Centrist American Jewish discourse is what happens when a too-insular community, connected to a foreign ethnonationalist project, is defined by unrepresentative institutions with artificially constrained political horizons in a country already consumed by its own exceptionalism.
We think the Jewish example, with the loosening of legacy institutions’ undemocratic hold over national and internal discourse and political horizons, offers additional urgency to other diasporic communities with complicated familial and cultural ties to countries with ethnonationalist leaders (India, Hungary, Turkey and so many more). We encourage Leftists to abandon crumbling legacy institutions and the conflicts and hypocrisy they foster and depend on to distract from their lack of constituencies. Instead, let’s construct the institutions we need and strengthen our existing dynamic communities, built over decades and deeply intertwined with those around us. They are not perfect, but they provide sturdier foundations on which to build improved formations.
We know such institutions will come too late for far too many in Gaza. We can only hope they will come in time for the other, ongoing genocides and those that loom. The other side has the arms and the money. We have the practice of solidarity, a fundamental sense of mutual obligation among all people. It powers everything from climate justice to abolitionism, from immigrant justice to a future of expanded freedom — from the land between the river and the sea to the land between two shining, though rising, seas.
Rebecca Vilkomerson and I consider, What if all our organizations were more like our politics – democratic, pluralistic, and beautifully weird? We see the center losing its grip, and then we look away from that mess toward the exciting possibilities visible now in In These Times.
Dania Rajendra 