On November 13, 2024, about fifty people gathered on a corner in West Orange, New Jersey, a quiet suburb an hour’s drive from Manhattan. The plan was to march down the block to protest in front of Moshe Glick’s home.
In his fifties, graying at the temples and bald on top, Moshe is an active member of the Jewish community in West Orange, where he lives with his wife and children. He has created and supported charities that help neighbors struggling with financial difficulties or food insecurity. He co-founded an after-school program for kids whose families could not afford Jewish education. He is a volunteer EMT.
Like most in the Modern Orthodox community, a community I grew up in, Moshe is an active supporter of Israel. More recently, he has emerged as a leader on the issue, co-founding the MetroWest Israel Action Committee, a local pro-Israel advocacy group, and serving as co-president (alongside his wife, Renee) of Israel365 New Jersey, an organization that “strengthens Israel by building bridges between Jews, Christians, and all who share [their] faith-based values.”
It was likely through these Israel-advocacy networks that Moshe connected with My Israel Home, a company that helps Americans buy properties in Israel and in Israeli settlements in the West Bank. West Orange would be the last in a series of info sessions that My Israel Home had offered in the tristate area, and Moshe had been slated to host the event at his house. “MAGNIFICENT JERUSALEM PROJECTS,” a My Israel Home flyer promised. “15/85 DEALS WITH NO INTEREST. SPECIAL DISCOUNTED PRICING UNTIL NOV. 15TH. TALK TO US ABOUT BUYING ‘EXISTING PROPERTIES.’”
In early November, about a week before the event, a white-haired woman in her seventies donning light gray sneakers and a kelly-green coat was captured on Moshe’s home-security camera, photographing his front door and leaving an envelope with “LEGAL AND CONFIDENTIAL” written across it in black marker. The letter, signed by several pro-Palestinian activist groups, demanded that Moshe “immediately terminate any and all hosting, participation, support, facilitation, and conspiracy to support such [real estate] events.” Soon after, social media posts appeared calling for a “protest [of] land theft in our backyard” and listing Moshe’s street corner as the location. Moshe had hired security for the event and been in contact with local law enforcement, but when the protests were announced, and after similar protests at other My Israel Home events earlier in the month, Moshe moved the event to Ohr Torah, the synagogue down the road.
The woman captured on Moshe’s security camera was Tova Fry, who also goes by the name Terri Kay. Born in Israel in 1949, Tova today lives in New Jersey. She appears to live alone. “My grandparents, all of them, were killed during the Holocaust,” Tova told an interviewer in 2025. She speaks in a low and breathy voice, as if slightly winded. “And after the war, my parents tried to come to the U.S., but there was a quota against Eastern European Jews. The U.S. and Britain, they didn’t want Jews either after the war. My family wound up in Israel penniless. And some Israeli soldiers stole a home from a Palestinian family and gave it to my parents, and that’s where I was born.” Tova cites this story as one of the key inspirations of her activism. “When I learned that history after I was in high school, it really started to make me think about what had happened there, and wanting to do something about it.”
Tova has since organized and attended countless protests and rallies and written hundreds of articles for revolutionary magazines like Mundo Obrero/Workers World: Workers and Oppressed Peoples of the World Unite and Fighting Words: Journal of the Communist Workers League. These are mostly missives from the front lines of actions she participates in. Occasionally, though, Tova zooms out to consider the larger conditions of revolutionary struggle. In one speech, given to “commemorate” the first anniversary of Hamas’s Al-Aqsa Flood, Tova (introduced as an “anti-zionist Jew”) praises the “honorable” work of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh (assassinated by Israel in 2024) and the “unwavering and heroic” efforts of Hezbollah, and links her efforts as an activist to theirs. “The cause of the Resistance,” Tova concludes, “the cause Sayyed Hassan [Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader] fought for, the cause of liberation is the cause of all humanity. We all must continue his fight.”
Which is what Tova was doing when she showed up on Moshe’s front lawn, caught by the convex lens of his doorbell camera. And what she was doing days later, when she brought a group of protesters to Moshe’s neighborhood. Tova was fighting for her cause.
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There is even disagreement about when this story begins.
For some the story starts with the biblical promise of a homeland, and the millennia of persecution and yearning, and the miracle of Israel’s establishment in 1948 and survival of the wars waged in that founding’s wake. This story continues through October 7, 2023, when Hamas invaded Israel and massacred nearly 1,200 people, most of them civilians. In the aftermath of that attack, many American Jews were forced to reckon with both Israel’s vulnerability and their own, as some progressive institutions in this country appeared unable or unwilling to adequately condemn mass Jewish death, while others failed to offer understanding at a time of communal mourning and fear. This, I believe, is how Moshe sees it (he declined to speak to me for this essay).
For others the story begins with the emergence of Zionism in nineteenth-century Europe, with the Balfour Declaration in 1917, or with the Nakba of the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. Those events led to the steady, violent displacement of the Palestinians, and to the intractable conflict and catastrophe that defines the region today. These were the preamble to the attacks on October 7th and the genocidal war that followed, which many American institutions, and both of its main political parties, have either actively supported or inadequately condemned. That, I believe, is how Tova understands it (she, too, declined to speak to me for this essay).
All these stories have elements of truth. Palestinians have been violently displaced, Hamas’s attack was horrific, parts of the American left have been chillingly quiet or worrisomely loud, Israel’s response has been merciless. And around each of these stories coalesce constituencies of the American Jewish public.
Moshe’s constituency is a growing demographic of Orthodox Jews, for whom the line between religious observance and right-wing Zionism has largely disappeared. West Bank land sales in suburban synagogues; Shabbat morning prayers for the soldiers of the Israeli Defense Forces; unflinching support for the war from the most powerful institutions of American Orthodoxy.
In the days immediately after October 7th, someone from this community pointed out to me how the strong show of solidarity that the Palestinians were receiving from the American left seemed to have prohibited any consideration of the brutality of Hamas’s attack, or even any sympathy for the Jewish dead. “There are only two sides now,” he told me, “ours and theirs.” Did ours refer to Israel or to Jews? If there had ever been a difference, there wasn’t any longer. Almost three years later, that sense of separation has calcified into a politics. “You’re saying that there’s a limit to the application of liberal principles,” I asked one participant in the real-estate event at the synagogue in West Orange. A limit that would apply to Palestinians. “Absolutely,” he answered immediately. “It has to be.”
If we interpret Moshe’s coalition as constituted, at least in large part, by America’s Orthodox Jewish community, then this movement represents a fast-growing demographic of American Jewry writ large. According to a 2020 Pew Research poll, among Jews ages 18 to 29, 17 percent are Orthodox compared with just 3 percent among Jews 65 and older. The median ages of various American Jewish denominations tell a similar story: Orthodox Jews have a median adult age of 35, Reform Jews 53 and Conservative Jews 62. Orthodox Jews also have 3.3 children on average, compared to 1.4 among non-Orthodox Jews. A recent demographic study estimates that the percentage of American Jews who identify as Orthodox “is expected to swell from 12% today to an estimated 29% in 2063,” or from about eight hundred thousand to nearly two million. “Over the same 50-year time period, Reform and Conservative Jews, who tend to be more theologically and politically liberal, will go from being 50% of American Jews to 39%, and the total number of people in those denominations aged 30-69 will decline by 46%.” Currently numbering at about 3.44 million—more than four times the size of the current Orthodox Jewish population—Reform and Conservative Jews will eventually be the smaller community.
The politics of this Orthodox constituency has become “as solidly Republican as non-Orthodox Jews are solidly Democratic,” Pew noted in 2021—a trend that has only deepened since October 7th. The commitment to Israel among this constituency is also deepening. In a recent survey, 94 percent of Modern Orthodox respondents identified as Zionist, and 40 percent of Modern Orthodox respondents said that their Zionism has intensified since October 7th. This coalition—Moshe’s coalition—is one version of the American Jewish future.
But Tova represents a growing movement too: of Jews increasingly alienated from Israel and the institutions of American Jewish life. “The Gaza genocide has made plain,” Arielle Angel, then editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents, wrote last year, “what many leftist Jews have long feared: that virtually the entire enterprise of Judaism—and nearly every organization charged with stewarding it—is infected with a voracious rot.” The Anti-Defamation League, the UJA-Federation, the Orthodox Union—all of them, Angel correctly points out, treat the support of Israel—and even of its current war—as central to Jewish life. And while progressive Jews’ opposition to Israel is not new, the centrality and the intensity of anti-Zionism among progressive Jews is very new indeed.
For these Jews—typically younger, often secular or not institutionally affiliated—much of American Judaism is complicit in a morally compromising project of apartheid and genocide. According to a 2024 poll conducted by the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, nearly 30 percent of American Jews “agreed with the accusation that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza”; among respondents under 44, the number was 38 percent. “Younger Jews are also more likely to say Israel has committed genocide,” a more recent Washington Post poll noted, “with 50 percent of those ages 18 to 34 saying so and the number hovering in the 30s among older groups.”
Beyond its opposition to Israel, what does this growing coalition believe? Its critics will argue not much. “Most anti-Zionists are not going to be Jews in a generation,” Joshua Cohen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Netanyahus, told the New Republic in 2024, adding that these Jews “have reserved for themselves as the final expression of their Jewishness the condemnation of Israel.” Angel wrestles with Cohen’s critique. “I cannot deny the charge that our Judaism has been primarily one of rebellion. Indeed, even among those who insist on the principled separation of Jewishness and Zionism, I’ve noticed a tendency to cede ever more territory, to declare more and more of Jewish life contaminated or at least suspicious, with suspicion reason enough for withdrawal.” This leads her to a call for “new spaces, new containers for the exploration of anti-fascist Jewish life.”
Whether Angel (or anybody else) will succeed in building such institutions is a separate question, but it is unquestionable that this community, too, represents a possible future for America’s Jews.
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Arriving at the West Orange meetup spot on a cool autumn evening, with flags and signs and megaphones and horns, Tova and the other protesters learn that the event has been moved to a nearby synagogue. To get from Moshe’s house, which sits atop a ridge, to the synagogue, which sits on a ridge across the way, they need to walk.
I picture them marching, noisy and colorful through the quiet streets of Jewish suburbia. It’s almost beautiful in its incongruity, this puncture of the postwar Jewish idyll, an age of security and innocence undone by the specter of a globalized intifada, arriving in the dark to accuse you of genocide. They pass a playground, a half-court hoop, a ball field surrounded by metal bleachers, yard signs with pictures of young people held hostage in Gaza, yard signs that say BRING THEM HOME NOW, metal poles festooned with Israeli flags, lawns strewn with colorful plastic toys or wooden swing sets, a patch of forest and then the languid Peckman River (a more Jewish-sounding name I couldn’t create), up the hill now past a senior-care facility, some county electrical infrastructure (including a steel cellular pole, a hundred feet high, which the county decorates to look like a pine tree so the steel won’t stick out; because there are so few pine trees around, the pole only draws more attention, a great brown rod toupeed with leaves and branches), until they reach the synagogue a half mile away, and find the counterprotesters waiting.
By now, everybody is outside: those who had been at the synagogue to attend the real-estate event and those who have come to demonstrate on their behalf. One person present estimated that there were 150 pro-Israel counterprotesters there, men and women and children.
The West Orange Police Department meekly tries to keep the groups separate, but without any physical barricades, the two camps are soon face to face on a narrow strip of sidewalk outside the synagogue, which shares a squat brick building with a preschool and gym.
It seems clear, from videos and witness testimony, that the protesters want to be as close to the synagogue as possible. “Where’s the entrance?” Tova asks, as the group moves toward the synagogue’s doors, ignoring police requests not to do so.
The horns, meanwhile, are really fucking loud. One of the protesters, a man named Altaf Sharif, is blowing his right in Moshe’s face, and Moshe swipes to swat it away. While Sharif is looking at Moshe, a masked pro-Israel counterprotester, David Silberberg, comes from the side and pepper-sprays Sharif. This appears to be unprovoked. Sharif wipes his eyes. A few seconds later, he tackles Silberberg and tumbles with him down the hill and into the parking lot of the synagogue.
For ten seconds, it is impossible to see exactly what is happening. The videos are too grainy, the cameras too far. All parties agree, however, that Moshe hits Sharif with his flashlight, Moshe claiming it’s to save Silberberg’s life, Sharif that it’s an unprovoked assault. The flashlight cuts Sharif’s head, and he releases Silberberg. The men separate and are gathered back to their sides.
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Within the isotropic worlds of pro-Palestine and pro-Israel activism, photos and footage from the West Orange melee immediately became yet more evidence of American Jewish support for Israeli apartheid on the one hand—of the equation of Zionism with its maximalist adherents—and of pro-Palestine protesters’ hostility to Jewish life itself on the other—of the equation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism.
For those arranged against Zionist perfidy, these events are a blatant display of a “colonial project” and “anti-Palestinian hate,” as Instagram posts characterized them in the aftermath. An article appearing a few days after the West Orange event in FightBackBetter.com, “Pro-Palestine Protester Allegedly Clubbed with Flashlight by Zionist Community Leader at Protest Vs. Illegal Sale of Stolen Palestinian Land,” began:
On Wednesday, November 13, a participant in a demonstration against an event hosted by real estate firm My Israel Home in West Orange promoting the sale of properties in the illegal Givat HaMatos settlement in Jerusalem, was assaulted by a gang of violent counter protesters including Dr. Moshe Glick of Riverdale Family Dental, leader of the MetroWest Israel Action Committee and the New Jersey chapter of Israel365.
The piece went on to quote Tova at length:
“Real estate companies like My Israel Home profit from stolen land sales and are a strategic part of the zionist entity’s settler colonial plans, encouraging zionist Jews to emigrate to a land many have never before set foot in while Palestinians ethnically cleansed in 1948 and their descendants are denied the right to return to their homeland,” said Tova of Palestinian Assembly for Liberation-Awda NY/NJ.
This version of events found support a few months later, when the Essex County prosecutor’s office charged Moshe and David Silberberg with bias intimidation and aggravated assault. Pro-Palestinian protesters celebrated the charges as vindication of their view, proof that the Israeli and Jewish-American alliance is so confident and callous in its lawlessness that it will sell stolen land from its synagogues and assault those decrying the injustice.
For many American Jews meanwhile—even those opposed to the sale of occupied land—protests in front of synagogues and community centers have deepened a generalized sense of unease. And how much more so when local law enforcement won’t even hold protesters accountable for their threats and intimidation—when prosecutors instead bring charges against Jews just trying to protect their coreligionists. “On November 13th, 2024,” Moshe told the newly established Presidential Religious Liberty Commission, which invited him to speak about the West Orange protest and its aftermath, “pro-Hamas agitators disrupted a peaceful Jewish-Christian gathering praying for peace in Israel, the safe return of the hostages from Gaza, reciting Psalms and biblical verses and exploring purchasing a home in Israel.” Peaceful Jews in prayer on one side, pro-Hamas agitators on the other. And yet Moshe was the one accused of wrongdoing. “My ‘crime’? Defending a 64-year-old man from a violent assault during an unauthorized protest that blocked and intimidated worshipers at Congregation Ohr Torah in West Orange, New Jersey.”
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One morning in early spring—the warmest in weeks, at the end of the coldest East Coast winter in decades—I drive to Moshe’s house, a two-story home on a quiet, leafy street. I recognize it from the photo in the charge documents, of Tova delivering a letter and standing on the front lawn.
I also recognize it from my years of coming to this town as a teenager, West Orange and the New Jersey suburbs like it, an era of late adolescence gummed onto I-95 and the Garden State. In my dad’s old Volvo V70, I’d drive from New York City on Saturday nights, all dick and disquietude, to get stoned with my camp friends and chase second base with the daughters of the American Jewish middle class.
When I got pulled over once, driving home a hundred miles an hour, my parents were furious but still paid a local lawyer to plead my case. His strategy was to convince the judge that I was a good Jewish boy, which, by and large, I was. But in my heart, flying up the freeway in that svelte-yet-sensible Swedish machine, I was a revolutionary man. I was a goddamned hero. And what is a suburb if not the architecture of everydayness? And what are the shtetls along the interstate that I sped past in my silver sportswagon with its thoughtfully designed trunk/rear-facing-third-row but a technology of conformity and provincialism? The sprawl, the shining toxic streams, the impasto paintings of the Western Wall, the glass cases of Judaica, the peasant potato foods. What an insane and awful order! Who could ever think to live this way, with a square of backyard and a heart full of desperation?
Every home these friends and girls lived in had tchotchkes and photos from Israel. A warm and easy Zionism was the water: regular trips to the Holy Land, singing “Hatikvah” at Jewish day school, wearing blue and white on the state’s day of independence. My desire, back then, was not to argue against my community’s default positions so much as leave the water altogether. And if there was one thing I was sure of, aged seventeen, it was that I’d have none of it—not the middle-class mediocrity, not the obedience to orthodoxy, not the acquiescence to expectation. The Family, the State(s), the Community—no fucking way.
Come college, this adolescent insurgency slotted neatly into the left-wing politics of a comp lit major circa 2009; come my doctoral years, which overlapped with Occupy Wall Street and the Bernie Sanders campaign, it had graduated into a cozy armchair Marxism.
In all this time, in college and graduate school, I hardly thought about Israel at all. I never visited; I had no friends there; I didn’t even read the country’s writers. This wasn’t an act of avoidance as much as reorientation. I had spent so much of my early life trying to reckon with the world I was born into; I was eager to try my hand at some American self-fashioning.
And that’s what I thought I had done when I left the Orthodox world of my upbringing—I thought I’d escaped a community of rigid ideological rules and conformities for a world without them. What I’d actually done was join a different ideological community, one with holy texts (Hegel, Marx, Freud, Fanon) and later commentaries, with style guides and vocabularies and written and oral codes, with unspoken and unexamined values and assumptions, an orthodoxy after all.
One of this community’s later commentators, Louis Althusser, famously grouped the family and church (in my case the synagogue) alongside the university as “ideological state apparatuses,” or institutions that serve to reproduce dominant ideology. The dominant ideology of my youth, which included a deeply felt Zionism, was now replaced with the dominant ideology of institutions operating in more opaque but nevertheless consistent ways. The humanities departments of New York University, for instance, where I did my B.A. and Ph.D. (and teach, as of this writing), educate students in a canon of anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist texts and theories. Among the orthodoxies of those departments is that Zionism should be treated with the same easy disdain as “privatization” or “the police”—an obvious evil with a straightforward meaning.
My feelings about Zionism remained unformed, even as I prattled on (prattle on) about neoliberalism and hegemony; as I moved away from religion; as I tried to figure out how to live. Then I married a woman I love, and had children, and locked in at a low rate. Distanced from religion I felt rootless, dissatisfied with an emptiness I began to experience in secular life. This was especially true as I confronted questions about how to raise my kids. I had been born into a vast and mostly wondrous cosmology of ritual and story and community—vast enough to dwarf my philosophical frustrations and aversions to orthodoxy, and wondrous enough to want to share with my daughter and son. My wife and I found first a school and then a shul that had the more meaningful aspects of our observant upbringings—the deep time of Shabbat, a joy in Jewish learning, a sense of communal cohesion—and less of what we’d found dogmatic and restrictive. I settled down in the great, green country between Moshe and Tova.
And lived there peacefully, in one of the happiest diasporic homes the Jews have ever known, blithely unaware of the goings-on in Israel or Gaza or the West Bank, in the headquarters of the UJA or ADL, in the synagogues of West Orange or the Maoist caucuses of the DSA, until October 7th, which ended this age of innocence, or age of ignorance, or both.
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Within days of Hamas’s attack, Moshe had already partnered with the Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest NJ to organize a rally in solidarity with Israel (which by then had announced a full blockade of Gaza; “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,” said Israel’s Minister of Defense on October 9th. “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly”), and Tova had already attended a pro-Palestinian rally in Times Square (where protesters held signs reading “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” and speakers joked about the “rave or desert party where they were having a great time, until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters”). Each side demanded, Moshe’s and Tova’s, that I disavow the other: the antisemitic left, the genocidal right; progressive secularism with all its dangerous bedfellows, Zionism in all forms. The logics were nearly identical: look at this community you belong to, this failed project you’ve supported; look at what it’s doing in the world and at the rot at its core: What would you need to see to finally understand its immorality?
Moshe and his community monopolized the pull of peoplehood, and of historical trauma, and of a rising sense of insecurity that has only deepened, as Jews have been murdered in D.C., in Manchester, in Melbourne. Moshe, I’d assume, has both an explanation and solution: antisemitism; Zionism.
Tova, too: empire; revolution. Such an explanation frames Israel’s collective punishment of the Palestinians in Gaza, or the state-sanctioned settler violence in the West Bank, or the war against Iran and Lebanon, as parts of a coherent colonial project that should be resisted by any means necessary—even the violent means deployed by Hezbollah and Hamas.
One might argue that such support for Hezbollah or Hamas is not representative of the Jewish left’s anti-Zionism, and it’s true that the majority of Jewish progressives do not endorse Hamas or its tactics. However, in their efforts to counter pro-Israel sentiment in mainstream Jewish institutions, leading voices on the progressive left can often create a welcoming space for those who do. Consider the “explainer” that Jewish Currents published in the immediate aftermath of October 7th. Hamas, the explainer explains, “has administered and supported robust social welfare services like medical centers, schools, and charities across the West Bank and Gaza. At the same time, it has continued to engage in armed operations against Israel.” The explainer says nearly nothing about the robust network of tunnels Hamas has built beneath civilian infrastructure, nor the organization’s use of torture and extrajudicial executions to silence dissent, nor its maltreatment of women and homosexuals. It omits to mention the tens of millions of dollars Iran provides Hamas annually (as well as the hundreds of millions of dollars Iran provides Hezbollah annually, its other proxy in the region; indeed it hardly mentions Iran at all). It does call Hamas’s rule “authoritarian” and mention Hamas’s founding charter (changed in 2017), which quotes the Hadith that “the Last Hour would not come until the Muslims fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them,” before citing a scholar who claims that “the charter isn’t representative of Hamas’s political thinking today.”
How can anti-authoritarians be so forgiving of some forms of authoritarianism? I wonder about this as I drive from Moshe’s house to Tova’s, a ground-level unit in a quiet complex surrounded by woods. It’s a matter of language, I conclude—that our words can’t really travel with us, even from one side of West Orange to another. To talk about Zionism or anti-Zionism with Moshe is entirely different from talking about Zionism or anti-Zionism with Tova, the words hollowed out by conflicting interpretations. Into that vacuum rush politicians, university professors, the media, the synagogue, the family, all working to impose their own definitions. When I say Zionist or anti-Zionist, I do so against the background of what those words have been made to mean, and by whom.
Which is not to say that these coalitions don’t hold real appeal. To live in a community like Moshe’s, as I once did, is to know its deep cohesion and spiritual intensity. To have left it and joined a secular and progressive community like Tova’s is to know its powerful sense of justice. And to have been a part of either is to know their shortcomings. The dogmatism and conformity, the us/them thinking. It is also to know the blind spots: sometimes there really are colonizers in the synagogues; sometimes it really is a Hamas supporter on the front lawn.
From Tova’s door, I can see a tennis court and gym and swimming pool. In the other direction, a bit of forest. She answers and I tell her I’ve come to ask about the Trump administration’s lawsuit against her, and about the protest outside that synagogue in 2024, and about Zionism and anti-Zionism, and she doesn’t like this at all. “It’s really invasive to show up at my door like this,” she says, which strikes me as understandable but also ungenerous, given her visit to Moshe’s house. She refuses to answer any questions.
But she doesn’t need to, nor does Moshe, because they are already delineating my world. They are activists, after all, and me, I’m reading about them in the paper, or clicking links online, or scrolling past videos on social media. An inactivist, if you will. A reactivist.
I can see—I think most of us can see—how incomplete and inexact the narratives and vocabularies are that we’re given to choose from, and how driven these narratives and vocabularies are by activists and algorithms. But against the activists, we have marshaled no mass movement of the conflicted. It is impossible to fill a sign with uncertainty. There is no slogan that announces ambivalence.
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Ten months after the West Orange event and seven months after New Jersey charged Moshe and David Silberberg, the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice brought a lawsuit against the protesters who’d gathered outside the synagogue. The suit named two pro-Palestine organizations as well as individual activists, including Tova.
The Trump administration has routinely used “antisemitism” to advance various causes: reforming higher education, clamping down on pro-Palestinian speech, the targeted deportation of legal residents and students here on visas who are critical of Israel or American foreign policy. That antisemitism is on the rise in America, is a real and growing threat, is precisely the point. A fear—and debates around that fear—revolve around a term whose definition has become increasingly contested and unclear. That lack of clarity makes the word both more and less useful: more for an administration seeking to instrumentalize it, less for those trying to tease out its true causes and meaning.
The lawsuit against the West Orange protesters, in the heavy hands of the Trump administration, transforms the complexity of that night’s protest into a straightforward morality play about “Dr. Moshe Glick, a well-respected healthcare professional” squaring up against an antisemitic “mob.” According to the DOJ’s charging documents, one of the Jewish men at the center of the fight—David Silberberg—was “helpless and defenseless” against the Muslim man, who acted with “antisemitic animus” as he became “visibly enraged” before “charging.”
To prove the protest was “antisemitic,” the DOJ repeatedly describes the West Orange real-estate event as a religious one. “Glick organized a religious event centered on the Jewish obligation to live in the Land of Israel, a tenet of Jewish faith,” the DOJ argues. “The event at Congregation Ohr Torah was to include prayer, a religious memorial service for the late Rabbi Avi Goldberg, a Torah sermon, religious songs with biblical verses, prayerful dancing, educational activities about the religious obligation to live in Israel, a real estate fair, and a festive barbecue in the synagogue’s parking lot—all part of the religious observance.”
In the opening salvo of her defense, a motion to dismiss charges, Tova insists that the event was not religious but commercial. Furthermore, Tova argues, the event could not have been religious because there is no religious reason to care about, buy property in or live in Israel. “The Government does not cite a single passage from Jewish law stating that Jews have an ‘obligation to live in the land of Israel,’ Tova’s lawyers write, “And for good reason. No such obligation exists.”
This is incorrect, or at least incomplete—several classical Jewish authorities cite biblical support for an obligation to live in “the land of Canaan,” and compare those who do not to “idol worshipers.” Nevertheless, it serves as the foundation of the second plank of Tova’s argument: that buying land in Israel or moving to Israel (or even supporting Israel) is not a matter of Jewish law or observance but merely the “political movement known as Zionism”—a political movement that she, as a Jew, explicitly disavows and opposes.
None of the promotional materials I reviewed for Moshe’s event described it as anything other than an information session about buying property in Israel. Yet Tova does not just argue that this specific event cannot be covered by the laws protecting religious observance. She insists that there is no connection whatsoever between the “life of an observant Jew” and the state of Israel. Zionism, she argues, is an idea that “originated in the late 19th century” and should not be understood as central to Judaism at all.
The feelings I have about Israel have nothing to do with Jewish law. But they also have nothing to do with politics. They involve inchoate attachments to an ancient idea, and a sense of peoplehood, and a dream of safety against a history defined by its absence. In this, I believe I am more representative than either Moshe or Tova. Between those who contend that caring about Israel is a “religious obligation” and those who contend that Zionism is merely “political” is where most American Jews actually live.
“Do you believe Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish, democratic state?” a Jewish Federations of North America poll asked American Jews in 2025. Nearly nine-tenths of respondents said yes; among Jews ages 18 to 34, the number was lower, but still roughly three-quarters. Large majorities also affirmed feeling “emotionally attached” to Israel. And yet, despite feeling that Israel should remain a Jewish state, and affirming their emotional attachment to it, only 37 percent of all respondents identified as Zionists. Such data captures less a story about religion or politics or Zionism or anti-Zionism than it does a story about the sentiments those words fail to capture: that most American Jews are liberal, that most have friends or family who live in Israel, that most oppose what’s happening in Gaza, that most support the existence of a Jewish state but don’t identify as Zionists, that almost all feel less safe in America than they did before the war.
How do you support and disavow an idea at once? For some it comes down to a conflict between Jewish rights and Palestinian rights. For others it’s an aversion to what “Zionism” has come to mean, as defined by its critics and supporters alike. For many—perhaps for most—it involves an aversion to choosing one side at the exclusion of the other, especially when there are clear social costs—when identifying as a Zionist will make you unwelcome in progressive and liberal spaces; when disavowing Israel will make you unwelcome in most Jewish ones. The spectrum runs from confusion and ambivalence to discomfort and cowardice. It is not a very noble range.
How much I’d like to avoid choosing, and how much I’d like to believe I don’t have to. How much I wish, Moshe and Tova, that you could come to some conclusion for me, on a street corner in New Jersey at night, the synagogue down the hill, the poles unlike pine trees in the distance. That amidst the noise and babble you’d find one another and embrace, and your bodies would fit together so sweetly, and you’d poof into a black-and-white cookie and the sky would split open and Moshiach would come.
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Or perhaps a blue-and-white one. These cookies, blue-and-white versions of the black-and-white originals, used to be a seasonal specialty in New York City around Hanukkah time. They’ve become regulars on the kosher-cookie circuit since October 7th, small acts of solidarity that taste only slightly worse.
At my son’s fifth birthday party, bouncy houses and pizza in the gym of his school, another family had just finished celebrating a brit milah. They had an extra box of desserts that they gifted us—rainbow cakes and Linzer tarts and oblong cookie sandwiches and then the blue-and-white circles.
Do I serve the Zionist cookies, two years into a war I take to be intolerable? Do I throw the cookies in the trash, which the ADL might consider a hate crime? Do I ask my wife, busy doing everything else, who will surely call me an idiot? Do I quietly eat all dozen before anybody sees?
Amid epochal wars and desperate struggles, I plate pastries. Mine is the smallest stage of history. Moshe fights for Jewish sovereignty and Tova for the workers of the world and I wring my hands. Still, for my children, my duty is something greater. I help construct their normative, after all; I am their water. Should they get from their father nothing more than uncertainty in the face of such ferocious violence and hatred?
My kids come home from school, a pluralistic yeshiva in Brooklyn, singing Israeli songs and studying Hebrew vocabulary—the language of the Torah, but also of this foreign land. They love falafel and hummus and Israeli salad; they have playdates with friends who have just moved to New York from Tel Aviv and adore teachers whose brothers are in Gaza or Lebanon. They ask if we’ll ever visit Jerusalem and are excited when I say someday we will. This is what it means to send my kids to a Jewish school, I realize now, and to raise them in Jewish institutions; incidental to what I care about completely—that they have a deep connection to our tradition, and a literacy in it—they inherit things I care about in ways I can’t quite name.
Will my children ask, later on, why I didn’t stand more firmly for one thing or another? I’d like to tell them that I tried. I’ll tell them that of course I served the cookies, because what mattered to me most was that they saw themselves as part of a community, even if that community might sometimes bring them shame. A community that will celebrate and mourn with them, and gift them cookies that are confusing, and fight with them and hopefully understand them. And if they say, in response, that’s not good enough, I’ll try to tell them about the way words failed me.
Art credit: Ben Blaustein, Two States, 2025. Cyanotype on paper toned with botanicals, salvaged wood, charcoal, 54 × 48 in. Courtesy of the artist.
On November 13, 2024, about fifty people gathered on a corner in West Orange, New Jersey, a quiet suburb an hour’s drive from Manhattan. The plan was to march down the block to protest in front of Moshe Glick’s home.
In his fifties, graying at the temples and bald on top, Moshe is an active member of the Jewish community in West Orange, where he lives with his wife and children. He has created and supported charities that help neighbors struggling with financial difficulties or food insecurity. He co-founded an after-school program for kids whose families could not afford Jewish education. He is a volunteer EMT.
Like most in the Modern Orthodox community, a community I grew up in, Moshe is an active supporter of Israel. More recently, he has emerged as a leader on the issue, co-founding the MetroWest Israel Action Committee, a local pro-Israel advocacy group, and serving as co-president (alongside his wife, Renee) of Israel365 New Jersey, an organization that “strengthens Israel by building bridges between Jews, Christians, and all who share [their] faith-based values.”
It was likely through these Israel-advocacy networks that Moshe connected with My Israel Home, a company that helps Americans buy properties in Israel and in Israeli settlements in the West Bank. West Orange would be the last in a series of info sessions that My Israel Home had offered in the tristate area, and Moshe had been slated to host the event at his house. “MAGNIFICENT JERUSALEM PROJECTS,” a My Israel Home flyer promised. “15/85 DEALS WITH NO INTEREST. SPECIAL DISCOUNTED PRICING UNTIL NOV. 15TH. TALK TO US ABOUT BUYING ‘EXISTING PROPERTIES.’”
In early November, about a week before the event, a white-haired woman in her seventies donning light gray sneakers and a kelly-green coat was captured on Moshe’s home-security camera, photographing his front door and leaving an envelope with “LEGAL AND CONFIDENTIAL” written across it in black marker. The letter, signed by several pro-Palestinian activist groups, demanded that Moshe “immediately terminate any and all hosting, participation, support, facilitation, and conspiracy to support such [real estate] events.” Soon after, social media posts appeared calling for a “protest [of] land theft in our backyard” and listing Moshe’s street corner as the location. Moshe had hired security for the event and been in contact with local law enforcement, but when the protests were announced, and after similar protests at other My Israel Home events earlier in the month, Moshe moved the event to Ohr Torah, the synagogue down the road.
The woman captured on Moshe’s security camera was Tova Fry, who also goes by the name Terri Kay. Born in Israel in 1949, Tova today lives in New Jersey. She appears to live alone. “My grandparents, all of them, were killed during the Holocaust,” Tova told an interviewer in 2025. She speaks in a low and breathy voice, as if slightly winded. “And after the war, my parents tried to come to the U.S., but there was a quota against Eastern European Jews. The U.S. and Britain, they didn’t want Jews either after the war. My family wound up in Israel penniless. And some Israeli soldiers stole a home from a Palestinian family and gave it to my parents, and that’s where I was born.” Tova cites this story as one of the key inspirations of her activism. “When I learned that history after I was in high school, it really started to make me think about what had happened there, and wanting to do something about it.”
Tova has since organized and attended countless protests and rallies and written hundreds of articles for revolutionary magazines like Mundo Obrero/Workers World: Workers and Oppressed Peoples of the World Unite and Fighting Words: Journal of the Communist Workers League. These are mostly missives from the front lines of actions she participates in. Occasionally, though, Tova zooms out to consider the larger conditions of revolutionary struggle. In one speech, given to “commemorate” the first anniversary of Hamas’s Al-Aqsa Flood, Tova (introduced as an “anti-zionist Jew”) praises the “honorable” work of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh (assassinated by Israel in 2024) and the “unwavering and heroic” efforts of Hezbollah, and links her efforts as an activist to theirs. “The cause of the Resistance,” Tova concludes, “the cause Sayyed Hassan [Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader] fought for, the cause of liberation is the cause of all humanity. We all must continue his fight.”
Which is what Tova was doing when she showed up on Moshe’s front lawn, caught by the convex lens of his doorbell camera. And what she was doing days later, when she brought a group of protesters to Moshe’s neighborhood. Tova was fighting for her cause.
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There is even disagreement about when this story begins.
For some the story starts with the biblical promise of a homeland, and the millennia of persecution and yearning, and the miracle of Israel’s establishment in 1948 and survival of the wars waged in that founding’s wake. This story continues through October 7, 2023, when Hamas invaded Israel and massacred nearly 1,200 people, most of them civilians. In the aftermath of that attack, many American Jews were forced to reckon with both Israel’s vulnerability and their own, as some progressive institutions in this country appeared unable or unwilling to adequately condemn mass Jewish death, while others failed to offer understanding at a time of communal mourning and fear. This, I believe, is how Moshe sees it (he declined to speak to me for this essay).
For others the story begins with the emergence of Zionism in nineteenth-century Europe, with the Balfour Declaration in 1917, or with the Nakba of the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. Those events led to the steady, violent displacement of the Palestinians, and to the intractable conflict and catastrophe that defines the region today. These were the preamble to the attacks on October 7th and the genocidal war that followed, which many American institutions, and both of its main political parties, have either actively supported or inadequately condemned. That, I believe, is how Tova understands it (she, too, declined to speak to me for this essay).
All these stories have elements of truth. Palestinians have been violently displaced, Hamas’s attack was horrific, parts of the American left have been chillingly quiet or worrisomely loud, Israel’s response has been merciless. And around each of these stories coalesce constituencies of the American Jewish public.
Moshe’s constituency is a growing demographic of Orthodox Jews, for whom the line between religious observance and right-wing Zionism has largely disappeared. West Bank land sales in suburban synagogues; Shabbat morning prayers for the soldiers of the Israeli Defense Forces; unflinching support for the war from the most powerful institutions of American Orthodoxy.
In the days immediately after October 7th, someone from this community pointed out to me how the strong show of solidarity that the Palestinians were receiving from the American left seemed to have prohibited any consideration of the brutality of Hamas’s attack, or even any sympathy for the Jewish dead. “There are only two sides now,” he told me, “ours and theirs.” Did ours refer to Israel or to Jews? If there had ever been a difference, there wasn’t any longer. Almost three years later, that sense of separation has calcified into a politics. “You’re saying that there’s a limit to the application of liberal principles,” I asked one participant in the real-estate event at the synagogue in West Orange. A limit that would apply to Palestinians. “Absolutely,” he answered immediately. “It has to be.”
If we interpret Moshe’s coalition as constituted, at least in large part, by America’s Orthodox Jewish community, then this movement represents a fast-growing demographic of American Jewry writ large. According to a 2020 Pew Research poll, among Jews ages 18 to 29, 17 percent are Orthodox compared with just 3 percent among Jews 65 and older. The median ages of various American Jewish denominations tell a similar story: Orthodox Jews have a median adult age of 35, Reform Jews 53 and Conservative Jews 62. Orthodox Jews also have 3.3 children on average, compared to 1.4 among non-Orthodox Jews. A recent demographic study estimates that the percentage of American Jews who identify as Orthodox “is expected to swell from 12% today to an estimated 29% in 2063,” or from about eight hundred thousand to nearly two million. “Over the same 50-year time period, Reform and Conservative Jews, who tend to be more theologically and politically liberal, will go from being 50% of American Jews to 39%, and the total number of people in those denominations aged 30-69 will decline by 46%.” Currently numbering at about 3.44 million—more than four times the size of the current Orthodox Jewish population—Reform and Conservative Jews will eventually be the smaller community.
The politics of this Orthodox constituency has become “as solidly Republican as non-Orthodox Jews are solidly Democratic,” Pew noted in 2021—a trend that has only deepened since October 7th. The commitment to Israel among this constituency is also deepening. In a recent survey, 94 percent of Modern Orthodox respondents identified as Zionist, and 40 percent of Modern Orthodox respondents said that their Zionism has intensified since October 7th. This coalition—Moshe’s coalition—is one version of the American Jewish future.
But Tova represents a growing movement too: of Jews increasingly alienated from Israel and the institutions of American Jewish life. “The Gaza genocide has made plain,” Arielle Angel, then editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents, wrote last year, “what many leftist Jews have long feared: that virtually the entire enterprise of Judaism—and nearly every organization charged with stewarding it—is infected with a voracious rot.” The Anti-Defamation League, the UJA-Federation, the Orthodox Union—all of them, Angel correctly points out, treat the support of Israel—and even of its current war—as central to Jewish life. And while progressive Jews’ opposition to Israel is not new, the centrality and the intensity of anti-Zionism among progressive Jews is very new indeed.
For these Jews—typically younger, often secular or not institutionally affiliated—much of American Judaism is complicit in a morally compromising project of apartheid and genocide. According to a 2024 poll conducted by the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, nearly 30 percent of American Jews “agreed with the accusation that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza”; among respondents under 44, the number was 38 percent. “Younger Jews are also more likely to say Israel has committed genocide,” a more recent Washington Post poll noted, “with 50 percent of those ages 18 to 34 saying so and the number hovering in the 30s among older groups.”
Beyond its opposition to Israel, what does this growing coalition believe? Its critics will argue not much. “Most anti-Zionists are not going to be Jews in a generation,” Joshua Cohen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Netanyahus, told the New Republic in 2024, adding that these Jews “have reserved for themselves as the final expression of their Jewishness the condemnation of Israel.” Angel wrestles with Cohen’s critique. “I cannot deny the charge that our Judaism has been primarily one of rebellion. Indeed, even among those who insist on the principled separation of Jewishness and Zionism, I’ve noticed a tendency to cede ever more territory, to declare more and more of Jewish life contaminated or at least suspicious, with suspicion reason enough for withdrawal.” This leads her to a call for “new spaces, new containers for the exploration of anti-fascist Jewish life.”
Whether Angel (or anybody else) will succeed in building such institutions is a separate question, but it is unquestionable that this community, too, represents a possible future for America’s Jews.
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Arriving at the West Orange meetup spot on a cool autumn evening, with flags and signs and megaphones and horns, Tova and the other protesters learn that the event has been moved to a nearby synagogue. To get from Moshe’s house, which sits atop a ridge, to the synagogue, which sits on a ridge across the way, they need to walk.
I picture them marching, noisy and colorful through the quiet streets of Jewish suburbia. It’s almost beautiful in its incongruity, this puncture of the postwar Jewish idyll, an age of security and innocence undone by the specter of a globalized intifada, arriving in the dark to accuse you of genocide. They pass a playground, a half-court hoop, a ball field surrounded by metal bleachers, yard signs with pictures of young people held hostage in Gaza, yard signs that say BRING THEM HOME NOW, metal poles festooned with Israeli flags, lawns strewn with colorful plastic toys or wooden swing sets, a patch of forest and then the languid Peckman River (a more Jewish-sounding name I couldn’t create), up the hill now past a senior-care facility, some county electrical infrastructure (including a steel cellular pole, a hundred feet high, which the county decorates to look like a pine tree so the steel won’t stick out; because there are so few pine trees around, the pole only draws more attention, a great brown rod toupeed with leaves and branches), until they reach the synagogue a half mile away, and find the counterprotesters waiting.
By now, everybody is outside: those who had been at the synagogue to attend the real-estate event and those who have come to demonstrate on their behalf. One person present estimated that there were 150 pro-Israel counterprotesters there, men and women and children.
The West Orange Police Department meekly tries to keep the groups separate, but without any physical barricades, the two camps are soon face to face on a narrow strip of sidewalk outside the synagogue, which shares a squat brick building with a preschool and gym.
It seems clear, from videos and witness testimony, that the protesters want to be as close to the synagogue as possible. “Where’s the entrance?” Tova asks, as the group moves toward the synagogue’s doors, ignoring police requests not to do so.
The horns, meanwhile, are really fucking loud. One of the protesters, a man named Altaf Sharif, is blowing his right in Moshe’s face, and Moshe swipes to swat it away. While Sharif is looking at Moshe, a masked pro-Israel counterprotester, David Silberberg, comes from the side and pepper-sprays Sharif. This appears to be unprovoked. Sharif wipes his eyes. A few seconds later, he tackles Silberberg and tumbles with him down the hill and into the parking lot of the synagogue.
For ten seconds, it is impossible to see exactly what is happening. The videos are too grainy, the cameras too far. All parties agree, however, that Moshe hits Sharif with his flashlight, Moshe claiming it’s to save Silberberg’s life, Sharif that it’s an unprovoked assault. The flashlight cuts Sharif’s head, and he releases Silberberg. The men separate and are gathered back to their sides.
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Within the isotropic worlds of pro-Palestine and pro-Israel activism, photos and footage from the West Orange melee immediately became yet more evidence of American Jewish support for Israeli apartheid on the one hand—of the equation of Zionism with its maximalist adherents—and of pro-Palestine protesters’ hostility to Jewish life itself on the other—of the equation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism.
For those arranged against Zionist perfidy, these events are a blatant display of a “colonial project” and “anti-Palestinian hate,” as Instagram posts characterized them in the aftermath. An article appearing a few days after the West Orange event in FightBackBetter.com, “Pro-Palestine Protester Allegedly Clubbed with Flashlight by Zionist Community Leader at Protest Vs. Illegal Sale of Stolen Palestinian Land,” began:
The piece went on to quote Tova at length:
This version of events found support a few months later, when the Essex County prosecutor’s office charged Moshe and David Silberberg with bias intimidation and aggravated assault. Pro-Palestinian protesters celebrated the charges as vindication of their view, proof that the Israeli and Jewish-American alliance is so confident and callous in its lawlessness that it will sell stolen land from its synagogues and assault those decrying the injustice.
For many American Jews meanwhile—even those opposed to the sale of occupied land—protests in front of synagogues and community centers have deepened a generalized sense of unease. And how much more so when local law enforcement won’t even hold protesters accountable for their threats and intimidation—when prosecutors instead bring charges against Jews just trying to protect their coreligionists. “On November 13th, 2024,” Moshe told the newly established Presidential Religious Liberty Commission, which invited him to speak about the West Orange protest and its aftermath, “pro-Hamas agitators disrupted a peaceful Jewish-Christian gathering praying for peace in Israel, the safe return of the hostages from Gaza, reciting Psalms and biblical verses and exploring purchasing a home in Israel.” Peaceful Jews in prayer on one side, pro-Hamas agitators on the other. And yet Moshe was the one accused of wrongdoing. “My ‘crime’? Defending a 64-year-old man from a violent assault during an unauthorized protest that blocked and intimidated worshipers at Congregation Ohr Torah in West Orange, New Jersey.”
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One morning in early spring—the warmest in weeks, at the end of the coldest East Coast winter in decades—I drive to Moshe’s house, a two-story home on a quiet, leafy street. I recognize it from the photo in the charge documents, of Tova delivering a letter and standing on the front lawn.
I also recognize it from my years of coming to this town as a teenager, West Orange and the New Jersey suburbs like it, an era of late adolescence gummed onto I-95 and the Garden State. In my dad’s old Volvo V70, I’d drive from New York City on Saturday nights, all dick and disquietude, to get stoned with my camp friends and chase second base with the daughters of the American Jewish middle class.
When I got pulled over once, driving home a hundred miles an hour, my parents were furious but still paid a local lawyer to plead my case. His strategy was to convince the judge that I was a good Jewish boy, which, by and large, I was. But in my heart, flying up the freeway in that svelte-yet-sensible Swedish machine, I was a revolutionary man. I was a goddamned hero. And what is a suburb if not the architecture of everydayness? And what are the shtetls along the interstate that I sped past in my silver sportswagon with its thoughtfully designed trunk/rear-facing-third-row but a technology of conformity and provincialism? The sprawl, the shining toxic streams, the impasto paintings of the Western Wall, the glass cases of Judaica, the peasant potato foods. What an insane and awful order! Who could ever think to live this way, with a square of backyard and a heart full of desperation?
Every home these friends and girls lived in had tchotchkes and photos from Israel. A warm and easy Zionism was the water: regular trips to the Holy Land, singing “Hatikvah” at Jewish day school, wearing blue and white on the state’s day of independence. My desire, back then, was not to argue against my community’s default positions so much as leave the water altogether. And if there was one thing I was sure of, aged seventeen, it was that I’d have none of it—not the middle-class mediocrity, not the obedience to orthodoxy, not the acquiescence to expectation. The Family, the State(s), the Community—no fucking way.
Come college, this adolescent insurgency slotted neatly into the left-wing politics of a comp lit major circa 2009; come my doctoral years, which overlapped with Occupy Wall Street and the Bernie Sanders campaign, it had graduated into a cozy armchair Marxism.
In all this time, in college and graduate school, I hardly thought about Israel at all. I never visited; I had no friends there; I didn’t even read the country’s writers. This wasn’t an act of avoidance as much as reorientation. I had spent so much of my early life trying to reckon with the world I was born into; I was eager to try my hand at some American self-fashioning.
And that’s what I thought I had done when I left the Orthodox world of my upbringing—I thought I’d escaped a community of rigid ideological rules and conformities for a world without them. What I’d actually done was join a different ideological community, one with holy texts (Hegel, Marx, Freud, Fanon) and later commentaries, with style guides and vocabularies and written and oral codes, with unspoken and unexamined values and assumptions, an orthodoxy after all.
One of this community’s later commentators, Louis Althusser, famously grouped the family and church (in my case the synagogue) alongside the university as “ideological state apparatuses,” or institutions that serve to reproduce dominant ideology. The dominant ideology of my youth, which included a deeply felt Zionism, was now replaced with the dominant ideology of institutions operating in more opaque but nevertheless consistent ways. The humanities departments of New York University, for instance, where I did my B.A. and Ph.D. (and teach, as of this writing), educate students in a canon of anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist texts and theories. Among the orthodoxies of those departments is that Zionism should be treated with the same easy disdain as “privatization” or “the police”—an obvious evil with a straightforward meaning.
My feelings about Zionism remained unformed, even as I prattled on (prattle on) about neoliberalism and hegemony; as I moved away from religion; as I tried to figure out how to live. Then I married a woman I love, and had children, and locked in at a low rate. Distanced from religion I felt rootless, dissatisfied with an emptiness I began to experience in secular life. This was especially true as I confronted questions about how to raise my kids. I had been born into a vast and mostly wondrous cosmology of ritual and story and community—vast enough to dwarf my philosophical frustrations and aversions to orthodoxy, and wondrous enough to want to share with my daughter and son. My wife and I found first a school and then a shul that had the more meaningful aspects of our observant upbringings—the deep time of Shabbat, a joy in Jewish learning, a sense of communal cohesion—and less of what we’d found dogmatic and restrictive. I settled down in the great, green country between Moshe and Tova.
And lived there peacefully, in one of the happiest diasporic homes the Jews have ever known, blithely unaware of the goings-on in Israel or Gaza or the West Bank, in the headquarters of the UJA or ADL, in the synagogues of West Orange or the Maoist caucuses of the DSA, until October 7th, which ended this age of innocence, or age of ignorance, or both.
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Within days of Hamas’s attack, Moshe had already partnered with the Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest NJ to organize a rally in solidarity with Israel (which by then had announced a full blockade of Gaza; “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,” said Israel’s Minister of Defense on October 9th. “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly”), and Tova had already attended a pro-Palestinian rally in Times Square (where protesters held signs reading “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” and speakers joked about the “rave or desert party where they were having a great time, until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters”). Each side demanded, Moshe’s and Tova’s, that I disavow the other: the antisemitic left, the genocidal right; progressive secularism with all its dangerous bedfellows, Zionism in all forms. The logics were nearly identical: look at this community you belong to, this failed project you’ve supported; look at what it’s doing in the world and at the rot at its core: What would you need to see to finally understand its immorality?
Moshe and his community monopolized the pull of peoplehood, and of historical trauma, and of a rising sense of insecurity that has only deepened, as Jews have been murdered in D.C., in Manchester, in Melbourne. Moshe, I’d assume, has both an explanation and solution: antisemitism; Zionism.
Tova, too: empire; revolution. Such an explanation frames Israel’s collective punishment of the Palestinians in Gaza, or the state-sanctioned settler violence in the West Bank, or the war against Iran and Lebanon, as parts of a coherent colonial project that should be resisted by any means necessary—even the violent means deployed by Hezbollah and Hamas.
One might argue that such support for Hezbollah or Hamas is not representative of the Jewish left’s anti-Zionism, and it’s true that the majority of Jewish progressives do not endorse Hamas or its tactics. However, in their efforts to counter pro-Israel sentiment in mainstream Jewish institutions, leading voices on the progressive left can often create a welcoming space for those who do. Consider the “explainer” that Jewish Currents published in the immediate aftermath of October 7th. Hamas, the explainer explains, “has administered and supported robust social welfare services like medical centers, schools, and charities across the West Bank and Gaza. At the same time, it has continued to engage in armed operations against Israel.” The explainer says nearly nothing about the robust network of tunnels Hamas has built beneath civilian infrastructure, nor the organization’s use of torture and extrajudicial executions to silence dissent, nor its maltreatment of women and homosexuals. It omits to mention the tens of millions of dollars Iran provides Hamas annually (as well as the hundreds of millions of dollars Iran provides Hezbollah annually, its other proxy in the region; indeed it hardly mentions Iran at all). It does call Hamas’s rule “authoritarian” and mention Hamas’s founding charter (changed in 2017), which quotes the Hadith that “the Last Hour would not come until the Muslims fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them,” before citing a scholar who claims that “the charter isn’t representative of Hamas’s political thinking today.”
How can anti-authoritarians be so forgiving of some forms of authoritarianism? I wonder about this as I drive from Moshe’s house to Tova’s, a ground-level unit in a quiet complex surrounded by woods. It’s a matter of language, I conclude—that our words can’t really travel with us, even from one side of West Orange to another. To talk about Zionism or anti-Zionism with Moshe is entirely different from talking about Zionism or anti-Zionism with Tova, the words hollowed out by conflicting interpretations. Into that vacuum rush politicians, university professors, the media, the synagogue, the family, all working to impose their own definitions. When I say Zionist or anti-Zionist, I do so against the background of what those words have been made to mean, and by whom.
Which is not to say that these coalitions don’t hold real appeal. To live in a community like Moshe’s, as I once did, is to know its deep cohesion and spiritual intensity. To have left it and joined a secular and progressive community like Tova’s is to know its powerful sense of justice. And to have been a part of either is to know their shortcomings. The dogmatism and conformity, the us/them thinking. It is also to know the blind spots: sometimes there really are colonizers in the synagogues; sometimes it really is a Hamas supporter on the front lawn.
From Tova’s door, I can see a tennis court and gym and swimming pool. In the other direction, a bit of forest. She answers and I tell her I’ve come to ask about the Trump administration’s lawsuit against her, and about the protest outside that synagogue in 2024, and about Zionism and anti-Zionism, and she doesn’t like this at all. “It’s really invasive to show up at my door like this,” she says, which strikes me as understandable but also ungenerous, given her visit to Moshe’s house. She refuses to answer any questions.
But she doesn’t need to, nor does Moshe, because they are already delineating my world. They are activists, after all, and me, I’m reading about them in the paper, or clicking links online, or scrolling past videos on social media. An inactivist, if you will. A reactivist.
I can see—I think most of us can see—how incomplete and inexact the narratives and vocabularies are that we’re given to choose from, and how driven these narratives and vocabularies are by activists and algorithms. But against the activists, we have marshaled no mass movement of the conflicted. It is impossible to fill a sign with uncertainty. There is no slogan that announces ambivalence.
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Ten months after the West Orange event and seven months after New Jersey charged Moshe and David Silberberg, the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice brought a lawsuit against the protesters who’d gathered outside the synagogue. The suit named two pro-Palestine organizations as well as individual activists, including Tova.
The Trump administration has routinely used “antisemitism” to advance various causes: reforming higher education, clamping down on pro-Palestinian speech, the targeted deportation of legal residents and students here on visas who are critical of Israel or American foreign policy. That antisemitism is on the rise in America, is a real and growing threat, is precisely the point. A fear—and debates around that fear—revolve around a term whose definition has become increasingly contested and unclear. That lack of clarity makes the word both more and less useful: more for an administration seeking to instrumentalize it, less for those trying to tease out its true causes and meaning.
The lawsuit against the West Orange protesters, in the heavy hands of the Trump administration, transforms the complexity of that night’s protest into a straightforward morality play about “Dr. Moshe Glick, a well-respected healthcare professional” squaring up against an antisemitic “mob.” According to the DOJ’s charging documents, one of the Jewish men at the center of the fight—David Silberberg—was “helpless and defenseless” against the Muslim man, who acted with “antisemitic animus” as he became “visibly enraged” before “charging.”
To prove the protest was “antisemitic,” the DOJ repeatedly describes the West Orange real-estate event as a religious one. “Glick organized a religious event centered on the Jewish obligation to live in the Land of Israel, a tenet of Jewish faith,” the DOJ argues. “The event at Congregation Ohr Torah was to include prayer, a religious memorial service for the late Rabbi Avi Goldberg, a Torah sermon, religious songs with biblical verses, prayerful dancing, educational activities about the religious obligation to live in Israel, a real estate fair, and a festive barbecue in the synagogue’s parking lot—all part of the religious observance.”
In the opening salvo of her defense, a motion to dismiss charges, Tova insists that the event was not religious but commercial. Furthermore, Tova argues, the event could not have been religious because there is no religious reason to care about, buy property in or live in Israel. “The Government does not cite a single passage from Jewish law stating that Jews have an ‘obligation to live in the land of Israel,’ Tova’s lawyers write, “And for good reason. No such obligation exists.”
This is incorrect, or at least incomplete—several classical Jewish authorities cite biblical support for an obligation to live in “the land of Canaan,” and compare those who do not to “idol worshipers.” Nevertheless, it serves as the foundation of the second plank of Tova’s argument: that buying land in Israel or moving to Israel (or even supporting Israel) is not a matter of Jewish law or observance but merely the “political movement known as Zionism”—a political movement that she, as a Jew, explicitly disavows and opposes.
None of the promotional materials I reviewed for Moshe’s event described it as anything other than an information session about buying property in Israel. Yet Tova does not just argue that this specific event cannot be covered by the laws protecting religious observance. She insists that there is no connection whatsoever between the “life of an observant Jew” and the state of Israel. Zionism, she argues, is an idea that “originated in the late 19th century” and should not be understood as central to Judaism at all.
The feelings I have about Israel have nothing to do with Jewish law. But they also have nothing to do with politics. They involve inchoate attachments to an ancient idea, and a sense of peoplehood, and a dream of safety against a history defined by its absence. In this, I believe I am more representative than either Moshe or Tova. Between those who contend that caring about Israel is a “religious obligation” and those who contend that Zionism is merely “political” is where most American Jews actually live.
“Do you believe Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish, democratic state?” a Jewish Federations of North America poll asked American Jews in 2025. Nearly nine-tenths of respondents said yes; among Jews ages 18 to 34, the number was lower, but still roughly three-quarters. Large majorities also affirmed feeling “emotionally attached” to Israel. And yet, despite feeling that Israel should remain a Jewish state, and affirming their emotional attachment to it, only 37 percent of all respondents identified as Zionists. Such data captures less a story about religion or politics or Zionism or anti-Zionism than it does a story about the sentiments those words fail to capture: that most American Jews are liberal, that most have friends or family who live in Israel, that most oppose what’s happening in Gaza, that most support the existence of a Jewish state but don’t identify as Zionists, that almost all feel less safe in America than they did before the war.
How do you support and disavow an idea at once? For some it comes down to a conflict between Jewish rights and Palestinian rights. For others it’s an aversion to what “Zionism” has come to mean, as defined by its critics and supporters alike. For many—perhaps for most—it involves an aversion to choosing one side at the exclusion of the other, especially when there are clear social costs—when identifying as a Zionist will make you unwelcome in progressive and liberal spaces; when disavowing Israel will make you unwelcome in most Jewish ones. The spectrum runs from confusion and ambivalence to discomfort and cowardice. It is not a very noble range.
How much I’d like to avoid choosing, and how much I’d like to believe I don’t have to. How much I wish, Moshe and Tova, that you could come to some conclusion for me, on a street corner in New Jersey at night, the synagogue down the hill, the poles unlike pine trees in the distance. That amidst the noise and babble you’d find one another and embrace, and your bodies would fit together so sweetly, and you’d poof into a black-and-white cookie and the sky would split open and Moshiach would come.
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Or perhaps a blue-and-white one. These cookies, blue-and-white versions of the black-and-white originals, used to be a seasonal specialty in New York City around Hanukkah time. They’ve become regulars on the kosher-cookie circuit since October 7th, small acts of solidarity that taste only slightly worse.
At my son’s fifth birthday party, bouncy houses and pizza in the gym of his school, another family had just finished celebrating a brit milah. They had an extra box of desserts that they gifted us—rainbow cakes and Linzer tarts and oblong cookie sandwiches and then the blue-and-white circles.
Do I serve the Zionist cookies, two years into a war I take to be intolerable? Do I throw the cookies in the trash, which the ADL might consider a hate crime? Do I ask my wife, busy doing everything else, who will surely call me an idiot? Do I quietly eat all dozen before anybody sees?
Amid epochal wars and desperate struggles, I plate pastries. Mine is the smallest stage of history. Moshe fights for Jewish sovereignty and Tova for the workers of the world and I wring my hands. Still, for my children, my duty is something greater. I help construct their normative, after all; I am their water. Should they get from their father nothing more than uncertainty in the face of such ferocious violence and hatred?
My kids come home from school, a pluralistic yeshiva in Brooklyn, singing Israeli songs and studying Hebrew vocabulary—the language of the Torah, but also of this foreign land. They love falafel and hummus and Israeli salad; they have playdates with friends who have just moved to New York from Tel Aviv and adore teachers whose brothers are in Gaza or Lebanon. They ask if we’ll ever visit Jerusalem and are excited when I say someday we will. This is what it means to send my kids to a Jewish school, I realize now, and to raise them in Jewish institutions; incidental to what I care about completely—that they have a deep connection to our tradition, and a literacy in it—they inherit things I care about in ways I can’t quite name.
Will my children ask, later on, why I didn’t stand more firmly for one thing or another? I’d like to tell them that I tried. I’ll tell them that of course I served the cookies, because what mattered to me most was that they saw themselves as part of a community, even if that community might sometimes bring them shame. A community that will celebrate and mourn with them, and gift them cookies that are confusing, and fight with them and hopefully understand them. And if they say, in response, that’s not good enough, I’ll try to tell them about the way words failed me.
Art credit: Ben Blaustein, Two States, 2025. Cyanotype on paper toned with botanicals, salvaged wood, charcoal, 54 × 48 in. Courtesy of the artist.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.