Creating a new – and antizionist – form of Judaism
JVL Introduction
Burley writes here with optimism about the growing response to education, worship and activism initiatives that reject zionism and are working to create new institutions, new prayer books and more. This is about turning our backs on those institutions that have completely conflated zionism with Judaism to create a Judaism rooted in equality, in learning and applying the lessons of our own peoples’ all too often horrendous past. We learn that never again means for anybody and our renewed strength comes from the solidarity movement and our particular role within it. It is prioritising for example the words of Rabbi Hillel: “That which is hateful to you do not do unto others; that is the entire Torah, the rest is commentary, go learn” and not the talk and consequences of talk about “amalek” and more It is about a Judaism, spiritually, culturally and politically, that is meaningful for the world that somehow includes a Jewish Supremacist State whose leaders use the language of the Books to justify their actual genocide,
These are positive signs; if those traditional institutions cannot make space for Jews who dare to believe the obvious fact that Palestinians are equal human beings to Jews, then we turn our backs on them and build our own.
LL
This article was originally published by In These Times on Tue 9 Dec 2025. Read the original here.
The Jewish Diaspora Movement
As young people break with established Jewish organizations over Gaza, a new kind of Judaism is flourishing.
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Thank goodness there are people sufficiently brave, creative and energetic to tackle such a huge and important project!
The US pioneers have already more than enough work to do BUT if they can link up with Israeli volunteers working on projects towards similar aims then TOGETHER they may be more effective in bringing about cultural change within Israel and America … and eventually a just peace for all.
There are an unknown but growing number of Israeli organisations and families supporting conscripts and reservists refusing to serve in the IDF. These people are already decoupled from their militarist society and from Zionism. They’re in desperate need of spiritual support and personal legitimisation during the long, lonely war against a state which doesn’t recognise conscientious objection to military service.
There must also be Israeli parents (and others) who are sickened by the racist, untruthful representations of Palestinians and of the Israeli state in school text books and lessons. (Israeli academic) Nurit Peled-Elhanan’s classic “Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education, Peled-Elhanan argues Arabs are represented solely as “refugees, primitive farmers and terrorists” in hundreds of textbooks, with no depictions of them as “normal people”. These parents and any home educators would surely welcome any input from the US pioneers they could use to offset such vile state-supported propaganda.
• Ideology and Propaganda: She contends that the education system uses textbooks as a weapon, constructing a narrative that justifies the exclusion and expulsion of the “Palestinian other” by portraying the Israeli soldier as the true “indigene”.
• Segregation: The Israeli education system is highly segregated, with separate streams for Jewish and Arab students, and Peled-Elhanan notes the disparity in funding and autonomy between these systems.
• Criticism of the System: Her research asserts that the current structure of Israeli education disallows education for peace and coexistence from its curricula.
As an atheist with no Jewish connections, this article comes as a revelation to me. I am absolutely in support of those who feel the term ‘the Jewish community’ is currently being abused to imply that every Jew supports the present Israeli government and their actions in Gaza. I hope sincerely that this growing movement in the US is spreading to the UK, where the pro-Netanyahu Zionist viewpoint ‘speaking on behalf of the Jewish community’ misleads the public and betrays the many Jewish friends of mine who violently disagree with the pro-Israel opinions of rabbis and journalists who seem to have a monopoly on mainstream media.