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Confessions of a Reformed Anti-Zionist

(Times of Israel) Zahava Feldstein - I grew up with 16 years of American Jewish day school. At seventeen, I stood on the train tracks of Auschwitz wrapped in an Israeli flag, convinced that Jewish survival deserved any cost. When I arrived at college, my professors taught me that Zionism is a colonial project, depicted Jews as European interlopers, and described Israel's existence as dependent on the continual subjugation of Palestinians. So I walked away. First from Zionism, then from Judaism itself. At that point, I thought I had liberated my conscience. In truth, I had only hollowed it out. In my mind at the time, rejecting Zionism and recognizing my "privilege" equaled solidarity with the oppressed. Really, though, I was living in a borrowed story - a story written by others, for whom Jewish pain is always suspect, Jewish safety always provisional. After Oct. 7, while enrolled as a PhD student at Stanford, I experienced firsthand how quickly "political anti-Zionism" slips into irrefutable Jew-hatred. I lived it. I am trained in critical race theory, ethnic studies, and Jewish and Middle Eastern history. Most Stanford classmates measured my solidarity by my willingness to endorse the murder of Jews, the rape of Jewish women, and the immediate dissolution of the Jewish state as necessary for the project of "decolonizing Palestine." To my classmates (and quite a few professors), to mourn the loss of Jewish lives was invalid - the selfish conspiracy of an oppressor. The same progressive thinkers who demanded I acknowledge complexity in every other struggle refused to grant even a fraction of that nuance to Jewish experience. They interpreted my attempts to humanize Jews as proof of my complicity in empire and racism. My classmates assured me that unless I was in agreement that Jews deserve to be murdered in the fight for "Palestinian liberation," I would never belong in their intellectual community. Being a Jew has always meant refusing to abandon our inheritance simply because it makes others uncomfortable. I am no longer willing to apologize for being a Jew. I have come back to my community, not because it is flawless, but because it is mine. And I will never again let anyone tell me that loving my people is something I must outgrow. The writer is Director of Academic Partnerships and Network Engagement at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP).
2025-07-13 00:00:00
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