The Millennial Jewish Left: An Insider’s History

Abe Silberstein

June 30, 2025

My story on the Jewish Left began shortly before the first election of Donald Trump in 2016, as I was finishing an internship at the World Jewish Congress. During that fateful summer, I was a rather proud American (neo)liberal. I had eagerly supported Hillary Clinton in the just-finished Democratic primary and was looking forward to a Democratic administration unencumbered by even the thin strand of suspicion toward American exceptionalism embodied by outgoing deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes. Trump was, of course, a vulgarian who represented the final cry of the white reactionary movement launched on right-wing talk radio during the Clinton years and peaked with the “Tea Party” movement in 2010. The orange menace would be quickly dispatched by the diverse coalition that had re-elected Barack Obama in 2012.

But there was an exception to my embrace of Clintonian liberalism, one that was and remains rather close to my heart: Israel/Palestine. No matter how much easier it would have made my professional and personal life, I could not countenance the catechisms of the “special relationship” and justify Israel’s domination over the Palestinians. Whatever else I believed, my position on Israel/Palestine placed me on the Jewish Left.

My upbringing was unusual for a member of the millennial Jewish Left. As Orthodox Jews somewhere to the right of Yeshiva University, my parents never identified with Zionism due to its perceived secularity. Nevertheless, they were pro-Israel chauvinists. It was an unsophisticated matter. “The Arabs” were our hardened enemies, as evil if not worse than the Nazis; had it not been for “miracles” in 1948 and 1967, the Holocaust – not a contingent series of events that began and ended in the 1940s, but a perpetual onto-historical stalker of the Jews – would have repeated itself. Against this crude worldview, even the mild liberalism of the New York Times and PBS Newshour will appear thoroughly revelatory if not radical. From there I eventually found my way to more trenchant and extensive critiques of the Israeli occupation. In college, I drifted toward J Street U, the student arm of the “pro-Israel, pro-peace” lobby, which allowed me to express my growing disenchantment with Israel while identifying as a leftist Zionist.

The significance of J Street U in the formative years of the millennial Jewish Left should not be understated. The first generation of J Street U leaders went on to create and shape the institutions of the Jewish Left as we know them today. J Street U alumni Simone Zimmerman and Yonah Lieberman co-founded IfNotNow in the summer of 2014, in protest of Israel’s war in Gaza, as others drifted further left into Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), a legacy of Bay Area 90s liberalism that, while always to the left of J Street, had only very recently become unambiguously anti-Zionist; and later to the revived Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) beginning in 2017. The latter was the backdrop to another J Street alumnus, Jacob Plitman, assuming control of Jewish Currents in 2018 from outgoing publisher Lawrence Bush. Dozens of J Street U alumni filled these organizations as volunteers, organizers, and writers When Eric Alterman neatly divides the institutional American Jewish community into the “legacy” establishment organizations, the “Next Generation” majority represented by J Street and allied liberal Zionists, and the “far right and left,” he misses the porous border between liberal Zionists and groups to their left. The assistant to the CEO of a liberal Zionist organization is a member of a “far-left” group, and this is more often than not an open secret.

J Street U students were always to the left of the organization’s leadership and the relationship was sometimes uneasy. I distinctly remember, at the 2013 J Street conference in Washington, students vigorously applauding a Fatah official who called for Palestinian right of return to Israel. The right-wing Jewish press seized on this to paint the entire organization as crypto anti-Zionists, but what they in fact stumbled on was a familiar division between the young and middle-aged. When then-Vice President Joe Biden gave an AIPAC-style speech at that conference, he received polite applause from the elders – the “kids” were mostly bored, not outraged. 

In my late teens and early twenties, I was only ever on the outskirts of this world. At Hunter College, where I earned my undergraduate degree, there was no J Street U chapter and most Jewish students were either Orthodox or from families who immigrated to the United States from the former Soviet Union. Neither demographic was favorable to progressive politics, let alone active opposition to the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. I made most of my J Street U connections through Twitter, and many have become close friends and comrades in the years since. But my relationship with them was uneasy for several years in the mid-2010s. In my determination to be a public-facing lefty Zionist, I sought to differentiate myself from the Jewish Left activists who were drifting away from both Zionism and the two-state solution. 

On social media, regrettably, I often played the role of a finger-wagging scold. I naively believed the American Jewish establishment was slowly awakening to what Israel had become by its own hand and agency in the occupied territories: a colonial pariah in a post-colonial world. The critique of the establishment advanced by Peter Beinart, whose institutional form J Street assumed, had been heard and understood. Surely there would come a time when they would support US pressure to end the occupation. I figured the growing ranks and influence of J Street were a sign of the times, and the brash and confrontational tactics of IfNotNow were misguided in their aim to force a polarization against the hawks on the Jewish right that would make the position of J Street untenable.

But disillusionment was not far away. In the summer of 2016, in what is now a largely forgotten episode, the Movement for Black Lives released a platform that included a claim that Israel was committing genocide against Palestinians. Two years after the police killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement was still organizing and had a steady presence in the headlines as Trump sealed the Republican nomination. Perhaps sensing a reprise of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee’s anti-Israel turn after the 1967 war, mainstream American Jewish leaders condemned the group, with the more liberal grandees adding that they were nevertheless committed to BLM. Although I was not yet fully on board with the Jewish Left, I shared their visceral commitment to not making the same mistake our parents’ generation of American Jews made. Not literally my parents, of course – as Orthodox Jews from the outerboroughs, their former classmates were more likely to populate the ranks of the Jewish Defense League than any civil rights organization. But I slowly came to identify with the alienated offspring of suburbia, who I had once mocked for politicizing their shitty summer camp experiences. Unlike our parents, we would not abandon “the movement.”

Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 seemingly upended me. Despite being squarely in the liberal resistance camp, in retrospect about as “out there” as Anne Applebaum, I felt radicalized. I was not going to allow Trump to be “normalized.” Not even two weeks after the election, I attended my first protest, outside the Grand Hyatt in Midtown Manhattan, where it was rumored (wrongly, as it happened) that Steve Bannon would address the annual dinner of the right-wing Zionist Organization of America (ZOA). The next day, I wrote the following grandiloquent screed in the left-wing Israeli daily Ha’aretz:

The Trump presidency has not even begun and yet the wheels of normalization are turning apace. Like some of their colleagues in Europe, the extreme elements of the alt-right will soon realize it is in their best interests to tone down anti-Semitism and focus their hatred on more vulnerable groups. Some might even find a latent love for Zionism and Israel. The temptation to appease rather than confront them will be great.

And the response from Jews of conscience and decency to Jewish organizations must be clear: They are not to be invited to your offices, galas, and conferences. If they are, we will stand outside and state clearly who these people really are. If that makes them our enemies, we should be proud.

The protest had been organized by IfNotNow. After two years of lightly sniping at these activists from the sidelines, I was ready to make my peace with them. In June 2017, I was trained as a volunteer and joined their impressive network of over 1,000 activists throughout the country. My experience as a freelance writer made me a natural fit for the national communications team, which I joined shortly after. 

An important fact to highlight about IfNotNow – one that remains relevant even today – is its historically steadfast agnosticism on Zionism, on the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS), and on any particular political “solution” (i.e., one state or two) to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This was a key distinction between IfNotNow and JVP, which just prior to the Trump years had endorsed BDS and formally oriented itself around anti-Zionism. To pro-Israel Jews facing protests and criticism from IfNotNow, this was a distinction without a difference, a cynical ploy to win over liberal Reform Jews who wouldn’t be comfortable with the anti-Zionist JVP. But having been on the inside, I can attest that keeping a healthy distance from JVP was a genuine priority for IfNotNow leaders. It was reiterated frequently in explicit terms. I recall being taken to task by a prominent founding member for accidentally retweeting a JVP petition from the national IfNotNow Twitter account. Today, IfNotNow and JVP will openly organize together, but these fundamental differences remain. 

The pragmatism of IfNotNow stems in part from origins in J Street U but also its incubation in the Momentum model of organizing, which “shifts popular opinion by engaging people where they’re at—moving them towards agreeing with what the movement is fighting for and taking action as part of the movement.” In other words, IfNotNow did not spurn the liberal Zionist bloc of the American Jewish community. In fact, they were the target of our messaging, being the parents, aunts, and uncles of the IfNotNow membership. The protests, sit-ins, and public letters were meant to make the status quo centrist establishment position – yes to a highly restricted Palestinian state, maybe in the future, totally on Israel’s terms – as morally untenable as that of the white moderate Martin Luther King deplored in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail. 

We aimed to polarize, to give the liberal Reform and Conservative Jew the following choice: the anti-occupation camp or Sheldon Adelson and his heavily subsidized network of right-wing Orthodox media and institutions. To this end, the election of Trump, almost universally loathed by liberal Jews, was a major boost to our prospects within the community. Certainly, there were individual members who wanted to push IfNotNow further left, including those who sought to transform it into a Palestine solidarity organization, but they never gained much influence. The overwhelming majority of members, at least in my estimation, were committed to effecting change from within the community. 

Of the unjust slurs these activists have endured from pro-Israel commentators over the years, maybe the most ignorant is that they are “assimilated” young Jews deracinated from their traditions. In many cases, in fact, the very opposite is true. Their parents gave them the best Jewish education available. Many attended Jewish day schools and summer camps. They left for college (typically the best ones in the country) as the crème de la crème and pride of their communities, with most maintaining strong ties to their families and childhood Jewish institutions. This is what made them such effective and threatening activists. They could in no way be dismissed as malcontents, at least not by those who actually bothered to learn anything about them. If a Jewish establishment organization called the cops on protesters sitting in the lobby, they risked having arrested the child, grandchild, niece, or nephew of a major donor. (What usually happened is that the building’s management company called the police, which gave us the pictures we wanted but also an easy out to the targeted organizations.)

At its height, IfNotNow was what we might call an integrated opposition group. I worked for the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ) at the time, and our office provided a modest contingent of cadres. One of my colleagues was actually encouraged by a major URJ leader to join IfNotNow so that the Reform leadership would have a direct channel to the group. In his landmark 2010 essay for the New York Review of Books, Peter Beinart wrote of how “for several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.” Perhaps an unstated assumption was that these young Jews would turn away from the door and make a beeline towards secular American leftism. Instead, after checking our Zionism, we tried to pry that door right open. We succeeded to a remarkable degree, at least for a moment.

What became apparent during the early days of the first Trump administration was the lack of a significant progressive media outlet targeted towards American Jews. The English edition of Ha’aretz served those who were primarily interested in news and opinion about Israel, with the occasional essays by diaspora Jews. The Forward’s English edition, though founded by the neoconservative writer Seth Lipsky in the 1990s, was still a reliably liberal publication under the editorship of Jane Eisner. After Batya Ungar-Sargon became opinion editor in the resistance ferment of 2017, The Forward began publishing more radical Jewish voices, including those of non-white Jews challenging prevailing pieties of both a predominantly liberal and white community. 

In less than two years however, this new milieu imploded after Ungar-Sargon heedlessly engaged in a lengthy Twitter brawl with Rep. Ilhan Omar in the immediate wake of her infamous “all about the Benjamins” tweet, setting her on the path to her now better known exploits as a Trump-boosting pundit. I was a regular contributor to The Forward as this was all going down, and I regularly received messages asking why I continued my association. I wish I’d had a more high-minded justification than “they pay well for the product,” but at least it was candid.

But the more important development in the Jewish media sphere during this time was the generational handover of Jewish Currents, a storied publication once-affiliated with the Communist Party USA that had long drifted into irrelevance. As recounted in a recent New Yorker article about the magazine, editor Lawrence Bush had put out a call for young Jewish writers and editors to take over the magazine. Jacob Plitman answered and brought with him a host of J Street U alumni and young leftist Jewish writers. Transforming a publication that had adopted a more-or-less progressive Zionist stance – critical of most Israeli governments but never doubting the justice of the national cause – Jewish Currents all but officially became an anti-Zionist magazine under its new leadership. While the hiring of Peter Beinart as editor and publisher on the eve of the pandemic might have been interpreted by some as a signal of moderation, any such expectation was soon shattered. In what may well prove to have been the most consequential act of reckoning in that long hot summer of 2020, Beinart announced his abandonment of the two-state solution and political Zionism.

Nevertheless, Jewish Currents under the new management was lively and being talked about in the larger Jewish community – which truly could not be said of its previous iterations under Bush or even his more prominent predecessor, the radical scholar Morris Schappes. The hackneyed adage that all attention is good attention applied. Beinart’s 2020 essay, “Yavne: A Jewish Case for Equality in Israel-Palestine” was soon followed by his embrace of Palestinian refugees’ right of return to lands that now constitute Israel proper through a reading of the Jewish concept of teshuva, or repentance. The latter intervention was coincidentally published one day after hostilities broke out between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, as well as Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel in the country’s “mixed cities,” in May 2021. The confrontation was precipitated by Israel’s advancing the eviction of Palestinian families from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of occupied East Jerusalem. 

While dwarfed by the mass death of the October 7 massacres and subsequent vicious total war on Gaza, the May 2021 events were critical, as formative a moment for Gen-Z activists as the 2009 and 2014 wars had been for millennials. “Operation Guardian of the Walls” for Israelis was a “Unity Intifada” for Palestinians, especially for those in the diaspora who were better-positioned to romanticize what often amounted to senseless acts of violence and destruction by both Jewish and Palestinian teenagers. The weeks before the summer in 2021 also saw the rise of Mohammed El-Kurd, a native of Sheikh Jarrah, as the uncompromising young spokesman for the West Bank Palestinians. The college juniors and seniors who mobilized protests on university campuses after October 7 and the encampments the following spring were the products of May 2021. 

Jewish Currents was unabashedly on the side of Palestine in the May 2021 conflict, including on the question of armed resistance against Israeli occupation, a line which even the most disgruntled progressive Zionist could not cross. I have never worked for the magazine and therefore can’t offer a reliable account of how or why this happened, but it likely reflected larger trends on the Left following the previous summer’s protests following the police killing of George Floyd, a style of politics already anticipated in the 2016 controversy over the Movement for Black Lives platform. On May 14, Jewish Currents published an essay by Kaleem Hawa, a Palestinian critic and Rhodes Scholar, titled “The Nakba Demands Justice.” In concluding, Hawa declared: “For our part, Palestinians will continue to resist by any means necessary, until our return is secured.” 

There is no question Jewish Currents had been outside the constructed “mainstream” of the American Jewish community long before May 2021, but it faced the sternest rebuke following the publication of the essay by Hawa. Yehuda Kurtzer, a liberal Zionist thought leader affiliated with the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America (which he now leads) called the publication of Hawa’s essay “absolutely indefensible” during a time when Israelis – implied, fellow Jews – were enduring rocket fire from militant groups in Gaza.

That same month, veteran activist Dorothy Zellner penned an essay in Jewish Currents that essentially repudiated the pro-Zionist militancy of Jewish Life (as it was then called) during the brief window in which the Soviet Union was more vocally and reliably supportive of Jewish statehood than the United States. Despite its historical topic, the Zellner essay is emblematic of a certain lack of interest in the history of the American Jewish Left. The Communists were not the only actors on the Left stage, certainly not among Jews. Even among liberals and social democrats, there was far more opposition to an emerging Zionist consensus than has previously been appreciated – hence, the explosion of scholarship on figures like Rabbi Elmer Berger, Rabbi Morris Lazaron, and William Zukerman over the last decade. (To Jewish Currents’ credit, it has covered some of this more recently.)

Two years after the Hawa controversy, Jewish Currents ran a piece by Dylan Saba, a Jewish-Palestinian attorney, arguing that the Iron Dome missile defense system was not defensive at all, providing Israel—already quite militarily superior to any armed Palestinian group—with effective immunity from any reprisal. Saba’s essay would not have been misplaced in a journal of international relations or even security studies; there is little question that the matter of how protection from retaliation changes the rational calculations of a warring party is a legitimate topic for discussion. Yet no one could accuse pro-Israel advocates of lacking histrionics, and the facts of Saba’s partisanship and Jewish Currents being a Jewish publication ignited outrage. Dan Elbaum, at the time the President and CEO of the Jewish Agency’s North America office, tweeted: “A more accurate headline for this @JewishCurrentspiece would be ‘We want more Jews to die.’”

Prior to October 7, Jewish Currents had found itself in a somewhat marginal position. What remained of a liberal Zionist intelligentsia a generation after the Second Intifada had declared the magazine’s stance outside the bounds of communal respectability, and developments in 2023 only deepened this divide. As liberal Israelis marched in the hundreds of thousands against the Netanyahu government’s effort to undermine judicial independence, Jewish Currents remained aloof. One of the few substantive articles covering the protests, by Joshua Leifer, was highly critical of the opposition’s failure to attract non-Ashkenazi Jews and Palestinian citizens of Israel.

The Old Left academic Arash Azizi found this especially troubling, judging the “project of many American Jewish Anti-Zionists is not to build a constituency in Israel but to distinguish themselves from Israeli society altogether.” Liberal Zionists, like Eric Alterman quoted above, began to see themselves as a sensible majority standing between an anti-Zionist far-left, including Jewish Currents, and the Trump-supporting network of Sheldon Adelson on the Jewish right.

October 7 only exacerbated the divide between liberal Zionists and the Jewish Left’s flagship publication. After five days of silence, Jewish Currents editor-in-chief Arielle Angel wrote a thoughtful essay grappling with the conflicting emotions of grief, inevitability, and outrage that the attacks and the beginnings of the Israeli military response brought. But it was an article published the next day, October 13, by the Holocaust scholar Raz Segal, that would define the magazine’s response to the attacks. Segal’s article, titled “A Textbook Case of Genocide,” spoke of “Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza” before almost anyone else. 

It is only appropriate to note here that since October 2023 Israel has done everything in its power to help vindicate Professor Segal. If one doesn’t consult his plainly premature musings, one can turn to the sober assessments of Aryeh Neier in June 2024, Amos Goldberg in October 2024, and Omer Bartov in April 2025 – or to the ongoing Witnessing the Gaza War project operated by Hebrew University historian Lee Mordechai – to understand why. Through the conduct of its politicians, military leaders, and rank-and-file soldiers, Israel has brought the charge of genocide on itself. Those who persist in their denial and dismissal of what is becoming increasingly clear to experts in warfare and international law are acting in the dishonorable tradition of American “support” for Israel which has allowed that country to commit slow-motion national suicide in the occupied territories since 1967.

But at the time, Jewish Currents had appeared to jump the shark. Gideon Lewis-Kraus reported for The New Yorker on some of the internal deliberations and conflicts within the magazine. Additional details can also be gleaned from Mitchell Abidor’s November 2023 critique of the American Left’s reaction to the Hamas attacks. In brief, the Jewish Left in general, and Jewish Currents in particular, was caught between the expectation of solidarity with the Palestinians – the price for which now included condoning, or at least not condemning, the Hamas attack – and the goal of changing the reflexive pro-Israelism of American Jewish institutions. Prior to October 7, and especially during the first Trump presidency, this was a difficult but manageable balance. After October 7, the Jewish Left faced an identitarian squeeze: no longer easily tolerated by Palestinian activists nor liberal Zionists, they were adrift. 

***

From our current vantage point, so much of the above appears obsolete. The just Israeli war against Hamas hoped for by, say, the leaders of Reform Judaism in the United States, was never in the cards. This much is obvious now. If the American Left and large segments of the Jewish Left failed in empathizing with Israeli civilian victims of October 7, the spokespeople and leaders of liberal American Jewry displayed unconscionable naivete about Israel’s intentions.

Yet, thankfully, we are no longer living in October 2023. The pro-war “big tent” Yehuda Kurtzer correctly observed forming in the American Jewish community after October 7 has collapsed in salutary fashion. Months into the war, self-identified liberal Zionists largely stopped defending it. When Israelis (mainly leftists) began protesting on behalf of hostages in Gaza, whose lives were being sacrificed to continue the war, the pre-October 7 political conditions in the American Jewish community began to reassert themselves. Meanwhile, the right-wing of the Jewish community has shown very little willingness to distinguish between progressive Zionists and anti-Zionists. Indeed, it is thanks to them, with a less-than-decisive contribution from the original polarization strategy of IfNotNow, that the pro-Israel center has started to break down. Today the distance between liberal Zionists and the Jewish Left is at last bridgeable. Jay Michaelson, a liberal Zionist rabbi and legal columnist, has recently started invoking the word genocide. For that, a speaking engagement of his was cancelled by a Jewish Community Center in Indiana, producing precisely the sort of wedge between obstinate centrists and liberals that my generation of the Jewish Left sought to trigger. 

Much work still lies ahead of us. In the first place, we must acknowledge the unenviable position of the Jewish Left. Daniel May, the publisher of Jewish Currents, was no doubt correct when he told The New Yorker that, “No matter what we do, it’s a given that we’ll be called either Hamas supporters or Zionist apologists – and most likely both, simultaneously.” To oppose Israeli domination over Palestinians without qualification is to invite the first charge; to neglect pre-endorsing every possible violent manifestation of Palestinian resistance is to elicit the latter.

Yet a few conclusions can still be drawn. The Jewish Left cannot be a political force on its own but must align with sincere liberals. The wide and growing split between leaders in the avowedly liberal groups and the legacy organizations of the American Jewish establishment presents an opportunity to finally bury a pro-Israel center hollowed out by ideological contradictions arising from the impossible project of representing an otherwise heterogenous Jewish community supposedly “united” by support for Israel. What is needed is a truly liberal American Jewish establishment, less overbearing and ambitious than its centrist predecessor. 

With a growing assertive right-leaning Orthodox influence, especially in the Republican Party and the current administration, liberal American Jews should cease understanding themselves as the natural leaders of a fantastical unified American Jewish community. The Jewish Left can help liberal Jews along the way. There will have to be creative experiments on this front to build beyond protest for the American Jewish future. The most intriguing such project to date may be the attempted revival of the American Council for Judaism (ACJ), a historical relic of equal vintage to Jewish Currents. Like the ACJ of the 1940s and ‘50s, the Jewish Left should insist on the disunity of American Jewry and the impossibility of “mainstream” representation. Too many liberal Jewish leaders remain beholden to an outdated model that compels them to compromise with the right-wing of the community, mainly but not exclusively Orthodox Jews who voted for Donald Trump. Since the right is now ensconced in its own communal and media institutions, liberal Jews should move on from the establishment. They have nothing to lose besides the illusion that they are still the consensus leaders of the American Jewish community.

To put my own cards on the table: I anticipate this will be my last word as an activist. Last fall, I returned to graduate school to research postwar Jewish politics. After more than a decade of activism, in both op-ed pages and to a lesser extent in the streets, I am frankly burnt out. My hope is that tensions between the more critical elements of liberal Zionism (represented by J Street, New Jewish Narratives, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, and the like) and centrist groups that have proved they will not budge from lockstep pro-Israelism can still be heightened by an intelligent Jewish Left. This means not writing off those who were historically liberal Zionists as insufficiently progressive and doing the difficult work of forgetting past grievances, especially those nursed in the aftermath of October 7. The successful alliance between New York mayoral candidates Brad Lander, beloved by progressive Zionists, and Zohran Mamdani, the choice of the Jewish Left, demonstrates the political possibilities of such a partnership. By contrast, the failed primary challenge to Councilmember Shahana Hanif in Park Slope, Brooklyn, showed the diminishing strength of the liberal Zionist “snapback” to traditional pro-Israelism following October 7.

If this causes some Palestine activists to distance themselves from the Jewish Left, it is a price the latter must pay in order to fulfill the role it is best placed to assume: a moral opposition in the American Jewish community, one which performs the necessary work of widening the political divide between liberal and right-wing Zionists. One can hope that without the guarantee of American support, Israel might finally realize that it cannot have it all, that it must finally choose between regional integration and antediluvian territorial expansionism.