A New Jewishness Is Being Born Before Our Eyes

Last Friday evening, amid the national panic over the campus protests in solidarity with Gaza, I met fellow Jews in downtown Los Angeles to welcome Shabbat. Candles, grape juice, and challah shared space with “CEASEFIRE NOW” signs on a folding table. We heard speeches and joined together in song and prayer as the sun dipped behind the Department of Water and Power Building and the wind blew through.

Our mystics teach us that the 25 hours of the Sabbath offer a taste of “the world to come”—a holier world, one outside capitalist logic and capitalist time. The precise nature of this world is up for interpretation. Traditional sources understand it as an afterlife, where the righteous get their reward, while the political visionaries among us take “the world to come” to mean a future, better version of the world we already live in.

It felt especially urgent to gather for Shabbat after a week in which students in our city had been brutalized for enacting their own imperfect vision of the world as it could be. Before sunrise the previous day, police firing rubber bullets and stun grenades had dismantled the sprawling encampment at the University of California, Los Angeles, and arrested students and faculty. In attempting to justify the raid, Chancellor Gene Block pointed to the bloody, hours-long attack by a visiting mob of pro-Israel counterprotesters the night before—essentially using the students’ own experience of terrifying violence, for which the university bears significant responsibility, as cover for inflicting even more violence on those same students.

That the crackdown on student encampments around the country is being done in the name of Jewish safety feels doubly offensive to those of us whose Jewish identities call us to Palestinian-solidarity work. At Friday’s service, I was surrounded by dear comrades of mine who’ve become something like family over these past seven months of furious organizing (in my case, as a member of the Los Angeles chapter of IfNotNow). Jewish safety is a subject we know about. Diverse groups of earnest students trying to create a more just future don’t alarm us. What does is the authoritarian response, which endangers people of all backgrounds, and which in seeming to single out Jews for protection serves to isolate us from our natural allies.

A new Jewish tradition is growing in those places where solidarity flourishes. Amid the ugliness and death, and as our institutions cleave to the mistaken idea that our safety comes from ever more brutal applications of state power, the future of our people is being written on campuses and in the streets. Thousands of Jews of all ages are creating something better than what we inherited.

I visited the UCLA encampment on Wednesday night last week, hours before the police closed in. The mood was anxious—large formations of officers were stationed just outside as helicopters circled noisily overhead—but there were dozens of tents packed closely together and hundreds of people hanging out or doing various jobs, including distributing snacks, ferrying supplies, fortifying the perimeter, and shining a strobe light at the cops peering down at us from the windows of Royce Hall. Your level of comfort in such a space might have depended on your level of comfort with duct tape and no official bathrooms; with chants ringing out over a snare-drum beat; with leftist graffiti scrawled on a stately Romanesque façade. The camp required an ethos of trust and mutual care. It also required bravery, given the way that counterprotesters had kept up a stream of hateful intimidation unimpeded by the university.

As it grew over the course of its week-long occupation of the normally brochure-gracing quad, the camp included a people’s library, teach-ins, art projects, and a screening of The Battle of Algiers. There was a Passover Seder (with olives, strawberries, and watermelon added to the ritual to symbolize solidarity with Palestine and Gaza) and a Kabbalat Shabbat service, which is Shabbat’s mystical, emotional, Hebrew-heavy expression. Aliyah, a medical administrator at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center who asked that I not use her last name—she is Muslim and fears harassment—told me that the Kabbalat Shabbat service was her first-ever experience of Friday-evening Shabbat. (The Shabbat downtown, where we met a week later, was her second.) “There were Muslims sitting down with Jews. There were Christians sitting down. We were just learning about it,” Aliyah recalled. “And at the same time, Muslims had their prayers.” (The daily prayers of Islam appeared alongside Jewish ritual on the agenda.) “It was beautiful.”

Many experienced a kind of mourning after the camp was destroyed. Two UCLA students I met Thursday afternoon outside the Twin Towers jail—they had driven there to support those who’d been arrested earlier that day—seemed overcome by sorrow and anger, sometimes collapsing into each other’s arms. They seemed like longtime friends, but they told me they’d barely known each other before spending the previous day building wooden fortifications in the aftermath of the pro-Israel mob attack. The cooperative spirit of the camp was “one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen,” one of them, Isabelle, told me. “And simultaneously, there were some of the most horrific things I’ve ever seen. I think that was probably the hardest part, just the whiplash.”

In Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Robin D.G. Kelley writes that the best social movements “do what great poetry always does: transport us to another place, compel us to relive horrors and, more importantly, enable us to imagine a new society.” Kelley is a professor of US history at UCLA and a founding member of its Faculty for Justice in Palestine chapter; he described the student encampment as a “huge success” when I spoke to him by phone after the police raid. “I was involved in the anti-apartheid movement back in the ’80s at UCLA,” he said, “and that kind of solidarity, that kind of cocreation of community—we didn’t have it like that. These students were far more advanced.”

The students’ demands, which include disclosure of university assets and divestment from companies “complicit” in Israel’s crimes, are nowhere close to being met. It might feel strange, moreover, to talk about “success” in the context of this movement, which after all is aimed at stopping an ongoing genocide.