One Year After October 7, American Jewry Has Been “Broken … in Half”

“I think this has thrown mainstream Jewish institutions in America into a tailspin.” Shaul Magid, distinguished fellow of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth, was describing October 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel and killed roughly 1,200 people, most of whom were Israeli civilians, and the tumultuous and tragic year that followed.

The year that followed has featured a war, carried out by Israel against Hamas in Gaza, that has seen over 40,000 Palestinians killed (some say this is a conservative estimate). It has featured massive rallies to stand with Israel and protests across the country to stop the war, both organized by Jews.

“The real crisis is in the liberal Zionist consensus that was operative since the 1970s,” Magid said. What October 7 and the war that followed did, Magid says, has been to carve out the liberal Zionist middle. The worldview of that middle has been built around certain principles: that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state; that the occupation is wrong; that there should be a two-state solution; that right-wing extremists in Israel are a minority, albeit one in power. But October 7 and the war forced American Jews in the liberal Zionist consensus to pick a side: Are you in favor of the war or not? If you’re in favor of a war that’s killed thousands of children, Magid asked, where’s the liberal part of “liberal Zionism”?

He answered his own question: “It has broken American Jewry in half.”

The sense of division is backed by polling. According to the latest polling by Pew on the issue, roughly a third of American Jews think that the Israeli response has been appropriate. Somewhere between a quarter and a third think it’s gone too far; another quarter, not far enough. Thirteen percent aren’t sure what to think.

The marked difference wasn’t captured only by one survey. Back in May, the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs found that just over half of American Jews supported U.S. President Joe Biden’s announcement of a potential arms embargo, which is to say just under half did not. (In the end, the White House paused one shipment of bombs and moved forward with a more than $1 billion weapons deal for Israel.) The same study found that about a third agreed that Israel was carrying out genocide in Gaza; about half disagreed.

Over the past year, American Jews have stared out from their different, competing realities, gazing at one another’s opposing views in disbelief, disgust, and fear. Some have wondered how their coreligionists couldn’t support Israel at this time. Others cried out in response asking how they could.

American Jewishness is distinctive for its pluralism. Other countries—in Europe, for example—have a chief rabbi and a formal Jewish community. The United States has Jewish communities. There are Orthodox and Conservative and Reconstructionist and Reform and secular humanist Jews.

And when it comes to religious practice, Magid said—whether you believe in God or you don’t, how you want to believe in God, what Judaism looks like in a person’s life—pluralism is alive and well. But, Magid said, “when it comes to Israel? It’s dead.” And in pluralism’s place is polarization.

“Where you stand on that national question becomes whether you’re a Jew or an un-Jew,” Magid said. “The un-Jew is the breakdown of pluralism—but only on the question of Israel.” He pointed to a 1915 quote from socialist Chaim Zhitlovsky, who predicted that a Jewish state would mean “the basis of our life in America will not be the Jewish religion, but rather our Jewish nationality.”

Said Hadar Susskind, head of Americans for Peace Now: “Groups have moved. Some of the folks who are, for lack of a more precise term, further to our left have moved, I think, further to the left. Some of the folks on the right have dug in even deeper.”

He referenced a panel he was on after October 7, during which a different speaker mentioned the group IfNotNow, a self-described “movement of American Jews organizing our community to end U.S. support for Israel’s apartheid system and demand equality, justice, and a thriving future.” Of this group, the speaker said: “If you ask me, they’re not Jewish.” Susskind further recalled: “He said, ‘It’s not my choice. They chose by their actions to put themselves outside of the Jewish community.’”

“I think IfNotNow, frankly, has made a lot of decisions in this past year that I disagree with,” Susskind continued. “But the fact that I disagree with some of the positions or things that they’ve said is entirely different from, ‘Oh, they’re not part of our community.’” He said that he asked the crowd at the event to think about their Jewish children and grandchildren who are involved in IfNotNow.

“I don’t like to call everything antisemitism,” said Simone Zimmerman, co-founder of IfNotNow. But “the most hatred and vitriol that I have received as a Jew has been from other Jews. Not just during this last year, but of course over this last year it’s reached new lows.”

“It’s been so hard,” said Audrey Sasson, executive director of Jews for Racial & Economic Justice. “It’s been so, so hard.”

Being called self-hating Jews and kapos (Jewish inmates in Nazi prison camps who carried out the will of the guards) “from our own so-called wider community” makes it hard, she said, to maintain community. And what were productive differences before October 7, in some cases, became “more oppositional.”

Still, she said, “I’m in many, many spaces with Jews I disagree with all the time.” She said she tries to keep that space open.

But the war is still ongoing. Israel is still killing Palestinians, and now, Israel has invaded Lebanon; Iran shot ballistic missiles at Israel the day before I sat down to write this. The fighting is continuing, as is the dying. And the pain and fear and unrecognition in American Jewish communities—that’s ongoing too. “I do think that we’re still in it,” Sasson said. “It’s hard to know where it’s going to land.”

American Jews are at odds not only over whether and how to support Israel but also what it means for their existence as political actors and simply as citizens here in the United States. “One of the very weird and difficult spin-offs of all of this is the very real antisemitism that has exploded exponentially in America, and the response to that threat and perceived threat,” Susskind said.

But people do not agree on what constitutes antisemitism, or how much has been driven by antisemitism as opposed to disapproval of the war, or on how to build coalitions with other groups, Jewish and not.

Amy Spitalnik, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, started her job a month before October 7. This is the only world in which she’s had the job. “I think there are so many people in a variety of spaces who are still treating this moment as if it’s normal, as if the same approaches to coalition building and fighting antisemitism and engaging people around Israel are going to apply,” Spitalnik said. “And our world has fundamentally changed. And we need to have people understand that.”

To her, that means creating space for Jews to have a relationship with Israel while recognizing the humanity of Palestinians, and “engaging across lines of difference” to help non-Jews understand they can do the same and that the Jewish community isn’t a monolith.

Many American Jews felt, after October 7, that non-Jewish groups that were otherwise ideological partners abandoned Jews, blaming Israelis for the attack. Others rejected that characterization. “I think this idea that nobody stood with us on October 7 is absolute nonsense,” said Zimmerman of IfNotNow. “I don’t think it’s true. I think that narrative has been fueled by people interested in keeping Jews terrified and isolated and [who] want to use that terror and isolation to mobilize support for the war.”

Zimmerman, the protagonist of a documentary called Israelism—which, as the title suggests, is critical of Israel and the American Jewish community’s support for it—noted that, while book talks were canceled because Zionist speakers were featured, screenings of Israelism were too, as were pro-Palestinian cultural events. “All of that’s very real,” said Yousef Munayyer, a Palestinian American writer and analyst. “At the same time, it’s sort of expected.”

All of this is happening in the context of a presidential election year. Orthodox Jews overwhelmingly support Donald Trump, while American Jews overall, per polling, are expected to support Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump has taken to using “Palestinian” as a slur while alleging that Harris hates Jews and that any Jew who votes for her “should have their head examined”; Harris has said there needs to be a cease-fire but has reiterated her support for Israel and not broken with Biden on policy.

Ann Toback, CEO of the Workers Circle, pointed out that her organization has, since its founding over a century ago, been domestically focused, turning its attention first to the labor movement, then to women’s suffrage, to immigration rights, and then to civil rights. Workers Circle left the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations in August 2023 because it felt the focus of the group’s activism was almost exclusively on Israel, and not on democracy.

“Even as our focus is domestic and democracy in the United States, we don’t have blinders on,” Toback said. “But for us, the focus has been the erosion of democracy in the United States, and also abroad, and we see that erosion as fueling this ongoing and expanding conflict, and we see it as driving the incredible suffering, extreme suffering that’s been being borne by ordinary people.”

“We’re just getting so close, and maybe we’re there, into racialized language about Jews, and that has historically been the most dangerous precondition” for threat to Jewish life and community, said Marjorie Feld, author of Threshold of Dissent: A History of American Jewish Critics of Zionism. She was referencing Trump’s comments preemptively blaming Jews should he lose the 2024 presidential election. “That is what scares me more than anything,” she said, adding, “I’m not frightened by the growing dissent. I actually think it’s healthy.”

But how many feel the same way? So often I hear from Jews that one thing they value about our tradition is debate; so often I have wondered whether they mean, “So long as I win it.”

There are still some who will use, and believe in, the center, the liberal Zionism. But I wondered if Magid wasn’t right: if, to be a Zionist, to defend the state of Israel, which is increasingly illiberal, American Jews wouldn’t make increasingly illiberal arguments, not only about Israel but also for American society. Is arguing against the right to protest liberal? Magid told me that, given the choice between liberalism and Zionism, he believed that many in the American Jewish center would choose Zionism. And many in the younger generation would not. We are divided, then, not only by generation but by what we see as our first Jewish obligation.

The center was fraying before October 7. A year later, I imagine someone yelling out across the void of consensus: How can you say that? Can’t you see what’s happening? What are we becoming? I picture the words echoing out, but never quite reaching the other end of the void.