My husband, who was raised Catholic, said recently that my relationship to Judaism has always been restive, oppositional. He’s right: I feel most Jewish when sitting in a church, least Jewish when a colleague makes assumptions about my level of observance, by wishing me an easy fast, or a good Shabbos. It is not surprising to me that in certain ways I have felt more Jewish in the two years since October 7th, while often also ashamed and further at odds with most American Jews, particularly those vehemently flying their Israeli flags. And yet the obligation to think, write and teach the tradition, the same subject I’ve been writing about for the past 25 years, weighs on me now with increased exigency.
There is a strange ironic alignment I experience now with my subject, with the generation of post-World War II French Jews and their allies, intellectuals that I have studied since graduate school. They too felt a call to identify with the tradition, to think about it and write about it, in the aftermath of a catastrophe. The irony arises from the fact that the demand they felt stems from their experience of a shared victimhood, while I feel implicated in the crimes of the perpetrators. It is not a comfortable feeling, one that would be easier to disown if, in the last seventy years, modern American Judaism had not sewn such tight transatlantic stitches, binding itself inextricably to the nascent state of Israel.
●
In 1939, the Lithuanian-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas had been a naturalized citizen of France for nine years when the threat of Nazi invasion reframed his sense of identity. Putting it in terms that seem scandalous in retrospect, he wrote, “Jews have the obscure feeling that Hitlerism is a call to their vocation and destiny. They situate, once again, their misfortune within the perspective of sacred history.” For Levinas, the experience of persecution literalized the Bible, actualized its tales. Within months he was mobilized by the French Army and captured during the French surrender. He spent nearly five years in captivity, writing and thinking about what it meant to be Jewish. Already for Levinas “being Jewish” was not divorced from shame. Levinas described shame in 1935 as a reckoning with being unable to escape from one’s own body. He diagnosed the philosophy of Hitlerism as a reaction to it that manifests as a subsequent allegiance to the body that propagates itself as force. During the war, he identified in Judaism its negative reflection in the experience of suffering.
●
Like many American Jews, my own upbringing was the product of a Judaism formulated in connection with Israel, one that was often concomitant with a loosening of practice, a desire for normalization. My mother’s mother kept a kosher home, but the family ate crabs and Smithfield ham when dining at Haussner’s in downtown Baltimore. My father’s parents named their sons Richard and Alan, as though they might be safer with first names that placed them among the British aristocracy. My own parents had no qualms about serving pork at home, but they gave their children biblical names, Benjamin and Sarah, and joined a reform synagogue to educate us. There I learned some basic Hebrew, the words moreh (teacher) and iparon (pencil), but mostly I learned about Israel. Our fourth-grade textbook, published in 1968, was entitled Behold, the Land. Its prologue begins with the same word that commences the Torah, also the Hebrew title of its first book:
Bereshit [In the beginning]: “The Jewish people has special qualities, and so does the Jewish state. Our problems are like no other peoples’ problems, neither are the solutions we are working out for them. We have ideals of our own in a country which is our own.”
The message was clear: 1948 was the new Genesis. The state had replaced scripture. I did not learn about the Mishnah or the Talmud in Hebrew school, but I did learn why the annexing of the West Bank in the Six-Day War was important to the state’s security. My teacher drew a map on the blackboard with a chalked dotted line to show the proximity between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, the ease with which the country could be bisected by invaders. It was meant to teach us that the occupation of the West Bank was not only politically savvy; it would save the Jewish people from another massacre.
●
As a member of the French Army, Levinas was not sent to Auschwitz but to prisoner-of-war camps, first in France and then in Germany. From 1942 until April of 1945, he was held in Stalag 11B at Fallingbostel near Magdeburg, Germany in a barrack reserved for Jewish prisoners—the word JUD in indelible ink on his uniform. He worked in a forestry detail. During those years he kept a series of notebooks small enough to fit inside a pocket. After his death in 1995, they were discovered, one nested inside the other, and published in a volume of his Oeuvres Completes entitled Carnets de captivité. These notebooks are not a diary, nor a narrative account of his life in the stalag, but something like an intellectual laboratory, where he would transform his suffering into something more widely communicable. His moments of greatest desolation are rendered in philosophical form: “a sense of the nightmare. Reality immobilized—absolute estrangement. Night in broad daylight.” Still in France, his wife and daughter spent the war hidden in a convent. His immediate family—father, mother and two brothers—were shot and killed during a Nazi roundup of Jews in Kovno. He wrote of his daughter, “Simone—catechism…for once a problem that is not material is serious. Usually, you worry about a daughter’s health, her conduct, her marriage. And suddenly it is a question of her salvation.”
Levinas began thinking during his time in captivity about what the camps conveyed about the fragility of civilization, and how his own experience of suffering connected him to a Jewish past. He refers multiple times to the “falling of the draperies,” an image to describe how civilization had been ripped away like a piece of décor, revealing its nature to have been nothing other than artifice. If civilization could not provide a sure foundation for ethics, he reasoned, it must be located elsewhere. He began to conceive of what it meant to be Jewish not merely as a culture or a religion but as a modality of being, contrasting it to Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein in Being and Time. In his seventh and last notebook from captivity, he wrote:
In persecution I rediscover the original sense of J[udaism], its initial emotion. This is not just any persecution—an absolute persecution, which pursues the being everywhere, enclosing it in the bare fact of its existence. And it is here also (chapter 53 of Isaiah)—in the discouragement which no one would know how to comprehend—that the divine presence is revealed.
Persecution and election are rendered as identical here. It is a conflation he would perpetuate in his work going forward, constructing analogously his depiction of ethics: an experience of election and responsibility inaugurated by the encounter with the face of another. The experience of Being-Jewish, if not the source for the ethical relation, was its theological rendering. He claimed both that this relation was phenomenologically based and that it could be found in the Hebrew Bible, in Abraham’s answer to God, hineni, here I am.
In the months after his release from the labor camp in 1945, he gave a radio address in which he explicitly compared his time in the camp to the experience of Abraham on the three-day journey to Mount Moriah. The camps provided a time and space of suffering and foreboding, he wrote, “that allowed for a consideration of the pain before being seized and destroyed. In this interval reflection slips in. Here spiritual life commences.” Misery becomes a “source of Jewish consciousness, a possible seed of a future Jewish life,” the discovery of “the signs of election in suffering itself.”
●
Six months after my bat mitzvah, in the summer of 1987, after I had learned my Torah portion by playing and rewinding a cassette tape, and chanting words that I did not understand, my father bribed me into going on a United Jewish Appeal “mission trip” to Israel with the promise that we would stop in Paris on the way home. My father felt a certain pride and identification for the state that had come into existence two years after his birth. He was an Eagle Scout and served in the Army reserves. He could build a fire without matches and find his way out of the woods at night without a compass. Like many postwar youth, even outside of the state of Israel, he was raised with a model of Jewish life meant to overturn centuries of lachrymose passivity.
A few days into the trip we rose before dawn and drove to the desert. Our bus was one among many idling at the base of Mount Masada as the heat began to rise, and I slowly realized that it was not car sickness or my teenage unease with the other trip members that was roiling my stomach. Some members of the trip took the cable car. My father, of course, insisted we hike the jagged trail. How else to experience a desert sunrise? I puked every five hundred feet. Emerging from the rudimentary toilets at the top, I found my group gathered around my parents’ cantor, a woman in a kippa dressed in linen, strumming her guitar. A moment later the thirteen-year-olds among us, my stepsister and me included, were brought to the front of the group. A few words were said, some songs sung. It was only back in the air-conditioned bus, some hours later, that I realized I had been “bat mitzvahed” for a second time.
What did my father and stepmother understand about this ritual? They knew they were supposed to love Israel, but did they know that Masada had been excavated and restored as a national monument, led by the archaeologist and military general Yigael Yadin, as part of an effort to reorient the story of the Jews from one of bookish passivity to one of unrelenting resistance to the point of suicide? Did they know that until the twentieth century, the story of the Zealots’ encampment on the mountain, their holdout against the Roman army, was barely known by Jews, recorded only in Josephus’s writings? The Babylonian Talmud, by contrast, had offered a different response to the religious and political catastrophe of the First Jewish Roman-War: the origin story of rabbinic Judaism. In one version given by the Talmud, during the Roman siege of Jerusalem the Zealots themselves are seen to be functionally holding Jerusalem hostage; to get past them, the savvy Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai sneaks out of the city in a coffin and secures the future for rabbinic Judaism by asking Vespasian for the city of Yavneh, where the rabbinic tradition would develop its practices of scriptural reasoning. Did my father know that the very act of having me bat mitzvahed on the site of the ancient fortress was part of an orchestrated move to replace text with land as the site of the sacred in the minds and hearts of Jews, not only in Israel but around the world?
●
Less than two years after Levinas was released from the internment camp he published the essay “Being Jewish” (Étre Juif). The target of this essay was the already famous Jean-Paul Sartre, who’d written the bestselling Being and Nothingness while Levinas was in the camps. In contrast to Sartre’s description of a radical freedom, Levinas wrote that “the recourse of Hitlerian anti-Semitism to racial myth reminded the Jew of the irremissibility of his being”—that is, “not to be able to flee one’s condition.” It is a formulation that recalls his description of shame over ten years earlier. Unlike Sartre’s subjects, Levinas suggests in the essay, Jews do not have the freedom to make an essence for themselves. With this formulation, Levinas had dialed in philosophically on an aspect of minority identity that for the last 75 years has marked not only the discussion of Judaism but marginalized identities across the board, a recognition of the false promises of assimilationism in all its various forms. For Levinas and his contemporaries the reclamation of Judaism was predicated on their shared suffering, on the experience of persecution as a basis for identity.
In many ways Jews established the terms for this way of thinking, made Jewish suffering the benchmark against which persecution, bigotry and racially motivated violence were measured. It was not until the 1980s and 1990s, one might counter, that the Holocaust and its accompanying landmarks developed the status of the sacred, but the groundwork for this shift, its philosophical underpinnings, were already underway by the 1950s, if not earlier. Levinas gave voice to this idea, put it in theological terms. In 1967 Emil Fackenheim situated it at the center of Judaism by naming Holocaust remembrance as the 614th commandment (there are 613 commandments in the Torah). In 1986 Elie Wiesel won the Nobel Peace Prize and declared the Holocaust a singular, “uniquely Jewish” event. Comparison between Jewish suffering and the suffering of others was thus declared sacrilegious.
●
I did not return to Israel or Masada again until as a graduate student I received a government-sponsored fellowship to study Hebrew in Israel. This time when I arrived at Masada, I took note of both the army recruits taking their oaths of allegiance to the state on its summit and the busloads of Birthright trips. It was the year 2000, and Birthright trips were still a novelty. I would only learn later one of the reasons the organization, which has now given free trips to Israel to more than 900,000 Jewish youth between the ages of eighteen and 26, was formed: to address alarm over falling Jewish birthrates, to produce more Jewish unions and thus more Jewish babies. What I saw then, each bus spilling a jubilant crowd of American teens in cut-offs and safari hats followed by a guard breasting a semi-automatic rifle, felt uncanny: Jewish summer camp—something my parents had also hoped I’d attend—served with a dose of xenophobia. Would the armed guard make them love the country more? I wondered. Would they meet any Palestinians?
When I teach the Jewish tradition to undergraduates, some of whom have already been on Birthright trips, I emphasize that while it may now be impossible to unwind, the conflation of Judaism with Zionism was neither inevitable nor predictable. I show them how modern Judaism from the late eighteenth century until the twentieth sought to divest itself from the messianic promise of restitution to sovereignty in Palestine. I assign modern Jewish thinkers, such as Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig and Jacob Gordin, for whom Jewish diaspora is central to the tradition. I read with them the original Pittsburgh Platform of the American Reform movement that describes itself as a “progressive religion” rather than a “nationality,” centered around the universal promise of “a kingdom of truth, justice and peace among all men.” I wonder each time whether the hollowing out of this tradition—especially in the kinds of reform synagogues that I attended as a child—paved the way for attachment to the state of Israel to become the primary way that many modern American Jews express their Jewish identity. Recently, I’ve been wondering if it also has something to do with Emile Durkheim, the French sociologist, himself the son of a rabbi, whose book The Elementary Forms of Religious Life I also teach nearly every year in my introductory class for the study of religion.
●
In his earliest postwar writings Levinas himself recognized the conflict between his nascent idea of Jewish identity and the establishment of the state of Israel. He wrote in a letter to his colleague from Strasbourg, the literary theorist Maurice Blanchot,
And herein lies the anachronism of a Jewish state. “We” are going to satisfy all the thirsts that two thousand years of privation have exacerbated. “These devils want to be happy,” as the neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen said with repugnance. … It is too bad. But aren’t difficulties alone ridiculous? I see myself as in a jar of alcohol, where intellectual systems are being preserved like dead organisms.
Levinas had just formulated a conception of Judaism for which suffering was constitutive, in which what it meant to be Jewish was to be exposed to the demands of the other, exposed to the point of self-sacrifice. This for him was what the Holocaust elucidated about the sacred. It concretized the relationship between election and self-sacrifice. To be called by God was also to be uprooted. Abraham’s story begins in Genesis 12 with God’s command to leave the land of his fathers. Jewish rootlessness was the moral antithesis of ethnic nationalism, particularly one that centered itself on sacralization of land. How could his conception of Judaism and the state of Israel coexist? Over the next forty years of writing, he would grapple with this question, trying to formulate a version of Zionism that was compatible with his vision of Judaism. It had to be a state, he wrote, that exemplified moral value, or it could not and would not be.
I have spent much of my career tracing out this tension in Levinas’s work, arguing that it led him to religious formulations of Zionism that were ironically more dangerous than those that arose from Realpolitik. It seems obvious to me that this justification of aggression in the name of the moral exemplarity that Jewish suffering seems to grant to the Jewish people is morally problematic. But if there is one thing I have had to come to terms with in the last two years, it is that for many Jews there is no tension between the sacrality of Israel and the sacrality of the Holocaust. They not only coexist, they have become twin pillars that mutually reinforce each other. Indeed, they are the sacred—exactly in Émile Durkheim’s terms: they are symbols of collective feeling. “Collective feelings can just as well be incarnated in persons as in formulas,” Durkheim writes. “Some formulas are flags.”
Last month, in a last-ditch sally in the fight over Zohran Mamdani’s election, a letter signed by over a thousand American rabbis who called themselves “the Jewish majority” claimed that criticism of the state of Israel “delegitimize[s] … Jewish identity and community.” The letter, insofar as it played on Jewish fears around having a Muslim mayor, verged on bigotry. It could also be read as its own allergic reaction to the shame of finding oneself bound by a shared identity to the crimes of an aggressor. It quotes the prominent rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, with whom, ironically, I once shared a classroom, both of us doctoral students learning the rabbinic texts of the post-Second Temple diaspora:
Zionism, Israel, Jewish self-determination—these are not political preferences or partisan talking points. They are constituent building blocks and inseparable strands of my Jewish identity. To accept me as a Jew but to ask me to check my concern for the people and state of Israel at the door is a nonsensical proposition and an offensive one, no different than asking me to reject God, Torah, mitzvot, or any other pillar of my faith.
In insisting that it is “the people and the state of Israel” that should be the focus of Jewish concern, at a time when Israel has conducted mass killings and starved the people of Gaza, the rabbis imply that Israel is not a state like other states but rather, as Cosgrove says, a “pillar of faith.” In an inversion of Levinas’s formulation—but one for which, I think, his own thinking ironically laid the groundwork—they invoke Jewish victimhood to claim immunity from prosecution.
It may be that it is my own restive nature that resists the feeling of identification that such symbols are meant to elicit, the same reason that I kept silent during summer camp sing-alongs. Either way, in the post-October 7th era, I am implicated. If Levinas was right about one thing, it is this: I experience being-Jewish as a condition from which I cannot flee. I feel that all the more when ashamed. My own response to the irremissibility of being-Jewish has been to commit to teaching the history of the tradition. My response to the Gaza war, and the hardening of lines between those flying Israeli flags and those shouting “From the river to the sea,” has been to focus on the complexities of the history, its contingencies, both to show students that the state of Israel was not the only possible outcome of European Jewish life, but also that for some refugees it was their only post-1945 option.
This does not change the fact that the conflict between the Holocaust’s symbolic value and Zionism’s remains. Durkheim writes that symbols don’t have to make sense for them to be real. He writes that “when men feel there is something outside themselves that is reborn, forces that are reanimated,” a life reawakened, they are “not deluded.” He writes that society cannot “reassemble” itself without such symbols. He may be right, more right than my Sunday school teacher with her map and her dotted line. I recognize this, but I do not concede. It may be that this twin devotion has been necessary for Judaism to reconstitute itself in the wake of catastrophe. Some may worry that it is nonetheless idolatrous. I worry that it is monstrous.
A different version of this essay will appear in the collection Being Jewish Today / Jüdische Stimmen aus Amerika (Suhrkamp, 2026) this spring.
Photo credit: Zairon (CC BY-4.0)
My husband, who was raised Catholic, said recently that my relationship to Judaism has always been restive, oppositional. He’s right: I feel most Jewish when sitting in a church, least Jewish when a colleague makes assumptions about my level of observance, by wishing me an easy fast, or a good Shabbos. It is not surprising to me that in certain ways I have felt more Jewish in the two years since October 7th, while often also ashamed and further at odds with most American Jews, particularly those vehemently flying their Israeli flags. And yet the obligation to think, write and teach the tradition, the same subject I’ve been writing about for the past 25 years, weighs on me now with increased exigency.
There is a strange ironic alignment I experience now with my subject, with the generation of post-World War II French Jews and their allies, intellectuals that I have studied since graduate school. They too felt a call to identify with the tradition, to think about it and write about it, in the aftermath of a catastrophe. The irony arises from the fact that the demand they felt stems from their experience of a shared victimhood, while I feel implicated in the crimes of the perpetrators. It is not a comfortable feeling, one that would be easier to disown if, in the last seventy years, modern American Judaism had not sewn such tight transatlantic stitches, binding itself inextricably to the nascent state of Israel.
●
In 1939, the Lithuanian-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas had been a naturalized citizen of France for nine years when the threat of Nazi invasion reframed his sense of identity. Putting it in terms that seem scandalous in retrospect, he wrote, “Jews have the obscure feeling that Hitlerism is a call to their vocation and destiny. They situate, once again, their misfortune within the perspective of sacred history.” For Levinas, the experience of persecution literalized the Bible, actualized its tales. Within months he was mobilized by the French Army and captured during the French surrender. He spent nearly five years in captivity, writing and thinking about what it meant to be Jewish. Already for Levinas “being Jewish” was not divorced from shame. Levinas described shame in 1935 as a reckoning with being unable to escape from one’s own body. He diagnosed the philosophy of Hitlerism as a reaction to it that manifests as a subsequent allegiance to the body that propagates itself as force. During the war, he identified in Judaism its negative reflection in the experience of suffering.
●
Like many American Jews, my own upbringing was the product of a Judaism formulated in connection with Israel, one that was often concomitant with a loosening of practice, a desire for normalization. My mother’s mother kept a kosher home, but the family ate crabs and Smithfield ham when dining at Haussner’s in downtown Baltimore. My father’s parents named their sons Richard and Alan, as though they might be safer with first names that placed them among the British aristocracy. My own parents had no qualms about serving pork at home, but they gave their children biblical names, Benjamin and Sarah, and joined a reform synagogue to educate us. There I learned some basic Hebrew, the words moreh (teacher) and iparon (pencil), but mostly I learned about Israel. Our fourth-grade textbook, published in 1968, was entitled Behold, the Land. Its prologue begins with the same word that commences the Torah, also the Hebrew title of its first book:
The message was clear: 1948 was the new Genesis. The state had replaced scripture. I did not learn about the Mishnah or the Talmud in Hebrew school, but I did learn why the annexing of the West Bank in the Six-Day War was important to the state’s security. My teacher drew a map on the blackboard with a chalked dotted line to show the proximity between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, the ease with which the country could be bisected by invaders. It was meant to teach us that the occupation of the West Bank was not only politically savvy; it would save the Jewish people from another massacre.
●
As a member of the French Army, Levinas was not sent to Auschwitz but to prisoner-of-war camps, first in France and then in Germany. From 1942 until April of 1945, he was held in Stalag 11B at Fallingbostel near Magdeburg, Germany in a barrack reserved for Jewish prisoners—the word JUD in indelible ink on his uniform. He worked in a forestry detail. During those years he kept a series of notebooks small enough to fit inside a pocket. After his death in 1995, they were discovered, one nested inside the other, and published in a volume of his Oeuvres Completes entitled Carnets de captivité. These notebooks are not a diary, nor a narrative account of his life in the stalag, but something like an intellectual laboratory, where he would transform his suffering into something more widely communicable. His moments of greatest desolation are rendered in philosophical form: “a sense of the nightmare. Reality immobilized—absolute estrangement. Night in broad daylight.” Still in France, his wife and daughter spent the war hidden in a convent. His immediate family—father, mother and two brothers—were shot and killed during a Nazi roundup of Jews in Kovno. He wrote of his daughter, “Simone—catechism…for once a problem that is not material is serious. Usually, you worry about a daughter’s health, her conduct, her marriage. And suddenly it is a question of her salvation.”
Levinas began thinking during his time in captivity about what the camps conveyed about the fragility of civilization, and how his own experience of suffering connected him to a Jewish past. He refers multiple times to the “falling of the draperies,” an image to describe how civilization had been ripped away like a piece of décor, revealing its nature to have been nothing other than artifice. If civilization could not provide a sure foundation for ethics, he reasoned, it must be located elsewhere. He began to conceive of what it meant to be Jewish not merely as a culture or a religion but as a modality of being, contrasting it to Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein in Being and Time. In his seventh and last notebook from captivity, he wrote:
Persecution and election are rendered as identical here. It is a conflation he would perpetuate in his work going forward, constructing analogously his depiction of ethics: an experience of election and responsibility inaugurated by the encounter with the face of another. The experience of Being-Jewish, if not the source for the ethical relation, was its theological rendering. He claimed both that this relation was phenomenologically based and that it could be found in the Hebrew Bible, in Abraham’s answer to God, hineni, here I am.
In the months after his release from the labor camp in 1945, he gave a radio address in which he explicitly compared his time in the camp to the experience of Abraham on the three-day journey to Mount Moriah. The camps provided a time and space of suffering and foreboding, he wrote, “that allowed for a consideration of the pain before being seized and destroyed. In this interval reflection slips in. Here spiritual life commences.” Misery becomes a “source of Jewish consciousness, a possible seed of a future Jewish life,” the discovery of “the signs of election in suffering itself.”
●
Six months after my bat mitzvah, in the summer of 1987, after I had learned my Torah portion by playing and rewinding a cassette tape, and chanting words that I did not understand, my father bribed me into going on a United Jewish Appeal “mission trip” to Israel with the promise that we would stop in Paris on the way home. My father felt a certain pride and identification for the state that had come into existence two years after his birth. He was an Eagle Scout and served in the Army reserves. He could build a fire without matches and find his way out of the woods at night without a compass. Like many postwar youth, even outside of the state of Israel, he was raised with a model of Jewish life meant to overturn centuries of lachrymose passivity.
A few days into the trip we rose before dawn and drove to the desert. Our bus was one among many idling at the base of Mount Masada as the heat began to rise, and I slowly realized that it was not car sickness or my teenage unease with the other trip members that was roiling my stomach. Some members of the trip took the cable car. My father, of course, insisted we hike the jagged trail. How else to experience a desert sunrise? I puked every five hundred feet. Emerging from the rudimentary toilets at the top, I found my group gathered around my parents’ cantor, a woman in a kippa dressed in linen, strumming her guitar. A moment later the thirteen-year-olds among us, my stepsister and me included, were brought to the front of the group. A few words were said, some songs sung. It was only back in the air-conditioned bus, some hours later, that I realized I had been “bat mitzvahed” for a second time.
What did my father and stepmother understand about this ritual? They knew they were supposed to love Israel, but did they know that Masada had been excavated and restored as a national monument, led by the archaeologist and military general Yigael Yadin, as part of an effort to reorient the story of the Jews from one of bookish passivity to one of unrelenting resistance to the point of suicide? Did they know that until the twentieth century, the story of the Zealots’ encampment on the mountain, their holdout against the Roman army, was barely known by Jews, recorded only in Josephus’s writings? The Babylonian Talmud, by contrast, had offered a different response to the religious and political catastrophe of the First Jewish Roman-War: the origin story of rabbinic Judaism. In one version given by the Talmud, during the Roman siege of Jerusalem the Zealots themselves are seen to be functionally holding Jerusalem hostage; to get past them, the savvy Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai sneaks out of the city in a coffin and secures the future for rabbinic Judaism by asking Vespasian for the city of Yavneh, where the rabbinic tradition would develop its practices of scriptural reasoning. Did my father know that the very act of having me bat mitzvahed on the site of the ancient fortress was part of an orchestrated move to replace text with land as the site of the sacred in the minds and hearts of Jews, not only in Israel but around the world?
●
Less than two years after Levinas was released from the internment camp he published the essay “Being Jewish” (Étre Juif). The target of this essay was the already famous Jean-Paul Sartre, who’d written the bestselling Being and Nothingness while Levinas was in the camps. In contrast to Sartre’s description of a radical freedom, Levinas wrote that “the recourse of Hitlerian anti-Semitism to racial myth reminded the Jew of the irremissibility of his being”—that is, “not to be able to flee one’s condition.” It is a formulation that recalls his description of shame over ten years earlier. Unlike Sartre’s subjects, Levinas suggests in the essay, Jews do not have the freedom to make an essence for themselves. With this formulation, Levinas had dialed in philosophically on an aspect of minority identity that for the last 75 years has marked not only the discussion of Judaism but marginalized identities across the board, a recognition of the false promises of assimilationism in all its various forms. For Levinas and his contemporaries the reclamation of Judaism was predicated on their shared suffering, on the experience of persecution as a basis for identity.
In many ways Jews established the terms for this way of thinking, made Jewish suffering the benchmark against which persecution, bigotry and racially motivated violence were measured. It was not until the 1980s and 1990s, one might counter, that the Holocaust and its accompanying landmarks developed the status of the sacred, but the groundwork for this shift, its philosophical underpinnings, were already underway by the 1950s, if not earlier. Levinas gave voice to this idea, put it in theological terms. In 1967 Emil Fackenheim situated it at the center of Judaism by naming Holocaust remembrance as the 614th commandment (there are 613 commandments in the Torah). In 1986 Elie Wiesel won the Nobel Peace Prize and declared the Holocaust a singular, “uniquely Jewish” event. Comparison between Jewish suffering and the suffering of others was thus declared sacrilegious.
●
I did not return to Israel or Masada again until as a graduate student I received a government-sponsored fellowship to study Hebrew in Israel. This time when I arrived at Masada, I took note of both the army recruits taking their oaths of allegiance to the state on its summit and the busloads of Birthright trips. It was the year 2000, and Birthright trips were still a novelty. I would only learn later one of the reasons the organization, which has now given free trips to Israel to more than 900,000 Jewish youth between the ages of eighteen and 26, was formed: to address alarm over falling Jewish birthrates, to produce more Jewish unions and thus more Jewish babies. What I saw then, each bus spilling a jubilant crowd of American teens in cut-offs and safari hats followed by a guard breasting a semi-automatic rifle, felt uncanny: Jewish summer camp—something my parents had also hoped I’d attend—served with a dose of xenophobia. Would the armed guard make them love the country more? I wondered. Would they meet any Palestinians?
When I teach the Jewish tradition to undergraduates, some of whom have already been on Birthright trips, I emphasize that while it may now be impossible to unwind, the conflation of Judaism with Zionism was neither inevitable nor predictable. I show them how modern Judaism from the late eighteenth century until the twentieth sought to divest itself from the messianic promise of restitution to sovereignty in Palestine. I assign modern Jewish thinkers, such as Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig and Jacob Gordin, for whom Jewish diaspora is central to the tradition. I read with them the original Pittsburgh Platform of the American Reform movement that describes itself as a “progressive religion” rather than a “nationality,” centered around the universal promise of “a kingdom of truth, justice and peace among all men.” I wonder each time whether the hollowing out of this tradition—especially in the kinds of reform synagogues that I attended as a child—paved the way for attachment to the state of Israel to become the primary way that many modern American Jews express their Jewish identity. Recently, I’ve been wondering if it also has something to do with Emile Durkheim, the French sociologist, himself the son of a rabbi, whose book The Elementary Forms of Religious Life I also teach nearly every year in my introductory class for the study of religion.
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In his earliest postwar writings Levinas himself recognized the conflict between his nascent idea of Jewish identity and the establishment of the state of Israel. He wrote in a letter to his colleague from Strasbourg, the literary theorist Maurice Blanchot,
Levinas had just formulated a conception of Judaism for which suffering was constitutive, in which what it meant to be Jewish was to be exposed to the demands of the other, exposed to the point of self-sacrifice. This for him was what the Holocaust elucidated about the sacred. It concretized the relationship between election and self-sacrifice. To be called by God was also to be uprooted. Abraham’s story begins in Genesis 12 with God’s command to leave the land of his fathers. Jewish rootlessness was the moral antithesis of ethnic nationalism, particularly one that centered itself on sacralization of land. How could his conception of Judaism and the state of Israel coexist? Over the next forty years of writing, he would grapple with this question, trying to formulate a version of Zionism that was compatible with his vision of Judaism. It had to be a state, he wrote, that exemplified moral value, or it could not and would not be.
I have spent much of my career tracing out this tension in Levinas’s work, arguing that it led him to religious formulations of Zionism that were ironically more dangerous than those that arose from Realpolitik. It seems obvious to me that this justification of aggression in the name of the moral exemplarity that Jewish suffering seems to grant to the Jewish people is morally problematic. But if there is one thing I have had to come to terms with in the last two years, it is that for many Jews there is no tension between the sacrality of Israel and the sacrality of the Holocaust. They not only coexist, they have become twin pillars that mutually reinforce each other. Indeed, they are the sacred—exactly in Émile Durkheim’s terms: they are symbols of collective feeling. “Collective feelings can just as well be incarnated in persons as in formulas,” Durkheim writes. “Some formulas are flags.”
Last month, in a last-ditch sally in the fight over Zohran Mamdani’s election, a letter signed by over a thousand American rabbis who called themselves “the Jewish majority” claimed that criticism of the state of Israel “delegitimize[s] … Jewish identity and community.” The letter, insofar as it played on Jewish fears around having a Muslim mayor, verged on bigotry. It could also be read as its own allergic reaction to the shame of finding oneself bound by a shared identity to the crimes of an aggressor. It quotes the prominent rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, with whom, ironically, I once shared a classroom, both of us doctoral students learning the rabbinic texts of the post-Second Temple diaspora:
In insisting that it is “the people and the state of Israel” that should be the focus of Jewish concern, at a time when Israel has conducted mass killings and starved the people of Gaza, the rabbis imply that Israel is not a state like other states but rather, as Cosgrove says, a “pillar of faith.” In an inversion of Levinas’s formulation—but one for which, I think, his own thinking ironically laid the groundwork—they invoke Jewish victimhood to claim immunity from prosecution.
It may be that it is my own restive nature that resists the feeling of identification that such symbols are meant to elicit, the same reason that I kept silent during summer camp sing-alongs. Either way, in the post-October 7th era, I am implicated. If Levinas was right about one thing, it is this: I experience being-Jewish as a condition from which I cannot flee. I feel that all the more when ashamed. My own response to the irremissibility of being-Jewish has been to commit to teaching the history of the tradition. My response to the Gaza war, and the hardening of lines between those flying Israeli flags and those shouting “From the river to the sea,” has been to focus on the complexities of the history, its contingencies, both to show students that the state of Israel was not the only possible outcome of European Jewish life, but also that for some refugees it was their only post-1945 option.
This does not change the fact that the conflict between the Holocaust’s symbolic value and Zionism’s remains. Durkheim writes that symbols don’t have to make sense for them to be real. He writes that “when men feel there is something outside themselves that is reborn, forces that are reanimated,” a life reawakened, they are “not deluded.” He writes that society cannot “reassemble” itself without such symbols. He may be right, more right than my Sunday school teacher with her map and her dotted line. I recognize this, but I do not concede. It may be that this twin devotion has been necessary for Judaism to reconstitute itself in the wake of catastrophe. Some may worry that it is nonetheless idolatrous. I worry that it is monstrous.
A different version of this essay will appear in the collection Being Jewish Today / Jüdische Stimmen aus Amerika (Suhrkamp, 2026) this spring.
Photo credit: Zairon (CC BY-4.0)
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