It appears that IfNotNow is going to shul.
The group has made public a plan that over the next two-and-a-half years, it will target American Jews to support the ending of U.S. arms sales to Israel. At least one method will be to organize so-called “fighting factions” that will infiltrate and subvert liberal synagogues.
To appreciate this move properly, some background is necessary.
On Nov. 8, 2017, Haaretz informed that certain young U.S. Jews were desirous to “Know Why No One Told Them About the Israeli Occupation.” Calling themselves IfNotNow, they launched a “You Never Told Me” campaign. Their demand was that Jewish educational groups be obliged to inform students about “the Palestinian narrative.”
Their slogan was introduced at a rally outside the Jewish Theological Seminary in Upper Manhattan with the specific insistence that the Conservative movement’s Camp Ramah start talking about the Israeli occupation.
A year later, upset that they perceived a “one-sided” message that Israel was a place to champion but whose policies weren’t to be questioned, again they sought to change Israel education at Jewish summer camps—“not just at Ramah, but at Union for Reform Judaism camps, at Young Judaea camps and many more.”
In fact, their campaign had run into a wall. At a March 2018 meeting, Ramah leadership made it clear that after listening to the views of IfNotNow, while liberal pro-Israel views will be taught at camp, “we will not allow any anti-Israel, anti-Semitic or anti-Zionist education at Ramah.” And their statement added that they will not partner with IfNotNow, as “Ramah will not partner with any organization that is not unequivocally pro-Israel.”
Rabbi Mitchell Cohen, then director of Camp Ramah, went further. He informed Haaretz that at Ramah, they are aware that “there is a very important difference between views that are pro-Israel, yet critical of specific Israeli governmental policies, and criticism that calls into question Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state … [which] will not be taught or allowed.”
To remind you, IfNotNow’s first grandstanding action was back in 2014. At the time of the Israel Defense Forces’ “Operation Protective Edge” in Gaza that summer, the group’s first members organized the infamous (and in my opinion, immoral) “Mourner’s Kaddish” recitations for slain Palestinians in the Strip, including Hamas terrorists. Four years later, the British anti-occupation group Na’amod copied that action in Parliament Square.
Fast-forward, IfNotNow is once again remobilizing.
Morriah Kaplan, executive director of IfNotNow, said it is seeking out the type of congregants that the “clergy knows are going to make a huge stink if they [the rabbis] sign on to a letter that says [New York City Mayor] Zohran Mamdani is a danger to the Jewish people.” Kaplan wants IfNotNow’s “fighting factions” to complicate the calculus for those synagogues. They want to make decisions not at all easy for the boards or senior rabbis.
It remains to be seen whether pressure will come in the form of letters, participation at meetings, demonstrations, harassment, shaming, threats to fire rabbis. etc.
Historically, it should be recalled that “faction fights” were an 18th- and 19th-century Irish phenomenon. They were mass brawls involving hundreds and sometimes thousands of antagonists who met at designated venues, such as fairs, markets, funerals or race meetings, and, as the National Museum of Ireland informs, “the result was often the deaths of one or more of the participants, and always maiming and injury.”
Kaplan informed Jewish Currents magazine that 20 congregations across the United States are being targeted, with much of that activity in eight synagogues in Philadelphia. They have support from the newly launched Jewish Diaspora Movement) lampooned as having “No God. No Torah. No Mitzvot, Land or Covenant, but Trust Us, We’re Jewish”), a renaissance of the Bundist/Dubnov failed ideology. They seem determined to maneuver into the mainstream Jewish community.
Alyssa Rubin, IfNotNow’s field organizing director, thinks there is the “potential for some synagogues to be able to catch up with their membership.” Oddly enough, last October, she was complaining that “we are up against forces who are looking to exploit every opportunity they can find to fracture this movement, and we don’t need to give them any more opportunities to do so.”
She wrote of Israel’s “apartheid regime,” of “Palestinians who continue to resist” and of “indoctrination in Jewish institutions,” believing that the transformation she and her fellow IfNotNowers are pursuing is not only personal. It’s one they wish to “unleash” as “a spiritual project, as a political one.”
This is but revolutionary claptrap. In a reverse move, however, she is now on the path of fracturing synagogues just as the group has aimed to fracture Judaism and Zionism.
Claiming 7,000 members, the group remains an outsider. Nevertheless, Elliot Beck, a leader of the Philadelphia chapter, has been meeting with synagogue members and organized two gatherings to bring together cohorts from all eight of those synagogues.
IfNotNow is not going to shul. They aim to infiltrate it.
Perhaps they are following the model of how the Communists took over Czechoslovakia by employing devices such as isolating the current leadership, undercutting its prestige, seemingly offering protection from rampant and vitriolic hatred, and undermining established management procedures. Or perhaps they are following other “Civil Society Empowerment” courses.
The organization’s members are proceeding with full intent and malice to dismantle American Jewry. They are intent on rejecting traditional Judaism’s values and principles—a central, undeniable one being that the Land of Israel has always been the Jewish people’s homeland, religious and cultural center, and the eventual redeemed and rebuilt country for all Jews.
