This is, not incidentally, why I think so many organizations that would 100% align with liberal Zionism if they matched their Israel politics to their U.S. politics (like, most of the Jewish establishment) are so reluctant to promote liberal Zionism and resort to standard pro-Israel rhetoric

Like, "Yes, this country is betraying all of our political ideals and values, and yes it's only getting worse every day, and yes we want to call that out and name it, but nevertheless our love for the State of Israel prevails" is a difficult message to communicate

The other reason I highlight them so much is that the URJ really is the largest liberal Zionist institution left in probably the world, and I think their messaging struggles as inseparable from the challenge of finding a coherent liberal Zionist message in 2025

I don't mean to pick on the URJ but the way they've been messaging about Israel since Oct. 7 is... somewhat confounding.

Like the actual substance of this piece is a pretty intense condemnation of settler violence but it's couched in sort of goofy terms (it's the Wild West — Bank!)

To the extent that Jews are being spared from the right-wing campaign to eliminate "DEI," the expectation is that those Jews are not Jewish leftists or anti-Zionists.

"There are Jews and Jews," Alvin Rosenfeld, the founder of Indiana's Jewish studies program, told me.

forward.com/news/783205/...

And the pressure on Jewish studies isn't only coming from donors concerned about support for Israel — as Trump and Republican state lawmakers crack down on ethnic studies, Jewish studies often finds itself protected.

But with the expectation that it's *different* than other fields.

Gunther Jikeli, the new director of Indiana's Jewish studies program, came out of its antisemitism research institute, posing the prospect that antisemitism studies — and a focus on defending Israel — may overtake traditional Jewish studies.

Antisemitism studies includes traditional academic work but often veers toward advocacy — the University of Washington, for example, put a pro-Israel epidemiologist in charge of its antisemitism initiative while Emory is giving Deborah Lipstadt an institute to promote the IHRA definition

More recently those donors have shifted their focus from "Israel studies" to "antisemitism studies," itself a field that was pioneered at Indiana's Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, which focuses largely on Muslim antisemitism and anti-Zionism.

Donors once broadly interested in Jewish studies shifted to Israel studies in the early 2000s over concern about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on campus — but when they realized faculty studying Israel were often critics themselves, they soured on this project.

But beyond a case of academic intrigue, the turmoil at Indiana is a microcosm of larger trends at universities around the country impacting those who study Jews and Judaism.

The new director, a German academic who is not Jewish, then stripped funding from an anti-Zionist graduate student on the basis that research questioning Israel's legitimacy is beyond the realm of Jewish studies.

The dynamics around going to yeshiva and rabbinic ordination in those communities bears no real resemblance to non-Haredi communities and Haredi rabbis (with a handful of exceptions) are not part of non-Haredi Jewish life

2. “Jews are running society, women need to shut the fuck up, Blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part, and we would live in paradise,” Fuentes said on the March 28 edition of his podcast.