At Croton's Temple Israel, the Jewish community faces "conflict and confusion" over anti-Semitism and Israel's war in Gaza.

In the latest in a series of public discussions of painful current events, the congregation hosted Ben Sax of the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies in Baltimore.

Temple Israel of Northern Westchester

Note: This story is free to all readers. To support local journalism, please consider taking out a paid sub. See details below.

In the first days after the horrendous October 7 attack by Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups against Israelis living near Gaza, in which an estimated 1200 people were killed and more than 200 taken hostage, most Americans rallied around Israel and condemned what were clearly atrocities and war crimes. “We stand with Israel” was a relatively non-controversial rallying cry at that time.

There was particular alarm that the spike in anti-Semitism in the United States clearly discernible before October 7 would now find new forms of expression (the online threats of a now former Cornell University student to stab, rape, and behead Jewish people was just one extreme example of what some feared.)

But as the death toll mounted among Palestinians during the ensuing days, weeks, and months—well more than 30,000 people in Gaza are estimated to have been killed, including at least 13,000 children—ambivalence about what was supposed to be a battle to root out and destroy Hamas has increased sharply among Jews and non-Jews alike.

Some of Israel’s staunchest political allies, including Senator Chuck Schumer, former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and increasingly, President Joe Biden himself, have expressed their disapproval at the high death toll of Israel’s campaign of what some human rights groups and experts call collective punishment, a war crime under international laws that were adopted after World War II to try to prevent another Holocaust. They have strongly criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for his conduct of the war.

Jewish journalists and commentators both in Israel and the United States have often taken the lead in this mounting criticism. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, long a defender and sympathizer of Israel, yesterday urged Israel to declare a cease-fire, get the hostages released, and forget about trying to destroy Hamas (a goal some analysts say might not be possible anyway.)

The day before that, veteran war correspondent Peter Maass penned an opinion piece in the Washington Post entitled “I’m Jewish, and I’ve covered wars. I know war crimes when I see them.” And of course, Israel is currently accused in the International Court of Justice of committing “genocide,” a charge the court, rightly or wrongly, has already declared is “plausible.”

Perhaps one of the most important recent investigations into why the death toll in Gaza has been so high came from within Israel itself. That story, “‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza,” published by the Israeli-Palestinian magazine +972, was authored by Jerusalem-based journalist Yuval Abraham, and was soon after reported on by the Washington Post and other American publications.

Given this ambivalence among many Jews, it should come as no surprise that the congregation of Croton’s own Temple Israel would harbor “confused and conflicted” views during what temple trustee Ed Ginsberg told the Chronicle was “a watershed moment in American Jewish relations, something we have never experienced before.” This is especially true because Temple Israel has a long history of social justice and civil rights advocacy.

Soon after the events of October 7, Ginsberg, who has taught for decades about the Holocaust and human rights at local schools and a number of universities in New York state, led a public interfaith workshop about anti-Semitism at Temple Israel. It included members of several Christian churches in Croton and nearby, and discussion and debate about the war in Gaza featured prominently.

Last week, Ginsberg moderated another in what has become a series of such public events hosted by Temple Israel, this time featuring Benjamin Sax, the Head of Scholarship and the Jewish Scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies in Baltimore. The event was originally supposed to be held in person at Temple Israel, but due to inclement weather that day, it was conducted via Zoom. The Chronicle attended.

Benjamin Sax

Sax began by talking about his efforts at the Institute to build “an inter-religious society,” a task he said has become much more challenging after October 7. “We are better when we learn from one another and develop better listening skills,” Sax said. “But since October 7, we have been trying to prevent our communities from unraveling after ten years of building community.”

Sax, who is Jewish and lived in Jerusalem for many years, told the group that on the board of the Baltimore institute “we have every opinion you can imagine on things related to Israelis and Palestinians.” He added that even before October 7, those relationships were “already stretched” by the continuing rise of the political right in Israel, along with the rise of anti-Semitism in the United States.

For a time after October 7, Sax said, “the solidarity worldwide for Israel was unlike anything I had seen in my lifetime. It was a moment of goodwill” towards the Jewish state. Among American Jews, however, there was a “feeling there was an imminent threat to our communities. I certainly feel that.” There was also a rise in Islamophobia caused by the Hamas attacks, including the shooting of two Palestinian students in Vermont.

“You have two communities in the U.S. that feel besieged by one another,” Sax said. “There is a feeling of exhaustion [caused by] these communities being under the microscope all the time, and fear of saying the wrong thing.”

As a result of these conflicts, and in light of his interfaith work, Sax says he thinks the right slogan for Jews after October 7 is not, “We stand with Israel,” but “We stand with the people of Israel.” This stance reflects some of Sax’s scholarly work, in which he has explored the question of when criticizing Israel is anti-Semitic and when it is not—a topic on which there is obviously wide disagreement.

Ed Ginsberg

During Sax’s talk, we suddenly realized that one of the Zoom windows, which had been occupied by Temple Israel rabbi Wendy Pein, was actually connected to a room in which a number of students in the temple’s Center for Jewish Learning, which Pein leads, were sitting in. One of the students asked a question about what Israel’s response to the Hamas attacks should have been, to which Sax responded with a series of what might be called Socratic questions designed to lead the student to question his own views and try to understand the point of view of a Palestinian—not necessarily to adopt that view, Sax emphasized, but to better know his own position.

The event ended with some discussion about what Jews should be discussing with their families during the Passover seder, which this year begin later in April.

Sax said that it was right that this year’s seder “should be a little bit uncomfortable,” given how much was at stake for the people of both Israel and Palestine. “The suffering that is unbearable for our own people, we don’t want to double that” for others, he said.

Sax added: “It’s important that there be self-criticism within our own community. Do we say it’s right that people are starving [in Gaza]? Do we say that’s all Hamas’s fault? Is this who we want to be? We are constantly reminded during the Passover seder that we were strangers in the land of Egypt. We all have a responsibility to love the stranger.”

* * *

Note to readers: To support local journalism, please consider taking out a paid sub to The Croton Chronicle. You can do that by clicking on this button:

To share this post, or to share the Croton Chronicle, please click on these buttons:

Comments policy: No hate speech allowed, no personal attacks on anyone. Please be polite and respectful.