Bandwagon ‘Activism,’ Uncritical Thinking, and the Ostracism of Jews in the Name of Progressive Anti-Zionism

• In Event: In the Wake of October 7

Abstract

This paper explores how the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas changed the positionality of Jewish progressives in the United States. It has been shown that left-leaning American Jews were suddenly viewed as politically conservative, right-wing, and even extremist by the same organizations they had supported and advocated for just days earlier. Many progressive activists and organizations, especially on college and university campuses, condemned Israel and shared anti-Zionist messages before Israel had even responded militarily to the massacre. The progressive left’s refusal to see the Israel-Palestine conflict as anything but a demagogic (Roberts-Miller, 2017) “with us or against us” binary has left American Jews in a state of existential flux. The purpose of this presentation is to examine the progressives’ reactionary, uncritical stance during the current Israel-Palestine conflict (Berkovits, 2019; Stogner, 2019), the place of American Jews in the changing sociopolitical spectrum, and implicaions for American Jews and progressive solidarity in the future.
This paper draws upon rhetorical analysis informed by conceptual frameworks of critical pedagogy, critical whiteness, and antisemitism studies, from both academic texts and current news articles, in order to analyze the progressive stance during the current Israel-Palestine conflict and the place of American Jews in the changing sociopolitical spectrum.
This paper will contribute to scholarship in the field because it identifies four interrelated dynamics prevalent among the U.S. Progressive Left since the October 7th attacks and resultant war in Israel and Gaza that serve, intentionally or incidentally, to isolate Jewish progressives, especially in academic spaces, from their presumed ideological peers (Leifer, 2023). These dynamics are an uncritical bandwagon “activism,” symbolic solidarity, binary thinking, and a misunderstanding of the Israel-Palestine conflict informed by privilege, distance, and reductive applications of a U.S. racial discourse that does not account for Jewish identities (see Biale et al., 1998; Blumenfeld, 2006; Grayson, 2023; Kaye/Kantrowitz, 2007). To illustrate and explicate these dynamics with greater detail and specificity, we consider the rhetorical operations that sustain each dynamic. As progressive Jewish scholars and educators, our intent is to shine a spotlight on the hypocrisy of modern progressive movements that exclude American Jews in the name of anti-Zionism. This paper was co-authored by Daniel Ian Rubin.

Author

• Mara Lee Grayson, Hillel International - Campus Climate Initiative