Anti-Zionism is Growing in Reconstructionst Judaism
In December 2023, as Sarah was preparing for their admissions interview for the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (RRC), they received an email from the college asking them to get on a phone call with an administrator. Sarah assumed the call would be about upcoming Hebrew competency testing. Instead, they were greeted with a series of questions about Israel/Palestine, including whether they knew that RRC students were required to study in Israel during their fourth year. The school knew about Sarah’s history with the anti-occupation group IfNotNow and the organization Open Hillel, which sought to bring non-Zionist perspectives onto American college campuses, and the administrator appeared to be asking, in so many words, how they would relate to Zionist Jewish life: Could they serve a Zionist congregation? Would they complete the required travel to Israel? Could they do what the college thought a position as a rabbinical student would require of them?
“It was clear the call’s whole purpose was assessing where I was with Zionism,” Sarah recalled. (Sarah is a pseudonym for a current rabbinical student at RRC, who, like many students interviewed for this article, requested anonymity for fear of affecting their career prospects.) Caught off-guard, Sarah said they had always worked in “pluralist” spaces, and was ultimately accepted—but the topic came up again when they began envisioning where they might want to work for their eventual fourth-year internship. Such internships are funded by RRC grants if the host organization cannot afford to pay the student’s salary, but RRC will not support explicitly anti-Zionist work. One local Jewish community organization that Sarah has discussed interning with is considering becoming an official affiliate of the anti-Zionist activist movement Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP); if the partnership goes through, Sarah fears they won’t be able to secure internship funding.