The politically acceptable Jew,
by Rabbi Steven Abraham, Future of Jewish, 2026-08-28.

Joel Rubin’s warning should make Western Jews uncomfortable precisely because it is not really about Israel. It is about us.

Rubin, who served as US Congressman Bernie Sanders’ Jewish outreach director in 2020, recently wrote that anti-Zionism is becoming “the boundary marker separating the politically acceptable Jew from the politically suspect one.”

That is the sentence worth sitting with.

The argument is no longer simply over settlements, Netanyahu, Gaza, or the borders of a future Palestinian state. Something else is happening: In parts of the Western Left, the question is increasingly not what Jews believe about Israel, but whether Jews are willing to place Jewish peoplehood itself on trial.

The acceptable Jew may criticize Israel, renounce Zionism, universalize Judaism into an ethical tradition detached from peoplehood, and assure everyone that Jewish safety requires no particular Jewish political claim.

The suspect Jew says something much simpler:

I am a Jew. I belong to a people. That people has a homeland. And after 2,000 years of dependence on the goodwill of others, I am unwilling to apologize for the existence of Jewish sovereignty.

That Jew has become a problem.

Abdul El-Sayed and Jamie Raskin sidestep Hasan Piker, and Israel, in Michigan campaign stops,
by Andrew Lapin, Forward, 2026-08-27.

As Michigan US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed made campaign stops with a prominent Jewish congressional leader on Wednesday, there was one subject neither he, nor his Democratic allies onstage, were interested in discussing.

“Don’t any reporter ask me again about Hasan Piker,” Michigan US Representative Debbie Dingell told the crowd at an Ann Arbor, Mich., town hall, to cheers. “It’s not what November is about.”

Dingell’s crack was the only time the prominent left-wing streamer’s name was mentioned at all during the pair of El-Sayed rallies that day. Piker recently commented, “If Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone’s going to come around and take action… against American Jews.”

His remarks prompted uproar from several corners of Democratic leadership and pushback from El-Sayed, who distanced himself from Piker’s remarks in a statement prior to his latest rallies. Despite this, El-Sayed’s new Jewish campaign surrogate, US Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, avoided the topic altogether.

That reluctance to talk about Piker on the campaign trail Wednesday extended to the candidate himself. El-Sayed didn’t mention Piker, nor Israel, once in either of his campaign stops with Raskin, except when asked directly by reporters.

In her speech on Sunday, Nessel alluded to Queen Esther, the biblical heroine of the Jewish holiday of Purim, in a dramatic illustration of the high stakes of the race.

“It is perhaps up to us now to follow in her path,” Nessel said, “and sacrifice the comfort, safety and security and even the very future of our own people in exchange for the opportunity to save the rest of humanity.” (In the Purim story, however, Queen Esther risked her own life to save the Jews rather than putting aside Jewish safety for a supposed greater good.)

She suggested the election hinged on more than just Israel, whose existence as a Jewish state El-Sayed has refused to acknowledge. “What good is defending the historic homeland of our ancestors and demanding that candidates acknowledge its right to exist, if the planet upon which it rests is no longer inhabitable?” she said to attendees at the event in Birmingham on Sunday.

I cannot disagree with her more. What good is the rest of humanity to me, a Jew, if humanity does not want us around? It certainly didn't matter to left-leaning gentiles in 2024.

Nothing creates Zionists quite as efficiently as people who insist Zionism is illegitimate or unnecessary and then spend their time demonstrating exactly why it exists.

I speak Russian as my first language. When I mention that in Canada, the reaction is usually warm - a smile, "Privet," maybe a friendly comment about Russia or Russian culture. Nobody demands that I explain Putin, apologize for the invasion of Ukraine, or answer for cities being destroyed by the Russian army. And this is despite the fact that pro-Putin sentiment is hardly rare in parts of the Russian-speaking diaspora here. Spend any time in Russian-Canadian Facebook groups and you will see plenty of people openly supporting him and repeating Kremlin propaganda. Then, at some point, I mention that I'm actually from Israel - and suddenly it gets awkward.

And that's exactly the point: nobody treats a Russian-speaking person as responsible for Putin, even though many Russian Canadians do support him.

The same principle works perfectly well with everyone else. Iran's regime has slaughtered thousands of protesters, brutally represses women and imprisons dissidents, yet nobody treats a Persian restaurant in Canada as the Revolutionary Guard. There are conservative Muslim communities here where women face serious religious and family pressure over clothing, marriage and gender roles, but nobody sane concludes that every Muslim Canadian should answer for Sharia law, Iran, Saudi Arabia or the Taliban. A Chinese Canadian is not Xi Jinping, an Iranian Canadian is not Khamenei, and a Russian Canadian is not Putin.

Then we get to Jews, and suddenly this very simple principle becomes incredibly difficult to understand.

A synagogue becomes "Israel." A Jewish school becomes the IDF. A kosher restaurant becomes a place to express rage about Gaza. A Canadian Jew with absolutely no influence over Israeli policy is suddenly expected to explain Netanyahu, settlements, the IDF and whatever happened in the Middle East that morning.

Apparently collective responsibility is racist and disgusting when applied to everyone else, but when applied to Jews it somehow becomes "activism."

And somehow "anti-Zionist" rhetoric so often comes packaged with the same old antisemitic clichés - "Steins," "Bergs," Jewish money, influence, secret networks and dual loyalty. Epstein gets dragged into everything, while Einstein somehow never does. At some point, it becomes very hard to pretend this is only about Zionism.

And this is where the claim that all of this is merely "anti-Zionism" becomes rather funny. If you genuinely believe Jews do not need a Jewish state, then logically you should be encouraging Israeli Jews to leave Israel and come live safely in Canada. Your message should be: "Come here. You don't need your own state. We'll prove it."

Instead, some of the loudest people fighting Zionism are helping create an atmosphere in which Jews feel increasingly alienated in the very countries that are supposedly meant to prove Zionism unnecessary.

In my case, Israel is not some distant country I suddenly discovered because Canada made me uncomfortable. I am from Israel. It is my country. What Canada has managed to do is remind me very clearly why having that country matters.

So congratulations. If your goal was to convince Jews that Zionism is illegitimate or unnecessary, treating Canadian Jews as extensions of the Israeli government is a spectacularly stupid strategy.

You may be creating more Zionists than Israel ever could.

The constitution is Islam! (How Arab nationalism armed its Islamist successors),
by Aurele Tobelem, Beyond Belief, 2026-09-01.

[A] guest essay, written by Aurele Tobelem, an historian and policy analyst specializing in Middle Eastern geopolitics and political Islam.

Tobelem’s central argument is that Arab nationalism and Islamism, despite a historic rivalry, were never cleanly separated ideological projects. He argues that while Arab nationalism is secular in principle, it relied heavily on Islam as the cultural/historical foundation of Arab identity. In other words, Islamic civilization was translated to Arab civilization, Islamic expansion was treated as an Arab achievement, and the early caliphate was a model inspiration for Arab unity.

Not standing together,
by Dave Rich, Everyday hate, 2026-08-30.

The [UK] Green Party has reportedly banned Standing Together, a grassroots Jewish-Arab peace movement in Israel, from holding events at the Green Party conference in October. This follows a similar decision to block a fringe meeting on antisemitism that the Antisemitism Policy Trust and the polling company More In Common wanted to hold; meanwhile, at the same conference, the party will debate a motion calling for Israel to be erased and fully replaced with a single state of Palestine. Add these together and you get a sense of the single-minded, destructive fervour of the radical anti-Zionists who have flocked to the party under Zack Polanski’s leadership.

Standing Together is hardly a Zionist mouthpiece. In Israel it campaigned for a ceasefire, blocked troop transports to Gaza and confronts violent settlers in the West Bank. They openly call the Gaza war a genocide and accuse the Israeli state of apartheid. These are positions that would put them well to the left of the vast majority of British Jews, never mind Israeli ones. You’d think they are exactly the kind of Israeli organisation that British leftists seeking to campaign against the Israeli government and its wars would want to hear from; but that is not what anti-Zionists want at all.

Last year the global BDS movement published a call by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) to boycott Standing Together for the crime of “normalisation”. This was backed by the UK’s own Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC). Standing Together published a response hoping, it seems, to persuade people against this boycott, but their patiently-argued explanation missed the point. The people who want to boycott Standing Together don’t care that they campaign for Palestinian rights or accuse Israel of genocide. All that matters is that Standing Together also recognise that Israeli Jews are people with rights and needs of their own; that Israeli Jews have a narrative about their history and their reality that is worth listening to, as do Palestinians; and that Jews and Arabs in Israel need to work together to build a common future. That’s enough to get them banned.

The message is that there are no Israelis pure enough or acceptable enough for anti-Zionists in the Green Party to talk to, hear from, or work with. The only acceptable Israelis are the ones who agree that Israel shouldn’t exist at all. The Greens For Palestine faction has even ejected veteran anti-Zionist Jews who fell under suspicion for being closet Zionists. This is the logical direction of anti-Zionism today, in which any sense of hesitancy, compromise or moderation is taken as evidence of “normalisation” with the hated enemy. Usually, the British Left will find partners and allies in other countries to work with, including within those countries they campaign against. But not Israel, because to work with Jews who live in Israel would admit messy, complicated reality into their simplistic, symbolic politics.