The Jewish Diaspora Movement

“I want the spiritual technologies of Judaism to be able to ground and nourish a movement that is facing despair after despair after despair,” Solomon says. ​“And I don’t want these institutions that are fucking racist and transphobic and Zionist to … gatekeep all of the access to those resources and that history.”

This is how Jewish Liberation Learning began: a slow, responsive and emergent educational program that launched in 2023. They hired Jewish educators, several of whom had been recently fired in relation to their activism for a cease-fire. The program was ready, but by then, interest had swelled.

Luckily, as Solomon explains, they are not the only game in town for anti-Zionist Jewish life. As a mass fracture hits American Jewry, new projects have sprouted, attempting to offer not just new options for observance but an entirely new model of Jewishness. 

While activist organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) have created a space for a new kind of Jewish identity to flourish, a new network of religious projects is growing to offer a pathway back to Judaism itself. With little funding and support from the larger infrastructure of American Jewish life, this upstart confederation is remaking American Judaism with the same ingenuity that marked the historical Jewish Left’s attempt to celebrate a diverse and ethical vision for Jewish life.

Judaism for the World

Judaism is not an easily practiced religion; it has arcane liturgical languages and complex rituals and histories. Many Jewish institutions have integrated Zionist historiography as a foundation of their pedagogical model, making it difficult for anti-Zionist Jews to belong. 

“What it means to … engage in Jewish religious practice is changing, it just doesn’t suit [some] people anymore,” Tobie Klibansky says. During the pandemic, Klibansky and his husband, Eli Conley, moved 90 minutes away from the Bay Area to Sacramento, leaving behind their progressive, non-Zionist Kehilla synagogue. 

When looking around for a Jewish community to join, the uniform Zionist politics of the area congregations left them unsure where to go. They got involved in the Sacramento JVP chapter, and, after attending some holiday celebrations, decided to host a group themselves. This became the anti-Zionist chavurah called Tzedek Tirdof, which takes its name from God’s commandment to the Israelites in Deuteronomy 16:20: ​“Tzedek, tzedek tirdof / Justice, justice shall you pursue.”

They started in February of 2024 with a Tu Bishvat seder, a mystical celebration for the Jewish New Year. For Jews nestled in the central California valley, it is when trees are blossoming as they start to leave the winter retreat. 

In collaboration with Palestinian organizers, their group held shabbat services in the streets in front of City Hall as activists, some observing Ramadan, demanded Sacramento City Council pass a cease-fire resolution. 

“Being publicly Jewish and publicly anti-Zionist and publicly religious, to engage in Jewish religious practice in open interfaith space … felt like the perfect coming together of all these things,” says Klibansky, who added they were jostled by pro-Israel protesters waving flags and shouting. 

Like many of these projects, Tzedek Tirdof became a beacon to Jews who felt forced out of their synagogues for their positions on Israel.

“[People] are tired and there isn’t space in more traditional Jewish spaces, even — especially— ones that otherwise espouse progressive values,” Leah Zarchy Geer, who attends Tzedek Tirdof, told me. ​“People are recognizing the hypocrisy of, for instance, supporting women’s rights, trans rights, etc., but not supporting Palestine. There are now enough people who have said ​‘enough’ to launch these projects and they’re successful and much needed.”

Geer and her husband were deeply involved in another synagogue, but things quickly changed as its connections to Israel became hard to ignore after October 7. With Tzedek Tirdof, she has found a Jewish community that is ​“a very queer-friendly space and, secondly, a space for Jews of all walks of life who don’t believe Jews in the diaspora need to be tied to Israel and strongly condemn their genocide of Palestinians.”

And many tell In These Times that the resources they are looking for were never on offer from mainline synagogues.

A yeshiva is a traditional house of Jewish learning and, historically, where a lot of the work of ​“doing Judaism” was done. Only after the haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment, and many of the reformations of Judaism occurred, did the current model of weekend Jewish services become standard as a way of mimicking the protestant Christian model. 

“The yeshiva is a radical place in and of itself,” says Binya Kóatz, cofounder of the queer, anti-Zionist yeshiva Shel Maala. ​“It’s where Judaism is created, is discussed, where mutual aid happens.”

Since Jews left the shtetl and the yeshiva, the problem of Jewish education has remained in our largely secular world of public schooling. Many have mixed memories of their after-school Hebrew programs, and as the cost of private Jewish day schools skyrockets, many Jews lack the skills necessary to lead a spiritual community. 

For Andrue Kahn, this is where rabbis come in. Kahn, a rabbi herself, was trained at the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College before serving at one of New York’s largest and most venerable synagogues, Temple Emanu-El. But when his critical opinions about Zionism became public, cracks began to enlarge. He eventually heard about the American Council for Judaism (ACJ), a group formed in 1942 to offer an alternative.

The ACJ advocated against Zionist politics and for what Kahn calls an ​“integrationist” perspective that sees Judaism as part of the religious tapestry of the United States. It quickly fell out of favor with the mainline Jewish world, particularly after the post-1967 Zionist consensus, and it remained a barely functional organization until the present. When Kahn learned about it, he reached out to the Council with a proposition: He would rebuild the organization’s board and create new programming, and they would hire him as executive director. 

If Kahn could pull it off, they had a deal, and early this year, he relaunched the American Council for Judaism as an anti-Zionist, anti-nationalist Jewish organization.

The group offers educational sessions on various pieces of Jewish history, a class with Rabbis for Ceasefire founder Rabbi Alissa Wise on how to build grassroots Jewish community, and an Introduction to Judaism class for people thinking about conversion. Jewish federations traditionally give support to upstart Jewish groups, but ACJ is helping pilot the radical Judaism Left that’s been left behind.

“[What] I’m hoping is that by giving people the tools of Judaism, they’ll continue doing what they’re already doing, which is building their own communities everywhere,” Kahn says.

Houses of Learning

As mainstream Judaism becomes increasingly centered on a pro-Israel politics, Xava De Cordova, a rabbi in Providence, R.I., and Binya Kóatz say it has increasingly stripped parishioners of access to the deep well of wisdom and spiritual tools Judaism offers. While anti-Zionism is a piece of their larger vision, their real work is to bring Jews to the complex world of wrestling with texts and the obligations of Jewish life.

Kóatz and De Cordova spent years rediscovering their Judaism, learning from the queer and trans yeshiva called Svara, which offers a distinctly nontraditional approach to Jewish learning by offering courses of Talmud study with an eye toward ​“queering” the text while wrestling with its complexities. 

“In creating a place for text, study, discussion, for bringing together different human beings being themselves, loving … wrestling with, struggling with, the Torah, all those elements together — that’s what really makes a Jewish community and a Jewish life,” says Kóatz. ​“I think that it’s intoxicating for a generation of people raised without, because it’s intellectually rigorous. It asks a lot of you.”

Shel Maala came to life during the pandemic as a ​“digital first” environment where people, including disabled students, could learn Torah. Cordova and Kóatz describe Shel Maala as ​“normatively anti-Zionist.” Anti-Zionism and radical politics are foundational, but anyone is welcome to join. 

“I believe that Judaism has power in the world,” says De Cordova. ​“We need to be skilled at reading Judaism in liberatory ways. Because if we leave Judaism to the people who would interpret it … for the most wicked ends, then we sort of abdicate our access to that power.” 

Even if you are building a radical alternative, religious communities need the tools to hold regular services and provide lifecycle events. The most important of these is the siddur, the prayerbook that guides worship across the three daily prayer sessions and on Shabbat, not to mention the many holidays. Considering that pro-Israel politics has been the standard for most Jewish communities for decades, even siddurs have prayers for Israel and the Israel Defense Forces, or antiquated language that many radical Jews say doesn’t align with their values. This is why a small group who met at the largely non-Zionist New Synagogue Project in Washington, D.C., wanted to create an explicitly anti-Zionist siddur. 

Robin Banerji began intensely practicing Hebrew and Talmud during the 2020 lockdown and collaborated with others to compile a siddur using some existing texts held on open-access Jewish portals, like Sefaria, while also employing “[intuitions] I’ve built in my own prayer practice with praying the siddur every day since 2020,” says Banerji. 

Banerji helped establish the anti-Zionist siddur Tatir Tz’rurah in 2024, which launched a 700-page siddur book (adorned with a cover design by anti-Zionist Jewish printmaker Liora Ostroff).

They did an initial run of 560 copies and almost immediately sold out. Now they’re working on an additional siddur for the weekday services and released a short, pocket-sized guide for the Selichot service used in advance of the High Holidays. Makom, a new anti-Zionist synagogue formed in Durham, N.C., immediately began fundraising to buy copies. 

Those forming their own congregations now have a siddur that both represents the philosophical background that many young Jews are trying to reshape their observance to highlight — one that also venerates many of the traditions, liturgical legacies and halachic responsibilities Jews are turning toward as global conflicts and climate collapse spark a spiritual reckoning.

“Where is the sense of moral clarity here when we see fascism blooming in our time worldwide … up to, and including, the genocide in Gaza? And that moral message is just not coming from liberal Judaism,” says Banejri.

The Problem of Newness

Each of these projects is grappling with perhaps the fundamental question at the heart of not just creating an alternative Judaism, but any counterculture: Where’s the money going to come from? 

Jewish communities often create tight-knit networks, historically borne out of necessity, to support the welfare of Jewish communities when the state refused. Today, Jewish organizations and synagogues often begin with a ​“start-up model,” in which funds are seeded typically through the Jewish Federation system. But centralization has also allowed funding to become politicized and de facto Zionist, particularly since the Hillel Standards of Partnership were established to prevent any relationship between mainline Jewish groups and anti-Zionists. This means that the entire infrastructure necessary to create Jewish organizations is largely unavailable to anti-Zionists — and may even actively oppose their startups.

Because the communities that anti-Zionists are forming are small and not flush with enough cash to hire a full-time Jewish educator or rabbi, DeWitt, who is a rabbi, and Amy Jaret, a teacher, figured out how to fund the kind of programming their community needed. They created a resource for parents running their own Jewish children’s educational programs.

At first, there was a certain vulnerability about setting a price for their work, but they ultimately acknowledged the need to pay people with the education and skill necessary to create good materials. They built a sliding-scale subscription service from which people could purchase monthly magazine guides with activities, educational materials and holiday and lifecycle guides.

“The story of these federations cutting off funds is an old story,” says Marjorie Feld, a professor of history at Babson College who studies dissident Jewish movements. But, as Feld points out, the energy may be with these renegade projects, even if they are broke. Many of the students coming out of schools like the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College or Hebrew College are bringing together innovative and popular approaches to Jewish practice, often doing so without relying on the consensus Zionism that many critics says robs mainstream synagogue life of spiritual depth.

“There’s a tremendous … overlap in their activism. Creating open spaces to talk about Zionism, non- or anti-Zionist friendly spaces,” says Feld about this new cohort of Jewish leaders. “[They] are pushing … inclusion of all kinds. Not just LGBTQ inclusion, which is great for everyone, but also inclusion of broader conversations that have been absolutely missing from the American Jewish community for a century.”

While many of these projects are relatively new, they do have ancestors as congregations like Tzedek Chicago hit their 10-year anniversary and maintain a committed membership large enough to employ a full-time rabbi and many part-time worship staff.

For rabbis like Solomon, creating a sustainable job was never the primary goal; she wanted to create a collectively run, ethical spiritual community that would set its own agenda.

But this need for resources has also been met by a growing desire for an affirmative, positive vision for the kind of Judaism they are building. Over the past two years, as Jewish activists have demanded a Judaism beyond Zionism, people have responded by asking what that kind of Judaism would stand for — not just what it would oppose.

For Wise, Judaism is rooted in the internationalism of Jewish experience. “[We] are firmly of the places we live, and ​‘diaspora’ is a word that reflects our solidarity,” Wise says. 

A group of rabbis, congregants, synagogues and havurah are launching the Jewish Diaspora Movement, a new vision for Judaism that, as they say, is based around all the places Jews live and rooted in social justice.

This Diaspora movement has been kindling for a long time. Many of the people we talked to for this article have connected with the movement or helped with its founding. In doing so, they hope to plant a seed of what Judaism can become, a spiritual exploration that grows past the confines of the political status quo and can nurture the yearning to heal the world. 

The question of whether they can cultivate a Judaism responsive to young people — particularly those who are anti-Zionist — remains to be answered. 

This may not simply be a Jewish question but, rather, one about the role spirituality has in our era of massive turmoil.