After October 7th, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) led many of the first protests against Israel’s genocidal violence in Gaza. These visible, powerful actions in support of Palestinian liberation were easily identifiable by participants’ t-shirts: oversized and black, reading “Not In Our Name” and “Jews Say Ceasefire Now.” And yet, many non-Jews joined these actions, complicating their claim on Jewish representation. On February 26th, 2024, for example, Euphoria actress Hunter Schafer, daughter of a Presbyterian minister, was photographed at Grand Central Station sitting in front of a banner that read “Jews to Biden: Stop Arming Genocide.” In recognition of the many non-Jews who have joined JVP actions since October 2023, or perhaps anticipating a contradiction, JVP quickly produced t-shirts that read solely “Ceasefire Now,” distributing them to participants before actions with the awkward question, “Jewish or ally?”

But as the “ally” t-shirt ensured a visible Jewish presence, and eliminated cases of mistaken identity, it also elided some compelling political implications. Even if largely unintentional, the spectacle of non-Jewish protesters in the United States proclaiming “Not In Our Name” hints at an understanding of the crucial material relationship between the state of Israel and the complicity of American citizens in this support. As such, early protests following October 7th led by Jewish groups like JVP and IfNotNow (INN) represented an opportunity to steer Jewish efforts for Palestinian solidarity in a direction that was not explicitly Jewish in composition, but American.

As the Israeli assault on Gaza ground on, however, these movements—which are among the most organized and active in the Palestine solidarity sphere—have continued to emphasize an exceptional moral responsibility for Jews, as Jews. For the last year, we’ve seen protests organized around Jewish holidays and public Jewish ritual, alongside signs with slogans that begin: “Jews say . . .” This focus is understandable: After all, the Jewish affiliations of such groups are embedded in their names. But to double down on an explicit connection between Jewishness and Zionism—even in an attempt to counter Zionism’s appropriation of Judaism—is to reify the misplaced belief that all Jews are complicit in the actions of Israel simply because they are Jewish. Even as Jewish left movements insist that it is essential to draw a distinction between Judaism and Zionism, in effect their approach often suggests that Zionism’s power is rooted primarily in Jewish communities, rather than in its relationship to the material processes of capital and geopolitics.

The late cultural and political theorist Mark Fisher coined the term “capitalist realism” to describe what feels like the sheer impossibility of imagining an alternative to capitalism. In our current age, resistance to capitalism has drifted away from visions of new futures and towards an acceptance of its core premises; the acquiescence to a world materially ordered around the concept of “monetary value” subsumes past, present, and future within its logic. Thought and action are constrained as capitalism comes to seem a natural and obvious existence.

Borrowing from this concept, one might say that Jewish organizing for Palestine, in seeking to offer visible Jewish support for Palestinian liberation through a framework that understands diasporic Jews as fundamentally entangled with Israel’s violent actions, have long practiced a kind of “Zionist realism.” This approach prevents Jews—and the broader public—from imagining a world outside of Zionism’s claim that the state of Israel and Jews everywhere are inherently connected. Moreover, it may overemphasize Jewishness as a site of complicity at the expense of other axes of complicity, most importantly one’s position as an American, or, more specifically, one’s employment at complicit entities like arms manufacturers or in government offices.

To be sure, groups like INN and JVP have been very successful at mobilizing Jews to challenge American support for Israel. JVP, in particular, sees its work as part of an effort to “build a Judaism beyond Zionism”—a notion that speaks to a potential path out of Zionist realism through the development of a positive, affirmative vision for Jewish life outside of its logic. But as it stands, “Judaism beyond Zionism,” is only a slogan, and the Jewish left as a whole has yet to articulate a project that is not just the negation of Zionism. Instead, the mobilization of American Jews around a conception of our unique responsibility to oppose the Israeli government entangles the anti-Zionist Jewish left in an overbroad definition of Jewish peoplehood that necessarily centers the state of Israel. It is what the anti-Zionist Reform Rabbi Elmer Berger referred to as a “convenient generalization,” an abstraction that cannot hold when confronted with “the reality of its diversities.”

This is less a critique of INN and JVP’s methods, whose campaigns and analyses often illustrate their deep awareness of precisely these dynamics, than an attempt to name the questions and contradictions which bedevil Jewish left organizing. Given the broad-based accommodation among all sectors of American society to an even more aggressive repression under Donald Trump, it may be time for Jewish organizers to rethink how Zionism has shaped our understanding of Jewishness, and thus our understanding of the threat we are trying to fight. What ultimately matters is not an abstract notion of Zionism as a totalizing spiritual contaminant upon the Jewish people, but the ways in which American Jews, alongside all other Americans, hold multiple kinds of material relationships to Israel. To escape Zionist realism means prioritizing a material understanding of both American complicity with Israeli violence and a positive vision for a “Judaism beyond Zionism” that fundamentally rejects the notion that Jews act as one uniform, univocal community.

What ultimately matters is not an abstract notion of Zionism as a totalizing spiritual contaminant upon the Jewish people, but the ways in which American Jews, alongside all other Americans, hold multiple kinds of material relationships to Israel.

The “Zionist consensus” in American Jewish life is a relatively new phenomenon: Historians often point to Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six-Day War as the beginning of the “Zionization” of American Jews. The war galvanized Jewish pride in Israel’s military prowess and broad identification with the state at the precise moment when many in the American Jewish community, inspired by Black nationalism and dissatisfied with establishment liberal Judaism, began to conceive of Jewishness as a form of ethnic identity. Starting in the 1970s, Jewish institutional life took on an increasingly Zionist character, with even historically non-Zionist organizations like the Reform Movement officially codifying Zionism into its platform in 1997. In her recent book, Threshold of Dissent, historian Marjorie N. Feld has noted that this consensus was manufactured from the top-down, with Jewish leaders, historians, and others historicizing the modern Jewish experience such that Israel was conceived of “as a natural and uncomplicated response to modernity and to the realities of antisemitism and the Holocaust.” Jewish critics of Zionism were repeatedly marginalized and alternative visions for Jewish life increasingly suppressed. Today, there is no major mainstream Jewish institution that is not firmly operating as a purveyor of Zionism. Federations, synagogues, non-profits, and the other institutional pillars of the Jewish community continue to offer material support to Israel and enforce loyalty to the state, while punishing those who criticize Israel and erasing non- or anti-Zionist Jewish histories from the record.

Both JVP and INN understand their appeal to Jewish identity as a strategic response to this reality: Jews visibly identifying themselves in opposition to Israeli apartheid as Jews sends a powerful message, showing Jewish communities and the world that not all Jews support Israel’s actions, and contesting the political discourse that offers Jews as justification for the machinations of empire. Their approach also seeks to acknowledge that many American Jews do maintain ties to friends and family in Israel, while refusing Israel as the representative of global Jewry. Yet many anti-Zionist Jewish organizers also frame this strategy as a response to a unique, overarching Jewish complicity in the oppression of Palestinians.

As suggested by the brief history offered above, it is true that the majority of Jewish institutions, leadership, and clergy are complicit. But American Jewish institutions are profoundly undemocratic. American Jewish leaders are not elected but appointed, often serving an enormously powerful donor class intent on enforcing conformity. It is not Jews in the abstract, then, who ideologically drive institutional life, but those with the power and capital to choose its leaders. As scholar Benjamin Balthaser notes in an articleinHistorical Materialism, centering the Jewish establishment in a discussion of Jewish life tends “to flatten Jewish experience into an expression only of large—if quite powerful—Jewish institutions.” It also flattens representations of the diversity of the Jewish rank-and-file. For example, a recent report from the Jim Joseph Foundation found that one of the greatest predictors of Jewish student support for Israel is class background, wherein “students from wealthier families are much more supportive of a Jewish state than those from less wealthy families.” Religious affiliation also plays a role, as 67% of Jews who practice “no religion”—people who identify as culturally or ethnically Jewish but who do not describe Judaism as their religion, and who compose nearly a third of the Jewish population in the US—say “they have little in common with Israel,” according to a 2022 Pew poll.

The Jewish left frequently emphasizes Jewish leadership’s lack of legitimacy in these terms: “Despite ever-increasing grassroots Jewish support for equality, justice, and human rights for all people, these undemocratic Jewish institutions and leaders claim to speak for us,” the INN website proclaims. But they still retain the habit of conflating Jews in the abstract with Jewish institutions. This speaks to a broader tendency that seeks to implicate all Jews en masse, regardless of individual ties to Israel, or lack thereof. This generalization of Jewish collective complicity has consistently structured the messaging of American Jewish anti-occupation organizing. Take for example, an October 2024 editorial written by Rabbi Linda Holtzman, a member of the JVP Rabbinical Council, which uses the context of a Yom Kippur confessional to “admit complicity” in the genocide in Palestine: “In our name—our Jewish name—the United States continues to send billions of dollars to the Israeli military government.” INN uses similar language when they say, in a statement on their website, “As we were dehumanized by the oppression we faced, we are now dehumanized by that which we inflict.” The specific Jewish subjects encompassed in collective pronouns like “we” and “our” are never identified—presumably ranging from a recent convert to an anti-Zionist Hasidic rebbe to some of the largest AIPAC donors. In the absence of specificity, “we” becomes all Jews.

To their credit, both INN and JVP have noted that complicity is also rooted in one’s American identity. Both groups have mobilized members around campaigns to end the “blank check” to Israel, and JVP was instrumental in leading the successful Deadly Exchange campaign to stop training programs between American police departments and the Israeli army. JVP has also offered a thoughtful analysis of how Israel serves as an outpost of American hegemony, noting on their website that “Israel is a core pillar of US dominance in the Middle East” and pointing out the material interests that “drive continued US support for Israel.” But, this begs the question, if the issue is ultimately one of material American interests, why particularize it into one of Jewish complicity?

To speak of the complicity of “our community”—as if there is one American Jewish community and not many—is to reify a false understanding of Jewish peoplehood contingent on our absolute intertwinement with one another and with the Jewish state. The public declaration of the slogan “Not In My Name” becomes necessary only when we understand Jews as a monolith. By the same logic, every Jew who does not exclaim “Not In My Name” becomes complicit and must respond publicly as a Jew. The emphasis on public Jewish dissent does not actually dispel the myth of Israel’s ability to speak for all Jews so much as reinforce the perception that Jewish American Zionism is the core of the state’s imperial power. Meanwhile, it traps anti-Zionist Jews in the mire of a public, self-abnegating politics of shame—a shame predicated on exaggerating the centrality of Jews to American Zionism.

The public declaration of the slogan “Not In My Name” becomes necessary only when we understand Jews as a monolith.

As such, it may be time for those of us on the Jewish left who have shed residual support for Israel—or who never expressed such support in the first place—to forcefully assert that the most relevant identities we hold in regards to Palestinian liberation are not our Jewish ones but our American ones. It is our American tax dollars that purchase the bombs used by the Israeli military to flatten Gaza, annihilating entire family lines. It is our presidents—the same ones elected by our gentile neighbors—who are unwavering in their support of Israel, who continue the unimpeded flow of arms and unconditional support for Israel in international fora like the UN. It was president Biden who stated time and again that even if the Jewish state didn’t exist, “we’d have to invent one.” It’s our current president, meanwhile, who has fully advocated for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, posting unhinged AI images depicting Gaza as a gaudy beachside resort for Americans and Israelis. Most terrifyingly, it is our governmental agencies, the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who are currently disappearing legal residents who have advocated for Palestine.

We rush to our Jewish identities to decry the murder of Palestinians, but the American empire’s support for Israel is rooted in geopolitics and the global capital of the arms trade, not a love for Jews. Jewish people in power in the United States may largely be Zionists, but this does not speak to the power of Jews, but the alignment between Zionist ideology and imperialism. Adherence to Zionism is a prerequisite for holding many positions of power in the US, for Jews and non-Jews alike. Hence the growing phenomenon of non-Jewish Zionists like Congressman Ritchie Torres, who have built power precisely by aligning support for Israel with progressive Democratic policies. Zionist evangelical organizations like Christians United for Israel—whose 10 million members outnumber all American Jews—are often downplayed in the discussion. In her recent book on the Christian right, Wild Faith, journalist Talia Lavin details how the most extreme Israel policies of the George W. Bush and Donald Trump administrations were crafted specifically at the behest of evangelical leaders, with Trump boasting in 2018 that moving the American embassy to Jerusalem was “for the evangelicals.”

This is not to say that Jews should stop showing up as Jews for Palestine. And in no way is this an argument for the Jewish left to pause its work. That would be both unstrategic and immoral. It is not the fault of Jewish groups that there is no cohesive, mass anti-war movement in the US, and it is a credit to them that they have managed to build some of the most visible, organized, and popular spaces across the country for Palestinian solidarity. Indeed, the presence of non-Jews at Jewish-led actions is a testament to the exceptional and consistent organizing work done by those in JVP. However, this moment offers an opportunity for the Jewish left to shift their focus outward, pushing for a movement that asks every American to struggle against genocide—not only Jews. Refocusing on how all Americans are co-opted into a systemic participation in genocide, and refining messaging to that end, offers a potent material understanding of our complicity that cannot be opposed except through collective action.

Turning away from the Zionist realist framework embedded in left Jewish strategy will have the added benefit of refocusing Jewish life away from Israel, even in opposition. In a conversation in Jacobin in early 2024, scholar Shaul Magid explained how even among Jewish left activists, “Israel is the center of their Jewish identity. But . . . as a critique.” Such an approach may offer a strategic platform, but it runs the risk of instrumentalizing Jewish identity, reducing it to an oppositional relationship with Israel that it can never transcend. Thinking beyond this framework is vital if we are to develop a material analysis that accounts for American Jewish life in all its diversity and contradictions. This work has perhaps already begun at the anti-Zionist Tzedek Chicago congregation, led by the co-founder of the JVP Rabbinical Council, Rabbi Brant Rosen. Rosen shared that Tzedek Chicago’s anti-Zionism is often defined not by its content, but its context. “This is a place where you can be your authentic Jewish self, even if it is a boilerplate Shabbat service,” he said. The intentional absence of Zionism, rather than its presence, even as an object of perpetual critique, may represent the most vital mode by which to decenter Israel. It is only once we’ve achieved this distance that we can begin to articulate a new imaginary, a new basis for the creation of our own institutions, communities, and political organizations—spiritual and secular—fully detached from national identity.

Towards the end of his monograph on capitalist realism, Mark Fisher argues that an effective anticapitalism cannot solely be a reaction to capital; it must be its rival. The Jewish left cannot be effective as long as it continues to labor under the auspices of Zionist realism, failing to interrogate how the presuppositions of Zionism have shaped our ways of thinking. This means that our approach to Palestinian liberation must move beyond just a notion of our own complicity toward an understanding that Zionism is fundamentally opposed to the world we desire. In a feature on the Palestinian American historian Rashid Khalidi published last fall in the Guardian, Khalidi emphasized his American identity as much as his Palestinian one: “The US gives Israel the green light . . . That is what drives me as an American. I am not just at this because I am a Palestinian. It is because I am an American. Because we are responsible.” His comments provide a model for Jewish organizers, too, in this moment. If we can tear down the curtain of Zionist realism, we can uncover the alternatives—and the movement—currently out of sight.