A 'Good Enough' Reader

“War, as Levinas notes…, threatens to make morality, and all of its aspirations to justice, laughable. He does not advocate for non-resistance to evil. Rather, he argues that if I am responsible for the other person, and for the other person’s neighbor, then I am not free to refrain from going to his or her assistance. … [Torah] requires that, before attacking, the other side must be offered the chance to surrender, thereby demonstrating the limits to war. Does this not suggest that it is war, not peace, which must remain the exception? … In other words, war makes people into objects against their will, turns them into bearers of historical forces, thereby diverting each one of his or her uniqueness and alterity. It precludes the aptitude for speech and justice. It is something to be overcome.”
— Richard I. Sugarman, from Levinas and the Torah [emphasis mine]

A note to readers: What follows is a thinking-out-loud piece about the relationship among Jews, the State of Israel, identity, morality, and Judaism. I wrote this mostly imagining my readers to be fellow Jews, likely Jews of a similar political and ethical stripe to my own, grappling with these and related issues. But I welcome readers of all kinds. I wish to make two of my fundamental positions clear as background to this essay: First, the destruction of Gaza and its people must stop immediately; and second, the State of Israel cannot continue as a two-tiered, occupying, repressive, and violent pseudo-democracy. Although I have ideas about what I think that future state should look like, for this essay, my focus is more on the utopian (a word I use without shame or apology) morality that should be its foundation. The questions I ask here about identity, morality, and religion are questions that I am only free to explore precisely because I am a diasporic Jew, and neither Israeli nor, importantly, Palestinian. To the extent that a significant and powerful faction of American Jews support the State of Israel, I do believe these are important questions to be explored and struggled over now for all of our sakes.

On the morning of Oct 7, 2023, along with shock at the news of the Hamas-led massacres I felt an immediate dread of how the State of Israel¹—under its current right-wing, cynical, and narcissistic governing coalition—would respond. In my lifetime, no Israeli government would have responded well, but the Netanyahu government had already shown itself to be particularly odious. I am no prophet, but after Biden gave the United States’ green light for Israel to do anything it deemed necessary in response, only a fool would have thought this could have unrolled in any other way than how it has. Netanyahu is so baldly cynical and evil (at this point can we in good faith avoid the adjective?), that he has used his own people, the hostages taken on Oct. 7, as a tissue-thin veil over his program of ethnic cleansing and genocide, sabotaging multiple chances to bring them home, creating new wars in Lebanon, Syria, and Iran to distract, all while the hostages die or disappear and the IDF murders tens of thousands of Gazans and razes its infrastructure to the ground.

I’m writing this on the 666th day of the so-called “war” in Gaza, 666 days of warcrimes, punishing an entire population for the crimes of a few, ethnic cleansing, using Palestinian lives for the cynical ends of an ethno-nationalist government, and mass starvation—in short, genocide. At this level of asymmetrical violence, “war” feels like the most egregious of misnomers.

Over the past couple of months, the Jewish diaspora in the U.S. seem to be finally waking up to the grave danger that the State of Israel poses for Jews and Judaism writ large. A few examples: In multiple interviews, the formerly pro-Israel New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has declared that his children and grandchildren will live their lives in a world where the Jewish state is a pariah state, and has wondered what that means for the future of Jewish identity and Judaism. During a recent conversation on The Daily Show, John Stewart and Peter Beinart discussed what happens “when David becomes Goliath” and in a very public forum give air to the growing concern among many diasporic Jews about what becomes of jewishness, Judaism, and importantly to Jew-hatred² in the wake of such wanton destruction and murder by the supposedly Jewish state. Ezra Klein, for his part, has been attempting to explain the divisions among American Jews over the State of Israel since Oct. 7th, and has grown increasingly pointed in his views of what is becoming of American Jewry as Gaza tears us apart. The Union for Reform Judaism, the largest denomination of American Judaism, has historically been a staunch and enthusiastic supporter of the State of Israel. This week, the URJ issued what amounts to a ground-shaking condemnation of Netanyahu’s program of intentional starvation and death by neglect of the people of Gaza.

During an interview with the Unholy podcast, Israeli historian Yuval Harari made a dire prediction that is at once bracing and flawed. In short and at the risk of oversimplifying, Harari argued that a particular 2000-year-old Jewish self-image and ethos is now directly contradicted by the actions of the State of Israel. When Jews gained the power to do so, they wielded the power of the state to become the oppressors. Harari concludes that this may be the end of Judaism as we know it—, although he is quick to clarify that this is not a prophecy, that time does remain to make different choices. His is a bleak, worst-case scenario, suggesting that the new Judaism will be one with an authoritarian state, dominating military, and oppression as its primary tool. He argues that the rest of world Jewry will have no choice but to accept or reckon with this new form of Judaism. I see some flaws with Harari’s analysis, which I’ll return to later.

In response to these dilemmas and intra-Jewish arguments, right-wing, pro-Israel American Jews, a loud and significant minority, have responded with their usual obfuscations, historical distortions, and evasions of moral and legal responsibility for the Israeli state. Centrist pro-Israel American Jews have echoed many of these talking points, but with some trepidation and qualification. Professor of Jewish Studies Shaul Magid has argued that most of these Israel-apologist arguments distract us from what he sees as the real issue: The genocidal actions of the state of Israel pose an existential threat to Jews and Judaism around the world by fundamentally contradicting both our history and our most core religious and cultural values. Magid argues that there is no way to claim to be the “victim of victims,” nor to maintain the Holocaust as the exemplar of inhumanity, in the wake of Gaza. How will the Holocaust be taught now, he asks. If modern Judaism is a religion created over the past 2000 years since the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. as a means to, at least in part, withstand and resist state-backed domination and murder, then what is Judaism when the Jewish state is itself the oppressor? In Magid’s analysis, as we argue with each other over whether or not “genocide” is the right word for what is happening to the people of Gaza, or whether or not it’s a form of Jew-hatred to criticize Zionism, our own Jewish culture is burning to the ground, set afire with flames fanned by the State of Israel.

Although I have Jewish ancestry (among many others, like many of us in the Americas), I was not raised Jewish; rather I chose to return to Judaism as an adult because of the power and beauty that I find in the Jewish religious tradition. Like many American Jews of my generation, I lived the first couple decades of my life with a mythologized view of the State of Israel, and for me personally, a romantic idea of the kibbutz movement, which resonated with my own ideals for community and justice. During the 1990s, between intifadas, I was in graduate school and began to see the State of Israel in a more full light. This amounted to a reexamination of my assumptions and an intentional application of my own critical moral system to the Israel-Palestine context. In the end, my Jewish identity is religious and spiritual, not particularly ancestral. And my Jewish identity has no connection to the State of Israel (but I will admit that I feel a certain profound connection to the cultures, histories, and land west of the Jordan River). That said, I am deeply invested in Judaism and my spiritual identity, in the religious tradition of the people of Israel.

From my own particular experience as an American Jew and as a critical humanist/social scientist, then, I think Harari’s prediction is flawed: He overestimates the link between the State of Israel and Jews, עם ישראל, as a necessary link, reproducing the conflation of the state with the people, most problematically with diasporic Jews who are not subject to the state at all. Historically, there have been long and vociferous objections to the establishment of the State of Israel among the diaspora, and the strong identity-link between American Jews and the State of Israel didn’t really begin until after the 6 Day War.³

As I’ve been trying to work through this heart-rending contradiction between my understanding and practice of Judaism and the injustice and violence inflicted by the State of Israel, I find that I keep returning to the bedrock of my understanding of Jewish moral values—aspirational and perhaps unapologetically utopian as this might be—as I have gleaned them from my own understanding of Torah, and more recently from reading Emmanuel Levinas’s description of what is, for him, the heart of Judaism.⁴

For Levinas, the best any state can aspire to (and indeed the moral purpose of a state) is to create a peaceful social environment that supports the creation and maintenance of real, thingly (not abstract or theoretical) justice. A good state creates the structures of or the potential for real justice, which in turn allows the people within that state to live out their highest religious values. According to Levinas, for Jews, the highest religious value is the responsibility to care for the other and for the other’s neighbor (and so on, radiating outward in a web of social relations). This is, for Levinas, the Covenant with God itself.

In Levinas’s theory of the state, the State of Israel’s obligation would be to create the conditions for justice, full stop. There is a long and vital conversation to be had once the genocide is halted as to what such a state should look like for the people of the land, including everyone who lives there—Jews, Muslims, Christians, secular atheists of all ethnicities, as well as Druze and Bedouins. But for now, I would insist simply that the State of Israel does not own or control Judaism, nor does it possess any special right to nor particularly authentic form of Judaism, nor may it expect the unearned loyalty of Jews, either within or outside of its borders. (As a unitedstateser in 2025, the issue of loyalty to a rogue, non-democratic state has particular and obvious salience.) Any end-in-view for Judaism, then, must begin with a conscious and intentional decoupling of diasporic Jewry—our identities and our religious lives—from the State of Israel. To be clear, I do not mean abandoning our relationship to fellow Jews around the world; but I do mean refusing to hitch our jewishness, and particularly our Judaism, to the Israeli (or any other) state.

Since at least the Babylonian captivity, diasporic Jews living outside of Judea/Palestina⁵ have had a vexed and vexing relationship with Jews living within the land, including disagreements over religious forms, language, ritual, and law, which have tended to revolve around relative authenticity and legitimacy of diasporic Judaism. Post-temple diasporic Jewishness, as exemplified in the Babylonian Talmud, has had at its core a respect for the minhag (tradition) of local Jewish communities, which created one of the ways that Jews scattered across multiple cultures and continents, have maintained a sense of belonging with each other despite our differences. As I alluded to earlier, since the U.N. recognition of the State of Israel in 1949, and intensifying after the 6 Day War in 1967, diasporic Jews and American Jews in particular, across the denominational spectrum, have linked their jewishness to the State of Israel in ways that are very unlike diasporic Jews of the past. Of course, this comes from a particular historical context after the Shoah; but the differences are nonetheless important to note as a possible way forward. I am far from the first to note that the imbricated identity between diasporic jewishness and the State of Israel is causing serious problems in the ways that American Jews interpret and respond to actions taken by the State of Israel.

On a human (and academic) level, I understand why facing the actions of the Jewish settlers in Palestine prior to 1948 and the actions of the State of Israel since then have created such intense cognitive dissonance and emotional pain for diasporic Jews whose identities have been constructed with the State of Israel it their core, and whose families survived various expulsions, pogroms, and genocides. That Israeli Jews are capable of wielding state power like this just makes them, of course, human beings; similar to the millions of humans on the planet right now committing other kinds of atrocities in the name of ethnic, religious, and political interests and powers. When it’s your own ethno-religious siblings committing the crimes, it evokes all kinds of psychological and emotional and cognitive troubles. I think of my German students at Universität Mannheim in 2015 who spoke candidly with me outside of class over beers about the kinds of social and psychological challenges they face when they account for their own families’ fascist histories. Or more poignantly, I think of Andrew Solomon’s book Far from the Tree, for which he interviewed and wrote about the parents of children who turn out to be violent criminals, sometimes murderers. Reading about these parents’ struggle to understand how they love their children but also deplore and are horrified by what their children have done was one of the more profound moral experiences of my life. I cite these two examples as analogies, which are always imperfect. But I just mean to say that at a human level, I understand the pain and difficulty that many Jews are experiencing as they face the genocide in Gaza and perhaps for the first time the history of the mistreatment and injustice experienced by Palestinians over the last 100 or more years.

And yet, if we take the ethical demands of Torah seriously, face it we must.

As a moral philosopher with a particularly radical view of the individual’s ethical responsibility to the other; a view of justice for the neighbor; a Holocaust survivor; and as a Jew with a simultaneously hopeful and suspicious view of the State of Israel; Levinas’s moral philosophy renders the moral condemnation of the State of Israel a self-evident obligation. And I would argue it also offers a glimpse of the way forward, once the immediate crisis has been resolved.⁶

As we think about how to unhook the State of Israel from Judaism and Jewish identity, Levinas’s critique of the relationship between statehood and religion is key. I won’t rehearse here all the details of Levinas’s Torah- and Talmud-based ethical philosophy, but I do want to highlight a few key points that arise in his work that are relevant to my thinking about the future of Judaism and of diasporic Jewishness. I will necessarily simplify here, which I’m sure will annoy philosophers and political theorists; my goal is to move our thinking briefly out of the mud and blood of Gaza to clarify our view and perhaps to motivate our actions and our future.

The most difficult and challenging lesson of this moment may be the core lesson that Levinas tried to teach us back in the 1950s shortly after the founding of the State of Israel: that stable and peaceful states are the necessary condition for the practice of a true or authentic Judaism, which would enable us to seek to establish real justice in the world. But, crucially, the state is not and must not be coterminous with religion itself. Levinas felt that historically, the state has subsumed and reduced religion to an instrument of its own power—a historical assertion that seems relatively well founded. (Critics of religion often invert the order here, arguing that religion is the motivator.)⁷

For Levinas, the tradition itself offered this critique as the Prophets repeatedly warned the ancient Israelites against establishing a state and urged them to maintain a social order governed by Torah judges. In any case, citizenship in a Jewish state is not the same as being either religiously or ethnically Jewish. In the end, the grave sin of Gaza may be the sword that once and for all cleaves ethnic jewishness from religious Judaism.⁸

Levinas argued that the European enlightenment, while imperfect and problematic, had created a context within which Jews in Western Europe (Germany, the Netherlands, and France in particular), had been finally freed from their centuries-old preoccupation with bare survival, and where they could finally pursue and express a true and full practice of Judaism. Whereas a state’s goals are its own survival, power, and perpetuation; the central goal of Judaism is the “transcendence” (for Levinas, a synonym for holiness) that can be achieved through striving to fulfill our moral responsibilities to each other as human beings. This is the true meaning of “spirituality.” Rather than an internal, solitary experience during a ritual or encounter with God, spirituality is the connection between Jewish ritual and practice that continually (re)awakens us to the moral responsibilities that comprise the “difficult freedom” of our Covenant. Although he doesn’t emphasize the point, for Levinas, this is what it means to be in relationship to God, the transcendent.

Levinas argued that “to accept the Torah is to accept the norms of universal justice. The first teaching of Judaism is the following: a moral teaching exists, and certain things are more just than others” (Nine Talmudic Readings [1990 first edition], 66). For Levinas, this morality is based in the inherent (and for him holy) value of another human being, בצלם אלהים, that we encounter whenever we encounter another person. But this is not limited to the one-on-one encounter. By extension, the other we encounter is always also in relationship to a third other, the grammatical third person, who is, for Levinas, the neighbor, רע. This extension carries our responsibilities to the other outward from the initial, intimate, one on one relationship to the social, infinitely interconnected web of humanity. For Levinas, this is the universal call of the Torah.

According to philosopher Richard Sugarman, in Levinas’s interpretation of the myth of the Promised Land in the Torah, “Creating a just society where all are equal and none exploited is a rejection of moral relativism. ‘And it is in the name of this universal justice, not in the terms of some national justice or other, that the Israelites [in the Torah] lay claim to the land of Israel’” (258, emphasis mine).

If we take Levinas’s framework for the relationship of the state to morality and religion seriously, and then by extension the relationship between a state and Jews with our moral obligations, then the aspired-to future, the end-in-view, seems pretty clear, at least in its value-propositions. The future state west of the Jordan River must be a state that establishes in a material, real, economic, and humane way justice. It must be structured in such a way that enables the people who live within it to continually make justice real; and it must make them free enough to live out moral lives of caring for the other and the neighbor. I have ideas of what this might look like, but many others have been thinking much longer and with more authority than I. I’ve seen compelling ideas for single multi-religious, multi-ethnic state; and others for a federation model akin to the EU. Whatever pathway is chosen, it must include something that has never happened in the U.S.: some kind of reckoning with the injustices of the past.

Can the land of Israel (for Jewish ancestors) and the land of Palestine (for the ancestors of Palestinians) be a land of freedom, perhaps even the difficult freedom of mutual responsibility Levinas describes, for all who live there? I think the answer must be very urgently, ‘Yes’; but even if you think not, what other choice have we but to try? The only alternative is the elimination or utter subjugation of one or the other people.

Notes and Bibliographic Doo-Dads

1. I’m intentionally using the admittedly clunky phrase “State of Israel” throughout this essay, because I want to emphasize the distinction between the traditional usage of the word Israel, which has been for thousands of years, the people of Israel, that is, Jews, as opposed to the founders of the state’s usage of the word for political nation-building purposes, conflating the traditional usage of the word with a state. For diasporic (i.e., non-Israeli) Jews, it is of vital importance in this moment that we reclaim the historical meaning of Israel to save Judaism and jewishness form the actions of this state. Ben Gurion is known for using religious words and imagery in his nation building project, co-opting the name of the people, Israel, for the state and the ancient religious symbol, the magen David, as the state’s symbol.

2. The word anti-semitism was coined by Germans in the mid-19th century during the rise of scientific racism. They wanted to give scientific legitimacy to their Judenhasse (Jew-hatred), a common German word at the time, by giving it a coined latinate scientific-sounding name. Although the word has never been used historically to mean anything but the hatred of Jews, its dubious etymology has been used to occlude and erase historical and present Jew-hatred, so I’m choosing to just call it what it is and letting the scientific racist term go.

3. The history of this transformation of Jewish-American identity has been much discussed since Oct. 7, 2023. See for example Beinhart 2025 and Leifer 2024.

4. I am currently working on a more formal, academic essay about Levinas’s philosophy of statehood, the administration of justice in national and international society, and the current configuration of the State of Israel which includes a radical separation and domination of Palestinians. For this blog essay, I want to take a more informal approach and walk through a few key concepts in Levinas’s philosophy that amount to moral normatives at the core of Judaism. I list the main pieces I refer to below, although I’m drawing from the full body of Levinas’s work in my gloss here. Like many philosophers and theorists, Levinas has been used to support a range of positions vis-a-vis the State of Israel—this is what scholars’ of Levinas’s work refer to as “the Levinas Effect” (see Alford). Many pro-Israel scholars have used his writings to support the establishment of the Jewish state; many anti-Israel or Israel-neutral scholars have used his writings to critique or condemn the establishment of the state. Whereas Levinas’s philosophy is often divided between a secular ethical philosophy (his academic work), and a Jewish or religious side, I fall in line with scholars who reject this distinction and argue that these two aspects of Levinas inspired and constrained each other, that they are interconnected and ultimately one and the same. On the liberal theological side of American Judaism (Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, and Renewal movements), much of our thinking has already been influenced by Levinas and Levinas was himself inspired by a particular line of Jewish interpretation of ancient texts, so some of these ideas should ring familiar.

5. Naming the land can be political act, but beyond the politics of it, the history which is quite well documented, of various regions of this tiny but hotly contested strip of land west of the Jordan River included Palestina (the land of the Philistines, modern day Gaza) and Judaea, the province named after the short-lived Kingdom. Various forms of “Judaea” were used by the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines. I’m using the term Judaea-Palestina here as the best I can think of at the moment.

6. Although it should go without saying, I am speaking about the moral obligations of the State of Israel, and by extension Israeli Jews. Depending on our actions, diasporic Jews may also be implicated here to lesser and greater degrees. I am not addressing the moral obligations of Palestinians at all, mainly because I’m neither a Palestinian, nor am I child who whines about how someone else did something bad to justify their own bad behavior. None of what I’m arguing here absolves Palestinians of their own moral responsibility. However, I would argue two things to my fellow Jews. 1) No matter what the Palestinians do, Jews are never absolved of their own moral obligations to Palestinians (that obligation differs among different populations of Jews—the obligation of Israelis is not the same as, say, that of Argentinian Jews or Chabadniks in Sydney). This does not mean that we don’t protect ourselves or work to prevent violence and harm, both of which are required in Jewish morality. Rather, it means that we are responsible for the consequences of our own actions, no matter what. And secondly, there is an evident and massive asymmetry of power between the State of Israel, Israeli Jews, and Palestinians (whether they are Gazan, Israeli citizens, or under the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank). Power asymmetry changes dramatically the relative moral obligations—just think of what a Jew’s moral obligation might have been during a Pogram relative to a conscripted Cossack. None of this should be particularly shocking; it’s the foundation of international laws of war.

7. Although there is a debate to be had, my read of the historical record comports with Levinas’s, that power and greed and self-perpetuation of existing powers (the state) tend to be the drivers; religion tends to be the tool states use to muster support and control of a population. But real history is of course complicated—in the U.S. right now, a rag-tag conglomeration of otherwise antagonistic religious movements have joined forces to take control of the powers of the state.

8. Throughout this essay, I’ve consciously and intentionally separated jewishness from Judaism, even though I also believe them to be tightly overlapping cultural phenomena. This flows from the social-scientific understanding of Jews comprising an ethno-religion, rather than simply a religion (which is the liberal, post-Englightenment desire to reduce Jews to a religious marketplace choice) or simply an ethnicity (which is the flip side desire to see Jews as like another immigrant ethnicity that can be absorbed or assimilated). Jews themselves can flow between these two formulations, but I think keeping them as two different but overlapping categories is both more empirically accurate (to the extent the culture can be empirically represented) and useful in understanding how Jews in the diaspora see themselves.

Alford, Fred C. “Levinas and Political Theory” in Political Theory Vol. 32 No. 2 April 2004: pp. 146-171. DOI: 10.1177/0090591703254977

Beinart, Peter. Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning. New York: Knopf, 2025.

Herzl, Theodor. The Old New Land: A Utopian Novel [1902]

Leifer, Joshua. Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life. New York: Penguin Random House, 2024.

Levinas, Emmanuel. “The State of Israel and the Religion of Israel” [1951] in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, translated by Seán Hand. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990: pp. 216-20.

—————. “Ethics and Religion” [1952] in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, translated by Seán Hand. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990: pp. 3-10.

—————. “Promised Land or Permitted Land” [1965] in Nine Talmudic Readings, translated by Annette Arronowitz. Revised Edition. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2019: pp. 73-99.

—————. “Beyond the State in the State” [1988] in New Talmudic Readings, translated by Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburg, Penn.: Duquesne University Press, 1999: pp. 79-108.

Solomon, Andrew. Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity. New York: Scribner, 2013.

Sugarman, Richard I. Levinas and the Torah: A Phenomenological Approach. Albany, NY: SUNY University Press, 2019).

— Todd
lovingkindness, curiosity, and faggotry

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