At Synagogues, Tensions Are Boiling Over
Early one morning last fall, Nathaniel Felder left his home, in Maplewood, New Jersey, dressed in a navy sweatshirt and a gray yarmulke. After putting on a backpack, he walked to Irvington Avenue, the location of Congregation Beth El, a Conservative synagogue in neighboring South Orange. Outside the shul’s entrance, a sign greeted visitors: “We Stand with Israel and We Pray for Peace.” Felder reached into his backpack and unfurled a sign of his own. It proclaimed, “Starvation Is Against Jewish Values: Our Support of Israel Cannot Be Unconditional.”
Felder angled his sign so that it would be visible to people driving past and also to parents who would soon be dropping their kids off at a Hebrew school that the synagogue runs. Before any congregants showed up, however, a police car pulled into Beth El’s parking lot, and a pair of officers from the South Orange Police Department stepped out. One of them told Felder that the precinct had received a complaint about a trespasser at the synagogue. Felder explained that he was a member of the congregation and that his kids attended the Hebrew school. After going inside the synagogue to verify this, the officers warned Felder that posting a sign without prior approval was prohibited—if he did not leave the property, he would be arrested, and potentially banished from Beth El. Felder agreed to stand on the sidewalk, which is public property, but he refused to leave or fold up his sign.
When Felder joined Beth El, in 2020, the “We Stand with Israel” sign hadn’t yet been mounted. It was hung roughly a year after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, to express solidarity with the twelve hundred people who were murdered—in the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust—and with the two hundred and fifty-one people Hamas had abducted. (“Bring Them Home Now!” was inscribed on the other side of the sign.) Felder understood the impulse behind the shul’s decision. The yarmulke he was wearing had originally belonged to his maternal grandfather, an observant Jew who had profoundly shaped Felder’s understanding of Judaism and his sense of right and wrong. His grandfather had been an ardent Zionist who, in 1975, sold his house, on Long Island, and moved to Beersheba, a city in southern Israel. Felder grew up in Montclair, where he joined Habonim Dror, a progressive Zionist youth movement. In 2001, after graduating from high school, he deferred college to spend a year in Israel with some Habonim friends, living for a while on a kibbutz and then in Karmiel, a city in the north. That year, marked by the suicide bombings of the second intifada, was tense and bloody. Felder returned to America with a heightened appreciation of the trauma and insecurity that pervaded Israel—a sentiment that resurfaced when he learned about the October 7th attack. He was especially upset to learn of the carnage at places such as Nir Oz, a kibbutz that reminded him of the one he’d lived on.
But Felder also feared that the attack would provoke unprecedented violence against Palestinians, and believed that being Jewish required adhering to certain moral precepts. Last spring, when he read reports that famine was intensifying in Gaza because Israel was blocking food and other humanitarian aid from entering the territory, the “We Stand with Israel” sign began to trouble him. Among other things, he was worried that neighbors would assume that he and his fellow-worshippers condoned Israel’s blockade, which Felder saw as a desecration of what his grandfather had taught him was the most sacred Jewish tenet: protecting human life. As the crisis in Gaza intensified, he sent an e-mail to Jesse Olitzky, Beth El’s senior rabbi, and Rachel Marder, the associate rabbi, in which he shared his distress and asked the rabbis to reconsider the sign. He was told that it would remain. Two months later, Felder wrote to the rabbis again. By this point, experts were warning that half a million people in Gaza were at risk of starvation, and organizations such as the Rabbinical Assembly, an association of Conservative rabbis, were urging immediate action to alleviate civilian suffering. Felder suggested that the Beth El rabbis send out a congregation-wide e-mail offering guidance on how to respond to the humanitarian crisis—say, by directing members to relief groups or by encouraging members to contact their representatives in Congress to exert pressure on Israel.
No such e-mail was sent. By late August, Felder had started to think about staging a demonstration at Beth El—even though he had never attended a protest and disliked drawing attention to himself. Felder, an architect with an obsessive streak, thought extensively about the design of his banner, ultimately opting for a white sign with lettering the precise shade of blue as the Star of David on the Israeli flag. He was equally exacting about the sign’s message. Instead of criticizing Israel, he decided, it should emphasize a core value of Judaism. Felder hoped that this would bring the members of Beth El together.
As he soon learned, the sign had the opposite effect.
“Go fuck yourself—you’re trash!” one man shouted at him.
“Get a life!” another person yelled.
Not only did some members disagree that Israel bore moral responsibility for the famine in Gaza; they were furious that Felder was making this insinuation at the place where they came to worship and to educate their kids about Judaism. But other people came up to Felder and engaged him in dialogue. Before heading off to the shul that morning, he had texted a photograph of his banner to a WhatsApp group for synagogue members who were distraught about the destruction of Gaza and dismayed by the lack of attention it was receiving at Beth El. Felder notified the group that he would be standing “outside the parking lot entrance.” An hour and a half later, a person in the chat uploaded another photo, which showed several members of the group standing alongside Felder and his sign.
Half a century ago, Norman Podhoretz, the editor of the magazine Commentary, published an essay in the Times in which he observed that American Jews “have all been converted to Zionism.” The event that had precipitated this change was the 1973 Yom Kippur War, a surprise assault on Israel launched by Arab forces on the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. The attack had punctured an air of invulnerability created by the 1967 Six-Day War, in which Israel had swiftly captured the Golan Heights, the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank, and Gaza from its Arab neighbors. The American Jewish community responded to the Yom Kippur War, which killed nearly three thousand Israeli soldiers, by flooding Israel with donations; doctors and students volunteered to join the war effort. Podhoretz found it striking that among the converts were many Reform Jews, who had often expressed opposition to the idea that Jews constituted a nation, as well as some Orthodox Jews who had previously seen Zionism as a heresy, believing that only God could end their people’s perpetual exile. Even some left-wing socialists had come around, Podhoretz noted, among them Irving Howe, the editor of Dissent, who admitted that his emotional reaction to the Yom Kippur War had been “astonishingly intense.”
It would not have been unreasonable to assume that, after October 7th, this dynamic would repeat and that the determination to bring home the Israeli hostages—twelve of whom were U.S. citizens—would galvanize a new generation. There was no such unity. For some American Jews, the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas, followed by the eruption of pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses, sparked a renewed sense of collective identity and Ahavat Yisrael—love for the Jewish people. For others, Israel’s merciless assault on Gaza, which has killed more than seventy-two thousand Palestinians, and the increased settler incursions into the West Bank alienated them from the Jewish establishment and from Zionism itself.
Even the word “Zionism” now stirs fierce debate. In the view of Israel’s founders, few American Jews today would qualify as Zionists, since they have chosen to live in another country rather than to participate in the building of a Jewish national home in Palestine, which was classical Zionism’s chief aspiration and goal. But, for many American Jews, Zionism has come to represent the belief that there should be such a home—both because of the Jewish people’s ties to their ancestral land and because of the centuries of persecution that Jews endured, culminating with the Holocaust. This form of Zionism remains deeply rooted in the American Jewish community, particularly the Modern Orthodox branch. At many Jewish institutions, rejecting Zionism is indeed regarded as a form of sacrilege. But more and more American Jews are having a hard time reconciling other core features of their identity, such as a belief in equality and social justice, with support for a country whose current leaders—a far-right alliance headed by Benjamin Netanyahu—pass racist laws and espouse Jewish supremacy. Some Jews have gone further, condemning Israel as an illiberal “ethno-state” that oppresses Palestinians and should be abolished in its current form.
This past October, a survey by the Washington Post found that forty-six per cent of American Jews supported the war in Gaza and forty-eight per cent opposed it. Thirty-nine per cent believed that Israel had committed genocide. Disagreements over the war have disrupted family dinners, upended friendships, and splintered congregations. Last fall, in a sermon delivered during Rosh Hashanah, Angela Buchdahl, the senior rabbi at Central Synagogue, in Manhattan, declared that she had never been more afraid to talk about Israel, for fear of offending some worshippers. “I want to tell you about my unconditional love for the Israeli people and our beleaguered homeland, still desperately struggling to bring its hostages home, still trying to eliminate Hamas terrorists that not only refuse to lay down their arms but intentionally trap their own people in a combat zone,” Buchdahl said. “But if I tell you these things, all of which I believe, some of you will stop listening and decide that I’m no longer your rabbi.”
She continued, “I also want to tell you how my heart breaks over the civilian deaths and tragic suffering in Gaza, the shattering destruction of Palestinian homes and cities. I want to denounce settler violence in the West Bank and the rhetoric from far-right government ministers who talk about annexation of the West Bank and the expulsion of Gazans. . . . But if I tell you these things, all of which I also believe, some of you will stop listening and decide that I’m no longer your rabbi.” The conversation about Israel was “ripping our community apart,” Buchdahl observed. She described her effort to navigate the fault lines as “the most painful experience of my rabbinic life.”
When Buchdahl gave the sermon, Israel and Hamas had not yet reached an agreement to stop the Gaza war. But tensions within the American Jewish community have hardly dissipated since a peace deal was signed, in October, 2025. Only weeks after the ceasefire, the mayoral campaign of Zohran Mamdani—who called the Hamas attack a “war crime” but also described the Israeli response as “genocidal”—prompted more than a thousand rabbis to sign an open letter condemning the “political normalization” of anti-Zionism, a development that they linked to Mamdani’s refusal to condemn phrases such as “globalize the intifada.” (Mamdani has discouraged use of the phrase but has also said that, for Palestinians, it can represent an appeal for equality, not a call to violence.) The sentiment voiced by the rabbis did not stop several prominent Jewish politicians in New York, including Representative Jerry Nadler, whose district spans much of Manhattan, and Brad Lander, then New York City’s comptroller, from endorsing Mamdani. It also failed to dissuade roughly a third of Jewish New Yorkers from voting for him, according to an exit poll. And in late February, just as attention began to shift away from Gaza, Israel and the United States launched a joint attack on Iran—a potentially epochal war that may end up dividing Jewish Americans no less than the Gaza war did, particularly if the conflict drags on and casualties mount.
To be sure, many Jews in America hold ambivalent views, feeling both a connection to Israel and a contempt for the Netanyahu government. (In the Washington Post poll, fifty-six per cent of respondents said that they felt “very” or “somewhat” emotionally attached to Israel, but fewer than a third approved of Netanyahu’s performance.) Arguments about Israel in the American Jewish community are also nothing new. In “Jew vs. Jew,” a book published in 2000, the journalist Samuel G. Freedman documented how Israel had gone from being a unifying subject among American Jews to a source of strife. The cause of the shift, he argued, was the Oslo peace process of the mid-nineties. Jews who were unaffiliated or who attended Reform synagogues largely favored the process, which created areas of limited Palestinian self-governance, whereas a majority of Orthodox Jews, who lean conservative, opposed it. But the debate that Freedman described was a clash between two strands of Zionism, pitting doves who accepted territorial compromise against hawks who believed that Israel’s security depended on the borders it had acquired during the Six-Day War. The new division runs deeper, raising fundamental questions about what it means to be a Jew. The debates have grown especially vexed at synagogues and other Jewish institutions that subscribe to liberal Zionism, which has long sought to combine devotion to progressive political values with fealty to Israel, allegiances that recent events have made difficult—some would say impossible—to maintain.
Immediately after the Hamas attack, the mood at Beth El was sombre, but there were few signs of discord. At morning minyan—the weekday service—worshippers began concluding the proceedings with a prayer for Israel. On Shabbat, the Acheinu, a prayer for liberating those held in captivity, was recited from the bimah, an elevated platform where sermons are often delivered. For several weeks, the name and the age of each hostage was read aloud.
In the weeks that followed, a detailed account of a different captive’s story was read every Shabbat, attesting to a lingering collective grief. The pain was particularly acute for worshippers who knew people who had been murdered or kidnapped by Hamas fighters. (Multiple Beth El members had loved ones among the hostages.) But some congregants’ anguish over October 7th was compounded by dread about Israel’s brutal, indiscriminate response. One such member was Liba Beyer. On October 9th, she attended a listening circle during which congregants consoled one another and cried. Six weeks later, she and two friends invited several dozen Jewish acquaintances to a meeting at Beyer’s home. The meeting was private, and no cameras were allowed, so attendees could speak freely. After bagels and coffee were served, the participants began sharing feelings that many had been afraid to articulate—including discomfort with narratives that cast Israel solely as a victim, and shame about the escalating civilian death toll in Gaza.
The gatherings continued, and the group acquired a name, Tzedek soma. (“Tzedek” is Hebrew for “justice,” and “soma” is local shorthand for South Orange-Maplewood.) Only a handful of people at the initial meeting attended Beth El. But more members started showing up, and the Beth El contingent created a WhatsApp group that allowed congregants to engage in critical dialogue about Israel and to post messages about events of shared interest, such as local vigils calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. By the time I visited Beyer at her home, last fall, the group had fifty members. Beyer, who has a warm smile and bright-pink glasses, did not hide her satisfaction. “I’ve built so many amazing relationships, and we’re having these meaningful conversations inherent to our identities,” she said, after leading me through her kitchen to her back porch, where we sat beneath a sukkah decorated with portraits of Hannah Arendt and other prominent Jewish women. (A sukkah is a hut, erected for the weeklong festival of Sukkot, that evokes the fragile structures the Israelites inhabited while wandering the desert.) Beyer also did not conceal her frustration that, within Beth El, virtually all criticism of Israel had been relegated to an unofficial text chain.
She had joined Beth El in 2013, drawn to the synagogue because of its demonstrated commitment to progressive values, an ethos reflected in the gay-pride and trans-pride flags displayed in the foyer. In the intervening years, Beyer co-led a committee to help settle Syrian, Iraqi, and Afghan refugees. She had also undergone a shift in her own Jewish identity. Originally from Dayton, Ohio, she’d grown up in a “super Zionist” household, she told me, and attended an Orthodox school. In college, she volunteered at the Hillel chapter. But, on a trip to Israel during this period, she joined a group of female peace activists who stood at checkpoints in the West Bank to document human-rights abuses. Beyer eventually became a director at Human Rights Watch, which, in 2021, published a report accusing Israel of committing the crime of apartheid in the West Bank. At the time, she still identified as a Zionist; she found the report’s conclusion deeply upsetting but fair. During the Gaza war, as images of schools and hospitals in ruins filled newspapers, she felt that a genocide was occurring, and her attachment to Zionism loosened, then gave way. “I would definitely call myself an anti-Zionist,” she told me.
Beyer was aware that saying this openly at her synagogue would not endear her to everyone. Her own husband, a right-wing Zionist who is the son of Moroccan Jews, disagreed passionately with her. “We’re a mixed marriage on Israeli politics,” she joked. She’d received her share of icy glares at Beth El, particularly when she came to services wearing a watermelon-print yarmulke—a symbol of solidarity with Palestinians, whose flag has red, green, and black elements. But there had also been times when a person she didn’t know approached her to ask for one of the “Jews for Ceasefire” pins she carried in her prayer-shawl bag. “A lot of shuls have a candy man—I’m the button lady,” she said with a laugh. These encounters had convinced Beyer that many congregants were wrestling with how to square their sympathy for Jewish Israelis with the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. “I really believe most people are struggling,” she said.
Beyer, who has two teen-age children, also noted that, although she stood out ideologically even among the WhatsApp participants, many of whom retained some connection to Zionism, her views were increasingly common among younger Jews. A month or so after the October 7th attack, Beth El hosted an educational program for teen-agers on the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Afterward, a student in the audience complained to his parents that, at the event, the deaths of Palestinian civilians had been characterized as collateral damage—a regrettable but unavoidable consequence of the battle against Hamas. Beyer said, “Who do the rabbis think are going to be their congregants in eight, nine, ten years?”
In June, 2024, during the summer holiday of Shavuot, which celebrates the giving of the Torah on Mt. Sinai, roughly fifty Beth El members gathered in a lounge behind the sanctuary to participate in a discussion about antisemitism. Six months earlier, the Anti-Defamation League, a group that monitors antisemitism, had issued a press release saying that more than three thousand such incidents had taken place in the U.S. in the three months after October 7th. The figure was alarming, exceeding the total in some previous years, though one reason the number had soared was a change in the A.D.L.’s methodology—a decision to define more anti-Zionist events, like antiwar protests led by such groups as Jewish Voice for Peace, as acts of hate.
For those who believe that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism,” as Jonathan Greenblatt, the A.D.L.’s national director, has argued, including these kinds of incidents is clearly warranted. The A.D.L. and its supporters have raised alarms about Jewish students who identify as Zionists being vilified on college campuses, and about protests against Israel’s occupation of Gaza that include chants like “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”—a slogan that many hear as a call for Israel’s destruction.
At the Beth El event, which was titled “Wading Into the Gray: Understanding and Disentangling Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism,” a different perspective was presented. After the room filled, the moderators, both of whom belonged to the WhatsApp group, passed out copies of a document called “The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism.” Published in 2021 by a team of scholars in such fields as Jewish studies and Holocaust history, it was created to help distinguish hatred of Jews from criticism of Israel. This distinction was missing both from popular discourse, the academics felt, and from an influential definition of antisemitism associated with the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which lists numerous examples of antisemitism related to criticism of Israel. (Among them are “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” and “applying double standards” to Israel that were not expected of other states.) In recent years, many countries have adopted the I.H.R.A. definition, including the U.S. An executive order signed by President Donald Trump mandated that federal agencies consult the I.H.R.A. definition when investigating complaints about discrimination toward Jews; at many colleges, this has emboldened efforts to punish pro-Palestinian speech.
The Jerusalem Declaration attempts to be more nuanced. Applying classical anti-Jewish stereotypes to Israel—such as suggesting that its leaders control the banking system with a hidden hand—is clearly antisemitic, it says, but other criticisms, including “opposing Zionism as a form of nationalism” and holding Israel to moral standards not demanded of other countries, might not be. “Hostility to Israel could be an expression of antisemitic animus, or it could be a reaction to a human-rights violation, or it could be the emotion that a Palestinian person feels on account of their experience,” its authors observe.
At the Beth El event, the moderators asked the attendees to signal whether they considered certain expressions to be antisemitic. Among them was “From the river to the sea,” which, according to the Jerusalem Declaration, can be used to express support for a binational state where Jews and Palestinians are accorded equal rights. The meeting broke into discussion groups—and soon erupted in anger. An older man stood up and told the moderators that they should be ashamed for having planned such an event on a Jewish holiday. A woman had walked out, informing the moderators that she found the discussion offensive. “It was very tense,” Avi Smolen, one of the moderators, acknowledged. In his view, the awkwardness underscored the value of having such a session; several people “came out of the woodwork” to thank him afterward, he said. David Mallach, a Beth El member who participated in the event, was more critical. Sharing the Jerusalem Declaration but not the I.H.R.A. definition “created a stilted conversation,” he told me. But Mallach did not disagree that the event had usefully exposed a rift in the community. “It made it very clear how deep the divisions within the synagogue were,” he said.
Mallach has been a Beth El member for thirty-seven years. Before retiring, he worked at United Israel Appeal, a subsidiary of the Jewish Federations of North America, which forges ties among synagogues and other Jewish groups. Over coffee one day in Maplewood, he recounted a split within the congregation sixteen years ago that had been sparked by a personality clash between the senior rabbi at the time, a woman, and the cantor, an older man. After the synagogue’s board voted to dismiss the cantor, scores of families who were loyal to him left. Mallach referred to this event as “the great schism.” Since the exodus, Beth El’s membership had recovered and indeed grown, he said, but now another schism had formed.
At one point, Mallach pulled out a pen and made two drawings on a napkin. The first was a gentle bell curve; the second was a jagged line, with two sharp peaks—one on the left, the other on the right. “If we posit that there was a spectrum of opinion on Israel like this,” he said, pointing to the first line, “post-October 7th, we have a fissure like this”—he tapped his finger on the second. As congregants were pulled in opposite directions, he said, the middle ground shrank. Although the Beth El community was overwhelmingly Democratic, he added, more congregants he knew had shifted to the right than to the left. (Over all, American Jews represent a solidly liberal voting bloc, with seventy per cent identifying as Democrats.)
Among those whose commitment to Israel had intensified after October 7th, numerous sources told me, was Olitzky, Beth El’s senior rabbi. A few weeks after having coffee with Mallach, I met Olitzky in his office, a small room appointed with prayer books, family photographs, and, on the top shelf of a bookcase, a shrine to the Baltimore Orioles—the star-crossed baseball team he’d rooted for since his grandfather began taking him to games. “There’s nothing more Jewish than being a baseball fan and believing that this year is the year,” he said with a smile. Nothing except getting into fierce arguments with fellow-Jews, some would say, which Olitzky—who has a round, boyish face and a conciliatory manner—portrayed as a privilege rather than a burden. “I’m blessed to be a rabbi of a community that understands the importance of wrestling, and that creates space for conversation,” he said.
The notion that Beth El had split into polarized camps was false, Olitzky insisted. But he acknowledged that “heightened emotions” had been stirred. Immediately after the Hamas attack, one of the emotions that overcame him, he went on to say, was a sense of abandonment. He had long been active in an interfaith clergy association whose members worked together during times of crisis, coördinating actions after such events as the murder of George Floyd, for whom Beth El organized a symbolic shiva. After October 7th, he did not hear from any of the clergy association’s members. The lack of outreach prompted him to co-write an article with two other local rabbis which struck a plaintive tone. “Clergy we have stood side-by-side with at rallies in support of LGBTQ+ rights and protections or raising our voices together to speak against racial injustice have simply disappeared,” the rabbis wrote. The silence “has gutted us.”
That silence was also instructive, some prominent American Jews said. In a column in the Times, Bret Stephens noted that the good will many Jewish Americans had assumed would be extended to them after October 7th never materialized. Instead, some progressive allies rushed to denounce Israel’s military response while either praising or refusing to condemn Hamas. Stephens called people who had been politically activated by this dynamic “October 8th Jews,” a term that has since gained wide currency. Last year, in an address on the “State of World Jewry,” at the 92nd Street Y, the author Dan Senor celebrated this awakening. “There was a crack, an opening, in Jewish consciousness on October 8th,” he said. “People started wearing Jewish-star necklaces for the first time, they went to rallies, they donated hundreds of millions to emergency campaigns and sent supplies to I.D.F. units, and, yes, by the hundreds of thousands, they listened to podcasts about Judaism and Israel.” (Senor is the host of “Call Me Back,” a podcast whose popularity surged after October 7th.)
Senor and Stephens are neoconservatives who hardly needed to be convinced that the members of progressive movements were not friends of the Jewish people. But the shift in consciousness they described was not confined to Jews on the right. It was arguably even more pronounced among Jews who thought of themselves as liberals—people such as Olitzky, who, in 2017, was among a group of rabbis arrested at the Trump International Hotel for protesting Trump’s executive order barring travel from seven Muslim-majority countries. The value of diversity, and of peace, had been instilled in him from an early age, he told me. In 1995, when he was in sixth grade, his parents took him to Madison Square Garden to attend a memorial for Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli Prime Minister who’d been assassinated by a right-wing extremist after signing the Oslo Accords. Olitzky’s father, Kerry, was himself a rabbi and the founder of Big Tent Judaism, a movement that sought to open the doors of temples to people who had previously been excluded, like queer Jews and interfaith couples. (A “Big Tent Judaism” sticker can be found on Beth El’s front doors.)
At our meeting, Olitzky said that he still prayed for peace every day. He emphasized that his love was for the people and the land of Israel, not for its current government, and least of all for extremists such as Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national-security minister, who has repeatedly praised violent Jewish settlers as heroes. Olitzky referred to Ben-Gvir as a booshah, a “disgrace.” But he also made it clear that none of the controversial things Israeli leaders had done in recent years—from allowing settlers to terrorize and humiliate Palestinians in the West Bank to blocking food and water from entering Gaza—had changed the fact that Beth El was a Zionist congregation committed to supporting Israel.
This was evident in the themes of his sermons. In one delivered a year after October 7th, he described breaking down when he learned of the death of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an Israeli American hostage whose body had been found in a tunnel in Rafah. The tears he’d shed for Goldberg-Polin symbolized “the pain of peoplehood,” he told the congregation, an ethos that bound Jews together and justified prioritizing their suffering over that of others. The previous day, Olitzky had similarly endorsed focussing exclusively on the plight of the hostages in response to a letter from Liba Beyer. He rejected her request to pass out buttons inscribed with the words “B’Tselem Elohim: ALL Life Is Holy” during the High Holidays, for congregants whose grief about the Gaza war extended equally to Israelis and Palestinians. Some time later, Olitzky also rejected Beyer’s request that Beth El host a reading group centered on the book “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza,” by the journalist Peter Beinart, who has argued for Israel becoming a binational state. She told Olitzky that eighteen members had wanted to attend. In an e-mail, Olitzky wrote to Beyer, “Sponsoring a conversation that offers the conclusion that Israel shouldn’t be a Jewish state isn’t a program that makes sense for us as a synagogue to host.”
Last fall, at the start of Yom Kippur services, Olitzky spoke about the meaning of the “We Stand with Israel” sign he’d put up outside the synagogue. This was about two weeks after Felder had mounted his demonstration and after many other Beth El members had expressed discomfort with the sign, in e-mails and in private conversations, with some suggesting alternatives such as “One People, One Heart” and “We Stand with the Israeli People.” In his sermon, Olitzky began by recalling the mood on October 7th. He had walked home with his daughter after services and explained to her what had happened. In response, she asked if they could hang an Israeli flag outside their home. A flag still waved there, he told the congregation. Olitzky acknowledged that the “We Stand with Israel” sign lacked nuance. But it served as an invitation for conversation, he said, and affirmed an unwavering bond. “Saying ‘I Stand with Israel’ means ‘I believe in Israel, what Israel is, and what Israel can be—the Israel I dream of,’ ” he proclaimed.
Many worshippers loved the sermon, including Keren Siegel. She and her husband had joined Beth El in 2021, after the birth of their twins, drawn by the fact that it was a Conservative shul (they both strictly observe the Sabbath) with a growing community of young families. Siegel, whose father is Israeli and who has many relatives in Israel, assumed that the worshippers there supported Zionism. In the days after the October 7th attack, which she spent frantically texting cousins to make sure that they were safe, she turned to Beth El for succor. The realization that many members did not have the same connection to Israel, and even sympathized with its critics, startled her. Last July, the son of one of her cousins died while on a military operation in Gaza, and she later memorialized the death by placing a sticker bearing the relative’s name on the “We Stand with Israel” sign. When she learned the news about her relative, she wondered whether some people at Beth El might think that his death was justified—she had heard about protests where pro-Palestinian demonstrators had shouted, “Death, death to the I.D.F.!” Olitzky’s Yom Kippur sermon was a welcome affirmation of the synagogue’s core values, Siegel felt. “We are a Zionist community and synagogue,” she told me. “And, just like we support economic justice and gender and racial rights, one of our values is that we believe in the right for Israel to exist as a Jewish state.”
Felder’s reaction to the sermon was, of course, very different. Since standing outside Beth El with his banner, he had come to find that his views were more widely shared among congregants than he’d understood. On his way to the Yom Kippur service, he was optimistic that their voices were being heard. Olitzky’s sermon left him crestfallen. So much for Big Tent Judaism, Felder thought while driving home. So much, too, for applying Beth El’s progressive values to Israel—a disjuncture that had struck him a month or so earlier, when he’d learned that the rabbis at Beth El were planning to lead a service outside an ice detention facility. When he saw the e-mail about the ice service, he told me, “that was the moment I printed out my sign. Because I am horrified by what’s going on with ice and immigration, but there was no mention of the biggest thing that was touching the Jewish community at the time. For me, we had lost our moral authority to advocate for social justice at that ice facility by ignoring the mass starvation of a civilian population. It made the ice protest hollow.”
Nothing Olitzky could have said about the Gaza war would likely have pleased all the members of Beth El. This is why, as the conflict entered its second year, rabbis at many American synagogues strained to avoid the subject.
Some rabbis who were privately appalled by Israel’s actions in Gaza stayed quiet for fear of being branded traitors. Sharon Brous, the senior rabbi at IKAR, a synagogue in Los Angeles, told me that pro-Israel advocates often resort to a discourse that she called Defend, Deflect, and Denounce. “First, defend Israel at all costs, even when Israel is blatantly wrong,” she said. “Then deflect—‘Why aren’t you talking about Sudan?’ And then denounce any person who refuses to play by the rules.” Back in 2012, amid an exchange of rockets between Israel and Hamas, Brous experienced this directly, when the Jerusalem rabbi Daniel Gordis accused her of “betrayal” in a column in the Times of Israel, citing a message that she’d sent to her community in which she expressed compassion for Israelis and Palestinians in “absolute balance.” The accusation stung, she told me, both because Gordis had been a mentor and because it prompted personal attacks on her, including rape and death threats. Not long after October 7th, on a Zoom call with more than a hundred influential figures in Hollywood, Brous emphasized her profound sympathy for Israelis; two board members at her synagogue had relatives in Israel who’d been killed or kidnapped by Hamas. But she also voiced concern for civilians being forced to leave northern Gaza. Brous recalls that the A.D.L.’s Greenblatt, who had joined the meeting and described anti-Zionism as a form of genocide, abruptly cut her off. “Please stop!” he snapped. “Don’t blame the victim. . . . We can humanize them when they stop dehumanizing us.” Then he hung up.
The Jewish establishment has long demanded uncritical support for Israel. “Israeli democracy should decide, American Jews should support” was reportedly the motto of Abraham Foxman, Greenblatt’s predecessor at the A.D.L. This stance, however, has not stopped some of the establishment’s members from criticizing Israel—from the right. The journalist Joshua Leifer, in his recent book “Tablets Shattered,” points out that many prominent American rabbis publicly assailed Yitzhak Rabin for signing the Oslo Accords. One called Rabin’s government a Judenrat, the Nazi term for Jewish councils appointed to oversee ghettos.
Although the Jewish establishment’s effort to silence criticism has sometimes proved effective with rabbis, it has not prevented Jews who care about Palestinian rights from joining groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace. Indeed, attempts to muffle criticism have backfired, some observers believe. Nomi Colton-Max, a Beth El member and a former president of the synagogue, told me, “If we could have had open conversations about Israel, the same way that we’ve had open conversations about everything else, the situation might not have reached this point.” Colton-Max co-chairs New Jewish Narrative, an organization that supports justice and self-determination for Israelis and Palestinians, and is a vice-president of the American Zionist Movement. Congregations throughout North America, she feels, have long embraced a notion of “inclusion” that, when it comes to Israel, stretches from just left of center to the extreme right. “We allowed the tent to go further to the right but never to the left,” she said. Shalom Bayit—a Hebrew phrase meaning “peace within the home”—“has always been about including only those on one side.”
In December, 2024, a Beth El member named Alex Willick received an invitation to speak in the synagogue’s main sanctuary on Shabbat about a recent visit to Israel. The rabbis had asked several members who’d made trips there to talk about their experiences while standing on the bimah, before the Acheinu prayer was read. Their presentations had all covered similar ground, relaying the resilience of the Israelis they’d met. Willick, who works at the New Israel Fund, a social-justice and pro-democracy nonprofit, was asked to talk about an “interaction” he’d had in Israel, “something that would inspire the community.” He decided to talk about his encounter with Yinon Levi, a Jewish settler who, among other things, is known to have rammed a bulldozer into an elementary school in Zanuta, a Palestinian village in the West Bank’s South Hebron Hills. (In 2024, the Biden Administration imposed financial sanctions on Levi and three other Jewish settlers for allegedly inciting violence against Palestinians, but the Trump Administration removed the sanctions last year.) During his visit, Willick had gone to the site of the attack and surveyed the ruins, which were strewn with children’s drawings and broken crayons. While Willick was there, some settlers drove by in a white pickup and smiled—including Levi.
Before Willick spoke, Olitzky and Marder asked to see his remarks, so that they could offer feedback. He agreed, and found their suggestions helpful. Afterward, he texted the WhatsApp chain, encouraging people to come to his talk. But, the week before he was scheduled to speak, he received an e-mail informing him that the invitation had been rescinded, and suggesting other venues at Beth El where he could tell his story. Olitzky said that this decision was made because there needed to be “conversation and dialogue” about such a topic, and because the bimah was a special place where the community came together to feel “a sense of hope.” Willick was not convinced by this explanation, noting that many graphic and upsetting stories had been shared from the bimah in the past two and a half years—stories about violence perpetrated by Hamas. Although the theme of Willick’s intended talk was dark, it opened with a description of his deep connection to Israel. Later in the talk, he would address those who might wonder why he was speaking about a Palestinian school in a space reserved for Jewish stories. His experience was a Jewish story, he explained: “Everyone involved, aside from the victims, are Jewish—the perpetrators, the enablers, and the observers.”
Willick told me all this while we walked through a New Jersey nature reserve where he likes to go running. A father of two young children, he described the day he visited the bulldozed school as “the darkest moment in my history of Zionism.” Now, he said, he was no longer sure that he considered himself a Zionist. “If I can’t dissociate that action from that word within my own community, I don’t even know how I feel about the word at all anymore,” he said.
As disappointed as Willick was, he had no intention of leaving Beth El. Neither did the other WhatsApp-group members I met. “I don’t want to burn it down—I’m only here to make it better,” Liba Beyer said, adding that her son would soon be having his bar mitzvah at the synagogue, which was also where her father’s memorial took place and where her daughter had celebrated her bat mitzvah, in 2024. Beyer hoped that, just as congregations had learned to welcome and accommodate L.G.B.T.Q.+ and interfaith families, so, too, they would evolve to make space for people with diverse views on Israel.
Not everyone believes that such accommodation should be made. In November, Nolan Lebovitz, the senior rabbi at Valley Beth Shalom, a synagogue in Encino, California, wrote an article for Tablet in which he stated that Jews who have forsaken Zionism “have removed themselves from our shared sense of peoplehood.” His argument echoed the thesis of a 2021 essay by Natan Sharansky and Gil Troy, also published in Tablet, that labelled defectors from Zionism as “un-Jews.” Since October 7th, Lebovitz wrote, the differences between Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox denominations paled next to the only division that now mattered: “Zionist or anti-Zionist.” A number of congregants who had rejected his shul’s “strong and unequivocal commitment to Israel” had quit, and Lebovitz had welcomed their departures.
Many Jews have stopped attending temples that refused to acknowledge their concerns about Israel. In January, I had tea in New York with a woman I’ll call Rivka. (She did not want her real name used.) A musician in her thirties who works at a social-justice nonprofit, she had joined a synagogue on the Upper West Side upon moving to New York several years ago. After October 7th, the synagogue sent out an e-mail collecting donations for the I.D.F., which she viewed as an “occupation army.” Then she overheard a member of the congregation say, “There are no innocent people in Gaza.” She left the temple and started searching for a place of worship that was more aligned with her values. By the time we met, she had found one—an anti-Zionist minyan in Harlem that she’d started herself. On Friday nights, the group met in a member’s apartment for Shabbat services and a potluck dinner. In the past year, many similar minyans have formed in such places as Brooklyn and Boston. Rivka no longer felt a connection to Israel, though her spiritual journey was hardly that of an “un-Jew.” Before launching her minyan, she’d spent months studying Jewish liturgy so that she could lead services. She’d also improved her Hebrew. “My faith has definitely gotten more intense,” she said, propelled by a desire to prove that Judaism “belongs to all of us—Zionism doesn’t have a monopoly.”
After meeting Rivka, I visited B’nai Jeshurun, a nondenominational synagogue on the Upper West Side. Although it was a blustery evening in the middle of the week, the synagogue was packed with people who had come to attend a panel discussion, “The Jewish Tent at a Crossroads,” about the rupture over Israel and Zionism. Before the event began, I chatted with a man sitting behind me, a retired rabbi named Paul Golomb, who had once served as the vice-president for programming at the American Zionist Movement. He was still holding out hope for “a Zionism that is liberal and just,” he said. His wife, Deborah, who was seated next to him, appeared to be less hopeful. “What’s going on in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank breaks my heart,” she said.
Rabbi Irwin Kula, the panel’s moderator, asked the participants to describe their biggest fear or nightmare. One of the panelists was Peter Beinart, the writer whose book had been deemed unfit for study at Beth El. Beinart, who continues to attend an Orthodox synagogue, said that, in addition to worrying that God will judge his community for doing too little to stop the carnage in Gaza, he feared that he would soon be banished from this community. “Shabbat is not Shabbat if you spend it alone, and I sometimes feel like that’s my future,” he said. Another panelist, Elliot Cosgrove, the senior rabbi at Park Avenue Synagogue, on the Upper East Side, said his main worry was that, at a time when the Jewish people did not lack for external enemies, “we are making internal enemies.” He called for summoning a “capaciousness of spirit.” It was a heartfelt message but a somewhat surprising one from a rabbi who had recently inflamed tensions among Jews. A few months earlier, Cosgrove had delivered a sermon about Mamdani, insisting that the candidate posed “a danger to the security of the New York Jewish community” because of his opposition to Zionism.
Cosgrove’s sermon inspired the rabbinical letter denouncing Mamdani. It urged Americans to “stand up for candidates who reject antisemitic and anti-Zionist rhetoric, and who affirm Israel’s right to exist.” Although the letter drew more than a thousand signatures, it was controversial. Many rabbis refused to sign it because they believed that clerical leaders have no business intervening in an election. Others feared that singling out Mamdani could stoke Islamophobia. Still others worried that the letter, which was titled “A Rabbinic Call to Action: Defending the Jewish Future,” would actually sabotage the “Jewish future” by alienating young Jews who were excited about Mamdani. Rabbi Hara Person, the chief executive of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the professional organization for Reform rabbis, said, “If we tell this entire swath of young people that their ideas and concerns are not welcome, we’re going to lose them.” Her fear was borne out on Election Day: although Andrew Cuomo, who attacked Mamdani repeatedly over his views on Israel, carried Hasidic neighborhoods, such as Borough Park, Mamdani won the Jewish vote in progressive strongholds such as Park Slope.
Cosgrove, in his sermon on Mamdani, asserted that Zionism and Israel were “inseparable strands” of his Jewish identity. The day after Mamdani was elected, I went to Park Avenue Synagogue to speak with Cosgrove. He has pale eyes and a contemplative bearing, and appeared to be in a reflective mood. When I asked whether he thought that the American Jewish community today shared his feelings about Zionism and Israel, he paused for nearly thirty seconds. “I’m not sure,” he said, finally. Later, he handed me “For Such a Time as This,” a book he wrote about the Jewish “awakening” after October 7th. Mamdani’s victory seemed to have surprised and unsettled him. “As certain as I am that these last two years have prompted many Jews to draw closer to Judaism and to Israel, so, too, there are many Jews for whom these last two years have prompted the opposite,” he said.
As Mamdani’s election showed, the Jewish community is as divided about antisemitism and concerns over Jewish safety as it is about Zionism and Israel—issues that are now inextricably related. “It’s become impossible to have a conversation about antisemitism without Israel-Palestine arising,” Dov Waxman, a political scientist and a professor of Israel studies at U.C.L.A., noted. In 2016, Waxman published “Trouble in the Tribe,” which centers on the growing debate about Israel in the American Jewish community. He is now working on a study of the equally fractious debate about antisemitism. Two decades ago, Israel’s conduct primarily affected the lives of Jews and Palestinians in the Middle East. Today, Waxman told me, what happens in the region profoundly shapes the security and perceptions of Jews in the diaspora. On one side were the “October 8th Jews” who were preoccupied by the growing influence of the anti-Zionist left at a time when violent attacks on Jews were becoming increasingly common: last spring, in Washington, D.C., two Israeli Embassy staffers were killed outside the Capital Jewish Museum; in Michigan, a man recently rammed a truck filled with explosives into a synagogue. On the other side were Jews who tended to be far more concerned about the resurgence of antisemitism on the right, from the likes of Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes, and believed that Israel’s aggressive actions were partially responsible for making Jews unsafe. As some news outlets reported, the suspect in the Michigan attack, a Lebanese American named Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, had recently attended a memorial for four members of his family who were killed by an Israeli air strike in eastern Lebanon. (Israel has claimed that Ghazali’s brother was a member of Hezbollah, a charge that Hezbollah has denied.) The argument about Mamdani was “a microcosm of the larger debate,” Waxman said. “Should we be concerned about anti-Zionist speech and phrases like ‘globalize the intifada,’ or should we view Mamdani as an ally because what’s most needed is an alliance in the face of rising Christian nationalism and a racist far right?”
Within the Beth El congregation, many members on the WhatsApp text chain were initially heartened that neither Olitzky nor Marder had signed the open letter criticizing Mamdani. But, a week before Election Day, Olitzky did sign it. Soon afterward, Marder followed suit. To the chat-group members, her signature came as a particular disappointment, because she was seen as more sympathetic to their concerns. Last fall, in a Rosh Hashanah sermon, Marder declared that her heart ached “for the innocents who are suffering in Gaza” and “for the thousands of Palestinians who have died in this war, and the many who are starving and suffering.” She also acknowledged “the trouble in our tent.” Remaining Am Echad—one people—“depends on our ability to tolerate diverse views,” she said.
The disappointment in Marder was short-lived. A few days after she endorsed the open letter, she took her name off it. When I asked Olitzky if I could talk with Marder, he demurred, telling me it was important that the synagogue leadership speak in “one voice.” (Marder declined to be interviewed, but in an e-mail she explained that she “didn’t feel comfortable as a spiritual leader having my name attached to a petition that endorsed or condemned a candidate.”) Olitzky expressed no regrets about signing the open letter, affirming his commitment to “call out antisemitism,” which he did not distinguish from anti-Zionism. After our meeting, he sent me a link to a sermon he gave in which he described the litany of hate crimes targeting Jews in places such as Staten Island, where a man wearing a yarmulke was assaulted with a metal bat. Such incidents had caused him to wonder whether he should cover his head with a baseball cap on train rides at night, or even on walks through his own neighborhood.
At Beth El in January, Marder led a discussion of anti-Zionism in politics. It was far less contentious than the one that had taken place two years earlier, during Shavuot. As the furor over the October 7th attack and the Gaza war subsides, such gatherings have become easier to organize, several Beth El members told me. “The temperature has been turned down—we’re in a different moment,” a board member said. “The rabbis have facilitated some sessions where people have been able to have productively uncomfortable conversations.” Olitzky and Marder recently returned from a listening tour of Israel and the West Bank, organized by the nonpartisan group Encounter. The trip raised hopes among some members on the WhatsApp chain that expressions of empathy toward Palestinians will become more common at Beth El, both from the bimah and in synagogue-wide communications. An e-mail that the rabbis sent to members after the outbreak of the Iran war began, “We prayed and continue to pray for the safety of our friends and family in Israel.” But it went on to extend “prayers for peace and freedom, peace for the entire region, for Israel, for Palestinians, for Iran, and for all of Israel’s neighbors.”
Although a space for dialogue has opened, the distrust has hardly gone away. A reminder of this came in late January, after Israel announced that it had recovered the remains of Ran Gvili, the last remaining hostage in Gaza. A day later, Olitzky sent out a congregation-wide e-mail sharing the news, which, after eight hundred and forty-three days “full of anguish, uncertainty and heartache,” marked “the end of this period of mourning.”
Some Beth El members shared Olitzky’s sense of closure and relief. But others were in a different frame of mind. One member of the WhatsApp group wrote a pointed response to Olitzky. When Beth El’s leaders “speak as though the community is unified around a single moral framing (especially after years in which many felt unseen, unheard, or unsupported),” the member argued, “it risks becoming a form of gaslighting. It suggests consensus where there is none.” Molly Rodau, another Beth El member, wrote a poignant note to Olitzky. “How can we declare our mourning ‘concluded’ when the killing continues?” she asked. “What has brought us to a place where we can mark the end of one group’s suffering while another’s continues—as if our lives and theirs exist on separate moral planes?”
Olitzky’s e-mail did contain some seemingly welcome news for these Beth El members. Now that the hostages were home, he announced, the “We Stand with Israel” sign would be removed. A couple of days later, on a frigid morning, dozens of congregants gathered in the synagogue’s foyer, bundled in hats and scarves. They followed Olitzky outside, along a concrete path slick with ice. After several prayers were recited, Olitzky trudged through snow and took the sign down.
Beyer, who attended the ceremony, was struck by the balanced tone of the proceedings—which she credited both to the sombre occasion and to the letters that her WhatsApp peers had written. She was especially moved when Marder came forward to read “Prayer of the Mothers,” a poem co-written by Rabbi Tamar Elad-Appelbaum, who is Israeli, and Sheikha Ibtisam Mahameed, who is Palestinian. “May it be your will to hear the prayer of mothers,” it began. “For you did not create us to kill each other / Nor to live in fear, anger or hatred in your world.”
Felder, who was also there, had more mixed feelings. As he watched Olitzky pull down the sign, he felt relief. But he also felt frustrated about an upcoming change at Beth El. The synagogue’s leaders had decided that a new emblem would replace the sign outside: an Israeli flag. ♦
An earlier version of this article mischaracterized Orthodox Jewish support for Zionism prior to the Yom Kippur War.