American Jewish Organizations Are Making a Dangerous Mistake

By conflating "Israel" and "Jews," these institutions are exposing American Jews to an antisemitic mass politics we haven’t had to worry about for a long time.

Growing up as a typical American Jew, I had it drilled into my head from a very young age that a strong Israel was a necessary condition for my safety. America was our home, sure, but as the grandson of a Holocaust survivor, I knew the history—at any moment our security could be shattered. Only the guaranteed protection of a Jewish state, made possible in part through the steadfast support of our Jewish community and all its institutions, could ensure my well-being in the long term.

It has been a long time since this claim made much sense to me. But in recent years it has become abundantly clear not only that this claim is false but that it is in fact the inverse of our current reality. Because here’s the truth: There is nothing making Jews in America less safe today than the actions of Israel’s far-right government—actions that too many of our mainstream Jewish institutions still refuse to disavow.

Over the last few years, the Israeli government—through its hubris, brutality, and high-handed approach to American politics—has been doing everything in its power to turn the American public against it. Americans have watched the Israeli military commit an unending stream of barbaric war crimes in Gaza, paid for in large part by our tax dollars. We’ve observed Israeli-backed settlers commit lynchings and other apartheid-enforcing mob violence in the West Bank, including against American citizens. We’ve seen the Israeli prime minister wield an astonishing degree of influence over American politics and government policy. And most recently, we heard the Trump administration admit that it was pushed into launching its war against Iran because Israel wanted it to.

As Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained, the “imminent threat” to America that required such extraordinary military action was that “if Iran was attacked, and we believe that they would be attacked, that they would immediately come after us.” Translation: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was going to attack Iran, so President Trump had to jump on board—because apparently the alternatives, forcing the Israelis to back down or letting them act alone, were inconceivable.

This joint Israeli-American war is already deeply unpopular. It will become more unpopular still as the costs (currently over a billion dollars a day) and the losses (at least 13 Americans have been killed) and the horrors (Iranians digging mass graves for the more than 150 elementary school girls our government killed and toxic black clouds raining carcinogens on millions of civilians) continue to pile up. That’s bad news for Israel’s standing with the American public, among whom a serious backlash against Israel has already been building.

Now, in an ideal world, a backlash against Israel would be just that—nobody would conflate the Israeli government with the Jewish people as a whole. Americans who are rightly angry about what they’ve been seeing from Netanyahu’s regime should say, “Israel’s government killed tens of thousands of children in Gaza” or “Israel’s government dragged us into a nightmare conflict with Iran” or “Israel’s government murdered my family.” In an ideal world, nobody would say, “The Jews did these things.”

But we don’t live in that ideal world. And that’s in part because of the radically pro-Israel posture of the majority of mainstream Jewish institutions in our country.

These groups—of course the political organizations like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the Anti-Defamation League, but also local community institutions (Jewish federations, professional groups, campus leaders, media outlets, and more)—have spent the last three years aggressively declaring that criticism of Israel equates to antisemitism, that anti-Zionist Jews are not real Jews, and that the American Jewish community will stand with Israel no matter what crimes the state commits. In short, they have been insisting that “Israel” and “Jews” should be conflated—or in the words of Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL president, “You cannot take the Zion out of Jewish identity, you cannot take the Zionism out of Judaism.”

Given that chorus from the very organizations and leaders who claim they represent the Jewish community, you don’t have to be a Nazi to start ascribing the Israeli regime’s horrifying conduct to all Jews. You just have to be a relatively low-information gentile who’s not familiar with the point of view of the growing majority of actual American Jews, who are increasingly critical of Israel but whose views are suppressed by our mainline institutions.

Of course—and I imagine some readers have already shouted this at their screens in frustration—antisemites will always find a justification to hate Jews. They did so before Israel existed, and they would continue to do so if there were no ethnonationalist Jewish state or if America’s Jewish establishment did break with Israel’s regime.

But this argument misunderstands the nature of the threat American Jews face today. Yes, there have always been, and likely will always be, virulent antisemites out there. But a world where this kind of resentment is relegated to a minor fringe is very different from one where these ideas have infiltrated a much broader population.

A decade ago, your average podcast-listening young man was not likely to think in terms of “the Jews are causing this or that harm.” But after years of watching a live-streamed genocide be committed by the Jewish state and rarely hearing any condemnation by mainstream American Jewish institutions, that is changing. And it’s easy to imagine the change accelerating as those same Jewish organizations celebrate a war that is despised by the American people.

This change matters greatly. It’s the difference between antisemitic provocateur Nick Fuentes being some freak few people have heard of, and Fuentes having such a large and influential following that people like Vice President JD Vance hesitate to exclude him from GOP spaces. Fuentes has grown his base dramatically since Oct. 7, largely because of his shrewd weaving together of young people’s legitimate outrage over the Israeli government’s conduct with his own classically vile “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”-style antisemitism. (A similar story could be told about other hugely powerful figures on the antisemitic right, like Tucker Carlson.)

To point out how antisemitism has been spreading is not to justify or legitimate its spread. On the contrary, it is to affirm that this is a real problem, and taking a problem seriously requires understanding it.

And so it must be said that the move Fuentes and his ilk are making—unequivocally equating Israel and the Jews—is functionally the same move that Jewish organizations make when they declare that criticism of Israeli policy is antisemitism, a charge the ADL recently leveled at California Governor Gavin Newsom for his relatively anodyne description of Israel as “sort of an apartheid state.” (To be clear, Israel is an apartheid state, definitionally—a Jewish baby born today in a West Bank community will have full rights in Israel, a vote in national elections, and access to civilian courts; a Palestinian baby born in that same community will have no democratic rights, tight restrictions on their movement, frequent harassment from settlers, and no access to justice beyond what Israel’s unaccountable military courts mete out. That’s apartheid.)

For years, these mainstream Jewish institutions have insisted they could have it both ways—declaring that being a Jew in good standing in our community requires undying support for the state of Israel while also maintaining that American Jews cannot be held responsible for Israel’s actions. But here’s the thing: You cannot claim that everyone who criticizes Israel for indiscriminately killing children is an antisemite—that is, someone who hates all Jews—without implying that indiscriminately killing children is somehow a project undertaken by all Jews rather than the project of a specific out-of-control far-right government and its supporters. And if you repeat that message often enough, well, some people are going to start believing it.

It is perfectly legitimate for a backlash against the Israeli regime to be building here in the United States. Americans are tired of seeing Israel manipulate our political system to ensure that our taxpayer dollars continue to subsidize Israeli aggression. And the fact that this observation seems to rhyme with a classic antisemitic trope of Jewish puppet masters controlling all world governments does not make it less true that Israel exerts enormous influence over US politics—though it does underline the degree to which Israeli policy fails to consider the safety and interests of American Jews. Given these empirical realities, Americans have to be ideologically committed to Israel to be satisfied with the current state of Israeli-American relations.

But if a significant proportion of the US population metabolizes their anger toward Israel into resentment against Jews as a whole—an outcome that the rhetoric of America First’s Nick Fuentes and the ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt both seem to be inviting—that is a more dangerous state of affairs than Jews in this country have faced in generations, as we saw recently in Michigan, where a man attacked a synagogue after an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon killed four members of his family. Certainly, it’s a less safe world for my Jewish sons than the one I had the privilege of growing up in, in which yes, there were antisemites, but they had no real path to take their hate to scale. Today, such paths exist, and it’s possible we’re already quite far down them.

Of course, the security of American Jews should not be the primary focus of public discourse right now. Iranian schoolgirls have been mass-murdered, ancient cities are getting carpet-bombed, American service members are under attack, and millions of people across multiple Middle Eastern countries are facing the dislocations, uncertainties, and horrors of war. These imminent crises all matter more than my long-term concerns about the growth of antisemitism in our country.

Still, this point deserves attention. The logic of Zionism rests heavily on the claim that Jewish safety necessitates a Jewish state. It is largely this desire—to protect our people, whom history has proved need protection—that has led so many national and local Jewish institutions to continue backing the Israeli regime, through apartheid and genocide and more. But this approach is self-defeating. Tying the honor and reputation of our people to the rogue government of an ethnostate is not making us safer. On the contrary, it’s making American Jews more vulnerable to the kind of antisemitic mass politics that we haven’t had to worry about in this country for a long time. That’s what my Jewish sons have to look forward to. And it’s not going to change until our mainline Jewish institutions start owning up to the danger they’ve created for all of us and start demonstrating, through their words and deeds, that Israel does not, in fact, equal the Jews.

This essay appeared in The Boston Globe and will be in Sunday’s print edition.

One last thing. I know there are people—including people I love very, very dearly—who will strongly disagree with parts or all of this essay. All I can say is that this conversation is important to me in large part because Judaism is important to me, and I don’t think I personally would be living in accordance with my Jewish values (values I learned from some of you) if I didn’t speak up.