Nearly ten years ago, I sat in the audience at the 92nd Street Y in New York City for a conversation among a handful of prominent Jewish leaders and intellectuals, all men. The hour-plus affair was given the ever-green billing: “What’s Next for Israel?” It took place in June 2015, three months after Congressional Republicans went over President Obama’s head to invite Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress. Netanyahu was invited to inveigh against the Obama-orchestrated Iran Deal, which he caustically characterized as an existential threat to Israel’s security. The American Jewish community was split over Netanyahu’s brazenness—as were the panelists on that June afternoon.
Seated in the very center of the group was its most charismatic member—a youngish brainiac full of nervy energy. Over the course of the hour, he took copious notes (the only panelist to do so) and gesticulated in every direction.
At the time of the panel, Peter Beinart was the intellectual face of left-liberal American Zionism. Beinart was (and is) a fierce critic of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. And, at the time, he was also strenuously in favor of a two-state solution. But Beinart’s policy agenda was not what had made him special; it was his irresistible defenestration of what he had derisively termed the “American Jewish Establishment” in a seminal article for the The New York Review of Books. After his prodigal rise at The New Republic, that 2010 article in the NYRB launched Beinart into orbit as the American Jewry’s communal gadfly of record. By 2015, seated squarely between Dan Senor and Abe Foxman, it was clear that Beinart had breached the Jewish establishment moat.
Today, Beinart is no longer a left-liberal American Zionist. But he still can’t seem to forsake what has become his comfortable role as teller of uncomfortable truths. In his recently published Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (Knopf, 2025), Beinart is still chiding the same cast of foes for hoodwinking themselves and their constituents as to Israel’s blamelessness.
Sure, the critique is apt—too many American Jewish organizations are still too reluctant to criticize Israel because they maintain a fantastical picture of Israel as blameless in all things. But in delivering his signature critique yet again, Beinart is refusing to harvest the fruits of his own labor. No one thinks any longer, except perhaps Peter Beinart, that Jewish establishment organizations speak for the whole American Jewish community. It is clear that in this era of profound Jewish sectarianism, even the largest Jewish organizations have no more than a narrow band of loyal constituents. The spell cast by these institutions was broken years ago, thanks, in part, to Beinart himself (though, for this, we should really credit the interminable reign of Bibi Netanyahu). Moreover, in this new book’s repackaging of the old thesis that the American Jewish establishment is responsible for a reality-distorting victimhood complex, Beinart continues to deny himself—and his readers—his long-deferred next chapter.
What should that next chapter be? In his concluding remarks at the 92Y, Beinart told a rapt audience: “we need the American Jewish community to make Jewish education a priority.”
He continued:
What we have on our side are texts that have inspired the entire world. I am tired of going to cities where they have recently built a gleaming Holocaust memorial, and the Jewish school has no gym and no science lab and it’s so unaffordable that people have to take out a second mortgage to send their kids there. What does it say about a Jewish community that is better at memorializing its dead than investing in its future?
After more than sixty minutes of denouncing Netanyahu’s deceits and Israel’s domination of Palestinians, Beinart deked. Out of the mouth of someone who had seemed to be a highly analytic left-liberal critic of Israel emerged a pathos-laden plea on behalf of Jewish texts. I remember that I nearly swooned, immediately overwhelmed by a sense of pride in our shared tradition and, even more, by a feeling of gratitude for someone willing to so bluntly put first things first. Beinart, I thought, was not just a creature of the political swamp or a gleeful critic of institutional sclerosis. He was a modern-style prophet come to tell the American Jewish community to set its house in order. The message? Jewish education comes first; everything else, Israel included, is secondary.
Beinart still can’t seem to forsake what has become his comfortable role as teller of uncomfortable truths.
Of course, since that afternoon in 2015, Beinart has overhauled his position on Israel-Palestine. In a 2020 essay for Jewish Currents, Beinart concluded that “it is time for liberal Zionists to abandon the goal of Jewish-Palestinian separation and embrace the goal of Jewish-Palestinian equality.” Beinart argued that it was no longer the moral choice to advocate for the two-state solution. He hadn’t changed, he told his readers. It was “reality” that had stopped “respect[ing] certain red lines.”
Beinart titled his essay “Yavne: A Jewish Case for Equality in Israel-Palestine” in an attempt to bring his evolving views into alignment with Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, the first-century rabbinic sage who, under assault by the Roman emperor Vespasian, is recorded as having said “Give me Yavne and its sages,” i.e. allow Jewish learning to continue even as you despoil Jerusalem’s temple. After recording Rabbi Yochanan’s famous request, the Talmud goes on to narrate the emperor’s son (and successor) Titus entering the holy of holies to lie with a prostitute on top of a Torah scroll. In his essay, however, Beinart did not tarry with the Talmud. He instead offered the following gloss: “From the academies of Yavne came a new form of worship, based on prayer and study. Animal sacrifice, it turned out, was not essential to being a Jew. Neither is supporting a Jewish state.”
Whatever your view of Beinart’s politics, this parallel is shallow—and the rest of the essay doesn’t go an inch deeper. I remember reading it for the first time and just asking “why?” Why did Beinart insist on such a cut-rate comparison between his new political orientation and the violent story of the origins of a Temple-less Judaism? Did he actually think that embracing opposition to the two-state solution was sufficient to save Judaism? Was “The Case for Yavne” really Beinart’s idea of what it looks like to “make Jewish education a priority”?
These questions also do not find clear or adequate expression in Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning. Beinart’s most recent attempt continues to relegate discussion of Jewish education in favor of yet another diatribe about Israel-Palestine. At the same time, peering a little more deeply into the book’s account of Israel’s failures—or in this case, its infliction of horrors—we can sense just how badly Beinart is itching to tell us something about Judaism.
Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning is best described as a cogently argued update to the NYRB article that launched Beinart’s Jewish communal reputation some fifteen years ago. Beinart is still a truth-teller trying to expose a hoodwinked Jewish community to the discomfiting reality that its legacy institutions desperately seek to distort and dissimulate. The update, the changing of the times, the “after Gaza,” is indeed important. Beinart grippingly lays out the mission of his book: “This book is about the story Jews tell ourselves to block out the screams.” In his sensitivity to the manufacture of Jewish or Israeli innocence, Beinart—at his best—has found himself writing in the tradition of James Baldwin. In fact, in the substance of the book and the tenor of the argument, there is considerable overlap with Ta-Nehisi Coates’s (another Baldwin acolyte) much splashier recent release, The Message.
Both books alight on what they consider the tragic circle of Jewish victimization. For each, Jews are the paradigmatic case of victims turned victimizers. Both Coates and Beinart tack back and forth between scenes of Jewish suffering and scenes of Palestinian dispossession in the effort—sometimes successfully, sometimes less so—to convey that their withering assessments of the state of Israel are not the result of insensitivity or ignorance. On the contrary, they both want to say that the opposite is the case.
Head-to-head, Beinart edges out Coates in their common task. At least one cannot say of Beinart, as one might say of Coates, that his rolodex of Israeli Jews begins and ends with Avner Gvaryahu, the affable executive director of the Israeli NGO Breaking the Silence.
Yet, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza suffers from its own debilitating species of narrowness. Though written “after” Gaza and October 7, it is stuck in the past. The book is littered with references to the “a-list” of American Jewish legacy organizations (AJC, ADL, AIPAC), including a bewildering comment about why Benny Morris, charter member of Israel’s “New Historians,” cannot be found on “the ADL or AIPAC lecture circuit.” These repeated comments, like polyester suits or one-use plastic straws, read as plainly out of date.
Today’s world is full of anti-Zionist minyanim and campuses flush with Jewish students standing in solidarity in Palestine. American Jews opposed to Israel’s conduct, or even a Jewish state as such, are no longer a negligible and beleaguered minority. On the contrary, they are a veritable caucus within the American Jewish community—one with several prominent politicians on their side. In other words, Beinart’s attempt at situating himself as decidedly outside the mainstream belies the fact that the mainstream, Jewish and otherwise, has vanished. He writes like the calendar reads 2010 and like he is no more than a friendless pest on the margins of the American Jewish community. But Beinart has long been a folk-hero to his own constituency—a fate many “more mainstream” Jewish leaders would kill for.
The book’s prologue, “A Note to My Former Friend,” would appear to confirm this self-portrayal. Beinart writes that when he enters a synagogue, he is “no longer sure who will extend their hand and who will look away.” No doubt, there are many American Jews for whom Beinart’s criticisms of Israel render him well beyond the pale.
Beinart then imagines what he looks like in the eyes of those who condemn him, and so conjures the Talmudic character Elisha ben Abuyah. The Talmud describes Elisha as one of four sages who entered the pardes, the orchard of mystical knowledge. Of the four entrants, only one—Rabbi Akiva—emerged unscathed. Of the other three, one died, one was permanently impaired, and one—Elisha—cut down the trees.
Beinart omits this background and instead offers a romantic account of Elisha’s enduring relationship with his erstwhile student Rabbi Meir. Concluding his paraphrase of a famous Talmudic tale, Beinart writes:
Elisha continued on—past boundaries that Rabbi Meir would not cross—just as I have crossed boundaries that you [my former friend] will not cross in my views about Israel and Palestine. But they walked as far as they could and parted with respect.
In “The Case for Yavne” Beinart unironically compared himself to the great teacher Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai. Now he is “merely” likening himself to the brilliant but ultimately solitary heretic, Elisha Ben Abuyah. It seems that Beinart’s self-conception has been see-sawing, from marginal critic to central rabbinic figure and back again. One might worry that he is having a crisis of Jewish self-confidence. We might also worry about someone who can’t stop comparing himself to the sages of the time of the Mishnah. What has happened to Beinart’s unself-conscious celebration of the brilliance of Jewish texts? Has it petered out, pardon the pun, and left us with a hollow definition “being Jewish”?
Beinart writes that when he enters a synagogue, he is “no longer sure who will extend their hand and who will look away.”
In Beinart’s newest offering, the answer is long-deferred (even for a book of such brevity), arriving only in the book’s fifth and final chapter, “Korach’s Children.” There, in a series of rapid and aggressive arguments, Beinart assails Jewish exceptionalism as a “deviant strain” in “Jewish thought.” He invokes the Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz to restore the conditions, namely the ethical conditions, on the holiness of the Jewish people. He then brings in the beloved theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel on the meaning of idolatry: “any god who is mine but not yours, any god concerned with me but not you.”
Finally, Beinart unleashes his decidedly theological riposte to the war in Gaza: “If the war ended tomorrow, and Gaza was rebuilt at the same pace as after previous wars, reconstruction would take eighty years. This is idolatry in practice. We have built an altar and thrown an entire society on the flames.” A page later, Beinart continues on his crusade with the title his book should have had: “But our Moloch wants more.” Even if painful to bear, these few pages are worthy of a book that announced early on: “With secularization…has come moral evasion.”
It is time for Peter Beinart to move on. It is time to stop pretending that he’s still a recent and unwelcome entrant into the fray. A cold shoulder in shul, or even several, does not mean that the ADL or the AJC are still hegemons. It is time to stop pretending that those of his co-religionists who disagree with him have been hoodwinked. It is time to stop with the shaky parallels to Yavne and the false humility of labeling himself Elisha ben Abuyah. Beinart is clear that he believes that the majority of religious Jews are guilty of idolatry where Israel-Palestine is concerned. And yet, he begins his book by calling himself a heretic only to dramatically reverse course by its end.
What makes Beinart categorically different from Coates is that he wants a new Judaism, or at least a renewed, rededicated Judaism, purged of its idolatry. The reason for his self-marginalization is not that he’s without friends (74,000 Substack subscribers would suggest otherwise). It’s that, fundamentally, his friends think that Israel-Palestine is a question of power and not of Judaism. His foes, meanwhile, are not simply AIPAC’s naïve victims. They don’t support Israel because they have been fooled as to the true character of Judaism. On the contrary, they understand their support for the state of Israel—and the Jews who live there—as the backbone of their Jewish identity. Beinart’s challenge, in other words, remains twofold: convince his political friends to get more interested in Judaism, while persuading his adversaries to change their picture of Judaism.
In the next book, I hope Beinart can make explicit the conception of religious life that has been simmering beneath the surface for so long. I hope that he tries to persuade his secular friends that it’s time to embrace the study of Jewish texts. I hope that he attempts a reformulation of the Jewish people’s relationship to the Land of Israel. I really hope that he can clarify some of the other “moral evasion[s]” that he sees as the offspring of “secularization.” It’s time for Beinart to step out of the shadows of the old Jewish establishment and tell his acolytes what he really thinks “being Jewish” is supposed to look like. Torah is the inheritance of every Jew, or so Peter Beinart seems to believe. It’s still hard to tell.