The Pain of Being a Trans Anti-Zionist Jew

I am probably making a mistake writing this blog post given all I have to lose and how high tensions are about Palestine. I am subjecting what is a hugely personal and vulnerable side of me to the very nuance-lacking and mob-happy internet. So my second mistake would be making this post public, which I am likely going to do. After all, this blog is predominantly about the intersection between my gender and spiritual/religious identities and it feels increasingly wrong to not write about the recent events in the world that have inevitably and largely impact my thinking around that intersection. So. Here we go.

I grew up Jewish in many ways that were my ancestors' greatest dreams. The migration to the United States after the late 1800s pogroms in Russia left many questions of Jewish identity to a diasporic people who were exhausted with being diasporic. The first generation immigrants asked, "How can I maintain my Judaism in America?" and their children asked, "How can I be Jewish and American?" These questions deepened in their urgency and their horror when the Holocaust (or Shoah, as it is called in Hebrew) occurred.

As a child, I never had to ask these questions. My parents raised me in a town that was at least 15% Jewish at the time. The northeast US has the second largest Jewish population in the world after Israel so synagogues are plenty and Chanukah is publicly acknowledged alongside Christmas. Between that and Jewish animators creating Jewish children's content on Nickelodeon like the Rugrats in the 1990s/early 2000s, I thought until I was 6 that there were an equal number of Jews to Christians in the world. I got to grow up Jewish. I got to grow up American*. These two identities were never in contradiction.

What was a contradiction, in hindsight, was how my Reform synagogue taught me Jewish identity. When I was in middle school, one of my Hebrew school teachers posed this question to my class: if the United States government was increasingly putting out messaging as Nazi Germany's did and it seemed likely a second Holocaust would occur here, what would you do? All my classmates said that they would move to Israel, as we had been taught that it was established to provide a safe place for Jews in the world. I was the only one who said I would stay in the US and fight.

My rabbi and teachers taught us that there were a variety of opinions to have on the Torah and Jewish scriptures. After all, that's what the Talmud is—multiple rabbis with different opinions trying to nail down the minutiae of how to be Jewish, minutiae that Reform Judaism more often than not flaunts with its interest in "ethics over ritual" and marrying secularism to religion. But my educators never taught us that we could have varied opinions on Israel. They never informed us that several historical Jewish thinkers in the late 19th/early 20th centuries did not believe having a Jewish government nor a Jewish nation would lead to higher safety for the world's Jews. They did not teach us that Zionism was only one strain of thought for a Jewish future among several. Or that Jewish writers upon seeing what was happening or about to happen in Palestine fervently advocated for Palestinians' humanity and Palestinians' continued right to existence and safety.

As part of this, my educators hardly ever mentioned the Palestinians at all. They didn't tell us that the Palestinians were still there, in the West Bank and Gaza, after being forced to evacuate the rest of the country if they survived massacres that occurred in 1948, which directly led to the formation of Israel. They disconnected the people from their ancestors who had lived on the land, sometimes in the very houses that Israelis now "owned." If they had to say anything at all, they talked about Hamas and other terroristic governments voted into power. This inferred that Palestinians were all evil terrorists, which was conveniently easy to say to mostly white children at a time when the US fought Al-Qaida after 9/11 and then justified a greedy war in Iraq using similar anti-Arab ideas.

Mostly, my educators taught that anyone speaking against Israel hated Jews. At the same time, Israel's accomplishments in science, innovation, art, and literature were highlighted. For us, going against Israel was unthinkable because Israel was a great fantasy country that in all ways justified the fulfillment of the Jewish right to return as our religious texts supposedly described**. There were many ways to be Jewish, but being anything but Zionist was UnJewish. Hebrew school curriculum today is still entrenched with pro-Israel education going as early as kindergarten. I went to a very Jewish-populated pre-school so I was possibly taught this content even earlier and so much of my deprogramming is as neurological as it is intellectual. My religion, particularly my Reform denomination which always touted free thinking, brainwashed me from a young age.

Despite this betrayal, I am still religious mostly thanks to my paganism. I would argue that I am the most religious of my family even if I am not religious in the same way as my Kohen ancestors. The personal ways I practice religion, as you can see in my other blog parts, are essential to me. They are inherently solitary because my nature largely does not fit into organized religion; I don't want to be told how to be a pagan, a Jew, or really anything by a larger deciding group, which is how Israel positions itself. I also grew up in a country where a ton of right wing Christians in regions outside of mine argued that it was a "Christian nation" and put their imperialist religious notions onto me in overt and subtle ways. These ways often combined with antiSemitism, which I now prefer to call antiJewishness due to the former term's association with white supremacist thinkers in the 19th century***. It is fully against my ethics to advocate for a religious country even if it shares my religion because I have experienced how that hurts citizens who follow other religions.

Additionally, Israel touts itself as safe for Jews, but has historically acted so that it is only safe for Jews who agree it should exist and defend any and all of its government's decisions. After the Six Days War—which I was taught falsely in Hebrew school started when Israel was attacked—Israelis worked with right wing American Jews to integrate Zionist thinking into almost all American synagogues and their Hebrew schools. This created an American Jewish landscape that is hostile toward anti-Zionism. As any anti-Zionist American Jew will tell you, Zionist Jews of any nationality will happily cannibalize their own^†.

That's where my most immediate issue lies. As you know from this blog, I am trans. I come from a very Zionist family and the most Zionist members have been the ones most supportive and protective of me as I have started my transition. My cousin, who is married to an Israeli, advocated for me to my transphobic parents when they would not listen to me. My uncle was among the first to learn I was not cis and is the biggest understander of my dysphoria as well as the champion of my becoming my own person. He is also an alumnus of and has financial ties to one of the universities that cracked down on its high profile encampment. Like how Israel in its narratives ignores the existence of Palestinians, my family either ignores or cannot seem to wrap their heads around the fact that many of the protestors blocking Seattle's bridges and upheaving Columbia University's campus are Jews. With my personal safety as a trans person at extreme risk, I do not know how to start that conversation with them.

There have been moments where I asked myself why I bothered continuing identifying as a Jew and I credit my ancestor veneration for why I still am. My dead are aware and supportive of how anti-Zionist I am even as I have newspaper clippings that describe how they spent their own lives holding "Palestine" (as in pre-named Israel) potlucks and fundraisers. They have provided books (particularly the aforelinked Bad Jews by Emily Tankin, amusingly left in the Magic and Spirituality section of the bookstore for me to find) and other resources to encourage me to keep my Jewish identity as I witness the other Jews using the Shoah to justify committing another.

So I try to ask other questions, harder questions that require me to not quit. Included is, "How can I raise my future children as Jewish?" with little good answer. Anti-Zionist Jewish parents I have met can't enroll their children into Hebrew school because of the aforementioned curriculum issues. People online unhelpfully suggest I can raise my children with "tikkun olam" (the important Jewish principle of "repairing the world") with no practical framework or guide as to how to do so. I still have a few years before I plan on becoming a parent (or "Moddy," the compound word between mommy and daddy I am currently entertaining having my children call me) and this process is sure to evolve as the rest of the world changes.

I also ask, "How can Jews have identity after Israel?" because I truly don't believe that there will be no consequence for Israel's government's actions. As of this writing, a number of countries in the UN are advocating for Palestine to be recognized as its own nation. Joe Biden foolishly fought against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's ICC indictment even though leaving it alone was an easy get—Netanyahu is the same man Israel's citizens were trying to oust over a year ago for very serious corruption charges. AntiJewish violence, even if I don't find trackers from organizations like the historically conservative and self-hating Anti-Defamation League to be trustworthy, is very much on the rise as I know Jewish nonprofit workers who have started programs against it since October 2023 out of need. Also damning, leftist protestors including protest organizers are not informing themselves on known antiJewish tropes and conspiracy theories as they fight to save Palestinian lives^‡.

What is Jewish identity when a fascist government has tied up your family and culture with genocide against others' families and culture? What is Jewish identity after it was entwined in nationalism against the consent of many Jews, both great thinkers of the past and present? What is Jewish identity when current events are fueling and will continue to fuel antiJewishness across the globe? What is Jewish identity when it will finally be proven that accomplishing capitalism, that accomplishing military might, that accomplishing right wing government, that accomplishing all status quo systems that are inherently violent and hateful and poisonous to the human spirit will not protect and save Jewish lives?

I'm not the only person who will have to answer by the end of this. I'm just among the many who will have to live with it after so many Palestinians suffered.  I will be medically transitioned off of testosterone manufactured and distributed by Israel while those who could not access their medications and through more painful means died. And then I'll have to face my own country, who contains many loud people and powerful politicians who hate me and want me dead for being androgynous.

*This isn't to elude the genocidal history of America toward the indigenous peoples. Being American, in my mind, is the same thing as being Israeli. I believe in Landback as an ethos even if I am still informing myself on the practice and I am looking to invest further in uplifting my local Native movements

**There are Jewish sects, albeit way too Fundamentalist Orthodox for me, who are anti-Zionist because they read those same texts to say that Israel is spiritual and that a political Israel interferes with this. Also, despite initial research on Palestine and resulting misgivings, I attended a LGBTQ-focused Birthright trip in 2016. Great fantasy country Israel turned out to not be, but I do credit several pro-Palestinian Jews in that group for further educating me about Israeli apartheid and validating the existence of anti-Zionist Jews

***I have another blog post in me about how it turned out there is a lot of assimilation trauma that comes with being an American Jew. Jews defining their oppression according to their oppressors' language is unfortunately very par for the course for Jews assimilated into majority cultures

†This is hard to imagine if you're non-Jewish, but is potentially socially deadly as a Jew in America. We are historically a really tight knit cultural group who loves to network with each other, resulting for example in relatively low unemployment rates for Jews during the Great Depression in comparison to the general population. Basically, mainstreamed Zionism has destroyed centuries-old roots of Jewish camaraderie

‡Such an example is the chant that went across university campuses, "Globalize the intifada." One of the oldest anti-Jewish conspiracy theories is "globalism" which purports a secret uber-wealthy Jewish cabal that controls the machinations of the worlds' governments. Y'all... come on. "We are the intifada" is a better chant as well as an easy alternative. Talk to your fellow protestors who are Jewish