(Image source: Rabbis for Ceasefire)

Activism has been part of my religious commitment as a Jew since my youth. In my confirmation address in 1965 at my classical Reform synagogue I focused on a verse from the prophet Micah (6:8) that had always grabbed my attention, as it was carved on the synagogue walls, in good King James English:

It hath been told thee, o man, what is good, and what the Lord doth require of thee, only to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.

That verse summed up how I connect activism with Jewish values. As I grew older, learned more Hebrew, became a feminist, came out as a lesbian, and lost my belief in a supernatural God, I decided I should make a new version for myself, and taking the license of the translator, interpret Micah to be saying that we must seek justice, love well, and tread gently as we walk in the world.

Most of my activism has continued to be through a Jewish lens that demands justice, love, and a gentle tread. Like my initial confirmation experience, I have done activist work primarily through writing and speaking. I do not underestimate the power of words to help me clarify what I believe and to share my values with others. When I became a rabbi and, later, a tenured professor of religion, I have had the privilege to have my words taken seriously and have been given access to platforms that amplify their power to reach people. In news outlets, sermons, public prayers, and in books and essays I have written, I have focused my energies primarily on supporting reproductive rights, Jewish feminism, LGBTQ freedom, and on ending anti-Black racism.

What I didn’t focus my activist writing or speaking on for many years was Israel. Growing up in the 1960s, Israel played no part in my Reform temple—no flags, no folk dances, no falafel. To learn about Israel, I spent my junior year in college at Hebrew University in Jerusalem from 1969-70. My reaction surprised me. I thought Israel would feel like home, but it did not. Having just left the Columbia University campus protests against the war in Vietnam, I was deeply alienated by Israel’s jubilant militarism. Israelis and my American Zionist cohort celebrated men with guns in uniform. The music we heard on the radio and were learning in Hebrew class was all in celebration of the June 1967 war. I still can’t believe we were taught to sing lyrics like “in darkness and light, and the flag blue and white, we conquered the Straits of Tiran.” No one discussed what the occupation of East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank would mean for the Palestinian inhabitants. No one even called them Palestinians. They were simply the “Arab” men who did the back-breaking labor of building our housing and the “Arab” women who cleaned our bathrooms, while all the while we heard the message about how wonderful it was to live where every job was done by a Jew.

I returned home and committed to focusing my energies on creating a robust American Jewish life that did not rely on Zionism. After graduating from rabbinical school, I joined anti-occupation groups Breira and New Jewish Agenda, signed my share of petitions, and was for that reason alone included on the infamous Self-Hating Israel Traitors list created by right-wing American Jewish Zionists. That list ultimately became the Canary Mission website where they label anyone who expresses a pro-Palestinian viewpoint an antisemite and, since October 7, a potential target for doxxing, firing, expulsion, or deportation. But early in my career my energies were elsewhere. Until they could no longer be.

Although I am not a pulpit rabbi, I have had the honor of giving Yom Kippur sermons at synagogues where I am a member. My first sermon about Israel was the night my daughter was born in 1982 in the midst of the war in Lebanon. When the Israeli army was shown to be the power behind the Sabra and Shatila massacre that killed thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese, I had no choice but to speak out. After that I gave occasional talks and sermons about Israel/Palestine (even the locution “Israel/Palestine” back then was considered traitorous in the organized Jewish world), but it still did not become central to my Jewish justice writing, preaching, or teaching for quite some time.

When I wrote my first essay about Israel/Palestine in 2013 in the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion more than one friend told me to beware: I would be committing a self-defeating act and would no longer be welcome in the organized Jewish world where allegiance to Israel was non-negotiable. But by that time, my concerns about Israel’s behavior towards the Palestinian population it ruled over demanded I speak out regardless of the consequences.

In that article, I wrote about why I believed a two-state solution was no longer feasible, primarily because Jewish settlers had already usurped the land that could have been a Palestinian state in the West Bank. Israel’s government encouraged the settlers to build homes and communities over vast amounts of the West Bank, seizing land and demolishing homes and olive groves that belonged to Palestinian families for generations. Claiming to protect the settlers from Palestinian violence after the Second Intifada in 2000, the Israeli government made a Palestinian state even less imaginable by building a separation wall that effectively kept West Bank Palestinians in isolated spaces, forced to go through checkpoints to get from one place to another, and often deprived of access to water and electricity. It was clear: given the settlements and Israel’s expanding boundaries, there was no land left to make a Palestinian state on the West Bank, or to connect to Gaza, which remained under siege.

In the same article I also concluded that Israel had to make a choice about whether it was a democracy or a Jewish state. In Israel, only Jews can become citizens under the “right of return,” the idea that Jews from anywhere in the world have the right to live as citizens in Israel. Palestinians in the diaspora and in occupied territories have no right to return to the land that they were forced to leave in 1948 when 750,000 of them were expelled or killed. Any access to the land inside the borders established in ‘48 is controlled through a system of color-coded identity cards and work permits. Those who live in refugee camps in the occupied territories and the Palestinian diaspora are barred from becoming citizens at all, even for the purpose of family reunification. It therefore seemed obvious to me that a Jewish state could not be a democracy for non-Jewish inhabitants.

And I was proven right, as the choice to be a Jewish state was made official by law in 2018, when the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) passed the Nation-State Law, declaring Israel the nation-state of the Jewish people and making Hebrew the only official language. That made it crystal clear: Israel is a democracy only for its Jewish citizens. Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are under military rule, governed by a separate legal system. Palestinians who live inside the ’48 borders are second-class citizens at best. They have the right to vote but not to serve in the defense forces, the primary path to socialization and success in society. They have some representation in the Knesset, but not in proportion to their numbers, twenty percent of Israel’s population. For Palestinians and anyone who is not deemed Jewish by the Orthodox rabbis who have the power to determine Jewish identity, Israel is not a democracy.

Finally, I pointed out that as a lesbian I was enraged that Israel was trying to use its acceptance of LGBTQ culture to distract from its oppression of Palestinians. These efforts, that have come to be known as pinkwashing, were disturbing, and do not tell the whole story of gay rights in Israel. The ultra-Orthodox not only disrupt Israeli Pride parades, but as arbiters of legal marital status also prohibit gay marriage. And queer Palestinian Israelis are not accorded any rights. So when Philadelphia’s Equality Forum decided to make Israel the country it honored in 2012, I decided to cancel my participation to protest Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in a very public letter.

Putting my thoughts about Israel in writing gave me the courage to continue to be more public with my increasingly anti-Zionist views. Somehow writing was not enough though, and I needed other outlets for my activism.

The first was through the American Academy of Religion (AAR), the professional association for scholars of religion. At the 2015 annual meeting I found myself in conversation with American religion scholar Edward Curtis. We met at a time of concerted efforts to get learned societies, as organizations of academics by discipline are known, to support the Palestinian civil society call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction (BDS). Other organizations had signed on or were having heated debates. Ed and I began discussing whether AAR might be a site for the BDS call. We were cautioned by the movement’s leaders to tread gently, so we began by organizing a Religious Scholars for BDS group that still exists today.

Later we took a bold step but in a different direction. We decided that our best approach was to form an academic seminar that would create opportunities for scholars to discuss issues from both Palestinian and Jewish perspectives. Our newly-formed group, “Theological, Ethical, and Pedagogical Approaches to Israel/Palestine” first met in 2022 and we offered the only sessions at the AAR’s yearly conference on Palestine/Israel. In 2023, after October 7, seven other groups also included the topic in their calls for scholarly papers. Scholarship on Israel/Palestine is now an integral part of the AAR, and our steering committee is happy to have led the way.

While these connections satisfied my interests in academic activism, the part of me that still identifies strongly as rabbi also needed satisfaction. I am not personally inclined to attend demonstrations, do civil disobedience, or create rituals that are the more common ways for rabbis to engage in protests. I admire and support those who do, but my dislike of crowds, chants, and engagement with police puts me outside that circle. I needed to do something different.

In June of 2023 a special effort to get rabbis to attend Jewish Voice for Peace Action’s lobby day in Washington DC caught my attention. (Years before I had learned the ins and outs of lobbying when I sat on the local Family Planning Council in Philadelphia. We went to D.C. and to Harrisburg to talk to our legislators about the importance of making contraception available for all women. Sometimes my young son joined me, and we learned together about why meeting with legislators and their staff played such a vital role in doing justice and holding our representatives accountable to us.)

Lobbying has now become central to my pro-Palestinian activism. Jewish Voice for Peace Action has brilliant organizers who set up meetings for us and taught us how to use our status as rabbis to open doors and to lovingly hold effective conversations to thank legislators who supported the Palestinian cause, present our case to those who were wavering, and attempt to reason with those who supported Israel unconditionally. After October 7, this strategy became even more important. I learned how to set up meetings and work behind the scenes with congressional staff. Being from Pennsylvania, represented by two senators who “stood with Israel” and a congressperson who had not signed on to legislation we were supporting, made it all quite challenging. But meeting with them and their staff enabled me to practice having conversations with powerful people who disagreed with me. And meeting serendipitously with one of their staffers who welcomed us and gave us support and advice lifted my spirits. The small changes that staff member has enacted, and the suggestions they made, really made a difference.

(Image source: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe. Rebecca Alpert (far left) and other Rabbis for Ceasefire meet with UN Secretary General António Guterres in February 2024.)

I was also deeply moved when I attended meetings with supportive senators and representatives that we visited to thank them for their courage and for sponsoring bills that have called for ceasefire and an end to the U.S.’s military funding of Israel. I was proud to be a Pennsylvanian when I had the opportunity to meet with Representative Summer Lee from Pittsburgh. She explained how important it is to her to support all people who have suffered from attacks: her constituents who experienced the shootings at the Tree of Life Synagogue, the Palestinians in the U.S. who are experiencing anti-Palestinian racism, and those in Gaza who are fighting for their freedom.

I encountered Summer Lee again this past winter, this time as a member of the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce. As it turned out, a talk I gave at Haverford College about the history of Jewish anti-Zionism was included in the list of items the President of Haverford had to account for as she was summoned to Committee hearings. I could not believe that my academic analysis could be thought of as promoting “a culture of antisemitic discrimination” as it was described in that letter. Frankly, I was dumbfounded that a well-researched and documented presentation could be so misrepresented and misused, but in retrospect I shouldn’t have been surprised. Bogus charges of antisemitism for any criticism of Israel are central to the campaign to undermine and silence any pro-Palestinian efforts, especially on campuses. Anticipating what might happen at the hearing filled me with dread.

I watched the proceedings on television, waiting for my talk to be discussed, but it never came up. The Republicans on the committee were too busy grilling Haverford’s president about such weighty matters as naming the names of students who were suspended for pro-Palestine protests and demanding to know whether students were permitted to eat donuts from an Israeli restaurateur at their graduation. And once again, I was grateful to Summer Lee, who spoke up during those hearings to critique the Trump administration for using false charges of antisemitism to suppress pro-Palestinian speech on campus.

Trying to persuade the U.S. Congress to work for peace and justice in Israel/Palestine is an uphill battle to be sure, and one might be left wondering why it’s where I have focused my activism. Attending a session on why we should keep lobbying at the Jewish Voice for Peace national member meeting last May provided me with the answer. The speakers reminded me that this strategy still matters, in the long term if not in the short term. We need our representatives in Congress to know that we are passionate about the cause of Palestinian dignity and freedom, that we are not going away, and that the organizations that claim to represent all Jews do not represent us. They must continue to hear from us; we can’t let them forget.

Rebecca Alpert is Professor of Religion Emeritus at Temple University and on the Leadership Team of Rabbis for Ceasefire.