The New York Times reports:

Dan Kleinman does not know quite how to feel.

As a child in Brooklyn he was taught to revere Israel as the protector of Jews everywhere, the “Jewish superman who would come out of the sky to save us” when things got bad, he said.

It was a refuge in his mind when white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., chanted “Jews will not replace us,” or kids in college grabbed his shirt, mimicking a “South Park” episode to steal his “Jew gold.”

But his feelings have grown muddier as he has gotten older, especially now as he watches violence unfold in Israel and Gaza. His moral compass tells him to help the Palestinians, but he cannot shake an ingrained paranoia every time he hears someone make anti-Israel statements.

“It is an identity crisis,” Mr. Kleinman, 33, said. “Very small in comparison to what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank, but it is still something very strange and weird.”

As the violence escalates in the Middle East, turmoil of a different kind is growing across the Atlantic. Many young American Jews are confronting the region’s longstanding strife in a very different context, with very different pressures, from their parents’ and grandparents’ generations. [Continue reading…]

Eric Levitz writes:

It’s not terribly mysterious why American Jews would pay more attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than hostilities between the Tigrayans and Oromo in Ethiopia. And given Jews’ influence over American political culture, it makes sense that U.S. discourse would bear some reflection of our concerns.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict doesn’t just concern American Jews because some of us have friends and family in the region. Even among those with no such kin ties, Israel can be fundamental to ethnic and self-identity. This is true of anti-Zionists and Likudniks alike. Whether the weight of Jewish heritage leads one to embrace ardent nationalism or disavow ethnocentrism, Israel is the theater of conflict over which conception of Jewishness is correct; or, to put a finer point on it, over how the suffering of one’s forebears can be redeemed.

My own investment in the conflict derives from such concerns. At a young age, I learned that my grandmother’s father had been buried alive, that her 15-year-old sister had been hung in the town square, and that her mother and brother perished in concentration camps, all before she hit puberty. How to reconcile such information with the idea that life can be meaningful — and human existence worthwhile — has been one of my preoccupations ever since.

Like many descendants of survivors, I was raised on a Zionism informed by persecutory delusions: The mainstream media was biased against Israel; Hillary Clinton was an anti-Semitic apologist for terrorism. At some point in middle school, I remember reading an issue of Spin in my town’s Barnes & Noble, discovering that Belle and Sebastian were critical of Israeli policy, and feeling crushed to learn that the people behind If You’re Feeling Sinister hated Jews.

So it was rather disorienting when I actually started reading about Israel’s founding, and the Nakba and the occupation and the blockade. The reality of the Palestinian plight hit me with the force of revelation. The “good Germans” were not exceptional. And neither were the Jews. Even the best humans on planet Earth, my parents, were susceptible to tribalistic propaganda that abetted the oppression of the vulnerable. Thus, redeeming my grandmother’s suffering meant pushing back against our species’ affinity for in-group chauvinism and out-group disregard — which meant insisting upon universal humanism over ethnic nationalism, which meant opposing Israeli apartheid.

This is why Israel-Palestine looms larger in my consciousness than other distant conflicts. It’s why, in 2014, when I walked by a group of Jews demonstrating in support of Israel’s bombardment of the open-air prison that is Gaza — in the name of Holocaust victims — I was overcome by despair and impotent rage. [Continue reading…]