This has been a theme of right-wing critiques of the rapidly spreading protest movement. Noting that the protesters identify themselves as part of the “99 percent,” Rush Limbaugh said: “Now, 99 percent, that leaves one percent, roughly the percentage of Jews in the population, too. And Wall Street and bankers have been anti-Semitic code for Jews in this country going back quite a while.” (Jews are actually more like 2 percent of the population, but never mind.) Conservatives have delighted in pointing out that Adbusters, the Canadian magazine that first put out the call to occupy Wall Street, ran an inflammatory 2004 article about neoconservatives headlined, “Why Won’t Anyone Say They Are Jewish?”

The charge that Occupy Wall Street is shot through with anti-Semitism is dishonest and deceptive. But it’s built around a kernel of truth. There are a few Jew-baiters at Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, though they are marginal, particularly compared to the large numbers of Jewish activists taking part. Yet the leaderless, diffuse nature of the movement, in some ways its greatest strength, also makes it hard to police bigots, bullies, and cranks. This isn’t just about Jews—Occupy Wall Street’s ability to find some measure of unity and discipline amid a commitment to anarchy will determine whether it is able to grow beyond demonstrating widespread disaffection with the status quo.

Occupy Wall Street, as you’ve surely learned by now, is organized, for lack of a better word, around non-hierarchical principles derived from anarchist thought. Decisions are made by consensus during interminable general assembly meetings, in which anyone can participate. So far, this model has fostered, for the most part, a spirit of volunteerism and cooperation. The occupied site itself, full of grimy tarps and sleeping bags and people who’ve been braving the elements for weeks, looks bedraggled, but it’s actually pretty efficient. Free food is prepared and served, donated blankets and clothes are given away to all who need them, and a first-aid station deals with minor medical issues. When the private company that owns the park threatened to evict the occupation to conduct a cleanup, the ad-hoc community mobilized to clean it themselves, depriving authorities of a pretext to get rid of them.

This do-it-yourself ethos has been a boon to Jewish activists, among others. One of the most iconic moments of the occupation came when as many as a thousand Jews gathered at the park on October 7 for an open-air Kol Nidre service, organized by Daniel Sieradski, the founder of the progressive blog Jewschool.com and a self-described “rabble rouser in the Jewish community.” “The whole thing is an anarchistic affair, so any affinity group that has an action is welcome to come and do their action,” he said. Sieradski went on to erect a pop-up sukkah at Zuccotti Park and found that the police who usually enforce a ban on erecting structures there were reluctant to interfere once they heard it was part of a Jewish religious observance. “I established a precedent for people here,” he said, obviously delighted. “We’ve given people a way of creating shelters for themselves here in the park for the week of Sukkot. One guy tried it, and the cops came and tried to take it down. Two hundred people came and shouted at the cops and made them go away.”

The anarchist nature of the protests has meant that some of the usual suspects on the radical left, people whose vociferous anti-Zionism can shade into anti-Semitism, haven’t gotten much of a foothold.

One of the curses of left-wing politics is the perennial presence of International ANSWER, a front group for the Stalinist Workers World Party, a tiny political sect with a perverse attraction to the world’s worst people. The party formed in the 1950s, after splitting off from the Socialist Workers Party over a disagreement about the Soviet invasion of Hungary, which the Workers World supported. Since then, the Workers World Party has thrown itself behind Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, and Kim Jong-il; it backed the Chinese crackdown on the “counter-revolutionary rebellion” in Tiananmen Square. The Workers World Party is not just pro-Palestinian; it is pro-Hamas and pro-Hezbollah, devoted to the destruction of Israel. It’s fringe views would hardly be worth noticing if not for its members’ organizing skills. For example, by securing protest permits on significant dates far in advance, it was able to take a leading role in the early marches against the Iraq war, even though many progressives were mortified by its involvement. It has often made things uncomfortable for Jews, even those deeply opposed to the Israeli occupation.

“Clearly there’s been tension for the last couple of decades between Jews who identify as supporters of Israel and the radical left that views Zionism as an extension of American imperialism,” said Sieradski. But groups like ANSWER aren’t running things at Occupy Wall Street—no one is. For progressive Jews, that’s opened up new room for involvement. Thus Sieradski, who has been alienated from much of Jewish communal life, suddenly feels “on fire again” about the possibility of specifically Jewish activism. “After the service, I had a line of 100 people come up to me and say, ‘Thank you, that was the most meaningful Jewish experience of my entire life,’ ” he said.

The conservative Jewish magazine Commentary has noticed the ecstatic Jewish involvement in Occupy Wall Street. “The turnout the event generated, as well as the discussion it has so far provoked, are deeply troubling trends that all who care about the Jewish future would do well to take seriously,” Matthew Ackerman wrote on the magazine’s blog. Rarely, he wrote, “has a movement so radical in its aims been tied so explicitly to a religious tradition as was the case with this past Friday’s service.”

In some ways, it’s contradictory for Commentary to bemoan enthusiastic Jewish participation in the protests one moment and accuse them of anti-Semitism the next. But it’s also true that the extreme openness that allowed Sieradski to organize his Kol Nidre service is not always benign. Occupy Wall Street lacks tools for enforcing any sort of discipline, or ostracizing troublemakers. When someone at a Tea Party rally holds a particularly offensive sign, as many have, the movement can denounce them. But there is no one at Occupy Wall Street to do the denouncing.

The occasional appearance of anti-Semites is probably the biggest sign of this problem so far, though it’s not the only one. There are small but telling tensions and conflicts around the edges of the encampment. The constant pounding of a drum circle, for example, located near the sleeping area, is driving both protesters and people in the neighborhood crazy, but efforts to quiet them even occasionally have had mixed results. The drummers have agreed to stop playing during the nightly general assembly meeting, but Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer’s attempts to get them to limit their drumming to two hours a day have gone nowhere. Last Friday morning, the de facto leader of the drummers, a man with greasy gray hair starting to dread and a wild look in his eyes, reacted with fury to suggestions that some people would appreciate a respite from all the banging. “This is a revolution!” he shouted. “It’s not about working with the same community we are protesting against.” When other protesters tried to argue, the drummers played harder to drown them out.

This inability to enforce some kind of order, or to even recognize a mechanism for doing so, could cause problems for Occupy Wall Street. Such issues have bedeviled left-wing movements before. In the early 1970s, Jo Freeman wrote an important essay about the self-sabotaging distrust of organization in the women’s movement, titled “The Tyranny of Structurelessness.” “Unstructured groups may be very effective in getting women to talk about their lives; they aren’t very good for getting things done,” she wrote. “It is when people get tired of ‘just talking’ and want to do something more that the groups flounder, unless they change the nature of their operation.” Such movements, she argued, awaken people’s energy without channeling it. “Some women just ‘do their own thing.’ This can lead to a great deal of individual creativity, much of which is useful for the movement, but it is not a viable alternative for most women and certainly does not foster a spirit of cooperative group effort.”

There are lessons here for Occupy Wall Street. The movement has been enormously successful at capturing people’s imaginations and giving them a place to gather, air deep and legitimate grievances, and be invigorated by the power of group solidarity. But coming together and creating a counterculture is ultimately not enough to effect real and lasting change. For that, leadership and structure are ultimately needed. Occupy Wall Street is not anti-Semitic, and the presence of a few odd Jew-haters is not the movement’s fault. Its inability to quickly shut them up, though, may augur problems for its future.

“Kol Nidrei reminds us that though we make commitments under duress, ultimately we are accountable only to the higher values of Justice and Righteousness,” Daniel Sieradski, a young Jewish writer and activist who organized the event, told the crowd, reciting a labor organizer’s midrash. (Right-wing critics would be correct to note that, if it were 100 years ago, Sieradski and the others would be inciting socialist riots on the Lower East Side; what they fail to see, here as elsewhere, is that it isn’t 100 years ago, and today you couldn’t find a minyan to form that riot.)

Today, we are thinking about a different kind of commitment made under duress. A big part of our financial crisis was caused by a banking system which misled and pressured, which up-sold and implored us to sign without reading, where fraud was rampant, and where caution was absent. Because of those external problems, many good hardworking people were steered, under a sort of duress, into financial doom while their futures were sold from the rich to the richer.

Today, as we think about how commitments must be contemplated in the context of right and wrong, of earth and heaven, we know that those notes have no moral weight, that banks can’t and shouldn’t own the futures of people who work, and that it’s time for the bankers to abandon their claims on everyday people’s futures. I will leave it to another [on this day] to think about what this means practically or what policies we should adopt as a country.

Note the clear values; note, also, the immediate disclaimer about how those values are to be implemented. (In yesterday’s New York Times, Tablet Magazine contributor Todd Gitlin expertly explored how far Occupy Wall Street’s essentially anarchist, policy-free plank has gotten them—and argues it won’t take them much further.)

I was lucky to have been there. Participating, politics took on an emotional poignancy they rarely do, and the spiritual issues we are commanded to think about during Yom Kippur—including those raised in the haftarah, from Isaiah, in which we are exhorted to think of what kind of fast God truly desires—were made as real and personal as my learning has told me they should be. Besides all of which, it was immensely moving to be a part of a group of Jews practicing our religion publicly and peaceably; I schepped naches from the organizers, who were very clearly putting hard-earned Jewish summer camp experience to good use; I felt like I was part of a community, in the way that the concept of the minyan is supposed to encourage.

Halal vendors dotted the outskirts, prompting one smart aleck to remark that we were their worst nightmare: several hundred Jews who weren’t eating. A couple onlookers claimed that the firm Brown Brothers Harriman, whose very tall building we all faced when looking east, had helped finance the Nazis, and that Bush’s grandfather had been a part of it. This cynic chalked the rambling up to dorm-room investigative journalism, until a quick Google revealed it to be totally true. Though I tend not to be one for crunchier variants of Judaism, the few moments of schmaltz were outweighed by the moral seriousness of the larger mission. And the politics should have been welcome to, let’s say, the open-minded. “I will be more accountable for Palestine. Aleinu,” was followed by, “I will be more accountable for Israel. Aleinu.” Afterward, a few folks pulled out instruments—a violin, a guitar—and there was dancing. “Early rabbinic texts call Yom Kippur one of the two happiest days of the year,” George Davis, our rabbi for the evening, told us. “What makes this day happy? It is the day of forgiveness.”

What seems undeniable is that the service, less than trying to advance a cause, was trying to be a cause. The organizers did not intend primarily to argue for a certain vision of society; they endeavored to be that society, in this instance an observant Jewish slice of it, in which members of all different denominations (Sieradski told me that from the chazzan to the machzorim, official Reconstructionist, Conservative, and Orthodox organs had all chipped in), political beliefs, and—emphasis here—classes and sexual orientations can come together to share in ancient ritual.

In this, the service was a perfect match for Occupy Wall Street itself, which to this point has been most successful in simply (to crib from Gandhi) being the change it wishes to see in the world rather than enacting it on a systemic level. A trip back to Lower Manhattan yesterday confirmed this. There is a fascinating, functioning mini-society in Zuccotti Park. There is a food line. There is a medical station, with a doctor on call. There is a newspaper (including a Spanish edition, a copy of which I proudly own). There are exhibits, almost as in a museum, showing new and better ways to live.

The politics yesterday remained focused on “occupying Wall Street”—calling to account a system that rewards the richest one percent with 40 percent of the country’s wealth and that allows financial tycoons who pay low tax rates and exploited the ignorance of the less-well-off to have prime membership in that top one percent. (Wall Street is responding: reportedly, JPMorgan Chase’s weekly email on the global economy was titled, “Tikkun Olam.”) Around 4, there was a rally led by clergy, and a rabbi got up and recited Isaiah on fasting. I saw a sign that read, “End the Occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.” I saw anti-Obama signs; I saw pro-Obama signs. What was almost totally lacking were any of the things you worry about. I saw a sign that read, “Finally, an occupation a radical Jew can get behind,” and if you don’t see that as harmless, I fear how much must trouble your sleep. I saw a solitary guy spouting Che. Will he be joined by more? That would be very, very sad.

If only there were another Jewish celebration that could continue with the theme of benevolent occupation. Say, a holiday in which you build a makeshift house and eat and sleep in it.

What’s that you say? It starts Wednesday night?

Yes, folks, it’s true: I can confirm that Sieradski and friends will be building an Occupy Wall Street sukkah.

Yom Kippur Prayers for Corporate Atonement at Occupy Wall Street [Religion Dispatches]
Related: The Left Declares Its Independence [NYT]
Earlier: Panic in Zuccotti Park

Now it’s time for the inevitable backlash, and this morning, Jewish blogger Daniel Sieradski posted an item to Twitter noting that he was “having a hard time feeling sad for dash snow, whose definition of good art included defiling Jewish objects.” Sieradski included a link to an image of a half-torn poster depicting a naked man with a tallis draped over his erect—and apparently Wahlberg-proportioned—member. Except, oops! The poster was actually created by Snow’s artistic collaborator and former roommate Dan Colen, whose first art project amounted to ejaculating over pictures of hip-hop stars taken from magazines. Colen’s father, Sy, an avid fundraiser for Israeli groups, speculated to New York magazine in 2007 that his son, whose family lost dozens of relatives in the Holocaust, was probably just trying to suggest his belief in Jewish procreation. “The penis for him, it’s something sacred,” Colen père told reporter Ariel Levy. “It is the staff of life.”

Related: Dash Snow, East Village Artistic Rebel, Dies at 27 [NYT]