Loss and Creation
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Yael Krifcher, 25, Potomac, MD, American Jewish activist:
“Something that a lot of us who grew up to love Israel so dearly who are in the activist pro-Palestine scene now experience is that all the beauty, and flavor, and joy and inheritance - and what’s more Jewish than inheritance - just turns to ash in your mouth.
“That loss, that grief - and you go into mourning over having lost such a beautiful thing that you still love - it has to be replaced by something. There is a cavity that needs to be filled with something. For many of us here, or at least speaking for myself, one of the ways I sought to fill that cavity is by trying to engage directly with the thing that is being done in my name - the apartheid regime, the occupation.
“While the motivation for engaging in solidarity work is obviously to end about apartheid and bring about liberation for Palestinians, part of it is also trying to rebuild that sense of inheritance and community and to tap into something a bit less corrupt and to maybe undo some of the corruption that you’ve participated in, knowingly and unknowingly.“
R., 27, Washington DC, American Jewish activist:
“I think something that we don’t talk about so much that is really important is just how beautiful it is, how wonderful it feels to be a part of this incredible tradition [of Zionism], to feel that you have a home somewhere that isn’t your home - that’s made for you, for your mythological inheritance. It feels really gorgeous to be part of this story. That’s what I was given - a sense of true belonging and community.
“I was so passionate about my love for Israel and my desire to not only be a proud Jew in support of Israel, but as Israeli as possible, as culturally Israeli as possible. This was really sold to me as the peak of what it meant to be a Jew. The more proximate you were to authentic Israeli culture, the more Jewish you were. [My year at a military prep academy in the settlement of Gilo in the West Bank] was the best year of my life. It was an incredible experience. It’s where my Hebrew is from. It’s why I speak with a much less-accented Hebrew, which at the time was a huge deal. When Jewish Americans heard me speak Hebrew, they were like ‘this girl has made it. This girl is the kind of Jew we want to be’.”
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Emily Glick, 28, Boston, MA, American Jewish activist:
“Two of my close Israeli [anti-Zionist activist] friends came to my birthday dinner a little while ago and I made kiddush. And I felt so aware of their presence. Every American Jew I know - religious or not - knows how to make kiddush. And these two friends, who are fluent Hebrew and Arabic speakers, don’t know how. I feared I was being judged; because Judaism has been equated with Zionism, performing Jewish tradition and practice and ritual is directly associated by them with Zionism. There’s a fear that the thing that you equate this thing with, that I’m displaying and that I care about and love, it not what I want you to equate me with. A lot of things would have been different if the Israelis weren’t around. It added so much to our experience there and to the effectiveness of the project, but culturally it’s not where I feel most comfortable. That connection to Jewishness and ritual, and they have a different way of processing their trauma and emotion.”
Sam Stein, 27, Lawrence, New York, American-Israeli Jewish activist:
“During my gap year, I lived and studied in [the West Bank settlement of] Efrat. I had zero proper understanding of what that meant. I knew that there was a line that was green, and that I was past it and this seemed to have made me a better Zionist… I was raised [in an Orthodox American Jewish community] knowing that the word ‘occupation’ was the absolute most anti-Semitic concept imaginable but had zero idea what that meant. I just knew that it was anti-Semitic. But, early on in college, one of my really good childhood friends started becoming very vocally anti-occupation and that made me have to reevaluate that. I had to think to myself: ‘My friend, Noam from Teaneck, New Jersey, who studied for two years in a yeshiva in Yerushalayim probably isn’t an anti-Semite’. I realized then this was a thing that I would have to grapple with...
“The fact that I’m here at all is so driven by my Judaism and my identity. So I guess anything I am doing here is completely inseparable from that.”
Margaret Hughes Robinson, 28, Brooklyn, New York, Rabbi and American Jewish activist:
“I remember going to the head of my Israel program [in rabbinical school] and saying ‘I don’t know what to do when I question actions of the Israel state towards Palestinians - or any minority group - within the state or in the West Bank or in Gaza?’ The answer was always ‘But Jews need a safe place’ and ‘Jews need a majority’. And I was like ‘But the state won’t protect the most marginalized members of the Jewish community. What is the point?’ And the head of the program, and I’m paraphrasing, responded: ‘You know, Margo, the questions that you are asking - if you follow them through to their logical conclusions - it would really unravel everyone’s base assumptions about Zionism.’ And I said: ‘Yeah, that’s the question I have and that’s why I’m asking for help. I thought you would know’. And he just wouldn’t answer me. Only said ‘It’s really hard.’”
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Oriel Eisner, 31, Denver, Colorado, American-Israeli Jewish activist:
“I was born in Israel in Ramat Gan. My dad is Israeli and my mom is American. When I was two years old, my family moved to Denver, Colorado. We came really frequently to visit Israel. When I was younger, we would come for a month a year. I always felt a sense of closeness, and familiarity, and family, and even nostalgia, you could say, about my grandmother's neighborhood, and experiences in Israel.
“As I got older, particularly in the last couple of years of high school and especially into college, I started getting more politically aware. And a part of that was also getting more politically aware about what's happening here in Israel-Palestine. And I think for a lot of those initial years, it raised a lot of questions and uncertainties.
“I wasn't quite sure how to make sense of it, didn't feel like I had so many avenues to turn to try and reconcile, not only the things that I learned through my Jewish education, but also the personal feelings and emotional attachments I had to Israel, and how to reconcile all of that with the things I was learning about, what was happening today in Gaza and the West Bank, what happened historically in terms of '48 and '67, and basically, trying to make sense of this political awareness and this upbringing. And it didn't feel like I had so many places to turn to, because I felt like in the political-awareness-raising communities or worlds, there wasn't any room for my personal associations and attachments to Israel. And I think those spaces brought out a lot of doubt, and insecurity, and maybe even shame around the positive associations I do have with Israel and Israeliness.
“And then, when I went to the Jewish community, where there was space for those positive associations, there was not any room to ask questions of Israel, to criticize Israel in any kind of way.”
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Margaret Hughes Robinson, 28, Brooklyn, New York, Rabbi and American Jewish activist:
“We hold a very funny space between the old Jew/new Jew thing of early Israeli Zionism - we are in love with the idea of the halutz [early Israeli colonists] - but also Larry David, and Seinfeld, and bagels and lox. These things have a certain kind of cadence that we think of as so Jewish but that also actually originates in Gemara and Talmud recitation. There is a love for both of those pieces. When you have that and then construct Israel as this Jewish homeland that I think is portrayed very much like Disneyland if you don’t scratch the surface, it is frightening to find out that the story is so much more complex because it doesn’t just threaten your faith in Judaism but requires a pretty radical reckoning with the conception of what it means to being Jewish and what your identity and positionality is vis-a-vis the rest of the world.”
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Sam Stein, 27, Lawrence, New York, American-Israeli Jewish activist:
“When I became left wing, I felt like I didn’t belong in the Orthodox community anymore. I don’t feel at home in that environment anymore, and this took away my ability to have the connection and level of integration that I wanted to have…
“But now as I’m exposed to more progressive Jewish communities, I’m starting to dabble with them more. I don’t think I’ll become 100 percent practicing any time soon, but I’m learning how to bring aspects back into my life that I was and am attached to.
“It’s a constant, back and forth journey. For a long time, even after I stopped practicing, I always wore a kippah until I ultimately took it off completely. I was in [the West Bank Palestinian village of] Tuba, and a Palestinian guy asked me ‘Oh… weren’t you wearing a kippah last time you were here?’ That made me think about my Jewishness in those spaces, and reclaiming Judaism from the occupation, Zionism, and the settler movement. I considered the thought that he remembered I was wearing a kippah last time and that had an impact on him. Someone was there wearing a kippah standing in solidarity with him and not throwing rocks at him. Maybe it’s really important for more people to be doing that.
“We have started organizing monthly anti-Zionist Friday night prayer services, which has been a really cool experience. Each time, I wear my yarmulka and even though it’s not activism per se, it really does feel like taking back and completely changing what all these symbols and practices mean and how I engage with them. These services provide the safety and comfort of a community that you know shares your values in a place where those values are incredibly polarizing and alienating.”
R., 27, Washington DC, American Jewish activist:
“[When you leave your community, there is a process of] reclaiming and replacing. There are things I have succeeded in reclaiming and continue to strive to reclaim from my past. I feel really strongly about being a part of intentional people who love Judaism and oppose the state, and see Judaism as something that is so much greater than the Zionist project. It was quite a fight to find a way back to loving Judaism because it meant disentangling it from Zionism. For example - and it feels a bit silly and a bit clunky - but I make a conscious effort now when I pray to try not to use an Israeli accent. When I think back to how hard I worked to acquire an Israeli accent and what it symbolized to me at the time, and think about where I am now and how hard I am working to uplift Diasporic Judaism as a Judaism that is gorgeous and expansive and, simply, mine. This small act feels to me like something I can do to stake my claim over a Judaism that is not tied to the Zionist project.”
R., 27, Washington DC, American Jewish activist:
“I have replaced my love of Israel with my certainty around the importance of standing in solidarity with Palestinians in their struggle for freedom and dignity. The clarity that I once felt about what it meant to love and to stand with Israel and to be a Jew for whom much of Judaism was about Israel, has been replaced with a clarity around the importance of standing in solidarity with oppressed and colonized people, specifically in this context in which the oppression and colonization is being done in my name and in the name of those that I love.”
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Sarah Brammer-Shlay, 30, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, American Jewish activist & rabbinical student:
“What does this say about my Jewish identity? As a rabbi-to -be, I think it can be very comforting to people to be getting spiritual and emotional support from exactly the community in which they may be struggling to be seen as a full person. With Jews in the context of Palestine, so many people have so much pain around being pushed out of the Jewish community because of their politics…
“Jewish religious leaders have a certain responsibility when it comes to Palestinian solidarity activism. For me, it’s a very core part of who I am as a religious leader. Unfortunately, not enough rabbis are speaking up about what’s happening. It’s an interesting conversation: Are American or other Diaspora Jews responsible for the actions of Israel? Israel is its own country, of course, but what is happening there is a reflection of Judaism. While it might not necessarily be fair or right, Israel is the most public way that Judaism operates in the world. So we need to assess: What do we want this very public representation of Judaism to actually represent?”
Margaret Hughes Robinson, 28, Brooklyn, NY, Rabbi and American Jewish activist:
“I feel that we [the American Jewish community] are inching closer and closer to a fuller reckoning with this history and the current situation with the occupation but anticipate the amount of cracking open and grief and how painful it’s going to be. I’ve been thinking a lot about how we are going to build a container so that people don’t have this break… so that people don’t need to take five or 10 years to be able to patch up their relationship and be like ‘maybe I can still love seder and go to shul’. That fracture… I wonder what the mechanism will be to hold people through this massive level of grief, how we will create something elastic enough to be able to hold this realization.”
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Oriel Eisner, 31, Denver, Colorado, American-Israeli Jewish activist:
“Israel could still be an important place because of the biblical history, the religious connection, and just the sheer mass of Jewish life here. Israel is, and for as long as there are Jews in Israel, will be a center of Jewish life in the world.
“I think what the problem is, and what this Diasporist calling is, is to make [Israel] not a center at all. I think for me, I’d make it not the center or the only center. And I think that means that for Jews in the U.S., myself included, there are important ways to be Jewish that are rooted more geographically locally.”