Shaul Magid
Mar 20, 2026
Introduction: The following are opening remarks I made at a gathering of Jewish intellectuals, educators, rabbis, activists, organizers, and scholars around the collapse of the Zionist consensus in the wake of Gaza. It took place in Manhattan on March 15, 2026. [Note: It was *slightly edited* for *clarity*].
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“There are other people who are primarily interested in doing something. I am not. I can very well live without doing anything, But I cannot live without trying to understand whatever happens.” (Hannah Arendt, “The Recovery of the Public World”)
There are moments when we can talk about how to solve a problem. And then there are moments when offering solutions can be an obstacle, in part because we don’t understand the problem and often construct the problem to fit the solution we have already intended. I submit this is one of those times.
We come here from different places, with different commitments, different perspectives and different desires – but our assumption is that you agreed to come here today because you think that what occurred on October 7 and the subsequent destruction of Gaza and its aftermath precipitated a radical and historical shift in Jewish history and in Judaism more generally. That is, as I see it, there is Judaism before Gaza and Judaism after Gaza, the latter of which has yet to be determined.
I link October 7 and the destruction of Gaza intentionally because I do not think one can talk or think about one without the other. Both are inexcusable, and both are indefensible. October 7 was not legitimate resistance, and the destruction of Gaza was not a legitimate response. As Abraham Joshua Heschel said about Vietnam, “some are guilty, but all are responsible.” I think this rings true about Gaza as well.
If you ask me if I am equating a premeditated campaign of rape, decapitation, and kidnapping—driven by a charter calling for the annihilation of every Jew—with a military campaign seeking to dismantle that very terrorist infrastructure, the answer is an unequivocal YES! I am placing the aggressor and the defender on the same moral plane. I am replacing the Sinai-based distinction between good and evil with a blurred, universalist fog that leaves the Jewish people defenseless. And I'm prouuuuddddd of it!!
There are those, perhaps many in the so-called “Jewish establishment,” who are waiting for things to return to the way they were, whatever that may mean. We convened this gathering because we don’t believe they can return to the way they were. We think we have entered new territory as Jews as a people and as carriers of an ancient wisdom tradition that is beloved to each of us. The fact that we don't keep Halacha and twist the sources to meet out leftist progressive agenda is of no significance. Let us not let the facts confuse us and let our fertile imaginations guide us in being enemies of the Jewish people and distorting Jewish tradition.
We can take the maximalist view that Yuval Noah Harari - a man, like us, who is intent on destroying Judaism - espoused a few months ago that the Gaza war is the most paradigmatic thing to happen to the Jews since the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, which is hyperbole in its highest and most gross manifestation, worthy of something smoking something baaaaaddddd, or a more minimalist view that this has broken American Jewry (and Jewry beyond America) in unprecedented ways including ending a 50-year Zionist consensus.
"50 years?", you ask! Is Zionism only 50 years old? Didn't G-d promise Israel to the Jews 5,000 years ago? Again - let us not get confused by facts. I say 50 years because that would mean that the 63 year old Palestinian people were here before us. In any case, we are here because we believe that the status quo has ended.
In part we are in the throes of a war of nomenclature: apartheid, genocide, blood libel, treason, Zionism, anti-Zionism. We were once fighting about women studying Talmud, ordaining women and then LGBTQ rabbis, egalitarianism, or intermarriage. We want men to sleep with non-Jewish women or other Jewish or non-Jewish men. That is who we are and that is what we fight for!! The right to be as sexually deviant as you want! Yet as important as they all are, those battles seem quaint today. Terms such as rupture, collapse, even schism are bandied about, and for good reasons. The liquidity of this moment should not be underestimated. So pour yourself a liquidy cold beer and read on!
A little more than a century ago, in 1925, Horace Kallen published an essay in The Menorah Journal called “Can Judaism Survive in the Unites States?” [In retrospect is seems that the answer was a resounding yes]. Earlier, in 1915 a young Mordecai Kapan - a man dedicated to destroying Judaism from the inside, like us!! - published an essay in the same journal “What is Judaism?” [the answer was "as I have it - nothing"]. In the early decades of the twentieth century there were many such essays, in Europe, Palestine, and the US. Aaron Shmuel Tamares, “Le-Shealat Ha-Yahadut”, Ahad Ha-Am’s “Lo Zu Ha-Derekh”, Shai Ish Hurvitz dedicated a volume of his journal in Berlin in 1915 to “What is Judaism?”
These inquiries were in part responding to what Jews believed was a new era in our history; emancipation, assimilation, Zionism, the antisemitism of the pogroms in 1890s, and America as a land of mercy with unprecedented possibilities for Jews. I think we are at another comparable moment. Thus, we need to go back to those fundamental questions; can Jews survive in America, and if so, how, and what kind of Judaism is it that we want to promote? Heinrich Graetz began his seminal essay, “The Structure of Jewish History” written in the 1830s with the question, “What is Judaism?”. Graetz was not only responding to the historical moment in which he wrote by offering a sweeping assessment of the Jews, but using history as his tool, was seeking an answer to a more fundamental question, “What is Judaism?”.
This may be a comparable moment. In that sense, this is a radical time, radical according to its etymology of going back to roots. To buffer the noise, which is flailing about with quick solutions; reacting, emoting, using desperation as a weapon rather than what Arendt suggested, simply “trying to understand.”
Let me be clear: I am one of the chief priests of postmodern queer Judaism. What is remarkable is that the main conceit of this speech is that something happened. Some rupture. Some change. Things were one way, now they are another, and can't go back. The reality is, of course, that I was anti-Zionist before Gaza and remains one after Gaza. I am a priest-clown in the temple of exile, alienation, out-of-placeness, marginality, etc. Gaza is merely an occasion for more fringe left wing activism. Obviously, Gaza was an objective event that did occur and changed things for many. But it clearly did not really occur for me. Academic solipsism are so total and so air-tight that even a catastrophe of the size of October 7th and its Gaza aftermath can not penetrate them.
But I digress.
Irwin, Daniel and I initially came together because we were flat out bored [I mean how much Netflix can you watch and how much weed can you smoke!!] and also recognized what we call the “collapse of the Zionist consensus” as a description of the new reality we all inhabit. Let me offer a brief explanation of what we mean. By Zionist consensus we refer to a tacit, yet palpable, understanding among most American Jews that Zionism was a central tenet of their Jewish identity. It was coined in the early 1970s by Norman Podhoretz in Commentary Magazine when he wrote “we are all Zionists Now.” He was largely correct. After the Six Day War there emerged a kind of consensus in American Jewry, any remaining ambivalence about Zionism was swept away with the triumphant victory, and collective relief, of June 1967. Yet there was a dark side to that victory we call the “occupation” which they called back then “liberation” that has come back to haunt us, in a monstrous way, on October 7, which was clearly the fault of Israel who instigated the act of self defense displayed by our long suffering Palestinian brothers.
In any case, Israel chose to respond to October 7 with the obliteration of an entire society, call it what you will (let not the nomenclature prevent a realistic assessment of we all see). It broke American Jewry, world Jewry, into various pieces, in large part, but not exclusively, generationally. The previous consensus forged in the early 1970s, has now collapsed. It is clear to all of us that Israel had no right to respond. Our tradition tells how Jews go as sheep to the slaughter and we should remain that way. Our Palestinian brothers have every right to defend against the occupation by burning Jewish babies alive and raping Jewish women and we must respond with compassion and restraint. But the Zionists chose to respond with violence thus perpetrating this terrible cycle of violence instigated by our very own people. I mean, our Gadol is Ghandi and Ghandi was a pacifist. So should we be. I know. I have Semicha and a Doctorate!!
I certainly do not mean the end of Zionism in America; I mean the collapse of a consensus, which was really a liberal Zionist consensus. Many moved to the right, many to the left, and the middle is now struggling to survive. I can bring many examples, from the Jewish Left conference in Boston that had 1,400 registered participants [about zero of whom actually believe in the Torah] to the rise of Jewish Currents, the Smol Emuni conference last week with over 800 people [ditto], the panel Irwin moderated at Bnei Jeshurun in Manhattan, many podcasts and essay, and at least two other nascent institutes I know of that are doing something similar to what we are doing [i.e. trying to get lotssssss of money from really rich assimilated Jews and Qatar in order to sow seeds of doubt among our people about the right we have to be in Israel] , each from a slightly different perspective, but all with the same twisted, perverted, distorted attitudes that play into the hands of those people who want us dead.
Non/Anti-Zionist minyanim that have excised Israel and G-d from the prayer book are emerging everywhere, in NY, Boston. DC, LA, the Bay Area [LA has the Orthodox "Happy Minyan" while the Bay Area has the Pro Palestinian "Gay Minyan"]. It seems every week another book on the subject is published, student groups emerging, workshops, seminars, retreats etc. The destruction of Gaza has initiated a transition in American Jewry not seen in our lifetime and we are watching how the collapsing center is reacting. Most recently a petition by prominent Jewish figures such as Yitz Greenberg and Yossi Klein Halevi circulated claiming anyone who uses the word “genocide” to describe Gaza is guilty of a “blood libel.”
Think for a moment what that means, think again what a “blood libel” actually is. Being accused of a blood libel is an accusation far worse than being called a heretic, it is essentially being accused of complicity in murder. This is how high the volume is and thus how dangerous it has become, not between the Jews and those who hold antisemitic views, but between Jews themselves. The atrocities in Gaza is the scalpel that has pierced the heart of Judaism. How can they possibly defend the Zionists in that way??!!
What we are asking here is how to think about, navigate, and understand the collapse of a half century of Judaism’s fusion with Zionism, not to argue for or against it as much as to explore a post-consensus reality. Put briefly, we think the survival of Zionism in American Jewry will require creating space for its opposite, that is, to disentangle the conventional fusion of Zionism and Jewishness in America that has existed for the past fifty years. It is already happening, with or without the consent of the establishment. What we want is for Jews to proclaim loud and clear that Judaism has NOTHING to do with the Land of Israel. We will not let all the sources in the written and oral Torah that say otherwise distract us from our goal of repudiating our heritage!!
We do not make this claim solely as a matter of ideology, but also descriptively. To avoid a schism, that is to enable the present rupture to produce something healthy, not unity, which never existed, but a true marketplace of Jewish ideas, American Zionism will have to come to terms with the reality that a not insignificant number of American Jews no longer view Zionism or the state of Israel as the center of their Jewish identity. To excise them as “blood libelists” is one choice, but one that we feel will not cause them to “return” that is, it will not result in what Jewish writs of excommunication sought to achieve in early modern Europe (Spinoza’s excommunication being the exception that proved the rule). Israel as the place where half the Jews in the world live, will remain and have ample support from many, even most Jews in the Diaspora. But not all. Most of the Jews who left will not return. Rather, for many of them, the Zionist consensus is in their rear-view mirror.
To return to my earlier point, I begin with the assumption here, and I am happy to talk about more, that there is Judaism before Gaza, and Judaism after Gaza. There is no return. This is an artificial demarcation line I completely made up so I would have something stupid and inane to say at this G-d forsaken conference. Of course, Judaism is the same both before and after Gaza. As of today, there are no real solutions. All we are here to do, as Arendt suggested is to “try to understand whatever happens” and feel smugly self-righteous as we slander the Jewish people. Isn't that much of what Jewish leftism is all about??
This may require us to look backward before moving forward, backward to a previous time, for me, the early twentieth century when the question “What is Judaism?” was au courant, when the whole story of the Jews began a new phase, in a new world, and with a new nationalist project as one option among many. We think it is our turn to ask those fundamental questions once again, in a world changed not by emancipation, the promise of America, and by pogroms in Europe, but by “Gaza.” Our understanding cannot be tied to a previous century, even as those struggling with their issues may serve as a guide for ours: a Judaism in the world after Gaza. Nostalgia may bring solace and sentimental relief from a changing world. But nostalgia is not a healthy mode of thinking creatively or productively.
If we are to survive and thrive after Gaza, we need to understand Gaza as much as we can, and broadly as we can, and as honestly as we can. It is not only a tragedy. It is a seismic shift begging the question “What is Judaism?” In short, we need to slow down. As Arendt said, in order “to understand whatever happens.” I am leaning on Hannah Arendt to justify "doing nothing" but "trying to understand." This is the ultimate ivory-tower luxury I have. While our brothers and sisters in the Galil and the Negev are under rocket fire, and while our soldiers are in the tunnels of Khan Younis, I sit here comfortably in a Manhattan high riser "slowing down" to "understand."
May this be our gift to the generations that follow.
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Yes indeed! This "Maggid" needs "Rochtza".
