Jewish Voices for Hate

My family and I used to be members at a Conservative synagogue. It seemed like a good match for us. We celebrated many family milestones there, and became friends with a number of families and other congregants, including a prominent judge.

But 20 years ago, something strange happened. The rabbi invited several Jewish speakers to address the congregation, from the pulpit, about the “boycott, divestment, and sanctions” (BDS) movement against Israel—namely, in favor of BDS. The rabbi argued that “the Jewish tent” was, or ought to be, large enough to accommodate all reasonable opinions, and he believed this was one.

I, on the other hand, was horrified. As a prosecutor in the Justice Department’s Nazi-hunting unit, the Office of Special Investigations, I came face-to-face with the foot soldiers of Nazi Germany and its “master plan” to exterminate European Jews. These men and women had been taught to think of Jews not as human, but as vermin. When I deposed them in the 1980s, four decades after they committed their heinous acts, they still clung to that view—giving me a valuable lesson in the longevity of hateful ideologies, and cautioning me against being at all tolerant of anyone whose views single out and spread lies about the Jewish people.

But one didn’t need that experience to understand what was wrong with what we were hearing from that pulpit. Regardless of the pseudo-sophisticated ideas and academic language these speakers couched their talk in, underneath it all was clearly a position that would result in the destruction of Israel—and the displacement, or worse, of its more than 7 million Jews. And that wasn’t merely another argument competing in the free and unfettered marketplace of ideas; it was a call for annihilating the world’s sole Jewish state and depriving the Jews, and Jews alone, of the dignity of self-determination and the right to an indigenous homeland. This, I believed, was a dangerous idea with potentially disastrous consequences, and no Jewish space had any business tolerating, let alone promoting, it.

I tried talking to other congregants. Most dismissed my concerns. Along with the few others who saw how disturbing this was, we approached the rabbi. We tried to explain that this wasn’t an issue of freedom of speech or free inquiry (or “viewpoint diversity,” as it came to be known), in part because these particular views were widely available to any member of the community who wanted to pursue them: They were then, and are even more so now, prevalent throughout academia, the arts, and the media. The speakers were free to spew venomous ideas in the public square; doing so inside synagogues was neither a right, nor a privilege that should be afforded.

It felt wrong to us for these noxious views to be platformed, and in a real sense validated, by the Jewish community—as Jewish communal ideas. The rabbi listened patiently, and said he understood our point of view. But he seemed to have the support, either overt or tacit, of enough of the congregation. The BDS lectures went on as scheduled.

In response, my family and I gave up our membership at that synagogue, and joined a different one.

Shortly after Oct. 7, I received an email from my friend the judge. Now he was the one who was concerned, this time about the amount of media attention devoted to groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, a self-proclaimed anti-Zionist organization that supports “Palestinian liberation” and that, while having very little moral outrage to spare for the Israeli victims of the massacre, has since staged several violent protests in support of Hamas’ Gaza—including disrupting highways, train stations, and bridges.

I asked him if he remembered when our rabbi believed that calling for the destruction of Israel from the synagogue pulpit was acceptable, and whether he understood that the synagogue had invited these poisonous ideas and organizations into our Jewish communal space—and in this way should be seen as, in fact, having participated in legitimizing them.

I am still waiting for an answer.

These last few weeks, many American Jews seem to be having a rude awakening similar to the one my former friend, the judge, captured in his email. They’ve watched the presidents of Harvard, UPenn, and MIT testify before Congress and refuse to unequivocally state that calling for genocide of Jews violated the university’s code of conduct, and they asked themselves how the campuses that hold themselves out as educating the next generation of leaders are instead becoming a breeding ground for antisemitism.

How, they suddenly wanted to know, did we get here?

There were many people and factors at play, including the rise of intersectionality and decolonization studies in academia; the embrace of wokism in media, arts, and culture projects; the infusion of cash from foreign nations, some with ties to terror groups, into all sorts of American organizations, including universities, and more.

However, the rabbis and Jewish organizations who at best stood silent and at worst gave a platform for people calling for the destruction of Israel also bear partial responsibility for today’s explosion of vile antisemitism. The same holds true for Jewish institutions that refused to recognize anti-Zionism as antisemitism.

Numerous Jewish organizations partnered with groups such as Black Lives Matter, which from its earliest days perpetuated the falsehood that Israel is an apartheid state. Others, like J Street, consistently hosted anti-Zionist speakers who advocated for boycotting Israel; last week, the organization “demanded” that Israel change its conduct in the war against Hamas.

If all Jewish organizations, rabbis, and community leaders had taken a stronger stand against the delegitimization of Israel—by condemning groups like JVP, IfNotNow, Bend the Arc, and other organizations that claim to be “Jewish” yet ignore history and promote anti-Israel vitriol—then perhaps such lies and disinformation would not have spread among some in our community, let alone in our country.

Today, the chickens have come home to roost. Young people are aligning with Hamas, and even Jewish students are comparing Hamas’ murderous attacks to the Jewish freedom fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto. Holocaust survivors, whose tormentors I helped to track down, have tragically lived to see young people, including their own descendants, tweeting—from the safety of some coffee shop in Brooklyn—Hamas propaganda against Israel. These young people didn’t simply absorb these dangerous ideas from the ether. In addition to hearing it at their universities and in the general interest media, some heard it in their synagogues and in their Jewish community centers and from Jewish organizations—so eager to appear fashionable and progressive that they legitimized people calling for their own destruction.

To reverse the growing movement to destroy the one and only Jewish state, the rabbis and Jewish leaders who allowed BDS and anti-Israelism into the “Jewish tent” must take responsibility for this misjudgment, and change course—with conviction and principle. We could not afford to make this mistake last time. We certainly cannot afford to do it again.