Holding Liberals Accountable is a Strategic Necessity

For four generations, the self-appointed leaders of “the Jewish community” have asserted an unrepresentative idea of who American Jews are to Jews and non-Jews alike: an affluent, cohesive and, above all, Zionist group. Since the Red Scare of the 1950s, these leaders, powered by their alliance with the non-Jewish right, have forced out leftist and especially anti-Zionist Jews, redefining us as “outsiders,” and redeveloping Jewish cultural and religious institutions into enforcers of political and cultural conformity.

The multiracial, multiethnic movements to end the genocide, to win Palestinian liberation, and most recently, to elect Zohran Mamdani the next mayor of New York have, finally, ended self-appointed leaders’ ability to impose their narrow definition on the rest of us. Jewish leaders reduced Jewish community and identity to Israel. This helped uphold the emerging bipartisan consensus that delegitimized Palestinian freedom as part of a suite of neoliberal economic and social policies that subjugated the power of organized people to organized money. 

But the political landscape has shifted. The Gaza genocide has exposed the brutality of Zionism beyond denial—just as liberal commitments to neoliberalism, individual opportunity over collective rights, and neocolonial foreign policy have undeniably contributed to the ascendency of the right in the US and around the world. Mamdani’s election demonstrated the power of deep multiracial organizing in service of moral clarity by rejecting those liberal limits, instead proposing a pluralistic politics that speaks to people’s needs and dreams. 

As the Left—whether anti-Zionist Jews or the broader Left—we need to claim this power of rejection in our coalition work. To make our coalitions powerful and durable, there must be some accountability for those individuals and groups who for too long were complicit with the genocide. We need to continue to articulate a new theory and practice of multiracial democracy, and build new institutions to hold it. The Jewish community, which has a long history of both liberal and leftist components, has insights to offer as this struggle unfolds with liberals writ large. 

Genocide forces a reckoning

For two long years, people in Gaza have been bombed and starved. Every part of their infrastructure has been destroyed, from mosque to university to sewers, and at least 70,000 people have been murdered. For far, far too long, the leaders of Democratic institutions and mainstream and legacy Jewish organizations in the US either vehemently defended and funded Israel’s genocide, or slowly fell silent as evidence accumulated. In Israel, the small protest movement focused almost entirely on the corruption and venality of Netanyahu’s government, with conditions in Gaza rarely meriting a mention. This is not to ignore the small but terribly brave anti-genocide protest movement inside Israel, nor the large, determined, creative, fierce movement that we are proud to be a part of here. But most Jewish leaders failed us, and they failed humanity.

It’s no secret that Jewish political, financial, and social infrastructures enforce Zionism inside our community. As Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg summed it up, “many of us fighting for justice in Jewish spaces have experienced both tacit and explicit pressure around I/P [Israel/Palestine] from employers, boards, donors, colleagues.” Since summer, rabbis and other Jewish leaders have struggled to meaningfully wrestle with the moral damage done by their institutional devotion to Israel. The cost includes democratic norms, and, in Ruttenberg’s own reflection, the “soul-splitting” quality of her own complicity. The wrestling coincides with the end of any pretense that the flagship American Jewish institution, the Anti Defamation League (ADL), is any kind of “civil rights organization,” and a growing understanding that the ADL supports American authoritarianism, up to and including Nazi sympathizers. (This, of course, is no surprise to leftists.)

In the months leading up to the ceasefire (weak, inadequate, and constantly violated by Israel as it is), and certainly since, more and more institutional Jewish leaders began to express—with many caveats and disclaimers about Hamas and terrorism and the hostages—some concern about what had been done in Gaza.

The rehabilitation and myth-making has begun. 

Accountability is a strategic necessity

We can be forgiven for feeling it’s too little, too late. Nonetheless, discourse almost immediately began about the need to be gentle with these new allies, to welcome them, to “think strategically” about “the big tent” in a framework of “responsible adult organizing;” to welcome people wherever and whenever they arrive, on the theory that enlarging the tent is always better (often couched as “avoiding unnecessary controversy”)—even at the cost of political clarity.

We’ve seen this before, many times. The same people who brought us the disastrous war on Iraq somehow still populate the establishment as experts. For that matter, the architects of the Vietnam War almost entirely retained their credibility until their retirement and sanctified deaths.

This is a question of ethics and an urgent strategic imperative as we resist MAGA and American authoritarianism. The strict political line on Zionism has kept liberal Jews’ allyship limited and unreliable on other subjects, including justice and protections for immigrants and refugees, trans people (including trans Jews), people of color (including Jews of color), and for reproductive rights. When those communities speak out on Palestine, they risk losing their Jewish partners. It created a permission structure for nominally liberal institutions to condone the alliance of the Jewish right with white Christian nationalists. It fed an Islamophobic mania visible in the New York City mayoral race (and elsewhere.) And, of course, it drove complicity in the mass slaughter and destruction in Gaza. 

For the cycle to end, leaders who brought us here should not, at this late date, be welcomed into our coalition without some self-reckoning and accountability. 

This is difficult, not only because a public mea culpa is inherently difficult, but because liberal politics emphasize unity and cohesion, and oppose conflict. But leftists and liberals do disagree on quite a lot, including the roots of crises; the configurations—or possible configurations—of power; and how to move together, as a coalition. Such conflicts are “structurally inescapable” explains historian Tejasvi Nagaraja, “especially in moments of potential.”

Conflict can be healthy and productive in a well-functioning coalition. This kind of coexistence with conflict is what Brad Lander is emphasizing in his lauding of Kolot Chaiyenu (where we are both members) as a place “where JVP Jews and J Street Jews daven [pray] together with a minimum of side-eye.” Lander credits the experience and the relationships of such spaces for making possible his decision to cross-endorse Mamdani, and for the importance of maintaining solidarity. Lander also named Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, which endorsed both him and Mamdani in the primary. A self-described liberal Zionist, Lander has been making public mea culpas for not doing enough about the genocide. Unfortunately, he is the rare example of this kind of principled, self-reckoning liberalism.

“Liberals and leftists, policymakers and activists, can’t wish away this contradictory terrain. They can only try to navigate through it, head on,” notes Nagaraja. This is, perhaps, the biggest challenge liberals face in learning to stop trying to control the politics around them, and instead, participate as equals. 

Equality challenges privilege

In New York City, Mamdani’s victory is helping the 60% of Jewish New Yorkers who did not support him discover that other communities have a voice that is equal to theirs; that Zionism is no longer the default. Up until now, they have interpreted equality as antisemitism. As Peter Beinart recently noted, the “prospect of equality comes to seem extraordinarily frightening” when you are accustomed to supremacy. He further notes how this was true for Protestants in Ireland when the Good Friday Agreement was signed, when white South Africans were on the verge of losing apartheid, and when white southerners experienced the civil rights movement. 

Just after the “ceasefire” in Gaza began, a friend told us about a tempest in a teapot at her daughter’s charter school in a fairly gentrified part of Brooklyn. In a unit about identity in a senior literature class, the teacher had taught a poem by beloved Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.

Chaos ensued. Behind the scenes, parents were apparently complaining vehemently that reading a poem from an Arab point of view had made their children feel unsafe, and was an act of antisemitism. This became public when the school wrote an open letter of apology to the Jewish families who had been “hurt” by this incident, and pledged to think more carefully about their choice of poetry in the future. Tucked into the end of several long, groveling paragraphs, and eclipsed by the parental anger, was a reference to school staff’s feeling subjected to “targeting, bullying, or harassment” as a result of the social media onslaught created by the angry parents.

This incident was negligible in the grand schema of the Palestinian genocide that has led to repression; ranging from students not being allowed to graduate from college and teachers being fired, to the targeting of civil society institutions including universities and philanthropic foundations. Still, the Darwish poem incident as a microcosm illuminates the dynamics. The school, which includes significant numbers of both Jewish and Muslim children, was trying to reflect the multifaceted reality of a Brooklyn neighborhood.

But the inadvertent lesson was that accusations of antisemitism can be used as a weapon against even the most innocuous attempts to honor the humanity of Palestinian life. It illuminates how racialized attempts to regulate and control every facet of life and culture directly threaten real democratic action, and highlights the distance that presumably liberal people still need to travel to truly embrace being part of a multiracial democracy. It was no surprise that in the following weeks, in the final days of New York City’s mayoral election, that the campaign took a nasty, Islamophobic turn. 

It is deplorable but unsurprising when Senator Ted Cruz reposts a racist, Islamophobic meme, because that is keeping with Cruz’s overall far-right politics. Actor Debra Messing is not on the far right. She is well-known for her support for many liberal issues; including, famously, LGBTQI issues, as well as immigrant and refugee protections and abortion access. Nonetheless, Messing also reposted Islamophobic memes. This is the same for former Obama White House speech writer Sarah Hurwitz, whose recent comments in defense of genocide have been particularly noxious. What distinguishes Jewish use of Islamophobia is that so much of it comes from people who self-identify as liberal.

From the ADL’s “Mamdani Monitor” to the choices Jewish New Yorkers make every day, letting go of their sense of hegemony and control will be crucial to moving toward a functioning multi-racial democracy. As Mahmoud Mamdani said recently in an interview, “The anxiety is not about Zohran, the anxiety is about what Zohran symbolizes. The anxiety is that the world out there is changing.” 

That anxiety was expressed most clearly by Park Avenue Synagogue Rabbi Elliott Cosgrove, who weeks before the election called Mamdani “a danger to the Jewish body politic of New York” for his legitimation of antizionism as a political position, after Mamdani told reporters, “I am not a Zionist…I’m going to have people in my administration who are Zionists—whether liberal Zionists, or wherever they may be on that spectrum.” This screed inspired an open letter that drew signatures of 1,100 rabbis across the country. Rabbi Cosgrove is not used to losing, and this new posture of equality-not-control is clearly taking some getting used to. After Mamdani won, Cosgrove took to the pages of the Jewish newspaper The Forward to call for unity, without actually reflecting on the harm his words had done, let alone apologizing for them. This may explain why he has returned to the politics of division, straight from the handbook of the anti-democratic right.

For a brief moment, the election results forced Cosgrove to recognize what was once normalized: his leadership produces an unrepresentative, homogenous, and anti-democratic culture common to the Jewish institutional world. This culture breeds a sense that one is entitled to control not only one’s own community, but the politics and participation of one’s neighbors. This shift was made possible by the solidarity that left Jews and our neighbors have built, and the victory has class dimensions: Cosgrove leads an extremely affluent, very expensive, very white, very exclusive community on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, home to some of our nation’s richest and most influential people, some of whom remain gripped in anti-Mamdani hysteria. (The Upper East Side also hosts far-right speakers and the occasional white nationalist assault.) 

Lessons for Democrats

For two years, we watched both the Democratic and Republican parties abet the genocide while a growing movement did everything we could to stop it. Leaders of both parties, just like mainstream Jewish leaders, misrepresented or flat-out lied about what we were all seeing unfold. By doing so, these leaders invited us to see all the other things they were obfuscating, misunderstanding, or actively dodging—from Biden’s capacity to serve another term, to the onrushing authoritarianism under Trump 2.0, to the ways unchecked capitalism is producing economic misery, and the far-right politics ascendant around the world. 

“I still always believed, perhaps naively, that if push came to shove those titans of industry would be guardrails for our democracy,” Kamala Harris said recently, going on to assail said “titans” for “bending the knee” to Trump. Like Cosgrove, she has not apologized for her part in funding and defending the genocide. She offers no changed analysis or course of action as a result of her realization. Nor has she, nor the Democratic Party leadership, reflected on the manifest inability of their bland centrism to galvanize voters and meet their deepest concerns.

In contrast, Zohran Mamdani winning his election as Mayor established a proof of concept that a principled campaign opposing Biden-style centrism on the genocide and “the titans of industry” beyond can be not just a winning strategy but can help forge a model of true multiracial democracy. As Patrick Gaspard told The New York Times, “You don’t get to first base on the other things if you haven’t come out of the batter’s box on Gaza.” 

In New York, Jews can finally begin to remake or replace institutions that produce artificial insularity, echo chambers, and Islamophobic mania. Our religious and cultural institutions can be ones that invite openness and plurality, support solidarity, and—especially—are heterogeneous and proudly so. We have some models and are actively building out others, like a new coalition of non– and anti–Zionist Jewish religious and spiritual institutions; we hope that everyone can learn from this de-radicalization project, as this problem is one that every community faces. 

We need the strongest possible coalition willing to engage the fight against the white supremacist, Christian nationalist right—outside the Jewish community and inside it. For that to come to fruition, liberals (Jewish and not) must relinquish their impulse to control other Jews, other communities, and other political tendencies. Mamdani’s campaign gave us a good start, because it was in the canvass that many got the chance to practice both being trusted and trusting others. Through the canvass, the liberal base participated in a left project and a left practice, many without (yet) becoming leftists, and in open defiance of their unelected leaders.

Even without formal democratic structures by which we might de-platform leaders like Cosgrove or ADL CEO Jonathan A. Greenblatt, their symbolic power as representatives of “the Jewish community” is so diminished that even they must contend with it, and shift accordingly. We shouldn’t kid ourselves that these shifts reflect a new understanding of anything but shifts in power. But as Jews say, dayenu—it would be enough. The shifts in power are bringing more people into our winning majority, which in turn is changing their orientation away from control, toward participation in a dynamic movement that more accurately reflects the urgent needs of all people.

Featured image: Kimmie Dearest