The 2023 Jewish World Dialogue – “Managing the Growing Challenges to Jewish Cohesion” – directly addresses the issue of polarization within the Jewish community. We conducted 13 sessions altogether, 11 in North America and one each in Germany and South Africa. For the first time, in addition to many federations convening groups of their leadership, this year, we also conducted dialogue sessions with groups convened by advocacy organizations, including the Conference of Presidents, the Nexus Project, and J Street. Thus, Dialogue participants were generally somewhat older and more deeply engaged in Israel and Jewish related issues than participants in previous Dialogues. The sessions though, did allow us “to take the temperature” of this important leadership cohort.
As in previous years since the onset of Covid-19, the Dialogue sessions were conducted via Zoom. The Zoom technology permitted participants to break out into small focus groups. Our experience has been that participants are more willing to express their more intimate thoughts, feelings, and experiences in these breakout groups. In the course of the Dialogue, two kinds of data were collected – quantitative and qualitative. All participants completed a short survey and were then asked the same or similar questions in the small focus groups. The online survey administered does not pretend to constitute a representative sample of North American Jewry, nor even of connected or engaged Jews. What it does do, to a certain extent, is provide an overview of the Dialogue participants. It gives us the opportunity to compare answers across the range of participants. In the small focus groups, participants were able to expand on their responses and give them further explication, nuance, and qualification.
247 people participated in the Dialogue sessions, more or less evenly split between men and women2. In terms of age, 70% of the group were over 46, and 38% were 65 or older.3 As regards the denominational streams, 33% identified as Conservative, which is more than twice the national level. Of those, 35% were 65 or older. Thus, the relatively advanced age of the group impacted its denominational distribution. The group reflected the liberal views of the American Jewish population – 39% identified as liberal and 68% as liberal leaning.4 Older participants, in particular, identified as liberal (58% of the 65+ cohort). The level of Jewish and Israel engagement of the entire group of participants can be inferred from the number of times they have visited Israel. Forty percent have visited Israel more than ten times.
So, does this “leadership” type group experience polarization? If so, how? Ninety-seven percent reported that conversations have gotten more polarized. Moreover, 73% reported that discussions about Israel are more polarizing than other topics5. In the breakout groups, we asked participants to relate their personal experiences in difficult, oppositional conversations. In practically every breakout group, participants related that they had stopped speaking to old friends and relatives about Israel because of disagreements over its policies, or that they had avoided discussing Israel with specific friends or at family gatherings and other occasions. At the same time, a participant from Toronto claimed that “issues of growing divisiveness and polarization were ‘generational’.” One participant from Palm Beach, even reported an occasion when a rabbi shut down a conversation concerning Israel in his synagogue.
Even when such conversations did not result in the dissolution of friendship or other relationships, participants described highly emotionally charged interactions around these topics. In Palm Beach, a woman reported she had left a meeting room because people “would not listen.”
It should be noted that the disagreements in question spanned a wide range of ideological and political perspectives. In other words, they took place between mainstream centrist Zionists and more extreme opponents from both the right and left wings. Tension emerged when interlocuters demanded more consideration of the Palestinian position and an end to the “occupation” and the settlement enterprise. At the same time, other controversies emerged from the “right.” One participant recalled asking right-wing interlocuters not to refer to the Israeli government as “Nazis” in relation to the 2005 disengagement from Gaza.
When asked in the survey “What do you find most difficult about discussions concerning Israel today?” 40% (the plurality) answered: “People increasingly assert that those with whom they differ are traitors, disloyal, anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, or even antisemitic.” The prevalence of this response indicates that participants in discussions about Israel use such discussions to structure
Jewish identity, at least on an informal level. That is, to determine who is a “good Jew” and who is “disloyal,” “anti-Israel”, etc. This was confirmed by participant reports of their own experiences. Several J Street participants reported that they had been excluded from their synagogues or made to feel so unwelcome there that they left. One J Street participant related that he had held a national position in a major Jewish organization and once its leadership discovered his affiliation with J Street, he was removed from that position.”
In the J Street convening, a woman said that she had been active in her community (Cleveland) AJC, but once she acknowledged that she was also active in J Steet, she was told “you are dividing the Jewish people.”
And it was not only members of advocacy organizations like J Street who complained of such exclusion. (One J Street participant spoke of being “exiled” from his community.) A former head of a Jewish day school in Palm Beach related that he was accused of “anti-Zionism” because he worked with someone who was critical of Israel. As he put it, “Any acceptance of discussion on Israel that isn’t fully supportive is shamed.”
The institutional exclusion of Jews for their opinions regarding Israel, seems to have predominantly taken the form of centrist or right-wing Jews excluding left-wing ones. Nevertheless, the practice of setting boundaries as to what sort of attitudes and speech are “legitimately Jewish” (that is, reflects authentic Jewish values and attitudes) and what is not, also takes place on the left, only it is of a more symbolic and less institutional nature. A good number of participants criticized Israel especially in regard to the “occupation,” the settlements, and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. Perhaps an even larger number criticized the right-wing Israeli government effort to enact a Judicial overhaul; with some asserting that its “anti-democratic” nature was, like the “occupation,” not in accord with “Jewish values.” In relation to the question as to whether Israel and America have “shared values,” 22% said that they do not.
Sixty percent of those identifying as liberals gave that answer, and a third those answering in the negative were participants in the J Street Dialogue session. Notwithstanding our very small sample of political conservatives, in general liberals seem to experience de-legitimization of their attitudes and themselves more than conservatives. Ninety percent of liberal participants indicated that Israel is a more polarizing issue than any other. Only 63% of conservatives answered similarly6. Fifty-seven percent of liberals said that what was most difficult in discussing Israel today is that their opponents accuse them of being traitors, disloyal, anti-Zionist, and even antisemitic. Only 16% of conservatives complained of being similarly labeled.
Perhaps one statistic best sums up this issue of polarization: 59% of participants said that due to polarization Diaspora Jews would not be able to come together to confront urgent phenomena such as antisemitism. We have already seen that liberal and conservative Jews tend to identify the threat from antisemitism differently (see JPPI’s 2021 Jewish World Dialogue report). Again, liberal Jews felt this way more than conservatives – 57% vs. 42%. Some participants even raised the possibility of formal religious splits or schisms within the Jewish community:
“Jews have long had internal divisions, but today we are facing increased divisions on the religious front that exacerbate the political differences. The Jewish community will likely look very different 50 years from now as these religious differences could lead to different groups viewing one another as being of different religions rather than belonging under a single umbrella.”
A similar response put it this way:
“I believe that there will eventually be a schism like the one between early Christians or Samaritans where a current sect or group of Jews will eventually not be considered Jewish and get excommunicated by the rest. Likely determined by whatever Israel decides is the boundary between Jew and Non-Jew, and therefore who gets to have an opinion on Israeli policy from the “inside” will shift to the right and more Orthodox7.”
