The pathology of Jewish anti-Zionism

When dissent becomes a strategy of communal self-erasure and double standards, it becomes pathology. Opinion.

Dr. Alex Grobman |

Peter Beinart’s latest New York Times essay warns about the way Tucker Carlson speaks about Israel and Jewishness. Beinart himself noted that the essay appeared in the Times this week under the title “What Tucker Carlson Means When He Talks About Israel.” On the surface, the concern is not absurd. Jews should never allow antisemites, isolationists, or conspiracy theorists to define Jewish identity.

But Beinart’s warning exposes a deeper paradox, one for which he, too, bears responsibility. For years, some Jewish intellectuals, Beinart among them, have helped create the ideological environment in which Israel is treated not as a flawed democratic nation-state confronting implacable enemies, but as a uniquely illegitimate enterprise whose Jewish character is itself the problem. When that argument migrates from elite journals and university panels into the vocabulary of Israel’s enemies, no one should pretend to be shocked.

The phenomenon is not new.

As early as May 1, 1936, Labor Zionist leader Berl Katznelson asked whether there was another people whose sons were so emotionally twisted that they considered everything their own nation did despicable, while murder, rape, and robbery committed by their enemies filled them with admiration. He warned that a Jewish child could come to the Land of Israel and “catch the virus of self-hate.”

Katznelson was not describing ordinary criticism. Zionism has always contained fierce internal argument. Jews have never needed lessons in dissent. The issue is not whether Israel may be criticized. Of course it may be. The issue is what happens when criticism – Jewish and non-Jewish – becomes compulsion; when the Jewish state is judged by standards applied to no other nation; when its enemies are romanticized; and when Jewish survival itself is recast as a moral offense.

That is the pathology.

Beinart once supported a two-state solution. He has since argued that it is time to abandon the idea of a Jewish state and imagine “a Jewish home that is not a Jewish state.” In a 2025 New York Times essay titled “States Don’t Have a Right to Exist. People Do,” he advanced an argument Israel’s enemies have made for generations: that Jewish sovereignty is not a moral necessity but an obstacle to justice. The prestige of the New York Times gives that argument a polite vocabulary. It does not make it new.

The same pattern appears in the rhetoric of Judith Butler, Jewish American feminist, queer philosopher, and gender studies scholar. After the Hamas massacre of October 7, Butler called the attack “anguishing” and “terrible,” but insisted it should be understood as “armed resistance,” not terrorism and not antisemitism. That formulation did not merely contextualize Hamas’s crimes; it morally reorganized them. The victims became representatives of a “violent state apparatus,” and the perpetrators became actors in an anti-colonial drama.

This is how moral inversion works. The slaughtered Jew is no longer a victim. He is transformed into a symbol of power. The murderer is no longer a murderer. He is transformed into an expression of historical grievance.

The late Tony Judt offered another version of the same argument when he declared the Jewish state an “anachronism.” For anti-Zionist historian Judt, the very idea of a Jewish state belonged to another era. But this claim has always been selective. Nation-states organized around language, history, religion, and majority culture exist across Europe and the Middle East. Only Jewish national self-determination is treated by these Jewish intellectuals as uniquely embarrassing, uniquely outdated, and uniquely in need of dissolution.

That is not liberal universalism. It is selective universalism deployed against one people.

In 2009, Israeli attorney Uri Silber called this phenomenon the “Jew Flu,” a strange illness of Jewish antisemitism that had mutated into anti-Zionist and post-Zionist forms. Silber argued that this vociferous minority wildly exaggerates Israel’s sins, real or imagined, while excusing or rationalizing Palestinian Arab violence and antisemitism against Jews. The phrase is deliberately provocative, but it captures something real: a recurring pattern in which some Jews seek moral purification by separating themselves from the Jewish collective under attack.

This should not be confused with clinical illness. Political and moral corruption are not psychiatric diagnoses. But they do have a psychology.

Dr. Kenneth Levin, in “The Canary on the Couch: The Psychology of Jewish Self-Delusions in the Face of Rising Antisemitism,” examines how minority communities under pressure can respond by accommodating the prejudices of their surrounding culture.

For some Jewish intellectuals, the psychological payoff is obvious. By denouncing Israel more harshly than its enemies do, they gain admission into progressive circles where Zionism is treated as a moral stain. They become the “good Jews” in rooms where Jewish peoplehood is tolerated only when stripped of sovereignty, power, and self-defense.

Their dissent becomes a credential. Their alienation becomes a brand.

That is why the phrase “as a Jew” has become so useful. It functions as a permission slip. It allows a Jewish critic to say what Israel’s enemies want said, while insulating the statement from the charge of antisemitism. The Jewish identity of the speaker becomes the rhetorical shield behind which anti-Zionist arguments advance.

None of this means Jews must defend every Israeli policy. Israel is a real country, not a theological abstraction. Its governments make mistakes. Its leaders may be criticized. Its military actions may be scrutinized. Israelis themselves do this every day with a ferocity that would shock most other societies.

But there is a profound difference between criticizing Israel’s policies and denying the legitimacy of Jewish sovereignty. There is a difference between demanding moral accountability and joining a campaign whose practical result would be the end of the one Jewish state. There is a difference between self-criticism and self-erasure.

A. B. Yehoshua understood this danger. In 1987, he warned against self-criticism untempered by self-respect and political honesty. He said he decided to judge Israel by the same standards he used for the rest of the world, not by impossible absolute standards. He feared Jewish self-hatred because, unlike the self-hatred of Englishmen or Frenchmen, Jewish self-hatred in Israel could be exploited by enemies who sought the country’s destruction.

That remains the central point.

When English intellectuals denounce England, England does not disappear. When French intellectuals denounce France, France is not placed on trial as an illegitimate state. But when Jewish intellectuals denounce Israel as uniquely racist, uniquely colonial, and uniquely anachronistic, they do so in a world where Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, PA Arabs and much of the international left already seek Israel’s isolation, weakening, and eventual elimination.

In that context, Jewish anti-Zionism is not merely another opinion. It is a strategic asset for those who want the Jewish state dismantled.

The tragedy is not that Jews criticize Israel. A nation that cannot tolerate criticism is morally brittle. The tragedy is that some Jews have confused criticism with contempt, universalism with surrender, and moral seriousness with the public performance of Jewish shame.

Beryl Katznelson saw the danger in 1936. A. B. Yehoshua saw it in 1987. We see it again now, amplified by elite universities, prestige media, activist foundations, and social platforms that reward Jews for indicting their own people in the language of their enemies, identifying with those enemies and joining in their hatred.

The question is not whether dissent is allowed. The question is whether dissent remains tethered to truth, responsibility, and Jewish survival.

When it is not, it ceases to be dissent.

It becomes pathology.

 

Dr. Alex Grobman is the senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society, a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, and serves on the advisory board of the National Christian Leadership Conference for Israel.

May 8, 2026 | 5 Comments »

Leave a Reply

5 Comments / 5 Comments

  2. Alan Rifkin on FB: “Daniel-Ryan Spaulding on Substack”:

    “”Jon Stewart and the Terrible Secret”

    In the spring of 2024, I was invited to an Israel Day party at a beautiful brownstone on the Upper East Side. It was being hosted by a group of gay Jews, and after months of watching the progressive world lose its fucking mind, I was happy to go somewhere I would not have to explain why kidnapping Jewish grandmothers was bad.

    Then the host sent me a message.

    I was welcome to come, but I could not take any photos or videos. I had a large platform, he explained, and some of the guests were not publicly out as Zionists.

    I asked whether it was simply a no-photos party.

    No. The rule was specifically for me. Somehow I was the dangerous one.

    Some of the guests were Israeli. Others were proudly Zionist in private, but terrified of being seen in one of my Instagram stories because it could affect their jobs, friendships or social lives. They were not prepared to confront the people who had made Zionism socially dangerous. It was easier to control the person who refused to hide it.

    That was when I began to understand: the terrible secret.

    Batya Ungar-Sargon often reassures people that America is still a deeply Zionist country. The woke left screaming on campuses and running cultural institutions does not represent most Americans. Most Americans are not spending their evenings debating settler colonialism. They are trying to pay their bills, feed their children and find out why a single bag of groceries now requires financing.

    My friend and mentor Fleur Hassan-Nahoum once put it to me this way: fifteen percent of people love Israel, fifteen percent hate Israel, and seventy percent are busy living their lives. They do not know very much about the conflict, they do not particularly understand why it matters, and they certainly are not sitting around contemplating the Muslim Brotherhood’s long-term plans for Western civilization.

    Batya is probably right about America.

    But Batya and I have experienced very different Americas.

    Batya wears a large Star of David everywhere she goes. She has spent years working in journalism and politics, discussing populism, class and the failures of the progressive left. Nobody meets Batya Ungar-Sargon and is shocked to discover that she is Jewish or that she has opinions about Israel.

    I came to October 7 from a completely different world. I was a gay comedian working in culture, living between New York, Tel Aviv, Berlin and other European cities, surrounded by artists, performers, drag queens, bohemians, writers, actors, and left-wing gay men.

    It was like a light switch flipped.

    People I had known for years began repeating exterminationist slogans as though they had learned them at a weekend workshop. People who could find fascism in a salad dressing commercial were suddenly unable to recognize it when mobs of ecstatic Palestinian men paraded the bodies of murdered Jews through Gaza. Hostage posters were ripped down. Kidnapping became resistance. Rape became complicated.

    I did not merely discover that half my friends disagreed with me about Israeli policy. I discovered that many of them had been completely radicalized, and that beneath all the language of social justice was a moral framework capable of justifying almost anything.

    Because I spoke out early, I also became very easy to hate.

    There is a reason most gay men do not express controversial political opinions.

    There is a reason we deepen our voices when we want to be taken seriously.

    There is a reason we work out like lunatics, build abdominal muscles and post photographs of our beautiful bodies. Human beings want to belong, and gay men know what it feels like not to. After fighting our way into the party, very few of us want to be thrown out for saying something unfashionable like the truth about the Islamic Republic.

    I made myself extremely throwable.

    At first, my videos were confrontational and sensational.

    But the work changed. I met hostage families. I spoke at rallies. I traveled to Israel and began showing people what life there actually looked like. I spent time with academics, public-policy scholars and counterterrorism experts. What began as a reaction became an education, and many people learned alongside me.

    People often assume that the Jewish community in New York must have rallied around me. Some did. Many people were enormously grateful. They told me that they finally felt less alone.

    But my biggest cyber bullies & tormentors were often Jews: a particular kind of culturally progressive Jew for whom denouncing Israel had become the most important expression of being Jewish.

    Anti-Zionism gave them a new identity: the Good Jew. The Jew who could enter the progressive room and reassure everyone that he was not like those embarrassing Jews in Israel who insist upon remaining alive.

    Then people like me, Elica Lebon, James Lindsay, Michael Rappaport, and Lizzy Savetsky came along to spoil their delusion.

    A non-Jewish gay comedian speaking at hostage rallies, spending months in Israel, during both Iran wars, and refusing to apologize created an uncomfortable reflection. I was publicly doing what many of them had decided was socially impossible.

    They were surrounded by people who hated Israel, worked for people who hated Israel, slept with people who hated Israel and attended parties with people who hated Israel. Their way of surviving was to remain silent, blame Netanyahu for everything or become louder than the antisemites.

    My existence suggested that another choice had been available.

    That drove them crazy.

    For some, I was not the ally they wanted. I was too loud, too gay, too public and much too difficult to quietly place in a drawer. I could appear in their Instagram feed at any moment, standing beside another hostage family or deconstructing their Queers for Palestine fantasy world.

    They did not see me as a whole person who had studied the issue and reached my own conclusions, with deep friendships and a connected history in Israel. I was an inconvenience. An embarrassing ally.

    And behind this entire phenomenon stood some of the most powerful Jews in American culture, giving moral permission for it all.

    Which brings me to Jon Stewart.

    Jon Stewart occupies a sacred place in the minds of a certain generation of American liberals. He taught millions of Americans that if you could make the other side look ridiculous, you had also proved them morally wrong.

    For years, Stewart’s particular genius was making ideology feel like common sense. He did not need to tell his audience what to believe. He created a world in which only an idiot could believe anything else.

    After October 7, that talent became much darker.

    Jon Stewart knew there were hostages in Gaza. Of course he knew. Everybody knew. Their faces were hanging across New York City until his ideological fellow travelers began tearing them down.

    The issue was never that Stewart had somehow missed the story. The issue was that the hostages interfered with the story he wanted to tell.

    If he sat across from the parents of a kidnapped twenty-year-old and allowed them to describe what Hamas had done, Israel might begin to look like a country full of actual human beings instead of an abstraction called “the occupation.”

    The hostages complicated the bit.

    I understood this more clearly after meeting the family of Omer Neutra, an American-Israeli hostage from Long Island. Omer’s father, Ronen, was from the same generation as Jon Stewart. This was not an unknowable conflict happening to distant people in a country Stewart had only read about. This was a New York family whose son had been taken by terrorists.

    So I began confronting Stewart publicly. Why did he never give the hostage families the attention he gave Israel’s critics? Why could he find endless time for conversations that portrayed Israel as uniquely monstrous, but not sit down for a serious, humane conversation with the Americans whose children had been dragged into Gaza?

    It was not an absence of information. It was an editorial choice.

    Jon Stewart has found plenty of time for Peter Beinart. He has found time for Ta-Nehisi Coates and his grand tour through a conflict he had barely begun to understand. He has found time for the fashionable intellectual architecture in which Israel is distorted into a white supremacist project and Palestinians are stripped of all moral agency.

    What he could not seem to find was curiosity about anything that might disturb that architecture.

    Recently, Senator John Fetterman appeared on Stewart’s podcast, and the conversation revealed something fascinating. Fetterman, a non-Jew, would not surrender his support for Israel simply because Stewart, a Jew, had decided that Zionism had become embarrassing.

    That is the power of “the Good Jew” in progressive culture. He does not merely criticise Israel. He gives everyone else permission to despise it. His identity becomes a moral hall pass.

    But identity does not make an argument true. Sometimes it simply makes the argument more useful.

    This: is the terrible secret.

    I recently heard Alan Dershowitz speak about Jewish self-hatred and the role it played in the Soviet Union. Some Jews became willing participants in the persecution of other Jews because they believed in the larger communist project. Their commitment to the ideology allowed them to justify the betrayal. The cruelty was temporary; the revolution was forever.

    The modern progressive version is not identical, but the psychological mechanism is familiar. Human beings are capable of justifying behaviour that violates every principle they claim to possess if they believe it serves a greater moral good. Jews can excuse antisemitism if confronting it threatens their place within the progressive movement. Gay people can excuse Islamism if acknowledging it threatens their outdated theory of oppression coming from only from Christians. Feminists can explain away rape if the rapists have brown skin.

    The ideology does not collapse when reality contradicts it. Reality is simply rewritten.

    That is why the hostages had to disappear.

    The hostage families were useful only as long as their grief could be separated from their political meaning. They could be pitied, but they could not be listened to for too long. Because if you listened to them—really listened—you might begin to understand why Israelis could not simply return to October 6 and wait for the next massacre.

    By the summer of 2025, nearly two years into this nightmare, I received an email from hyper progressive a synagogue in New York.

    What struck me was not simply the content of the email. It was the emotional posture behind it: nervous, cautious, managerial. American Jews were living through the largest explosion of public antisemitism in generations, yet so much of the institutional response remained trapped in the language of dialogue, nuance and community sensitivity.

    What it did not know how to do was confront the bad actors inside its own community.

    “The Good Jews” such as Jon Stewart were not challenged with anything approaching the force used against outspoken defenders of Israel.

    The Jewish celebrities gave anti-Zionism its cultural legitimacy in New York City.

    That is what Jon Stewart’s “comedy” now does. It does not merely criticize an Israeli government. It creates an emotional world in which Israel’s fears are ridiculous, its enemies are simply reactive, and its defenders are either corrupt, stupid or bloodthirsty. The details may change from segment to segment, but the moral casting has already been completed.

    Jon Stewart is intelligent enough to understand what he is doing.

    He understands editing. He understands framing. He understands that the guest sitting across from him is not merely providing information but being granted legitimacy. He understands that repetition creates a worldview. And he understands that what you leave out can matter as much as what you put in.

    So when he repeatedly amplifies people who portray Israel as the central moral horror of our time while giving comparatively little emotional space to the Israelis living with the consequences of jihadist violence, we should stop pretending this is an oversight.

    It is the show.

    John Fetterman refused to perform the role Stewart had prepared.

    There was something almost comical about it: the non-Jewish senator defending Israel against the Jewish comedian who appeared determined to make him feel embarrassed for doing so.

    But Fetterman had nothing to be embarrassed about.

    That is ultimately the weakness of identity politics. It asks us to believe that identity confers moral authority, but only when the person with that identity reaches the approved conclusion.

    A Jew may speak “as a Jew” if he is condemning Israel. A Black person may speak “as a Black person” if she is endorsing the correct progressive program. A gay person may speak “as a gay person” if he agrees that every global conflict can be explained through colonialism, whiteness and oppression.

    And if you do not, the same movement that claims to celebrate your identity will use it to humiliate you. You become a bad Jew, a race traitor, a transphobe, a fascist, a white supremacist in a homosexual tank top.

    This is not liberation. It is a cult with better graphic design.

    The Democratic Socialists of America have turned this technique into an entire political movement.

    This is also why the movement becomes more extreme. A cult cannot tolerate the person who says, “Actually, I have looked at the evidence and I disagree.” Disagreement threatens the system. The dissenter must therefore be reclassified as evil, ignorant, compromised or secretly motivated by hatred.

    Jon Stewart’s terrible secret is not that he is a Jew who criticizes Israel. There is nothing remarkable about that. The terrible secret is that he knows how much his Jewish identity is worth to the people who want Israel condemned, isolated and eventually dismantled. He knows that when he delivers their arguments, he makes them sound safer. Kinder. Funnier. Kosher.

    And the terrible secret of the American Jewish establishment is that it has been more willing to manage people like me than confront people like him.

    Perhaps Batya is right. Perhaps America remains fundamentally decent, sensible and far less radical than its universities, media institutions and artistic scenes would suggest.

    I hope she is.

    But culture is not controlled by the average American buying groceries in Ohio. It is controlled by the people deciding what can be said, who can be hired, which stories receive sympathy and which people become socially untouchable. Those people may represent a minority, but minorities with institutional power can make everyone else feel alone.

    The guests at that Upper East Side party were afraid of being seen with me because I had made my choice publicly.

    They had made theirs privately.

    Sooner or later, every one of us will have to decide which choice allows us to live with ourselves once the party is over.”

    https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1C4vNNv3ej/?mibextid=wwXIfr

  4. ATTACK ISRAEL, GET INVITED TO SPEAK IN A SYNAGOGUE

    Just weeks after Sen. Raphael Warnock voted to cut off some US weapons to Israel, he is scheduled to speak at one of New York City’s most prominent Reform synagogues, Temple Emanu-El.

    Sen. Warnock’s vote against Israel on April 15 was not a one-time occurrence. He also voted in November 2024 and July 2025 to prevent the sale of some weapons to Israel.

    Now Sen. Warnock (D-Georgia) is scheduled to speak at Temple Emanu-El’s Streicker Center on June 7, where he will offer “Reflections on the Moral Meaning of America.” The publicity for the event hails him as a “transformational voice in Congress.”

    Sadly, Sen. Warnock is helping to transform the US Senate into a place where some consider it “moral” to deprive Israel of its ability to defend itself.

    Lebanon still bristles with Hezbollah rockets. Thousands of Hamas terrorists remain in Gaza. Iran still has ballistic missiles aimed at Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. How, exactly, does Sen. Warnock think Israel should protect the lives of its citizens from those imminent threats?

    The Warnock invitation raises an interesting question: Is there nothing that a public figure can do, that would disqualify him or her from being honored with a synagogue speaking invitation?

    Is there any reason Temple Emanu-El should not invite Graham Platner, the Senate candidate in Maine, to explain why he got that Nazi tattoo, or why he applauded that video of Hamas kidnapping and murdering Jews?

    Perhaps Maureen Galindo, the recent congressional candidate in Texas, can come to shul to share her thoughts on why American Zionists should be put in detention camps.

    While they’re at it, Temple Emanu-El could invite Congresswoman Ilhan Omar to elaborate, from the bima, on her theory about Jews bribing members of Congress with “Benjamins.”

    Or Rep. Rashida Tlaib could help the congregants at Emanu-El understand why her use of the battle cry “From the river to the sea” doesn’t really mean eliminating the Jewish state that sits between that river and that sea.

    In short—should a synagogue provide a platform to literally anyone, no matter hostile they are to Israel? Should there be no limits?

    #StreickerCenter #RaphaelWarnock
    @followers

    Rafael Medoff reposted by Ardie Geldman

    https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1DYwaBj8Lh/?mibextid=wwXIfr