I recently sat through a panel on antisemitism at my Reform synagogue in Durham, North Carolina, gripping my hands and clamping my lips shut.
My muzzled outrage was due to my synagogue’s decision to feature Steve Schewel as its star panelist, the instigator of a historic boycott against Israel when he was mayor of this city in 2018.
Schewel’s infamous boycott of Israel’s acclaimed international police training program remains on Durham’s municipal books. It widened the Overton window, allowing regular Americans to talk about Israel as a bloodthirsty oppressor of Palestinians and black Americans alike since both libels drove the boycott.
Schewel said into his mic the night the city council unanimously passed his boycott: “I know the terrible traumas visited on us as a people we are now visiting on others in Gaza and on the West Bank,” casting Israelis as Nazis. This was the man my rabbi saw fit to school us on antisemitism.
“I know the terrible traumas visited on us as a people we are now visiting on others in Gaza and on the West Bank.”
Steven Schewel
In a spectacle worthy of billing at the Theatre of the Absurd, panelists ostensibly addressing antisemitism refused even to acknowledge anti-Zionism, the leftist source of Jew hatred that is wreaking havoc in progressive-leaning cities like Durham. Instead, the group – also partly comprised of local Hillel campus executives – doggedly blamed all our problems on the American Right.
That my synagogue would hold up Schewel as a model for fighting antisemitism rather than normalizing it was stunning. But it was not surprising. At congregations like mine, anti-Zionism is considered just another point of view. It’s outspoken Zionists who are cast as the problem.
Our Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina region is bookended by Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, both formidable academic institutions where Zionist kids know to steer clear of certain professors.
Suffice it to say, we’ve got problems here and not only when something so blatant occurs as when Jew-hater Mohammed el-Kurd gets paid to take to the podium at Duke and openly heckles Jewish students in the audience. As a local mom, I can tell you with authority that anti-Zionism is in our high schools and even our middle schools now.
It’s one thing to watch non-Jewish anti-Zionist bullies erecting “blood” smeared “Israel Apartheid Wall” propaganda installations on college campuses across the United States; it’s quite another to witness so many Jewish anti-Zionists cheering them on as they tighten the screws.
Amid all this, where the hell are our rabbis?
Mine has gone on record to say he is not anti-Zionist. At the same time, he touts his membership in the rabbinic council of J Street, an organization that filed an amicus brief in support of companies that want to boycott Israel.
MY RABBI is no outlier. Reform Judaism, since its earliest days, has wrestled with its relationship to a Jewish state. Even at the height of the Holocaust, Reform leader Lessing Rosenwald was arguing against the establishment of Israel, writing in Life magazine on June 28, 1943, that “Jewish citizens of other nations would be embarrassed either by its decisions or by its neutrality.”
“Jewish citizens of other nations would be embarrassed either by its decisions or by its neutrality.”
Lessing Rosenwald
As Rosenwald wrote those repugnant words, he had the luxury of an ocean between himself and the marked Jews of Europe. That luxury has evaporated. We’re the marked Jews now. We are openly asking each other how much longer we have left in this country. Maybe we’re not history’s exception. Maybe Zion was important, after all.
It’s against this backdrop that I’ve begged my rabbi and synagogue executives through a handful of polite but urgent letters over the years to stop normalizing anti-Zionism. I was ignored.
So I resolved to make my case in person. Nervously standing before my synagogue’s Social Action Committee last fall, I implored them to consider a new proposal to raise money for victims of antisemitic attacks, teach parents about the toxic antisemitism in schools and commit to showing up whenever another anti-Jewish event takes place in our town. I was refused.
So I threw open the issue to my entire shul. In an open letter I emailed last month to some 1,200 members listed in the congregation directory, I wrote there is a rot in our synagogue. I called on my rabbi to clean house, and not just for the sake of Israel, but for the future of American Jewry, too. I was denounced.
Synagogue brass fired off an email to all members, except me, apologizing for “any confusion, inconvenience, or discomfort” my letter supposedly caused. They issued a full-throated defense of the rabbi and of Steve Schewel. And they took aim at me, ominously threatening “next steps.” All the while, they copiously avoided any mention of the dire issues I raised.
Our religious leaders may insist on sticking their fingers in their ears and yelling “la, la, la, I can’t hear you,” but that won’t stop the fire on the horizon.
When our rabbis hitch their love for Israel to an apology, they hand ammunition to Jew-haters. When our rabbis, from the safety and comfort of their sun-dappled offices, try to impose their will on Israelis, they exemplify American hubris. When our rabbis soft-pedal anti-Zionism, they sow moral confusion. When our rabbis feature anti-Zionists, they normalize calls for our destruction. When our rabbis cancel outspoken Zionists, they sabotage our defenders.
Our rabbis must declare unabashed support for Zionism and vehement condemnation of anti-Zionism in our very last sanctuary: our shuls. Anything less is to be complicit in our undoing.
The writer spent nearly two decades as a staff newspaper reporter. As a freelancer, her work has appeared in Tablet magazine, Jewish Journal and The Forward. She lives with her husband and their two daughters in Durham, North Carolina.