What it means to be a leftist Jew

What does it mean to be a Jew shaped by memory, not nationalism? Michael Cohen reflects identity, honesty and inheritance conscience.

I am the son of the Holocaust victim. I grew up in the shadow of the genocide between the silence and gaze of the survivors, not in theory. Not as a poster, but as a birthmark – inevitable, inherited, deeply printed with me. And from this shadow, now I learned something that marked me in another way: I am a leftist Jew.

This sentence is often greeted with a contemptist-Jewish Jewish hates itself ”. It was like a betrayal of compassion. It is as if refusing to be in harmony with nationalism or Zealotry means that you turn your back on your people.

But no. Being a leftist Jew is not an act of hating yourself. In fact, it is an act of self -defining. A Jewish identity, not ethno-national or dog, but an older, deeper and inevitable thing: a moral heritage.

When the Jews criticize Israeli policies or express solidarity with the Palestinians, there is a reflexive assumption that this should be out of some internalized shame. But this projection. For many of us, our openness does not come without rejecting our Judaism, but it comes from having very deeply to see it.

Although he is Jewish, we do not support justice in Gaza. We support this because we are Jewish. Because we remember what it means to be stateless, occupation and revision. Because our history is not a license to dominate others, but a warning against it.

We are not treacherous. We’re not confused. We are not trying to please foreigners. We are trying to live in an authentic way in the values ​​that shape us – values ​​that do not bring our identity to flags or faith or force.

Quite simple way humanists, but with a memory. A Jewish moment. A memory with ghettos, camps, pogroms, exclusion and exile. And this is a seed in the memory: don’t refuse to be what we were afraid of.

This is not betrayal. This integrity.

Being a leftist Jew is not a deviation. It is not a side current in the Jewish identity. A long, proud history of a stream: Bundists To civil rights of Eastern Europe in America, from Israeli peace activists to diaspora writers, and the thinkers who never hand over Judaism to chauvinism.

We are not unsuccessful Zionists or demonstrators. We and we are something in ourselves – a whole identity. We cannot be nationalist. We cannot be a supremacist. We cannot see. It’s not a stance we adopt. It’s a way to be almost wired.

And for many of us, the only type of Judaism we can live together.

You misunderstand the self that we are loyal to those who say that we hate yourself.

We don’t hate being Jewish. We hate to say that Judaism should mean to close our eyes, to harden our hearts or to remain silent in the face of pain – especially when this pain is given in our step.

We’re not here to erase the past. We are here because the past taught us what to happen.

We are still Jewish. We believe that our history is forcing us not to stand with the oppressed, not on them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwyoqed41a

Michael Cohen is a Jewish Australian writer based on Sydney, who has previously contributed comprehensively to international newspapers and offers both articles and conceptual materials. Now it focuses on human rights problems.

Support independent journalism subscribe to IA.