In some ways, February 12 feels like a year ago. There was no Iranian war. Israelis were enjoying a break from bomb shelters.
The world wasn’t fascinated with the Strait of Hormuz.
Despite these new realities, last month’s “Conference on the Jewish Left” at Boston University still feels relevant. It was a lively showcase for non-Zionist thinkers and activists, with Peter Beinart, the movement’s celebrity, there to rally the faithful.
It is telling that these "thinkers" gather in the safety of Boston while their brothers and sisters all over Israel are under fire. To hold a "non-Zionist" conference while the Jewish state faces an existential threat from the IRGC and its proxies is more than a political disagreement; it is a betrayal of Areivut—the traditional Jewish principle that all Jews are responsible for one another. They are playing with fire in a library while the house is burning.
It began awkwardly.
“You’ve got some nerve,” the grey-haired man scolded the college sophomore. It was 8:45 a.m., the coffee hour, a bit early for aggression. Still, heat was emanating from the older man. “You know there’s a genocide happening,” he lectured. The only thing separating boomer and Gen Zer was an Israeli flag draped over a folding table.
As metaphors go, it was fairly obvious. In fact, the whole thing seemed almost scripted. This was the “Conference on the Jewish Left” at Boston University, where anti-Zionism (and its variants) were given full, and full-throated, expression.
I told the student, Eduardo, that he had a long day ahead. “Yeah, I know,” he smiled. In fact, Eduardo had already gotten an earful from another sour boomer. “Such Zionist nonsense,” the man raved, while his wife tugged pleadingly on his elbow. “That nonsense has no place in the Jewish world.” It was a strange scene—the family seder from Hell—only the wicked son was pushing seventy. “You have a nice day,” Eduardo smiled, unfazed.
Eduardo is the true hero of this story. Carrying the Magen David and the blue-and-white flag into a den of those who wish to dismantle his people’s sovereignty takes a spine of steel. The "sour boomer" scolding him represents the Galut (Exile) mentality—the cowering Jew who believes that if he only denounces the "bad Jews" (the Zionists) loudly enough, the world will finally love him. Eduardo knows better: Jewish pride isn't about seeking permission to exist.
What did Eduardo—slender, handsome, with a silver star of David dangling from his necklace—hope to accomplish? His small booth, with its crisp Israeli flag, was already drawing scolds and cranks.
“We’re just here to share our perspective, like everyone else,” he said with a verbal shrug.
Twenty feet away, a white-haired woman from Jewish Voice for Peace eyed him warily.
To be honest, I felt a little out of place, too. An academic conference, in Boston, in midwinter, hadn’t been on my agenda. Still, I’d come voluntarily, hoping for insight. I wanted to make sense of an off-kilter Jewish world.
In New York, Jews rallying for Mamdani. On college quads, “Seders for Palestine.” On X, wild posts of “Death to Israel” by a writer for the Jewish Lives series. And on, and on. At times the liberal Jewish world seemed to be fracturing. The rifts were generational, ideological, almost existential.
We are witnessing the rise of the Erev Rav (the Mixed Multitude) within our own ranks. When a "Seder"—the ritual celebrating our liberation from slavery to become a nation in our own land—is co-opted to support those who would re-enslave or eliminate us, the ritual is no longer Jewish. It is a pagan imitation. Traditional Judaism is rooted in the land, the people, and the law. You cannot extract the "Zion" from the Jew and have anything left but a hollowed-out husk of universalist slogans.
In this atmosphere, the Boston conference felt like a bellwether, a sign of changing times. And who knows, I thought. It might be memorably strange.
“Anyone can register. Even Zionists!” Shaul Magid, a Harvard professor, wrote on Facebook.
He added a winky-face emoji next to “Zionists.”
It was a cold, clear morning, and the student union—a large brutalist building off the campus’s main artery—was already buzzing. In the vending hall, a Syrian student in a brown hijab was selling keffiyehs. Around her, Rabbis for Ceasefire chatted with Jewish Voices for Peace. There was free coffee, free brochures, and free “free Palestine” stickers.
Next door, in the crowded ballroom, an eager Peter Beinart was on stage, hitting all the familiar notes about Zionist perfidy. Beinart speaks quickly, swallowing syntax, yet he can also downshift into normal cadences—say, when discussing Jewish fears. At such moments, he takes the gentle, forbearing tone of a first-grade teacher toward a student afraid of scissors.
It’s alright, he seemed to say, you can relax. One young woman, a recent college graduate, wasn’t relaxed. After Beinart spoke, she rose nervously, reading from her smartphone. “Does this history”—she invoked the Holocaust—“not strengthen the case for self-determination and sovereignty?”
Beinart fidgeted with his microphone, then nodded warmly: I understand you. “It took me a long, long time to break with that [logic],” he said, calmly explaining that Israeli violence caused Palestinian violence. The key was ending “group supremacy.” Then peace and safety would follow.
Beinart’s "logic" is the ultimate victim-blaming. To suggest that Jewish sovereignty is the cause of Arab violence is to ignore 1,400 years of dhimmitude and the pogroms of 1929, 1936, and 1947—all before a single "settlement" existed. Beinart has traded the safety of his people for the "warm nod" of the academic elite. He treats the Holocaust not as a lesson in the necessity of power, but as a burden to be discarded so he can be "liberated" into the arms of our enemies.
Afterward, a youngish man approached the woman, whose name was Erika. “He didn’t really answer your question, did he?”
It was a difficult time for Beinart, the day’s headliner. In November, he spoke at Tel Aviv University. The event went smoothly, but the response was brutal: Beinart was pilloried, rebuked by the movement’s commissars for engaging with Zionists. Chastened, Beinart apologized. If he ever addressed Israelis again, it would be “without violating BDS guidelines.” He promised to do better.
His mea culpa provoked widespread derision. “This isn’t moral clarity; it’s fear wearing the mask of conscience,” a woman wrote on X, identifying herself as a trauma psychologist with experience treating cult members. “What you hear isn’t a free person speaking,” she wrote. “It’s someone who obeys because losing the group frightens them more than losing themselves.”
Inevitably, the Tel Aviv debacle came up in Boston. Beinart, 54, has a coltish energy, and he retains his old liberal habit of speaking freely. “When I got invited to Tel Aviv University, that instinct for me kicked in in a very big way,” he said. But he had crossed “this virtual picket line” and been scolded “in public and in private.” On stage, he thanked his rebukers.
“People have been very tolerant of me,” he said.
Watching a Jewish intellectual grovel and apologize for speaking to other Jews at a world-class Jewish university is pathetic. This is the "Picket Line" of the self-hating. By adhering to BDS, Beinart isn't fighting for "justice"—he is participating in the economic and academic strangulation of his own kin. This is the behavior of a man who has lost his soul to a cult of anti-Zionism.
Meanwhile, the conference was humming along. When it began, three years ago, a relatively small audience gathered in a converted hockey arena on campus. This year’s main venue was the 12,000-square-foot ballroom, a fairly large (in every sense) upgrade.
Beinart’s opening act was Jeremy Menchik (“It’s like mensch”), the event’s excitable planner and impresario. One of his 100 jobs—besides running the conference—is describing what, exactly, it is. An academic assembly? A strategy session?
At times, it sounded like group therapy. “We’re gonna have 350 people in a room saying, You’re not alone,” he said last year. This year, he promised both safety and excitement. There would be debates (civil, of course!). Dialogues would be “a little spicy.”
I tracked down Menchik, who was everywhere at once, and thus easy to find. Where were the debates? “Yeah, so, um,” he said. “There are a lot of them.” Had he invited any Zionists? “They all said no,” he said. Actually, one Zionist organization said yes. It was leading a workshop called “Confronting Genocide.”
Generally speaking, no one minded “genocide” (the word), but some scholarly nerves get frazzled easily. “We’re scholars. This isn’t advocacy,” Magid insisted before a 2025 conference. But it was a hard stance to maintain. “Are we disinterested scholars? My answer is no,” Magid announced during Brown University’s conference on Jewish non-Zionism.
In 2025, the Boston conference prompted a similar argument. It happened in our modern agora—the Facebook comments section. “These confabs feel like a small circle around a campfire,” one professor wrote, claiming to speak from concern. “I do find myself in agreement,” wrote a Yiddishist: “this is more of an in-group activist event than an academic conference.” Another scholar found it “performatively clannish.”
I tried again with Menchik, whose smile was tightening by the second. Why so few Zionists? “It wasn’t a political choice,” he assured me, pointing out that “not everyone wants to come to Boston in February.” It seems the cold had only affected Zionists.
This was all getting a bit silly. After we spoke, I dug up the video of the 2024 Boston conference. There was Menchik, in his beige suit, spelling things out: “How can the Jewish left . . . make concrete contributions to the project of Palestinian liberation?” He cheered the Columbia students “demonstrating for Palestinian liberation.” (This was in February, before they invaded a university building, smashing windows and pummeling security guards.)
“It may truly be a transformational moment,” Menchik predicted. “Like 1968.”
In truth, nearly every speaker in Boston was part of the broader Palestinian solidarity movement. Some worked with Academics for Peace, which works to “shift public opinion on Israel/Palestine”; others with Concerned Jewish Faculty & Staff, which supports “legitimate criticism of Zionism.” Menchik, who works with both, had just appeared before a Massachusetts commission, where he complained about angry Zionists harassing leftists. Later, he accused the commission itself of “actively bullying non-Zionist Jews.”
Fortunately, there were no Zionist bullies around. On stage, Arielle Angel, the outgoing editor of Jewish Currents—the flagship periodical of the young anti-Zionist left—was commending her essay, “We Need New Jewish Institutions.” Angel writes subtly about emotions, and less-than-subtly about Zionism, which she regards as an Ebola-like pathogen, infecting everything it touches. As she put it, “the entire enterprise of Judaism—and nearly every organization charged with stewarding it—is infected with a voracious rot.”
Angel projects the "rot" outward, but the rot is internal. The "pathogen" she describes is actually the survival instinct of the Jewish people. To call the mainstream Jewish community "infected" because they support the right of Jews not to be slaughtered is a level of dehumanization usually reserved for the pages of Der Stürmer. They want "New Institutions" because the old ones—synagogues, federations, day schools—remind them too much of the Covenant they are trying to escape.
After October 7, she led Jewish Currents into battle. One contributor, a Palestinian, tweeted, “I could not be more proud of my people.” Another declared, “Glory to the resistance.” That was typical scorched earth leftist rhetoric. An essay in the journal n+1 dismissed “smarmy moralizing about [Israeli] deaths.” Angel’s clear-cutting of the Zionist forest was resonating, and not just with Gen Z.
Magid, for his part, cheered younger Jews “re-making” Judaism, and hoped boomers might “recognize that, smile, and start listening.” The alternative was frightening. One could easily become “the old man with a rake screaming at the kids from his front porch, ‘get off my lawn.’”
Was I that geezer, waving his rake at Jewish Currents? I decided to call Larry Bush, its former editor. He seemed conflicted: reluctant to talk yet eager to talk. Since leaving Jewish Currents, he never reads it. Except for when he does.
"I just don’t find this generation’s voice compelling,” he admitted. During his editorship, he crafted a thoughtful, curious magazine. “My punctuation was a question mark,” he said. “Today, it’s an exclamation point.”
He had plenty of gripes, but he was pleased with the magazine’s success: “They’ve achieved the national presence that I couldn’t.” Indeed, Jewish Currents scored major profiles in the New Yorker and The New York Times. It even made the Times 2025 Giving Guide, alongside charities that help Sudanese war orphans and visually impaired schoolchildren.
Still, Bush sounded wistful. “I tried to cultivate a certain Jewish progressive pride,” he said. “Today, they have such a problem with Jewish exceptionalism. They’re so interested in shooting it down.”
Talking with Bush, I felt less alone yet also gloomier. I decided to call Paul Berman, the journalist and scholar of leftist movements. What happened to the liberal left? I asked. The moderate left. The social-democratic left.
Silence. I thought Berman had hung up. Hello?
“Obviously, your question stumps me,” Berman said. Eventually, he granted that his left—the liberal Zionist left—was fading. “The traditional mainstream Jewish left has suffered all kinds of political defeats,” he said. I began to mention the old, serious Dissent magazine. “Don’t go on,” Berman pleaded.
So we shifted to another fraught subject: Israel/Palestine. “The whole turn toward anti-Zionism is bizarre,” Berman told me. “This young generation lacks any idealism or passion except despising Israel. I know we’re not supposed to call it antisemitic. But it’s antisemitic.”
Did this send him to despair, or to the barricades? “I am in despair,” he said, though I also heard outrage, regret, and vexation. It wasn’t just students, I suggested, it was their professors. Could they moderate? Berman scoffed. “If, at twenty-two, that person mastered Foucault and Derrida, that’s the greatest feat of their lives. They’ll never move on.”
I thanked Berman. But he had one more thing to say. It was something he took from Daniel Bell, the great sociologist and postwar intellectual. “The young generation ignores the older generation, and just starts anew, with all the naïveté and errors,” Berman told me. “Thus, the American left fails to progress.”
Back at the conference, Dove Kent, a movement organizer, was discussing alliances. Kent is slender and stylish, and could pass for a hip barista in a place like Austin. On stage, she shifts easily between registers. One hears the soft, soothing tones of a crisis counselor, followed by long, lyrical bursts, a preacher rousing the flock.
“The U.S. Jewish left is massive,” she says, starting a call-and-response:
“I believe we can win.” (“Speak it!”) “We are the good news.” (“Whoop!”)
“When I see a winning coalition, it is a left-liberal coalition,” Kent was saying. That was the question of the day. Who was included? Should the big tent expand? Angel, for her part, was tired of Zionists crashing leftist meetings. “I would want to see liberal Zionists feeling uncomfortable,” she once said. (How uncomfortable? Through what tactics? Details for later.)
Such questions were hardly abstract. Back among the vendors, a drama was playing out, one that illustrated both the possibilities for dialogue and also its limits.
I had returned to check on my beleaguered student Zionists. As it happened, their long day was about to get longer. Just as I arrived, the young Syrian woman in the hijab wandered over. “We don’t work with Zionists. And you’re Zionists,” she announced. “There is nothing for us to say.” For a shocked moment, there was silence. Eduardo looked aghast. “What was that?” he said. “I was just talking with her. She was totally friendly.”
Earlier, his friend Shira had proposed a Jewish–Muslim alliance, and the Syrian seemed amenable. Then she spotted their Israeli flag.
“Well, this is going to be awkward,” Shira said. “We know each other. We’re in a class together.”
I was less surprised. Earlier, I met the Syrian woman, and we chatted pleasantly. “It’s nice to have Jewish allies,” she said, mentioning Jewish Voice for Peace. A minute later, though, she drew a hard line. “I’m not open to conversations with pro-Israel people,” she said. “It’s like having a conversation with a Nazi.”
Of course, she wasn’t alone. On the far Left, almost anyone can tell you that Israel is a criminal/colonial/apartheid state, and, yes, a genocidal Nazi state. Before the conference, I asked Michael Walzer, the great political theorist, about this. At ninety years old, he’s still writing, and, more remarkably, traveling, most recently to Israel. It was his forty-fifth trip (give or take).
Walzer met me at a patisserie in downtown Manhattan. I asked the author of Just and Unjust Wars whether Israel had committed genocide in Gaza.
He shook his head. Genocide was a special category, he said, the gravest human crime. (He had recently noted “how easy it is to define genocide down”). At the conference, one heard “genocide” tossed around casually—which raised another question. I asked Walzer whether anti-Zionism was antisemitism. “Anti-Zionism is bad enough,” he said.
Why was anti-Zionism—which Walzer has called “a very bad politics” and “the leftism of fools”—so popular? Leftists have a simple answer: revulsion over Gaza. That’s certainly true, but terrible wars don’t often produce calls for eliminating states.
The sociologist Atalia Omer, who studies Jewish anti-Zionists, has suggested another answer. In her research, she has observed “an enhanced sense of self-approval and self-love” in her subjects. In short, they feel good.
That was obvious at the conference, where a family reunion vibe prevailed. People hugged and swapped stories. They shared confessions of white privilege. (“I have so much racism in me just from being a white person,” said Kent.) At the final session, a young Jewish man told a Palestinian about his shame over Zionism. The moderator stepped in. “I think what the gentleman is asking for is your absolution,” he said.
Absolution feels good. Virtue feels good. Community feels good. A leftist community offers something rare in life: gentle acceptance. At the conference, the only violence was to language and reality. Israel wasn’t a complex, ever-evolving country. It didn’t have a culture. In a sense, it didn’t even exist. Not as a real place, where real people live.
Indeed, there was little of the pesky nuance that characterizes, well, reality. As Beinart framed the issue, you’re either for justice (“liberal ideals”) or you support apartheid and genocide. No moral complexity. No unsettling ambiguity. Only righteous action, with both feet planted on the right side of history.
One person who understands Israel’s history—yet still wants it to dissolve into a single binational state—is Shaul Magid, the Harvard scholar. During a quiet moment, I spotted Magid in a corner. Over a busy life, Magid has been a hippie; lived with haredim; embraced messianic Zionism in Israel; and gotten his PhD in Jewish thought at Brandeis.
Magid can sound like he would prefer to lecture, study hasidic texts, and never think about Israel again. But then—in a kind of repetition compulsion—he resumes his critique. “Zionism had its time,” he once wrote, but now it should be discarded—“along with Manifest Destiny, colonialism, and any number of other chauvinistic and ethnocentric ideologies of the past.”
When I approached, he indulged me. I asked if there were any conceivable Zionisms he would embrace. “Umm,” he said.
What if—miraculously—there was peace? Could Israel exist then?
He paused. “Well, I think—it’s an interesting hypothetical.” He began discussing Israel’s treaties with Arab countries. “But, umm, I think as long as Zionism is committed to an ethno-state, it can never work. Resistance will just keep coming up.”
Why did people cling to Zionism? Was their failing moral? Or intellectual? “I think its existential,” he said. “They—and I—were raised to believe in Israel’s right to exist. And the necessity of its existence.”
No one really wanted a one-state solution, I said. Not Israelis; not Palestinians. It was the one thing everyone agreed on. But Magid clung to his solution. “In 2026, I don’t think one state is any more impossible than two states,” he told me. If there was no feasible solution, why not an unfeasible one?
Magid’s "aspirational" one-state solution is a blueprint for the dissolution of the Jewish people. History has shown us exactly what happens to Jews in the Middle East when they do not have a state and an army: they are massacred, expelled, and relegated to second-class status. To call for a "binational state" in a region dominated by Islamic fundamentalism is not "academic"—it is a death wish for eight million or so Jews.
“At this point,” he said, “I’m satisfied to call it aspirational.”
By mid-afternoon, the conference was winding down. Beinart was long gone. Menchik was chatting with Dove Kent outside the hall. (“That genocide thing? Turns out, people don’t like that. And when the Jewish state does it . . .”) Twelve feet away, an eager crew circled Magid, who, with his gold earrings and long white beard, was hard to miss. “You’re Shaul Magid!” a wide-eyed freshman yelled. For an instant, Magid looked surprised, then greeted his admirers, all Princeton students. “We all love your book,” one said. “And your Substack.”
Some conference-goers had practically clawed their way to Boston, some arriving sleepless (in New York, an Amtrak snafu sent scores of passengers to the hellish Port Authority searching for overnight busses). Here, a woman told me, she felt at home. Her minority was a majority. Menchik seemed comfortable too: just his allies, no Zionist bullies. The conference—or whatever it was—had been powerful. It had made people feel good, while tapping into a deep collective rage over Israel.
Gradually, things wound down. People were doing the end-of-day shuffle. The armed security guards, casual but watchful, relaxed, assuming off-duty poses. From outside the hall, I watched Eduardo carefully fold his Israeli flag.
Leaving Boston, I pondered the popular one-state solution: what was it, exactly? A rhetorical gesture? A utopian fantasy? Or simply a reckless thought experiment? I also recalled my conversation with Walzer. I had asked what qualities he would inculcate in young thinkers. “Listening,” he said.
A leftism that listened. Something to consider. It might be less exciting, less inspiring, than the righteous radicalism of speeches, social media blasts, and quasi-academic conferences to rally the faithful. But it would certainly be more Jewish.
What would also be "more Jewish" is loyalty. In our tradition, we have a concept called Ahavat Yisrael—the love of our fellow Jews. This conference was the antithesis of that. It was a festival of Sinat Chinam (baseless hatred), wrapped in the language of social justice. While they "listen" to their own echoes in Boston, the real Jewish world—the one that Eduardo represents—will continue to build, defend, and thrive in our ancestral homeland. Am Yisrael Chai.
