The New Neo

[Hat tip: commenter “Irish Otter.”]

About a month ago Karol Markowicz wrote this essay in which she said:

College campuses across the country were erupting in Jew-hating outbursts, and parents were rightly worried about their Jewish college-aged kids caught up in the frenzy of hate. On Facebook, a group called Mothers Against College Antisemitism (M.A.C.A.) was founded and grew quickly to over 50,000 members. …

What became clear within that Facebook group and in so many other quarters since Oct. 7 is that much of secular Judaism, in both the Reform and Conservative branches, had become overtly political and not really religiously based at all. For many Jews, their religious identity had become so intertwined with leftist politics that they couldn’t force a separation even when they themselves were being targeted with their own bad ideas.

I could follow Markowicz’s piece quite well up to that second paragraph in the above quote, and then it began to be confusing because it contains a puzzling oxymoron: “secular Judaism, in both the Reform and Conservative branches … ” But Reform and Conservative are branches of the religion of Judaism rather than the secular identity of just being Jewish either by ancestry or culture.

Look, I know that being Jewish can be confusing, even to Jews (Markowicz is Jewish). It is many things. The first is a religion with three main branches but many offshoots, the main branches being Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox (perhaps ultra-Orthodox is a fourth main branch, but we won’t quibble about that). Jewishness is also a culture, or several cultures (Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Mizrahi) that roughly parallel its main ethnicities, because for many Jews (although not all), it is an ethnicity: the result of centuries of in-group marriage from an original Middle Eastern source. Therefore, Ashkenazi Jews have Middle Eastern plus European ancestry, and Mizrahi Jews are almost entirely Middle Eastern, and some Jewish groups (such as Ethiopian Jews) very similar ethnically from the places they lived for ages and ages. And yet they are all indeed Jews – as are converts to Judaism, who can be of any ethnicity whatsoever. Converts are not sought in Judaism, but sincere converts are welcomed.

The Jews are also a people. That’s a different concept, not the same as an ethnic group. It’s a people, a group that generally identifies as having a historical trajectory with its origins in lands roughly equivalent to modern Israel and parts of the lands occupied by Arabs, such as the West Bank (known in ancient times by Israelites as Judea and Samaria).

On the other hand, secular Jews simply are not religious. But they might identify with some parts of Jewish identity, most likely ethnicity and culture. They are the children of Jewish parents or grandparents. Or, they might not even identify as being Jewish but the rest of the world sees them that way because of their ancestry. The world has had its own changing and varied definition of what makes a Jew. The Nazis, obsessed as they were with race, defined it quite precisely in the Nuremberg Race Laws, and had little to no interest in whether a Jew was secular or even had converted to Christianity. To the Nazis, a Jew was a Jew was a Jew, and the Nazis got to define who was what.

Today, someone like George Soros – an ethnic Jew raised without any religion by parents who were, according to him, anti-Semitic – is defined by many, especially those who hate him, as a Jew. He most definitely is an ethnic Jew despite being an anitsemite raised by antisemites. Many of those who defend him define any criticism of him as antisemitic, which it is not (although to complicate things, it sometimes is, depending on what form the criticism takes). Is that complicated enough?

But back to Markowicz’s piece. I find that she blends some of these aspects of Jewish identity in a way that leads me to have trouble understanding her points.

The way I would put it is that the Jewish religion isn’t political, but like any religion it – and its three or four divisions – is connected with the prevalence of certain political beliefs. The more Orthodox a Jewish person is the more likely to be politically conservative. The less Orthodox, the opposite. This makes sense for a host of reasons, including the fact that leftism is often a substitute for religion.

The liberals and/or leftists (that is, the Democrats) in the groups Markowicz concentrates on – a significant proportion of the parents fighting anti-Semitism in colleges – of course find some conflict between their desire to protect their children from anti-Semitism and their political beliefs as leftists. This reflects an actual dilemma; not a fake one. They probably haven’t been paying much attention to the growth of anti-Semitism on campus until recently, and may have even misunderstood or failed to notice that it comes almost wholly from the left rather than the right. That also represents a very painful cognitive dissonance, something that’s always hard to resolve.

They’re working on it. It takes time. But it’s no mystery. I’m certain that there are political conservatives in those parent groups, too. But to them the antisemitism is much less of a surprise, and they have no cognitive dissonance about it with which to deal.

In addition, Markowicz discusses the fact that in Reform and Conservative congregations, liberal/leftist politics is usually assumed, and is even sometimes preached from the pulpit. She suggests that shouldn’t happen:

To those who sat in the pews for years as their congregation became a shameless political operation, the time has now come to depart. Your synagogue must be a place of worship, not of political activity, and, unfortunately for you, who paid your dues and hoped to align with a community of your peers, the political movement your shul promotes is the one that hates you. You should have departed years ago, like when your rabbi couldn’t condemn constant rockets into Israel for years without also condemning the Israeli response. Or when your rabbi could stand up for every group other than our own.

I’m not sitting in any synagogue’s pews, so I can’t speak to personal experience of this. But if it happens in synagogues it wouldn’t be a surprise, because it also happens in many churches. Go to your local Unitarian house of worship and you’ll get a bellyful, and Unitarians are hardly the only ones. Many churches have turned to the left and make no secret of that fact. I would bet that the rabbis Markowicz describes, who had earlier condemned both the rockets and the Israeli response, were speaking not only from a leftist point of view but probably because they believed a modern Israel/Palestine “cycle of violence” point of view that they thought might and could lead to peace in the region. Many of them are probably experiencing a great deal of cognitive dissonance these days, too.

A mind is a difficult thing to change.