: I study antisemitism.

The warmth drained instantly. His expression hardened. “So you’re racist,” he concluded. “You waste all your energy and resources talking about Jews instead of caring about Black people, who are actually oppressed.”

I tried to steady myself. “Wait,” I said. “I study critical race theory. I teach ethnic studies. I absolutely know Black people are oppressed.” I thought I was building a bridge, signaling solidarity.

He leaned in, sharper now: “Don’t you dare try to speak for Black people. You have no right. You don’t understand persecution.”

Something inside me broke. Astonished, I replied, “Jews have been murdered, too,” almost pleading with him.

“The Holocaust is nothing compared to slavery,” he retorted. “It doesn’t matter in the face of what happened to my people.”

I left quickly, fleeing into the night, and walked until my legs decided not to move. On the Atlanta Beltline I collapsed, hunched over, sobbing into my knees. A casual conversation in a smoky bar had become an accusation that left me mercilessly undone. I wept to a Tom Lehrer song I never meant to take seriously: “And everybody hates the Jews.” Then I texted my dad: “Why does everybody hate the Jews?”

Lehrer released these words in 1965 as part of his satirical piece “National Brotherhood Week.” The entire song mocked America’s shallow attempts at tolerance—where racism, antisemitism, and bigotry were papered over with a week of civic niceties. His point was that beneath the platitudes, the hatred remained. Jews, he sang, were despised across the spectrum—by liberals and conservatives, Catholics and Protestants, Blacks and whites. It was satire. But that night, curled on the Beltline, it just didn’t feel funny. It felt prophetic.

I still remember that night—the sudden turn, my collapse of faith in humanity. What does it mean that studying antisemitism can be read not as a fight against oppression but as a betrayal of it? That even attempts at solidarity—to say yes, I see your suffering too—can be heard as appropriation, arrogance, theft?

In progressive spaces, I’ve seen these dynamics before: Jews asked to prove our virtue by apologizing, by disavowing, by putting our own history last. But this wasn’t an activist circle or a campus protest. It was an everyday encounter—a stranger, a moment that turned—recasting my life experience and my intergenerational trauma as racist harm.

I walked into that establishment hoping to get out of my house, to interact with people, to be regarded as a person. I walked out forced to accept that, for many, talking about antisemitism will never count as justice. To name Jewish experience with sympathy is to invite suspicion. To research our own survival is to risk being cast as complicit in others’ suffering.

And now, with the assassination of Charlie Kirk, that night feels less like an isolated personal collapse and more like a warning sign of something larger. Dr. Charles Asher Small, Executive Director at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), once said: history shows us that when antisemitism spikes, it is not only about Jews. Rome expelled its Jews as its power fractured. Spain drove them out on the eve of its decline. In Weimar Germany, Jews were scapegoated before the republic itself fell to pieces.

Lehrer’s satire was written in an America that congratulated itself on “brotherhood” while barely disguising its hatreds. My encounter in a smoky Atlanta bar, and now the political violence surrounding Charlie Kirk’s assassination, both expose the same truth: antisemitism signals more than prejudice. It signals instability, the unraveling of a larger order.

The smoke of that night still lingers. I left that bar in tears. But what broke me wasn’t the insult—it was the reminder that Jewish survival is still a story too many refuse to acknowledge, and that justice, in America, has lost its meaning. If spikes in antisemitism are the canary in the coal mine of empire, we would be foolish not to listen right now.

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by the Times of Israel on September 12, 2025. With edits to match audio, it is cross-posted here with permission.

We have a choice. Intangible heritage is dynamic, and embodied, and actively alive. We can continue to transmit a story written 85 years ago, or we can tell one capacious enough to hold the fullness of our histories. If we do not, we risk raising another generation of Jews who will feel, as I once did that they were lied to — and walk away not just from Zionism, but from the Jewish community itself.”

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In Rabbi’s Daughter Rebellion: A Weekly Drash you’ll find both written text and a podcast of my work narrated from my own voice. You’ll also encounter:

* Radical honesty about Jewish education — especially the gaps and silences in how Israel has been taught in American Jewish spaces.

* Ideological conformity in today’s college classrooms — where classic antisemitic conspiracies are reformulated using the language of social justice, and Jewish students are pressured to agree.

* Scholarship that speaks — grounded in my graduate work at Stanford and the University of Chicago, and my current Ph.D. research in Antisemitism Studies.

* Personal narrative — the voice of a rabbi’s daughter wrestling with disillusionment and reclamation.

* Psychological safety and imagination — essays that make room for difficult questions, deep reflection, and new ways of belonging.

The first issue drops September 18, 2025. Subscribe now to be part of the conversation from the very beginning. And please share with your networks and chosen people!

And when my Zionism collapsed, my Judaism collapsed with it. I had nothing left to fall back on. When university professors convinced me that Zionism is a settler-colonial project, and that Israel is a proxy for Western imperialism, I valorized them for finally teaching me the meaning of these words. When college classmates assured me Jewish history itself is fabrication, I cheered them on! To belong in the progressive space of a historically women’s liberal arts college in Southern California, I shed my complicity in evil–Zionism– because I learned a collective framework for the world to dismantle power and achieve justice in the world, and Zionism was the clear symbol of all injustice.

The unraveling was not immediate. At first, I did not even realize I was losing. But eventually the tools I carried proved laughably insufficient. Armed with slogans about Israel inventing drip irrigation and instant messaging, my Jewish education implied innovation could counter claims of dispossession. It offered me cherry tomatoes when what I needed more were olive groves. When college professors spoke of checkpoints and displacement, I was truly dumbfounded.

No one in the Jewish community had ever taught me how to think about Jews as both oppressed and powerful, vulnerable and sovereign. In that vacuum, I embraced the new narrative offered to me. It was totalizing, coherent, morally compelling – and it left no room for my Jewish story.

This is an excerpt of a larger work. Subscribe to read and listen to the full piece when it’s out Sept 18! The text comes accompanied by an author-narrated podcast so you can follow along or throw on headphones for a walk.

Each week, I’ll share my essays about Jewish history, ethnic studies, CRT, U.S. politics, diaspora Zionism, and my lived experience with antisemitism in America. You are welcome follow the written text as you listen, or just pop on some ear buds and take an educational, reflective stroll. Equal parts memoir, meditation, and scholarship, this project invites you into a space of reflection where intimacy meets intellectual rigor and courage meets compassion.

This short clip is a preview of what’s to come.

📅 First issue drops September 18, 2025: “The Israel Education Crisis No One Wants to Admit”👉 Subscribe now to get essays delivered directly to your inbox:

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