I Was Raised On Love And Socialism— Then Along Came Came Israel

Memory, Identity And The Collapse Of The Zionist  Dream

Abe's in the back with Michelle; me, mom, Jean and Fern in the front

My mother was born in Brooklyn, like me. Her parents, though, weren’t. Abe and Jean met in the Bronx but they both came to the U.S. as children, Jean at 4 years old from Germany/Poland and Abe from Russia/Ukraine at 15. They were two of the most important people in my life. Abe taught me about socialism, politics and ethics. I’ve written about him a lot over the years. Jean, not as much, although she taught me about unconditional love… and about home-cooking; not how to do it, just how to enjoy eating it.

Jean also taught me about ethnocentrism. She didn’t share Abe’s expansive and more illuminated perspective on Enlightenment values. Her Jewishness was forged in the crucible of European anti-Semitism and she tried to instill in me a tribal feeling of Jewish superiority. Abe, whose shtetl was wiped out by Cossacks in a pogram, was more about equality than superiority. His worldview was refined by a moral clarity that never curdled into bitterness. His values were expansive— universalist, humane and he believed in justice for everyone. Thank goodness.

Israel was a point of pride for both of them— born, like me, their first grandchild, in 1948. But for Jean it was a triumph of Jewish exceptionalism; for Abe, the hopeful beginning of a democratic socialist state. I inherited both sets of values, and like a lot of American Jews of my generation, I went through a period of youthful Zionist fervor. I even wanted to enlist in the Israeli army during the 1967 Six-Day War. Thank God, no one let me. Over time, though, the Abe in me won out.

As the decades passed, Israel became harder and harder to defend— not just in policy, but in principle. What began as a labor-aligned, ostensibly democratic project gradually morphed into something unrecognizable: militarized, authoritarian, ethnonationalist. The kibbutz faded and the militant settlers advanced. The universalism that animated Abe’s socialism was ground under the boot of a more primitive and exclusionary tribalism. My views of Israel… evolved. By the time it had left European-aligned democratic socialism bleeding on the side of the road for the more primitive Eastern ethnocentric fascism, I was already starting to question the legitimacy of the state. When Roland and I visited Egypt he had to drag me onto a bus from Cairo to Jerusalem, which I really didn’t want to visit. In retrospect, I’m glad I went— although the most memorable parts of that trip were spent in Palestine, not Israel. Israel gives me the creeps, not just the Likud, AIPAC, Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, Daniella Weiss… Israel.

When Israel was fighting for its life in its first 3 decades of existence, Iran was an ally, the second Muslim country— after Turkey— to recognize Israeli sovereignty. That didn’t change until 1979 with the establishment of the Islamic Republic, although Israel secretly aided Iran against Iraq from 1980 until 1985. The Israeli sneak attack on Friday left me non-plussed. Now, with Trump back in the White House— surrounded by Christian nationalists, convicted felons, and theocratic fanatics— Israel’s descent into ethnofascism no longer looks like a tragic exception as much as part of the neo-fascist blueprint. The same toxic blend of supremacy, siege mentality, and unchecked militarism that corrupted the promise of Israel is metastasizing here too. What Abe feared— what he warned against— is happening again, in a different form, under a different flag. But the sickness is the same. And Jean’s instinct to retreat into a myth of tribal invincibility? That’s everywhere now, too— from Jerusalem to Tulsa to Capitol Hill.

There are still people fighting for the values Abe believed in: justice, equality, human dignity. But they’re not running governments. They’re in the streets, in the jails, in the rubble of Gaza and Jenin. They’re organizing, resisting, surviving. I think about my grandparents all the time. I still feel Jean’s love. I still live by Abe’s principles. But I no longer confuse pride with loyalty. And I no longer mistake the past for a mandate.