At the Family Table

Beinart recognizes, as he has said on his podcast, that many Jews approach questions of Israel/Palestine “as partisans of one particular group, a people imagined as a kind of extended family,” and he seeks to meet them at the dinner table. He uses the first-person plural pronoun a lot. One can imagine him leaning forward, trying to be heard over the din of passing platters of mashed potatoes and roast. His extended family needs a new perspective “to answer the horror that a Jewish country has perpetrated.”

He reads beyond the favorite stories about Jewish survival and Jews’ liberation from tyranny that are told at Hanukkah and Passover. His purpose: to locate biblical reminders that “Jews can be oppressors” too. He finds them in the Maccabees’ transformation into the authoritarian Hasmonean dynasty, in the Book of Esther’s account of Jews killing seventy-five thousand people, and in the enslavement of Hagar by Abraham and Sarah. For Beinart, these religious narratives create a space for reexamining Jewish identity. As he puts it, “We are not history’s permanent virtuous victims. We are not hardwired to forever endure evil but never commit it.” This is the reckoning of the title.

By placing Jews back into the broader context of universal, flawed humanity, Beinart’s message runs counter to what scholar of Jewish philosophy Shaul Magid calls the “Judeopessimism” of many far-right Zionists. Magid identifies ultranationalist leader Meir Kahane as the poster boy of this perspective. Kahane, an American-born anti-Arab fascist who founded the Jewish Defense League in 1968 (officially deemed a right-wing terrorist group by the FBI), argued that antisemitism was inevitable and universal, and that Jews had the right to pursue sovereignty by all means necessary.

Kahane’s rhetoric encouraged violently anti-Palestinian, anti-peace attitudes — a legacy that contributed to events such as the massacre of twenty-nine Palestinian worshipers at the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron by his follower, Israeli American Baruch Goldstein in 1994. More recently, a similar brand of extremism has appeared in the policies of Kahane’s protégé, Itamar Ben-Gvir. Ben-Gvir was Israel’s far-right ultranationalist national security minister from 2022 until 2025, when he resigned from Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet in defiance of the Gaza cease-fire deal in January.

Beinart contends that those who embrace and promote violent extremism are the exception among Jews. Presumably, these are not the type of people who he hopes to convert at the dinner table. Beinart has faith that the majority, who often “look away” from the violence while focusing “on what they tried to do to us,” can be persuaded to rethink their positions. What to do about those who proselytize a specifically ferocious Jewish tribalism is a question Beinart leaves unaddressed in this book.

Non-Zionist Jewish Traditions

Beinart is one in a long line of Jewish dissidents who have dared to counter the Zionist orthodoxy — that Israel represents all Jews, is their safe-haven, and can do no wrong. Anti-Zionists have long offered a variety of arguments: religious (Jews were never supposed to have a state); political (Jews are now quite fine in their home countries, requiring no separate state for their thriving); moral (the dispossession and oppression of Palestinians is wrong); and security-based (a rethinking of Jewish safety).

Today organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace and Tzedek Chicago — the first explicitly anti-Zionist synagogue — are echoing similar arguments. Recent publications and symposia about what Brown University conference organizers described as “a rainbow of non-Zionist Jewish traditions” similarly track the costs born by Jews and others pinned by a forced Zionist consensus. Their goal is to expand the conversation about Jewish belonging and to challenge those who have policed what historian Marjorie Feld calls “the threshold of dissent.”

Beinart’s arguments — spanning religious, political, moral, and safety concerns — are delivered with an energetic, almost prophetic conviction. He has come to a new political and ethical consciousness about Israel’s injustices and feels compelled to share those epiphanies. He quotes the teachings of Orthodox Judaica scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz to confirm: “In our capacity for justice and injustice, we are no different from everyone else.”

The point may sound unremarkable to those not steeped in the “Jewish exceptionalism [that] grants Israel license to disregard the entire world.” For those who were raised on it, however, it is a powerful belief undergirding a “kind of theology” of the state heralding that “Israel is righteous by definition.”

One might expect this intimate tone and narrowly defined audience to make Beinart’s discussion less relevant to secular, non-Jewish people, whether Palestinian, Muslim, or anyone else not accustomed to reading a weekly Torah portion. To the contrary, ideal readers include non-Jewish people who want to challenge what Beinart’s buddy Ta-Nehisi Coates calls the “default Zionism” of American public discourse.

In attempting to disentangle Israel from an exclusively Jewish identity, Beinart provides an insider’s view into the tightly knitted ball of fantasy, emotion, and ideology that has kept so many Jews (and others) supportive of “Israel right or wrong” — even when its genocidal core has exploded into the open. Those concerned to stop the genocide or challenge Israel and its allies may find new insights into the forces they face.

Particularist Stories of Universal Ethics

Throughout the book, Beinart reminds his readers that the knee-jerk support of Israel and the demagoguery that has made Zionism obligatory is not just bad for Palestinians but is bad for Jews. He explains how the conflation of Israel with Judaism makes the fight against antisemitism harder, as leftist opposition to Israel more easily bleeds into a disdain for Jews assumed to be its supporters. Drawing on liberal readings of South African and Northern Irish histories, he argues that political equality and inclusive voting rights for all groups within a nation make society safer and foster peace.

He’s on shakier ground when discussing Palestinian citizens of Israel. He suggests that their relative peacefulness toward Jewish Israelis is due to their capacity to vote. Palestinians in Israel are not free and equal citizens — which he surely knows — and the mellowness he observes is likely a result of political repression and limited economic integration (however unequal), not a sense of inclusion in a shared national project. His point, however, remains clear: political inclusion is essential for peace.

Putting concern for Jews first could strike some readers as egregious, given Palestinians’ conditions of utter political and physical subjection. The moral imbalance that has allowed Israel’s genocide has pushed reason and sympathy to their limits, and some will not find the “empathy for the historical trauma that leads many young Jews . . . to support Zionism even in its statist form” that Beinart seeks. I think it would be a mistake, though, to dismiss him for his devotion to “his tribe” in this book — he is speaking in a language that will resonate at certain dinner tables.

Beinart’s epigraph is a quote from professor of Jewish thought and ethics Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: “Judaism is about the universality of justice but the particularity of love.” Ultimately, Beinart is using particularist means to talk about universalist, humanist ethics. His calls for justice should be heeded by all.