Liberal Jewish anti-Zionists get together — and stay confused

Fresnozionism.org
23 July '10

Every time I think that I can’t be surprised by the things Jews do and say, I come across something like this:

A 25-year-old environmental activist named Hillary Lehr from Oakland, California, said she no longer wanted to visit the Reform synagogue she’d attended as a child because its pro-Israel stance was casually embedded into ritual life, from prayers for the Jewish state to tzedakah boxes for the Jewish National Fund. “I want to de-Zionize my synagogue because it’s not about being a Zionist, it’s about Judaism,” Lehr said. “There’s a generation that’s ready to go back to those religious and spiritual spaces. I want to say to my rabbi, ‘I want to come back to my spirituality and I want there to be space for all of us because we’re all Jews.’ ”

Yes, yet another group of anti-Israel Jews. Described as “first major gathering of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network,” the 2010 “U.S. Assembly of Jews” was held in Detroit this summer.

Since the founding of the Jewish state, Jewish anti-Zionists have fallen mostly into two groups: observant Jews who believe that Judaism teaches that they may return to the land of Israel only when the Mashiach takes them there, and highly secular left-wing ideologues who think that Jewish nationalism is just another bourgeois detour away from international anti-colonial solidarity.

But these people, although closer to the latter than the former, insist that they are Jewish not just by culture or tradition, but because they observe some form of Judaism:

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