In December 2023, as Sarah was preparing for their admissions interview for the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (RRC), they received an email from the college asking them to get on a phone call with an administrator. Sarah assumed the call would be about upcoming Hebrew competency testing. Instead, they were greeted with a series of questions about Israel/Palestine, including whether they knew that RRC students were required to study in Israel during their fourth year. The school knew about Sarah’s history with the anti-occupation group IfNotNow and the organization Open Hillel, which sought to bring non-Zionist perspectives onto American college campuses, and the administrator appeared to be asking, in so many words, how they would relate to Zionist Jewish life: Could they serve a Zionist congregation? Would they complete the required travel to Israel? Could they do what the college thought a position as a rabbinical student would require of them?
“It was clear the call’s whole purpose was assessing where I was with Zionism,” Sarah recalled. (Sarah is a pseudonym for a current rabbinical student at RRC, who, like many students interviewed for this article, requested anonymity for fear of affecting their career prospects.) Caught off-guard, Sarah said they had always worked in “pluralist” spaces, and was ultimately accepted—but the topic came up again when they began envisioning where they might want to work for their eventual fourth-year internship. Such internships are funded by RRC grants if the host organization cannot afford to pay the student’s salary, but RRC will not support explicitly anti-Zionist work. One local Jewish community organization that Sarah has discussed interning with is considering becoming an official affiliate of the anti-Zionist activist movement Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP); if the partnership goes through, Sarah fears they won’t be able to secure internship funding.
Such scenarios are not uncommon at the RRC, where a growing segment of rabbinical students are anti- or non-Zionist, and are grappling with the possibilities and challenges of working within a major Jewish institution that holds a pro-Israel position. The RRC, which graduates a handful of rabbis each year, is the only seminary affiliated with Reconstructing Judaism, the umbrella group for the Reconstructionist denomination, with which roughly 3% of American Jews identify. The Reconstructionist movement has long been distinguished by its inclusivity and progressivism: Historically, it was pathbreaking in increasing women’s participation in American Jewish life (it was responsible for the first American bat mitzvah celebration for girls in 1922), and led the charge in making space for interfaith families and advocating for the acceptance of queer congregants. Unsurprisingly, it has also tended to draw anti-Zionists. Roughly 60% of the JVP Rabbinical Council are graduates or students of the RRC, and so are at least 97 of the 364 members of the post-October 7th group Rabbis for Ceasefire, despite Reconstructionism’s small share of American Jewry.
At the same time, the Reconstructionist movement remains committed to what it calls “progressive Zionism,” meaning that it supports a two-state solution in Israel/Palestine and Israel’s status as a Jewish state. “The stance of the Reconstructionist movement, since the time of [the movement’s founder] Mordecai Kaplan to this day, is that Israel has a right to exist and is a vital center for Jewish life and the Jewish people,” said Deborah Waxman, who has served as president of the college for a decade and is also the CEO of Reconstructing Judaism, in her 2024 commencement address. She reiterated this commitment in an interview for this article. Yet many of the students the school attracts, while enthusiastic about the evolving tradition of Reconstructionism, are no longer compelled by this mission. Since October 7th, 2023—as Israel’s war on Gaza, widely described by the human rights community as a genocide, stretched on for 15 months before this month’s ceasefire agreement—student activism against what some describe as RRC’s “compulsory Zionism” has accelerated, causing increasingly heated debates within the school.
The questions students are confronting reverberate far beyond the school’s small campus in a Philadelphia suburb, reflecting a contentious fight over American Jews’ relationship with Israel. They are meaningful in part because RRC graduates go on to lead some of the most innovative Jewish communities in the US; as American Jews increasingly pivot away from traditional shuls, many have turned towards independent minyans and small non-denominational congregations, which are often led by graduates of the RRC. The tensions breaching the surface at the RRC are also present across other non-Orthodox rabbinical schools: Conservative and Reform leaders complained to Jewish Insider last March about the increasing presence of anti-Zionist rabbis in their movements’ graduating classes. But the RRC has indisputably become the rabbinical pipeline for the anti-Zionist left; today, some RRC sources estimate that more than half of the current student body holds anti- or non-Zionist beliefs. Waxman disputes those numbers, but says such students are welcome at the school regardless: “Any litmus test we have in the Reconstructionist movement is not about particular stances around Israel,” she added in the commencement address. Still—according to interviews I conducted with more than 20 current students, alumni, and former faculty and staff at the school—the RRC’s current faculty and most major figures in Reconstructionism remain committed to Zionism, meaning students often feel pitted against their mentors, funders, and potential employers. These movement leaders have been reluctant to shift longstanding policies, including the required summer study in Israel for students. This dissonance between the politics of the institution and those of the students has created a fractious climate where a new generation is fighting for what the future of the movement, and progressive American Jewish life, could look like. As Will, a current student who asked to use a pseudonym, put it to me, “What’s happening at RRC is the same thing that’s happening in the broader Jewish world.”
Mordecai Kaplan developed what would become Reconstructionist ideology as a rabbi and professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary, the Conservative movement’s flagship school, in the early 20th century. He focused on the customs and rituals of the Jewish people more than on a transcendent God, and promoted a vision of Judaism as an “evolving religious civilization” based on spiritual and secular practices—one that could meaningfully integrate into the United States while maintaining a distinct identity. His movement focused on recalibrating Jewish tradition for a modern audience, and he became famous for using the phrase “the past has a vote, not a veto” to describe how Jewish laws and practices would be carried into subsequent generations.
Kaplan supported the building of a Jewish society in the land of Israel, even before many American Jews had warmed to Zionism, and maintained his stance after the founding of the State of Israel and the accompanying expulsion of Palestinians. Still, since his death in 1983, the movement founder’s relationship to Zionism has been debated. Some argue his vision was closer to cultural Zionism, a proposition offered by figures like the early-20th-century journalist Ahad Ha’am and the philosopher Martin Buber, who advocated a Jewish cultural revival in historic Palestine rather than an exclusivist Jewish state, and hoped for a shared Jewish/Arab society. “Kaplan adamantly disagreed with political Zionists’ concept of sh’lilat ha-golah (negation of the diaspora) and the idea that all Jews should live together in one ethnonational territory based on ethno-cultural uniformity,” wrote Rebecca Alpert, a Reconstructionist rabbi and professor of religion at Temple University, in a 2022 essay for the Reconstructionist online publication Evolve. Alpert writes that Kaplan and the movement he founded expressed concern for the political rights of all inhabitants of the land. As David Teutsch, a professor emeritus at the RRC, recounts in a 2016 essay for the movement website, in 1949 the Reconstructionist movement objected to the state’s adoption of the Star of David flag because it excluded Palestinian citizens.
This position evolved alongside Israel. After the Six-Day War in 1967, as American Jews rallied around the state, so did Reconstructionists—but the movement also housed figures who were critical of what would become an entrenched occupation in Gaza and the West Bank. As the years went on, Reconstructionist institutions continued both to attract dissenters on Israel, and to sometimes enforce the same political red lines as the rest of the community: In 1987, prominent progressive rabbi Arthur Waskow was fired from his position as a lecturer at the RRC after he criticized Israeli state policy in a press interview.
Since then, the school’s relationship with students’ Zionist politics has often appeared ambiguous. On the one hand, Brant Rosen, who founded the pioneering anti-Zionist synagogue Tzedek Chicago, graduated from the RRC in 1992, and the school awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2017. Many prominent anti-Zionist liturgical leaders have passed through the RRC’s doors, such as Alpert, who was among the first women rabbis ever ordained, and Alissa Wise, who worked for JVP for a decade and more recently formed Rabbis for Ceasefire in 2023. But many such leaders have been embattled while at the school. Wise said in an interview that she clashed with faculty during her time there, and during her senior year found that some of them were trying to get her expelled. A faculty committee demanded she make edits to a blog she kept while doing peace work alongside Palestinian partners in Israel, including telling her to mention “suicide bombers” in the text. In the end, she took the post down rather than change it. She received her ordination in 2009, and has never been invited back by the institution to speak or teach, as many graduates are.
Some students at the school have continued to report such experiences. May Ye, a 2022 graduate, told me that in her second year, she was pulled into a meeting with a faculty member where she was informed that some of her social media posts had been flagged by teachers as well as trustees of the school. (She subsequently found out from a school official that the posts in question had used the phrase “from the river to the sea.”) She was told that she would need to avoid posting inflammatory content related to Israel/Palestine, and would need to submit any political material to the school before posting. When she asked what would happen if she didn’t comply, a faculty member told her, “I really want you to become a rabbi, May,” which she took as a threat of expulsion. She spent the rest of the time at the school self-censoring, she told me. “I just lived in fear for five years. Are they going to see a photo of me at a Palestine protest and am I going to be censored or expelled from school?’” (Waxman said the RRC legally cannot speak to specific student or personnel issues, and declined to respond to specific claims made by students and alumni, though she wrote in an email that, in general, RRC faculty see it as their responsibility to train students in cultivating a public rabbinical identity that will help facilitate their career prospects. She added that “there are no policies restricting students’ right to free expression.”)
Despite such episodes, several past and current students told me that many anti-Zionist students still see the RRC as the only place they will be welcomed and ordained. “I knew that toeing the party line on Zionism was not something that I could do. And RRC offered a place with a known variety of opinions and [political] leanings and you weren’t to be kicked out because you were not a Zionist,” Iris, a second-year student who asked to use a pseudonym, said. “It was a critical portion of why I applied.” Indeed, students who speak honestly about their anti-Zionist beliefs in their entrance interviews are frequently accepted into the school. Louisa Solomon, who is currently in her fifth and final year, told me that she was asked in her interview if she knew about the school’s requirement that students study in Israel. She answered that she hoped by her fourth year Palestine would be free.
But since October 2023, some students have reckoned with the fact that the school’s acceptance does not translate to support. Anti-Zionist students were dismayed when, in spring 2024, the school laid off its only openly anti-Zionist professor, Linda Holtzman, from her part-time position as director of student life. (Holtzman is continuing to teach some classes at the school, Waxman said.) “Linda was a public face of anti-Zionism in the rabbinate. She would attend every protest. She would say things that needed to be said, as a rabbi,” Rivka, a fifth-year rabbinical student who asked to use a pseudonym, said. Holtzman’s dismissal “really decimated any respect or trust I had” in the RRC’s commitment to a “big-tent community,” said Sai Koros, a third-year student. “She was the only publicly anti-Zionist faculty and was beloved by everyone.” The school cited budgetary issues as the reason for eliminating Holtzman’s position, and Holtzman told me she believes that explanation, though students like Koros found it unsatisfying. But Holtzman also told me she had found herself facing more friction with the administration after Israel’s campaign in Gaza began: “No one was completely comfortable [with the situation before], but there was something kind of working, and then October 7th happened, and since then it’s really been hard,” she said.
Anti-Zionist students have also chafed against some of the school’s policies, including the mandatory study in Israel, a feature of most non-Orthodox rabbinical education. Today, the school requires students to attend a summer study program in Tel Aviv—cut down several years ago from a yearlong requirement—but students who are politically opposed to studying in Israel are regularly exempted from the requirement after claiming to have personal reason they can’t make the trip, like a disability or family needs. Some students I spoke to, however, complained that this meant that faculty tacitly encouraged them to lie instead of giving their true reason for not wanting to go. Waxman, in our conversation, said that the school remains committed to the Israel study program, which she defended as “not about propaganda” and said highlights a diverse set of voices, including the voices of Palestinians, Israeli peace activists, and Druze and Bedouin citizens of Israel. “[Israel] is the place where more than half of the Jewish population of the world lives,” she said. “If we take seriously our commitment to understand and to grapple with the lives and the aspirations of the worldwide Jewish population, that feels really essential to us.”
But anti-Zionist students have continued to push back. Jessica Rosenberg, a 2018 graduate, said that she and a few other students told the administration they wouldn’t go for political reasons, but that they all ended up having to claim an exemption for personal reasons. Rosenberg said she felt it “didn’t count” as a political protest because it didn’t change the policy. In spring 2023, Solomon and six other students wrote to the school encouraging it to rethink the requirement and expressing their intention not to submit individual exemption petitions. “We wanted to air the open secret that anti-Zionists don’t go to Israel,” Solomon told me. According to emails viewed by Jewish Currents, some faculty members seemed open to the conversation, but the process stagnated. In June 2024, with their ability to graduate on the line, Solomon and two others sent a joint exemption petition claiming “conscientious objection” to the requirement. “From our perspective, participating in tourism to the State of Israel is complicity in the normalization of colonialist and imperialist land theft, a racial apartheid system, and displacement of Palestinian people from their homeland,” they wrote, according to a copy of the petition shared with Jewish Currents, noting that their objections had “only become clearer to us this past year” since October 7th. Eventually, the school exempted all three students from the requirement due to “safety” concerns given the ongoing war.
Anti-Zionists have also struggled with the school’s aforementioned internship policy. Thirty percent of internships are funded by the RRC, according to Waxman. That money is prohibited from directly supporting anti-Zionist work. (For example, an email viewed by Jewish Currents about grants for internship projects that the RRC offers in partnership with the Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation Fund stated that the grant is “not able to fund projects oriented toward explicitly anti-Zionist goals.”) This policy has limited students’ options: Solomon, for example, had hoped to fulfill the requirement with a new Jewish education project she was in the midst of launching, called Liberation Limmud, but was unable to get funding because of its overt anti-Zionism. Waxman said that the policy reflects the views of the Reconstructionist donors who provide funding for internships. “The donor pool that supports the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, including scholarships and including internships, are ideological Reconstructionists,” she told me. “And ideological Reconstructionists who are actively funding the movement have a very expansive vision that makes space for anti-Zionists, but that does not promote anti-Zionism.”
Indeed, many of those interviewed said they believe the school’s official commitment to Zionism stems from the power of donors. “There’s a lot of fear about money and funding. There are a lot of conversations about, ‘Does the board and do major funders know how anti-Zionist the students are?’” said Eli Dewitt, who graduated from the school last year. Reconstructing Judaism’s annual financial report for 2023 showed that the cost of training rabbis exceeds the revenue from tuition, meaning that the movement relies on other sources of revenue, including donor contributions, to keep the school going. Waxman confirmed in an email that the school’s budget is “heavily subsidized by our community” of Reconstructionist donors.
Such donor concerns have escalated since October 2023. Two days before graduation last May, former RRC students Talia Werber and Steven Goldstein wrote in The Forward that they were “forced to resign” due to the school’s overwhelming anti-Zionism. They said their “final straw” was that the Reconstructionist Student Association made a $1,000 donation to the Black Jewish Liberation Collective, which has characterized Israel’s actions as settler colonialism, apartheid, and genocide on social media. They were especially upset about what they described as Waxman’s acceptance of the anti-Zionist positions of these emerging rabbis. (In her response in The Forward, Waxman reiterated that the RRC stands “in solidarity with Israelis” but that the school would “not impose a litmus test around our positions on Israel.”) The op-ed took off in the Jewish press. In a representative piece in the right-wing Jerusalem Post, the historian Asaf Romirowsky decried “institutions like the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College” for having “transformed themselves into Anti-Zionist mills.” According to students I spoke to, the Forward article was also much-discussed at the RRC, with rumors swirling of donors considering pulling money from the school and congregations threatening to leave the movement over the perception that the college had become a hotbed of anti-Zionism. Waxman told me that the “perception” that the RRC is churning out anti-Zionist rabbis is “incredibly damaging”: “There are people within the movement and beyond, including in the institutional funding world, and in the press, who paint us with a broad brushstroke in ways that threaten the well-being and the future of the Reconstructionist movement,” she said.
In simply allowing anti-Zionists to exist publicly within its ranks, the RRC has made itself more open to dissenting voices than most Jewish organizations. But many wonder whether any institution can continue to hold together Zionists and anti-Zionists in the same ethical and spiritual project. “It’s temporarily possible, but it’s not sustainable,” Rosen, the Tzedek Chicago rabbi, said. “I don’t know how you find common ground with these two ways of being Jewish.” Reconstructing Judaism has tried to strike a balance by remaining Zionist while including critical voices: A recent December plenary on Israel included anti-Zionists and highlighted some people involved in Palestine solidarity organizing. But the movement’s overarching politics still circumscribe the conversation. For example, Havaya, the youth camp for the movement, prohibits calling Palestinians “terrorists” and “barbaric,” but it also bans the terms “apartheid,” “colonialist,” and “genocide,” along with any “questions about Israel’s right to exist.”
Many of those I interviewed said they hoped to see the RRC lean into the politics held by a plurality of students, offering equal infrastructural support for anti-Zionists and backing away from its Zionist policies. Practically, sources say, such a change might include revising the movement’s official Progressive Zionist position, dropping the Israel requirement, leaving the World Zionist Congress, and instituting universal internship funding that also supports anti-Zionist projects. “The fact of the matter is that there are a lot of folks who will not affiliate themselves with an institution that is officially Zionist,” Iris told me. Waxman made it clear that she doesn’t see any such shift on the horizon. Reconstructionism “evolves” when there is an overwhelming amount of belief in the community that change must happen, she said. Though she acknowledged the striking generational change in attitudes about Israel, she does not believe that the movement is currently at such a tipping point. “I know that you’ve talked to a lot of people, but I’ve talked to literally thousands and thousands and thousands of Reconstructionists,” she told me.
That means that the RRC and its many non- and anti-Zionist students may remain caught in much the same dynamic in the near term. There is no officially non-Zionist option for non-Orthodox aspiring rabbis. And the RRC likely wouldn’t have enough students to keep its doors open if it shunned those with leftist politics, especially given the rabbi shortage across all liberal Jewish denominations. “It’s perceived as a buyer’s market. There’s not enough students, so schools are reluctant to draw clearer ideological boundaries that require their students to adhere to” [sic], Shalom Hartman Institute of North America president Yehuda Kurtzer told Jewish Insider last February. The RRC also wants to maintain its reputation for being open to a diversity of opinions.
As a result, the school is continually graduating students who may find themselves misaligned with the broader movement when they enter the workforce. “Most of the rabbis who are willing to speak out as anti-Zionist don’t have work in the Jewish community,” says Alpert, an assessment that many current and former students echoed. As a result, some RRC graduate students have created new anti-Zionist Jewish projects: Dewitt, for example, started a “diasporic, anti-Zionist summer camp” out of the synagogue Makom in North Carolina, which was founded by another recent RRC graduate. Others have struggled to make it work. Ye started her career at the anti-Zionist Mending Minyan in New Haven, Connecticut, but ended up having to take a non-rabbinic position at a Reconstructionist synagogue, since her congregation was not large enough to pay a sustainable wage.
Still, anti-Zionists in the movement are holding out hope for change. With the rising generation of young Jews sharply divided over Zionism, they argue, the very thing that frightens Reconstructionist institutions could actually ensure their future: They could become the primary alternative for Jews who feel abandoned by other denominations and shut out of synagogue life. “It’s not just survival—it’s actually where the Jewish community is going,” Wise said. Anti-Zionists say they are fighting for the future of the movement: “I actually love the RRC. I want to see it survive this moment of calamity and change. And I would be devastated if it stopped training new rabbis,” said Ariana Katz, who graduated in 2018 and now leads the congregation Hinenu Baltimore, which holds an explicit commitment to Palestinian liberation. Holtzman, for her part, told me she believes that Kaplan would no longer be a Zionist if alive today. The Reconstructionist vision of Judaism holds out the possibility that tradition can transform; from the beginning, Kaplan’s philosophy incorporated the notion of revision and even rejection as foundational parts not only of Reconstructionism, but of Judaism itself. Students argue that rejecting one path can open up another. “Ultimately, I hope the movement decides to stop taking a position on Zionism and puts energy into identifying and building relationships with people who are interested in supporting anti- and non-Zionist inclusion and community building,” said Anna Coufal, a third-year rabbinic student. “Will it? I don’t know.”
A previous version of this article stated that the RRC's budget is subsidized in part by dues from Reconstructing Judaism’s member congregations; in fact, both the school and the services that congregations receive from Reconstructing Judaism are subsidized by donors. The article has also been updated to clarify that Alissa Wise has never been invited to speak at the RRC by the institution itself (though she has returned to speak at the invitation of an individual class).