It’s extraordinarily sad that these kind of inane, solipsistic cliches are what now pass for insight on the American Jewish left. Whereas the traditional left position was once somewhere on a spectrum ranging from progressive Zionism to non-Zionism or post-Zionism — the latter of which conceded that the founding of the Jewish state was an understandable, or even necessary response to the Jewish experience in the 20th century — we now get these kind of performative disavowals of the Jewish state in toto.

Like other Jewish American leftists, Barkan betrays a kind of inchoate rage and despair at the mere existence of Israel. But even if I thought that the founding of the state of Israel was some kind of terrible tragedy, so what? What does it tell us about the present moment or how to move forward? What insights does it offer us beyond slogans and the disavowals of those Jews over there?

Barkan says that he is proud to be a Jew and an American. I don’t doubt otherwise; but it’s worth noting that Barkan’s “pride” isn’t uttered in a vacuum; it’s positioned in opposition to Israel, which gives the game away. Like Barkan, I’m proud to be Jewish (and I like America too), but I feel more luck than pride to be a Jewish American, because I understand that it is a mere accident of history that makes me a Jewish American and not a Jewish Israeli. This realization doesn’t compel me to alter my politics, as it might for some of the more guilt-ridden pro-Israel Jews who represent the mirror image of Barkan’s politics, but it does fill me with a great sense of humility about different kinds of Jewish life and the different kind of political commitments they might entail. This humility compels me to stand in solidarity with Israeli leftists fighting for a better future in the only home they know, rather than regurgitate vacuous dogma about the “problems with Zionism,” a project that is long over and which tells us nothing about the present.

(Since we’re talking about pride, and by extension, shame, I should add: I don’t know if “shame” is the right word to use, since it implies a level of identification that I’m not sure is quite right, but I feel an extraordinary sense of despair regarding Israel’s atrocities in Gaza and the daily horrors of dispossession and settler terrorism in the occupied West Bank.  And as far as “ethnostates” go: the problem is not that Israel is an ethnostate as such, the problem is that it maintains its ethnic majority via a regime of occupation/apartheid in the West Bank, which I would like to end.)

Behind Barkan’s disavowal, I suspect, is an identification with Israel – the place and its people; an understanding somewhere deep down that but not for the accidents of history, he too would be a proud Israeli rather than a proud American. Why else proclaim that Israel fills him with no pride (why would a foreign country fill you with pride?) or that there is a government there he didn’t elect (plenty of Israelis didn’t elect this government either)? 

But if you can’t bring this sensation to consciousness – if you cut off the people that you could have been from yourself – you are bound to start looking out at them with disgust and shame. You begin to mistake the accident of your birth for some kind of virtue; you point the finger at the unwanted parts of your history, as if to purge them, to make clear that these people you could’ve been are the Bad Ones, that they don’t belong to you, even as it’s clear that on some level they are every bit as much you as the proud American and proud Jew you claim to be on Substack.

I don’t know if I feel any pride in Israel’s existence per se (I don’t feel much pride in the existence of countries in general), but I’m not ashamed of its existence either. More to the point, I certainly don’t feel ashamed that the Holocaust happened to my family, and I refuse to oblige in these ritual performances of shame and disavowal for a movement that is increasingly interested in convincing Jews that such performances are some sort of exercise in social justice. They are not; they are an exercise in debasement and betrayal – of ourselves and of the Jews we could have been.

Nor do I feel any Jewish shame that the world closed its doors to desperate Jews in the years before, during, and after the Shoah – a reality which settled any arguments about the necessity of a Jewish state once and for all. Indeed, these facts fill me with a terrible sense of rage, as does the present posture of the Western left, which has consistently failed to stand with the Israeli left, or take the grotesque antisemitism within its ranks seriously in the two years since October 7th.

So I don’t think Barkan is upset with Jewish nationalism as such; I think he’s upset with Jewish history. And what’s not to be upset about? It’s a litany of betrayals and failures of solidarity. Faced with this almost unbearable truth, the only path forward for Jewish leftists who want to retain their pride is to stand closer with the Israeli left and speak out against Jew hatred in their movement; this is the most powerful and subversive act of Jewish pride that we in the diaspora can engage in today, in this fraught moment when the non-Jewish left demands our submission and humiliation by enlisting Jewish identity exclusively on their terms, and not our own.