Daddy Issues, Patriarchy and Anti-Zionist Jews
Some queer Jewish theory for your consideration
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Slugs for salt! Chickens for KFC! Jews for… Hamas?! It is a great mystery which particular aspects of the human condition must be broken in order for a person to actively seek and desire harm against themselves or their own people — or any other beings, for that matter, though affinity bias tends to invoke increased empathy for the people most like us.
If you are a Jewish person, there’s a good chance you know an anti-Zionist Jew — you know, one of those less than 10% of Jews worldwide who do not believe in the right for Jewish self-determination on ancestral homeland (no caveats for oppressing Palestinians, depriving them of sovereignty, etc. Simple as that!).
If you are a non-Jewish person, there’s a good chance that you disproportionately see anti-Zionist Jews propped up in American media and activism, because they are the favorite tokens of “progressive” people who proudly boast that they don’t hate ALL Jews — only the 90% of Jews who don’t want their families in Israel to be murdered and displaced.
While all anti-Zionist Jews may not actively praise Hamas, the majority of them are proclaiming “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” (a call which actively incites the ethnic cleansing of Jewish people from the land of Israel), calling to “globalize the Intifada” (an invocation for the same terrorist violence that claimed the lives of almost a thousand civilians through things like bus bombs and random street stabbings in the 00s) and demanding a one-state solution that annihilates the Jewish state and gives the entirety of the land of Israel to Palestinian people for a solely Muslim ethno-state.
I won’t go into the full history here, but what you should know is that Jews are indigenous to the land of Israel, and this is corroborated by archeology, genealogy, history, culture and thousands of years of continued presence. The Arab conquests in the 7th century forced most of the Jews in Israel into the diaspora, which anti-Zionist Jews are now a part.
And though Jews prayed for over a thousand years for a return to our homeland (which we eventually did after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, in case you have amnesia as to whether Europeans were the only ones capable of imperialism), as we lived in constant persecution and fear of expulsion or murder, there are anti-Zionist Jews today who call themselves “diasporists” (a neologism that bears suspicious resemblance to the words “diaper,” “spore” and “diarrhea”), who believe the Jewish people ought to remain stateless and wandering forever.
Anti-Zionist Jews come in many flavors, but there are some trends that I have observed that may lend some clues on the path to understanding what has caused this group of people to harbor such animosity and selective hatred against their own people, and themselves.
So, join me, dear reader, on a journey of armchair psychology, cultural analysis and Freudian critique as we dive into the minds of the most deluded Jews since their not-distant ancestors who avidly fought for Hitler in Nazi Germany.
Why are you like this?
In order to fully illustrate who these anti-Zionist Jews are, and why they have become so militant about the assimilation of Jews worldwide and the annihilation of the state of Israel (and the sanctity of radical Islamist resistance), I will regale you with the stories of several actual people I have known for a very long time — names will all be changed to protect their privacy.
There are so many reasons why these Jews turned out the way they are: daddy issues and patriarchy are huge contributors. But it goes much deeper than that; the reality is that any identity that requires you to actively hate and shift who you are to make yourself more palatable to people who conditionally accept you is a consequence of abuse, systemic fear and ancestral trauma. Let’s dabble!
Mean old daddy
I met Myrna in 2019. She was an American herbalist who was apprenticing in the mountains of Greece, the land of her maternal ancestors. She grew up with her hippie family in upstate New York but had relocated to New Orleans after attending an expensive herbalism school in Vermont, and was now an herbalist and sex worker, entrenched in the trendy queer culture of NOLA, where she could cosplay having the same type of poverty as people whose families had lost everything in natural disasters.
Myrna was also half-Jewish, a tidbit she mentioned to me with great shame when we sat down together. I was in my own “cool” queer anti-Zionist phase, so I reacted with commiseration when she told me that she was embarrassed and ashamed of technically being half-Jewish, since she hated Jewish people and found them to be disgustingly privileged and selfish. Her Jewish father had also walked out on her and her mother when she was very young, which I’m sure did not help.
Myrna found herself in the position of becoming a smaller-scale influencer, and in 2021, she informed me that she had been “visited by ghosts of dead Palestinians,” and after learning a bit about Jewish herbalism and quickly cashing in on it by teaching courses with other larger influencers, she became one of the token “As a Jew…” anti-Zionists who cement non-Jewish people’s conceptions that Israel=bad.
Emma’s story bears some resemblance to Myrna’s, but she came from a different life situation. Emma is a trust fund baby, and the elder of two very cultured children of Ivy League law school-educated Ashkenazi Jewish parents. In a classic yet tragic mid-life crisis, Emma’s mom left their family before she was even a teenager, changed her name and moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting. She remained in touch, and saw the children a few times per year, but the damage was done.
Meanwhile, Emma’s father remained an esteemed man of society — an aspiring politician, journalist, runner, attorney for an eminent non-profit. After a dysfunctional marriage to a dramatic Jewish woman, he changed his tune and started exclusively dating and marrying blonde, white women who were often clearly gold-diggers, but they bore a general resemblance to Heather Locklear (i.e. the American male boomer fantasy), so it didn’t matter.
Emma went off to an expensive art school, and despite having studied abroad in Israel in high school and developing a strong bond with the holy land, the sincerity and vulnerability of her connection was no match for the temptation of “cool” social justice.
Early into her 20s, Emma had already proclaimed her intention to “have Black babies,” and she eventually found a token non-Jewish Black boyfriend that she could parade on her fat lingerie-modeling and Americana Instagram while surely upsetting her dear father. Thankfully for that boyfriend, he ended the relationship after several years.
Meanwhile, Emma, who had already long since bought into QAnon conspiracy theories (including the whole “babies in Wayfair cabinets” canard), in between whimsical baking and lingerie photos on her influencer Instagram, declared shortly after October 7th the simple phrase “Anti-Zionism forever.”
I know so many people like these, dear reader, that my head is spinning trying to find just a few. There’s Vanessa, whose daddy is a wealthy FOX News anchor and dragged her into drama with his reality television show housewife, and though she grew up with extreme wealth, is now a “struggling” social worker (who travels to another city to party at least every other week) and rabid anti-Zionist “activist.”
There’s Mark, a Portland DJ and almost convicted rapist whose wealthy family continued bankrolling his mediocrity after he refused to go to college and was then arrested for selling drugs, though he remains a dedicated “activist” along with a gang of his other Jewish Portland comrades, and wholeheartedly agreed that the 10/7 mass gang rape was “resistance” and “freedom fighting.”
There’s Hailey, a queer non-binary person who is a quarter Black and a quarter Jewish, and has severed ties with their Jewish father for not raising them with a strong enough Black identity — that is, after they enjoyed an all-expenses paid college education and some nice financial support into their 20s, of course. Now, they are a rabid anti-capitalist organizer, severing ties with anyone who supports Zionism because it is “against Black liberation.”
Or Melinda, a queer Jew who became obsessed with anti-racism, and found no irony in her white savior-esque decision to teach poor Black kids in the Bay Area, and who began believing and peddling antisemitic conspiracy theories about how Ashkenazi Jews aren’t actually Jewish. She worshipped Black artists to the brink of fanaticism and began coopting a lot of Black culture in an almost Jonah Hill-like maneuver to mitigate her guilt and lack of identity.
She incessantly invoked esoteric racial theory, as well as the truly insufferable teachings of her voraciously anti-Zionist, antiracist educator, queer Jewish friend (who is, naturally, a wealthy homeowner in the Bay Area) to attempt to teach her hopelessly non-woke family to “do better.” While she had been active in reform Jewish youth groups and camps throughout her upbringing, she clung to an unrequited crush on her best friend who was straight, and never seemed to recover from the anger of that rejection.
There are so, SO many of the same or eerily similar cases of anti-Zionist Jews. Most of them do come from a place of relative socioeconomic privilege (economically, and in that they are by a landslide white-passing Jews); many of them didn’t find belonging in Jewish communities growing up. All of them are very left-leaning, come from neoliberal, reform and/or secular families. None of them intimately know the dangers of war, beyond what they saw on TV on 9/11.
Who’s your daddy
I am taking a few liberties here, so let’s get clear on definitions before we move forward. I’m using the colloquial term “daddy issues” here to represent more than literally just an issue with one’s own biological father; the way that I’m invoking that term can generally apply to issues with parents of any sex, but the daddy as a figure is also representative of the patriarchal structure of families in the West, and the patriarchy that undergirds the culture at large.
The reason I defer to the daddy as the central figure underlying the proliferation of anti-Zionism in contemporary Western Jewish communities is because of how generational trauma uniquely interplays with patriarchy and toxic masculinity in the context of Jewish households and culture (though you can see how this plays out in many other cultures as well, such as through machismo or misogynoir).
When I say “Toxic masculinity,” it doesn’t mean “all men are toxic,” or that “all women are nice and good.” Instead, I’m referring to paternalism as an archetypically masculine behavior, which limits and controls the freedom and autonomy of bodies and energies that are more archetypically feminine.
Please bear with me on the use of “masculine” and “feminine” here as binaries, as I believe this is a complex and nuanced topic where words are imperfect in describing ineffable phenomena. But for consensus understanding here, please assume “masculine” as representing the energetic principles of protection, safety, assertiveness, and discipline; “feminine” in turn represents care, compassion, love and emotion. Note that neither of these principles are exclusive to either gender they bear an etymological resemblance to.
Still, there is immense generational trauma that has plagued and beleaguered Jewish masculinity in American culture. In a society that has perpetuated longstanding stereotypes of Jewish men as weak and ugly and suspicious and “other,” not belonging — and indeed, not being able to provide for your families, and fearing another Holocaust or pogroms — can engender some interesting survival behaviors.
Assimilation was an attractive prospect for American Ashkenazi Jews whose entire families were wiped out by the Holocaust, and who narrowly avoided the same reality by fleeing pogroms while they still could. Right now, 42% of all Jewish American families are intermarried with non-Jewish spouses.
To be very clear, this is not a bad thing! But it is unprecedented, and it is very much a function of secularism through assimilation; Judaism is a closed practice, and historically, intermarriage was extremely low. Even now for religious Jewish communities in America, 98% of orthodox Jews are married to another Jewish person.
What assimilation necessarily produces is a decreased identification with whatever differentiating attributes you formerly possessed, in favor of becoming more like the dominant culture.
The patriarchy
Rates of domestic violence in the Jewish community are on par with what they are for the rest of America, because most American Jews are secular and very much assimilated and immersed into the broader culture of America.
And domestic violence in America is quite high. According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, “1 in 4 women and 1 in 9 men experience severe intimate partner physical violence, intimate partner sexual violence, and/or intimate partner stalking.” Furthermore, the Childhood Domestic Violence Association reports that 1 in 7 adults experienced domestic violence as children.
Research shows that Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE), including witnessing or experiencing multiple forms of abuse, can result in serious implications for mental and physical health and wellbeing later in life, as you might intuit. This is not a uniquely Jewish problem, but the expression of it through anti-Zionism is.
And I am not saying that every single anti-Zionist Jewish person comes from an extremely violent household either, though I can personally attest to witnessing many emotionally abusive (and some physically abusive) Jewish households when I was growing up.
The other thing to keep in mind is that most of the Millennial and Gen Z anti-Zionist Jews today came of age in a patriarchal cultural zeitgeist that reinforced some pretty heinous stereotypes about Jews, Jewish masculinity, and toxic masculinity in general.
I recently rewatched just enough of the hit 00s TV show Weeds to see Andy, rabbinic student and zany Jewish philanderer, proudly attempt to buy his middle school-aged nephew Shane a hand job from a prostitute. Even Ross from Friends, a pinnacle of Jewish masculinity in the 90s, was an irrationally angry man who was sexually attracted to his own cousin. We don’t need to touch Woody Allen, but you get the picture.
A secular and increasingly assimilated Jewish culture in the 90s and 00s was a breeding ground for exactly the same type of toxic behavior that characterizes the worst aspects of chauvinistic American culture — that is, fatphobia, homophobia, transphobia, racism, ableism, and so on. This doesn’t make it unique to Jews, but if you grew up in these communities, you may have felt that way (or expected better and thus disproportionately blamed Jewish people for the existence of these behaviors).
And of course, who can forget the endlessly destructive lunacy of the term “Judeo-Christian values?” The term is a fixture of race and gender theory and activism in general, and despite the fact that Jewish values and culture are intrinsically not at all like Christian culture (a fact that has resulted in Jews being killed and conquered and persecuted by Christians across time and space), it pays homage to the old antisemitic trope that Jews control everything, despite being only 2% of the American population (and the Founding Fathers were most certainly not Jews, nor were they likely to be chummy with any Jews).
See you later, daddy-o
Rebelling against your parents is a normal thing to do in your youth, but today’s youth (all the way up to older Millennial) anti-Zionists are doing something a little different. The public disavowal of their Jewishness, or at least a selective renunciation of certain core attributes of Judaism that they are willing to sacrifice for conditional acceptance among their non-Jewish peers, is a projection of every shred of powerless rage they have felt toward their daddies, the patriarchy, and indeed their own Jewish “otherness” that has chronically precluded them from belonging.
By advocating for the destruction of the state of Israel and the half of the total global Jewish population that lives there (as we are only about 15 million worldwide, a mere 0.2% of the world’s population), they can symbolically sacrifice their own disappointing daddies.
Every proud Jewish person, every powerful Jewish person that has the will and capacity and pride to stand up for themselves and be unapologetically, visibly Jewish (like Israelis) is a threat to these anti-Zionist Jews. Every person living the dreams of our ancestors in our ethnic and cultural homeland is a reminder of the anti-Zionist Jew’s otherness, their inability to fully assimilate, and the pain they feel towards fathers and systems that didn’t protect them or their parents from feeling ugly, targeted, scared and othered.
I am the best person to make this projection, A) because I love projecting, and B) because I know this all too intimately. When I was at the height of my loneliness and depression, I was entrenched in conditionally accepting queer social justice communities, and I began to rethink my love of Israel.
I was also beginning to process what culminated in the severing of my own relationship with my father. I felt so alone, and so angry. I was lucky to have a family that was generally accepting of me being queer, but I still didn’t feel understood or like I belonged. There were many issues in my family, and there were many issues in society. Between pangs of loneliness, delusion festers. In this space I decided that Judaism was solely to blame for everything wrong in my life, and everything wrong in the world.
Of course, it wasn’t even really my dad and his Jewish masculinity that was the sole issue (though it was certainly part of it). It was that I hated myself, and that within me, there was a knowing that a large part of why I never belonged and felt so different is that I was Jewish — and that I was deeply disappointed with the Jewish communities I had been part of.
Like many American Jews, I grew up in reform Jewish spaces that were almost entirely secular and brimming with misogyny and bullying and toxicity. In my mid-20s I didn’t have the capacity to hold space for the fact that that was merely the reality of living as a human person in the 90s and 00s (and some would argue it hasn’t stopped, though fortunately the toxic masculinity espoused by Weeds probably wouldn’t fly today).
Oy, Mista! You Me Dad?
The point is, human beings are exceptionally flawed. American Jewry has largely become such a shadow of itself and has experienced such a collective amnesia from generations of trauma, that even most Jews don’t have a deep understanding of who we are. Some may not even understand the concept of Judaism as an ethnoreligion.
If there is to be a hopeful future for American Jews, I sincerely hope that many of us do the difficult work of looking inward and attempting to understand who we are, where we come from, and what kind of beauty and understanding that can bring.
There will be many who attempt to distance themselves from who they are, leaning on the same Census Bureau definition of “Caucasian” (e.g. whiteness) that would rob even a very brown Afghan or Persian person of the experience of being a “person of color.”
And rest assured, ethnic American Jews who are white-passing do not need to cling to an identity of being “a person of color” to get sympathy for benefitting from white privilege. But they also shouldn’t be the token spokespeople for antisemites who would ignore, defend and champion levels of antisemitism that seem fit for Nazi Germany.
Every person is entitled to struggle with their identities, to search for ways to self-destruct in order to seek revenge against their daddies, their patriarchal societies, the uncontrollable nature of life itself, yada yada. But no one — not even rich, “Marxist” white-passing Jews whose parents wouldn’t fund tooth gems for them when they turned 28 — should be upheld as a “credible” example when they are calling for the annihilation of an entire state, merely because it is Jewish.
It is interesting and sad to recall that about a century ago, secular, well-educated young Jews in the Diaspora joined Left-Zionist movements such as Hashomer Hatzair in huge numbers and came to fight to establish our homeland, while their Zoomer epigones - secular, well-educated young Jews - now embrace performative "anti-Zionism".
“Don’t argue to me that some Jews are for Palestine,” said another (UC) student in public comment. “I’ve had the experience that those Jews ultimately are ashamed to be Jewish.”
…..yeah? Well we’re ashamed that they are Jewish too.