A version of this sermon was delivered on Yom Kippur Morning 5787 at Temple B'nai Torah - A Reform Congregation in Wantagh, NY.
The ritual begins at dawn.
Great crowds converge from far and near
upon the Temple,
until its courts are filled to
overflowing
with priests and Levites, men and women,
young and old.
The High Priest has prepared himself for
seven days.
How can he intercede for others if he is
impure himself?
All night he has rehearsed the sacred
ritual.
Robed in gold,
he burns the incense, offers the
sacrifices,
dispatches a goat into the wilderness,
The goat a symbol of the people’s longing
to be rid of sin.[1]
The scapegoat ritual in the ancient Temple in Jerusalem was performed once a year on Yom Kippur, as commanded by God in Leviticus. This ritual allowed the people to see their sins put upon the animal and watch them disappear over a cliff, or into the distance, into an abyss, to Azazel. The goat was a physical symbol for people to atone and to spur them to teshuvah, as if to say, according to Maimonides, “we have freed ourselves of our previous deeds, have cast them behind our backs, and removed them from us as far as possible,”[2] now we can move forward in righteousness.
The celebration began at 5:00 p.m.
Crowds converged from near and far.
A candle lighting, by the sea,
celebrating rededication at a beach,
symbolic of the land.
By 6:40 the gunmen have parked.
At 6:42 the bullets fly through the air.
The beach, filled to overflowing, empties
as young and old, men and women,
flee for their lives, shelter for their
safety.
The shooters have prepared themselves for
days, years.
All night they rehearsed their macabre
ritual,
clothed in terrorist rage and keffiyeh.
By 6:48 there are 15 victims bleeding,
goats carrying the alleged sins of the
people.
When I went to Bondi Beach, on my stop in Sydney, I said Kaddish for the victims, to honor their memory and sanctify God’s name, even in the face of senseless murder. The young Rabbi leading the short service spoke of light and life, of goodness overcoming evil, before reading the names of the victims, and then leading the small crowd of about 30 people in sanctifying God’s name…Yitgadal v’Yitkadash…
What
an irony for our people that, time and again, our ritual for spiritual
purification and reconciliation with God has been twisted against us. We have been scapegoated throughout our
history, and what is happening to our people now, under the term antizionism,
is on the one hand the same as has happened to our people before. Corporate guilt, exclusion from society,
danger to Jews. On the other hand,
antizionism is different from what we have been through before in ways that it
is incumbent upon us as Jews and those who love us to understand, if we are to
confront it and God willing send it to Azazel.
At
Bondi, the targets were not IDF soldiers or reservists, they were not Israeli
government ministers or representatives from Israel, as if that would be ok. They were Jews. Jews celebrating Chanukah in their
hometown. It was not the perceived sins
of the Jewish people laid upon them, warranting their deaths, in the
sick calculations of the shooters.
Instead, it was the perceived sins of the world’s one Jewish state,
put upon all Jews everywhere, resulting in the deaths of these 15 people, including
a 10-year-old girl named Matilda.
The
massacre at Bondi Beach solidified for me that antizionism is a distinct form
of anti-Jewish hate, and that we are in a new era of animus against our people
that we are underprepared to combat.
Unfortunately, this new hatred does not mean the old one has gone away,
making distinguishing one from the other even more complicated.
Before I continue, I recognize that this is a charged topic and that there are a wide variety of opinions about Zionism. Yes, there is historical precedent for Jews being against Zionism. These early non-Zionists, like the Bund, had a difference of political opinion about how best to protect Jews. The Bund thought that by eschewing Zionism, they’d be safe. They all ended up dead, too. Today’s antizionists, spelled purposefully without a hyphen and without a capital letter, are not that. Their vitriol against us is not a difference of opinion, and their goal is not Jewish safety or saving Jewish lives. This is not critique of Israeli policy or strategy. This is denial of Israel’s right to exist, uniquely among the family of nations.
Antizionism is not antisemitism, though it shares characteristics in form. Antizionism is in many ways an inversion of what we understand antisemitism to be, at least according to writer and anthropologist Adam Louis-Klein, who founded the Movement Against Antizionism. Using anthropological methodology, Louis-Klein posits that: “Antizionism represents a political inversion of classical antisemitism.”[3]
If traditional antisemitism said, “Jews can never really belong here,” antizionism makes a different claim: “Jews can belong here as individuals or as a religious group, but they should not have a nation of their own.” Antisemitism treats Jewish identity as a problem; antizionsim treats Jewish national sovereignty as the problem. This results in a reversal of the old stereotype: Jews go from being portrayed as a powerless minority that does not belong and must be purged, to being portrayed as a powerful majority that is itself a colonizer that must be purged.
The foundation of both is a hatred of Jews. And, sadly, the end result is the same. More businesses vandalized and forced to close, like Avner’s bakery in Sydney, Australia, closed after 2-years of harassment; more Jews excluded from salons, like Jessica Watson in Alexandria Virginia, who was denied service for being Israeli; coffee shops, like Poetica Coffee in Brooklyn, which banned Congressman Dan Goldman and libeled him a genocide supporter on social media after all he did was buy a coffee while stopping in with his daughter; pride parades, like the Chicago Dyke march excluding Jews; publishing houses, where Jewish- and Israeli-themed and authored book deals are down up to 75% from 2023; and progressive spaces, like California State Senator Scott Wiener who was verbally harassed and forced to leave the San Francisco Trans March.
The result is also more hurt Jews, more vandalism against Jewish targets like the Hatzola ambulances firebombed in London, and, as we know from Sydney, more dead Jews.
And because the results are the same, and the foundations are the same, it is easy to conclude that antizionism and antisemitism are the same. Or that antizionism only becomes antisemitism after a line nobody can point to has been crossed. Debating when antizionism becomes antisemitism, or if it ever does, obfuscates that just because something is not classically antisemitic, doesn’t mean it isn’t hateful toward the Jews. Understanding that antizionism is a distinct hatred empowers us to be ready to combat it.
For our people’s safety, for our survival, it is incumbent upon us to know the differences, see the differences, and understand that where we are now didn’t just happen after or because of October 7, 2023. October 7 happened because of Islamist antizionism, which never accepted Jewish sovereignty over any part of the Middle East. The hatred directed against Jews that raged on October 8 was spurred on because of left-wing and academic antizionism. The left-wing-Islamist alliance poses significant dangers for Jews and for western democracies who allow this ideology to run rampant and violent in their streets, lest they be labeled racist or Islamophobic by daring to confront this hatred head on.
Antizionism is not new, though it is newer to us. It is the product of Soviet and Islamist propaganda. Soviet antizionism dates back to Lenin, and it led to the cultural erasure of Soviet Jews, stripping them of their identities, their names, their histories. Islamist antizionism traces itself back to the Nazi-Arab alliance, and led to the ethnic cleansing of 850,000 Jews from the Arab world and North Africa, including my mother and her family. Antizionism has always been dangerous for Jews. The campus and left-wing antizionism we see today is the result of 20 years of Qatari influence and money pouring into institutions of higher learning, leading to a generation of professionals and academics who have been taught and trained to see Israel as the sole evil in the world that must be eradicated, the scapegoat for all the world’s wrongs.
Israel is reframed, reinterpreted, and taught about not as a liberated nation, not as a miraculous example of decolonization and a displaced people’s return to their indigenous land. Instead, Israel is a guilty settler-colonial state, like the United States or Australia, that must be decolonized. Antizionism “has appropriated the language of…liberation to justify oppression, transformed anti-racism into a racist accusation, and turned hatred of Israel into a global ritual.”[4]
How does it do this? By using the same playbook as previous iterations of anti-Jewish bigotry: libels. Not just lies, but libels. What is the difference? Libels make hatred or violence against a group seem justified. They defame an entire group and therefore justify exclusion, discrimination, and violence.[5]
Historically, the Jews have been the scapegoat for the worst sins a culture could imagine. In the Middle Ages, when religion reigned supreme, deicide, the libel of killing God, led to taxes, forced conversions, expulsions, and massacres. In the 20th century, when race and eugenics ruled, the libel of race-mixing and blood pollution led to the Holocaust. In the 21st century, the libel of genocide led to the massacre at Bondi, the shooting in Washington, D.C., and more attacks on Jews and synagogues than there is time to list. If we don’t stop it now, and name it for what it is, there is no question where this is going.
Antizionism is an anti-Jewish hate movement and we have to understand it to stop it.
Antizionism shares some characteristics with antisemitism, of course. In the same way that antisemitism shares characteristics with medieval anti-Judaism. A singular focus on Jews, for one. But also, a sense that Jews are liars, manipulators, and deceptive, and that Jews are aligned with power and domination.[6] A belief that Jews are bloodthirsty, especially for children. In the Middle Ages, the blood libel, accusing Jews of using blood in our matzo, led to the massacres and martyrdom of many of our people. These lies and their repercussions continued well into the 20th century. In the 21st century, Israeli snipers target Gazan children and Israeli bombs target Gazan hospitals. Israel starves children by denying aid. There are common threads, to be sure.
Ultimately, however, it is the differences between the two sister hatreds that render antizionism its own phenomenon, with distinct origins and ideologies. Antizionism is predicated on three libels: genocide, colonization, and apartheid. These are the great sins of our age.
Apartheid, or institutionalized racism, is used as a libel to boycott and sanction Israel or Israeli businesses. A tactic practiced as the Nazis rose to power, seeking to undermine Jews’ economic stability and force them to leave. While Israel has its issues, there is no apartheid in Israel, no segregation by race or ethnicity or religion. Separation between Israeli society and Palestinian society and strong border controls are a result of terrorism, not their cause.
Genocide and settler-colonial theory go hand in hand. In order to understand these libels, we have to first appreciate that the definitions of these words that we think we know no longer apply for the folks screaming them in our faces. Unfortunately, this means that too often, we are having a conversation, or more likely an argument, with folks using the same terms but understanding them differently.
Colonization is not something from the past, it is ongoing. The colonizer libel understands colonization as predicated on the displacement of native populations, not on economic desires and drives. It understands that settler-colonial nations, Australia, Canada, and the USA, for example, are responsible for the destruction of indigenous populations, not in the past, but in an ongoing manner.
The colonizer libel frames all Israelis and therefore all Jews as white and European, interlopers on a land belonging to Arabs. It erases Jewish indigeneity and peoplehood. If Jews are not indigenous, or if Jews are solely a religious group, Zionism is merely an extension of the European colonial project, and any historical or archeological claims thew Jews have to the land are either illegitimate or lies.
The destruction of populations in this settler-colonial argument is labeled genocide. The logic then leads as follows: “If settlement is a genocidal invasion, and invasion is an ongoing structure and not a completed event, then everything (and perhaps everyone) that sustains a settler-colonial society today is also genocidal.”[7] Settler-colonial theory defines genocide more broadly than I imagine most of us would, especially since if you are listening carefully, it means that you and I are perpetuating genocide both in Israel and here in the USA.
Some scholars of this pseudo-science go so far as to claim that no one needs to die for a genocide to take place.[8] As Jews, for whom the term genocide was coined in the aftermath of the gas chambers and ovens of Europe, it is especially hateful and dissonant to accuse us of genocide. Israel’s declaration of independence offers protection to any citizen regardless of religion, race, or sex. The Hamas charter seeks the full annihilation of Israel and all the Jews. Yet it is Israel who is labeled, and libeled, as genocider. Antizionism inverts genocide onto the Jews to libel us and present us as so evil that we must be stopped, even violently.
With this understanding, it doesn’t matter what the casualty numbers actually are in Gaza, it is defined as a genocide, because the settler-colonial Israelis are the perpetrators. And not only that, Israelis as colonizers are destined to be genocidal because all colonizers are predestined to it. This is why the protestors on October 8 were already chanting against genocide, before an IDF soldier even entered Gaza.
Antizionism is an anti-Jewish hate movement that claims that all Jews are guilty of Israel’s original sins of racism, colonization, and genocide, and that Israel’s inherent evil sullies all Jews who are guilty by association, and must be purged.
We have to know what it is to be able to fight it. And we have to fight it in our own homes and communities, too.
So many of our young people have been caught up by this propaganda. So many of our young people see antizionism as the new way to show their progressive bona fides, standing up for the oppressed Palestinians.
We teach our young people to stand up for the oppressed and the vulnerable. We teach our young people to cry out for justice and that their voices matter and are powerful. We have universalized Judaism in ways that are beautiful and important. And, we have been remiss in teaching our young people their history and how to stand up for themselves.
Antizionism is not pro-Palestinian, no matter what campus leaders, activists, or the mayor of New York City might say. It is, in fact, focused in the wrong direction. It is not about making life better for anyone in Gaza or Judea and Samaria. It is not about seeking peace between neighbors. It is not about a two-state solution. It is about hatred for and destruction of a nation of people, not the creation of anything. Antizionists are the ones seeking genocide in its literal sense, not Israel. Antizionism is anti-progressive because it is founded on a belief that sees the best days behind us, not ahead of us. It is anti-progressive because it demands hatred of a group of people because of their national origin and/or their religion.
And yet, we cannot convince them to change so easily, because the arguments are emotional and they believe that they are standing up for the oppressed minority, even though a quick zoom out shows that Israel is the actual democratic minority in a sea of Muslim ethno-state autocracies and monarchies. We cannot throw our young people out of the tent or our families without trying to fight for them, without trying to bring them back to sanity and love for our people, not by arguing, but by disagreeing firmly, actually knowing the facts and the history, and standing our ground.
We can challenge their assumptions, but only if we know what we’re up against and what they believe. We can tell them how we feel. We can ask them to logic their way through the arguments. Where are the Jews supposed to go when the land from the river to the sea is freed? Will the countries that kicked us out welcome us back? How will Palestinians ever be free and safe with Hamas in power?
We see the new scapegoat before our eyes: the Jewish nation, Israel. Only by understanding can we begin to be ready to combat. If we don’t start pushing back, I fear the consequences for our people. Elie Wiesel reminds us that we should, “never say that society will not do this or that,” and to not delude ourselves into thinking that “history will know when to stop so as not to destroy itself.” Legacy institutions are a generation behind. America’s young people are 50/50 on support of Hamas. The hour is late, and there is still time.
The animal scapegoat of Yom Kippur symbolically removed the sins from the people of Israel. Human scapegoats are an expression, not of their own shortcomings, but of those that choose them.[9] The antizionist movement is dangerous for Jews, even as it says more about the people who have joined it. It is the newest iteration of the hatred that has been with us for thousands of years.
With the scapegoat of Israel before us, and armed with new understanding of what we are facing, let us heed Maimonides and, freed from our previous understandings, let us be spurred to righteousness.
Because the cause of Israel is righteous, and so are we when we support it.
G’mar Chatimah Tovah
[1]
Stern, Chaim, Gates of Repentance. P 421
[2]
Maimonides Guide for the Perplexed part 3; 46:20
[3]
Louis-Klein, Adam. “Antizionism is a distinct Anti-Jewish Bigotry.” Journal
of Contemporary Antisemitism, Vol 9, No. 1 Spring 2026, p 64.
[4]
Louis-Klein, Adam. “The Left-Wing Case Against Anti-Zionism.” The Atlantic. June 18, 2026.
[5]
Based on Louis-Klein in JCA p 63-4
[6]
Based on Louis-Klein in JCA p 71
[7]
Kirsch, Adam. On Settler Colonialism: Ideology Violence, and Justice. 2024
Norton. p. 23-4
[8]
Ibid. p 25-26.
[9]
Rabbi Jonathan Perolman
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