As a history major and a believer in history, I look at the current splitting of Jewish opinion between the Zionists (not me) and the liberals (me), and I'm conscious of how my family's Jewishness has always been of a sort different from the Temple attending traditional Jews.
I was circumsized at birth, but that was about it for Jewish indoctrination. I was not bar mitzvah, we never went ot services, I went to two years of Sunday school to learn some rudiments of tradition and Hebrew, we had holiday dinners, but that was it.
What I suspected now finds new explanation in a book by Molly Crabapple: HERE WHERE WE LIVE IS OUR COUNTRY: The Story of the Jewish Bund. It is well reviewed by Adam Hochshield in the NY Review of Books. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/28/a-dream-of-a-socialist-commonwealth-the-jewish-bund/. And also in the NY times. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/06/books/review/here-where-we-live-is-our-country-molly-crabapple.html.
To reduce the idea to a sentence, there was a split among Jews jusrt over a hundred years ago in Europe, among Zionists who thought Jews would only thrive apart from common society in a country of their own, and those Jewish Labor Bund unionists who advocated socialism in Europe and cooperation with other groups. That's a one sentence summary of a 453 page book, so some details are missing. But the point is this: Even though my family was not working class as were the Bundists, they must have supported them. Me, I wouldn't be comfortable with them. They were working class unionists, and although I agree with many of their concepts, I am irreducibly middle class and intellectual elite. Nonetheless, I think that we are seeing the continuation of that fight now with the dire split among Jews, at least here in the US, where the zionists elevate Israel to sacred status, and the descendants of bundists insist that Israel should be a liberal state, not a repressive and cruel one. Israel's claim to fame should not just be that it is Jewish. Israel is exhibiting is that it is Jewish, the wrong kind of Jewishness, it's the nationalistic Jewishness, rather than the internationalist Jewishness based on values that we endorse.
I see what has happened to Israel as more or less what has happened to the Department of Justice. DOJ used to be righteous, and being so, the courts gave it deference, the default being that DOJ would do the job right. Now, that's changed, since Trump corrupted it. Likewise, we used to be able to have support of Israel's position as our default, knowing that even if they made mistakes, they were trying their best, guided by righteous ideals. Now that Likud and Netanyahu and his henchmen have corrupted Israel, that country no longer warrants default approval. Rather the opposite. If they are accused of murder, that accusation is probably correct. When they say they will be investigating it, that's probably a lie.
I can understand the traditional Jews' hanging on to Israel as an ideal. It's almost impossible to stop believing in something that you have been taught to regard as sacred. Israel to many is a guiding lighthouse in a sea of fear. To give up that light is to be bereft. Moreover, for many, just as with many causes, belief in Israel has become their profession, their source of income. If you have gotten an email from me, you might remember my tag line there: "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer I would say that AIPAC has become the kind of racket that Hoffer warned against.
Traditional Jews are caught in a trap. They cannot easily leave their traditional beliefs, Next Year In Jerusalem. Jews who know about the holocaust through their own family ordeals cannot abandon the one source of succor that their family needed, when other countries turned their backs, or worse, collaborated. Where is one to turn? The USA of Trump? Europe? Where? It's a complete dilemma. So, the good-hearted traditional Jews continue to support Israel, some hoping for reform there, and others just saying, no matter how iniquitous it becomes, how racist, Jews will always need someplace to go. It's a dilemma without an easy solution.
Many bemoan the rising tide of anti-Semitism. I'm unhappy about it, too, but I ask – who is responsible? It doesn't come from nowhere. There is the increasingly repugnant nationalism and illiberalism of Israel for the last 25 years under Netanyahu, Likud, and the right. Israel is now so truculent, and AIPAC and ADL and other groups are so aggressive and abhorrent. Have they never heard of the virtues of charm, let alone liberality and humanism? Of course their actions are going to raise opposition, and of course people will generalize from Israel and the Jewish Right to all Jews. That's especially true when they all claim to speak for all Jews. They invite the world to be anti-Semitic. And by so doing, they separate Jews from the general population - the white world, maybe - so that they stand alone, which is exactly where we don't want to be. But of course, this is exactly where Netanyahu and his ilk do want to be, heroic isolation, it's me against the world! How unfair! How brave I am! Or something like that. Free to break international laws, free to be nationalistic, to expand, etc. What more could they do to incite anti-Semitism? They're doing their level best.
As someone who was never inducted into the Israel as a savior and an ideal mode of thought – a family of Bundists, I'm guessing -- I am left with thinking, hoping, and believing that the US will in the end continue to be the best country for a Jew to live in in the world. If it should go full fascist and turn on the Jews, I will still die in this country, and my descendants, all of them being only half-Jewish and none being a member of a temple, will assimilate somehow, as they have pretty much done anyway, although they still identify as Jewish, if asked. Other families who maintain a stronger Jewish identity will have a harder time. Part of the harder time they will have will be the decrepitude of the official Jewish organizations, not to say their obnoxiousness, their insistence that their way and their beliefs are the only credible ones. What do you do when the official organizations are so uncomfortable for you? I don't know, but I won't be around to find out.
You can look at the young Jews who protested in favor of Palestinians as those looking for Israel to be just. It's a pretty stupid step to take, I think, but that's what they did. There is no organization as strong as the traditional Jewish organizations that would represent their point of view without going whole hog extremist Palestinian supporter. Somehow, J Street didn't measure up. Individual Jewish leaders did speak up, some terrific liberal rabbis, I think, but they didn't have the money and the organization to consolidate that alternative movement. Maybe they will coalesce.
Meanwhile, for me, if someone is to say, Next Year In Jerusalem, as is traditional but never was in my family, I'll say, OK, Next Year is fine, let's eat together next year – but not in Jerusalem. That's gone, man.
Budd Shenkin
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