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By far the largest U.S. Jewish denomination, Reform Judaism has long represented the liberal heart and leanings of American Judaism. The movement was early to embrace interfaith marriage, LGBTQ+ clergy and broader social solutions, including reparations for African Americans.
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But the Israel-Gaza war that started Oct. 7 spotlighted rifts among liberal Jews about not just how to address Israel’s military campaign but also about what the word Zionism means and how core a connection to Israel should be to being Jewish.
As the Reform movement in North America marked its 150th anniversary and members held a conference in D.C. this weekend, Reform Judaism confronts a key moment in its evolving history. Its institutions, leaders and members are more urgently navigating those chasms, and more broadly, the complexity of being a progressive ally of Israel today.
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Reform leaders, like the leaders of several other prominent progressive Jewish groups, including J Street and Americans for Peace Now, have not emphasized a cease-fire and have said an Israeli military response in Gaza was appropriate. Instead, they have focused on calling for a more just execution of military attacks, more humanitarian aid to Gazans and a prioritizing of freeing the hostages.
Elements of the Reform conference at the Marriott Marquis and its attendees reflected the complicated current state of affairs for the standard-bearer of liberal Judaism: a desire to be open to change and unknown solutions to the conflict, even as members are grieving Oct. 7, crushed by the subsequent spike in global antisemitism and still searching for the right language to support Israel.
At the weekend’s opening prayer Friday, the 1,000 attendees began with a song that implored: “Open my eyes to truth, open my hands to give freely, open my lips to good words, to pure words.” A rabbi-artist then cited the story of Genesis and posited that God’s creative process in making the world started first with a pause.
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“Rather than immediately trying to change or resolve the darkness, the depths,” said Rabbi Adina Allen, what if instead people try to “come into gentle contact” with the unknown. “We don’t have to know what comes next. In fact, we can’t. … What kind of ancestors does the future need from us?”
In a Shabbat morning sermon, Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, or the URJ — the movement’s congregational arm — said Reform Jews “must acknowledge a significant number of younger Jews are struggling with the War in Gaza and the American Jewish community’s strong support of Israel’s prosecution of the war. … They wrestle with these complex moral issues drawing on the justice and equity values they learned in their Jewish upbringing, and offer principled, thoughtful arguments for their views of the war.”
Later Saturday, Jacobs told The Washington Post: “The question of how Israel lives in Jewish identity is big.”
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While they don’t have data, movement officials said they are aware that some people are leaving Reform communities because of the movement’s official responses. Organized religion already in recent decades has been upended by Americans leaving denominations and institutions, a phenomenon sped up by the pandemic.
Noah Shapiro, an undergraduate studying organizational science at George Washington University, has been involved in Reform synagogues and camps his whole life. Both his parents and grandparents met in a Reform summer camp.
Even as he feels “looked down upon and excluded” on his campus as a supporter of Israel since Oct. 7, Shapiro also feels a surge of interest and conversation and engagement on the topics of Judaism and Israel. The issues are everywhere, he says. He is a leader of a summer program for teens about Israel, and knows the curriculum needs to be revamped to incorporate the new reality.
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“Personally, I think this is the key moment” for Reform Judaism, Shapiro said. Whether it becomes an opportunity for engagement or a threat “entirely depends how the movement decides to handle this. It’s all about response and proportionality and figuring out how to continue forward. … The URJ’s job is to move forward and have productive conversations at a table open to all viewpoints.”
“A lot of people feel isolated, pushed away because they don’t consider themselves Zionists,” he said. “I think this is a time where we can be united in recognizing Israel is a core value of the Union, but we can 100 percent do a better job to opening up conversations, not just where we get some result we want. We need to foster discussion and bring people of different views and allow folks to learn without judgment.”
Shapiro and others at the D.C. conference said they were balancing this looming rift with the deep joy of being together, and a feeling of profound unity and connection to global Jewish peoplehood since Oct. 7.
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There was a particular feeling of coming together Thursday night at a pre-conference gathering for Reform Jews of color at Sixth and I Synagogue in Chinatown. As people milled around eating snacks, they said how powerful it was, especially since Oct. 7, to get a break from Jewish spaces where they are often in a narrow racial minority, and from progressive spaces where they feel notable antisemitism since the Hamas attack triggered a war.
“Jews of color, especially now, they need to be able to have their voices elevated in this conversation. That is imperative to creating community of belonging,” said Yolanda Savage-Narva, assistant vice president of racial equity, diversity and inclusion for the URJ. “You have to be ready to hear everything. It’s not: ‘You’ve heard of one Jew of color, you’ve heard from them all.’”
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Religious affiliation has slipped in importance in the United States, and Jews are particularly unaffiliated. Thirty-seven percent of U.S. Jews, the Pew Research Center found in a 2020 survey, identify as Reform, 20 percentage points higher than the next group, Conservative. Nine percent identify as Orthodox, while 32 percent say they’re not connected with any particular branch.
And U.S. Jews’ connection with Israel has been shifting, Pew found. Fifty-eight percent of U.S. Jews say they feel very or somewhat attached to Israel, but that number drops to 48 percent for Jews ages 18 to 29. Forty-five percent of U.S. Jews say caring about Israel is essential to being Jewish; 35 percent of Jews 18 to 29 say that. But how the past two months will affect these questions is impossible to predict, experts say.
According to Pew, there are about 7.5 million Jews in the United States, about 2.8 million of whom identify as Reform.
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The Reform movement has had its own shifts on the topic of Zionism. At its founding in North America in the 1800s, its leaders were not Zionists. Their focus, post-Enlightenment, was on universalism and modernism, and moving out of the ghettos — literal and intellectual — into which Jews had been forced.
“America was their Zion,” said Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman, a prominent scholar and teacher at Hebrew Union College, the Reform movement’s main seminary. “Our ancestors then had the audacity to believe Jews need not be afraid of their neighbors” and saw their role as actively trying to improve the world “instead of just praying God will do it.”
The pogroms against Jews in Eastern Europe and other developments, including the 1967 War, moved Reform Jews to strongly emphasize the need to defend Israel as essential to Jewish peoplehood and self-determination.
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The Reform movement’s concept of a Jewish state “has always very much been support for a Jewish homeland that is pluralistic, democratic and equitable,” said Rabbi Esther L. Lederman, who works in leadership development for the movement. “We’ve always been in favor of two-state solution. This is a double-promised land; Jews and Arabs are Indigenous. … When you’re mourning and burying your own families’ dead, it may not be the first thing out of our mouth.”
To Josh Burg, 26, a public defender who spent two decades at Reform synagogues, camps and involved in the movement’s policy and advocacy arm, what he saw as a lack of emphasis on Palestinian rights — including the occupation and violence by Jewish settlers — was part of what propelled his recent departure from his spiritual home.
On Friday night, Burg went to Shabbat services for 10 or so young adults who also grew up in the Reform movement, including children of rabbis and temple youth group leaders.
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“Most of that group had in the last 60 days said they were looking for a new Jewish home because of the URJ’s position on Israel/Palestine,” he said the next day.
“These are the kids deepest in the movement; we’re saying we need something more. I’ve never seen it like this. It’s rebellion and dissent from every corner in my age demographic,” Burg said.
On Saturday, advocates released a letter signed by more than 850 current and former Reform members, many of them who are active — or were active — in leadership.
“The URJ teaches practicing Pikuach Nefesh, ‘saving a life,’ and Tikkun Olam, ‘repairing the world.’ An immediate ceasefire is in line with these Jewish values,” the letter says.
A second letter, signed by 30 descendants of Reform rabbis and of other movement leaders, also demanded a cease-fire. “The next generation of Reform Jews will rewrite this narrative,” it reads, “with or without you.”
A spokeswoman for the Reform movement said they it has no data about members’ views on Israel.
One thing some attendees of the conference discussed was more listening and education and nuance around explosive topics such as the word Zionism.
“When young people say they’re not Zionist, I don’t reject them, I want to know what they mean by that. They usually mean they’re opposed to occupation and needless violence, and for a two-state solution, all of which I want too,” said Hoffman, who wrote the liturgy for a presentation Saturday night about the history of the movement.
“True Zionism stands for us caring deeply for the poor, including in the Arab communities, and justice for the Arabs as much as we care about a strong Jewish state. … Early Zionists would be shocked by the extent the two peoples have been separated by seemingly a lack of will by both sides to engage.”
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