When Mayor Zohran Mamdani recently presented Ruth Messinger, the legendary former President of American Judaism’s premier international development organization, with a Lifetime Achievement Award, I imagine that some observers saw an uplifting moment. Here was a progressive mayor honoring a pioneering figure in Jewish social justice. Many others, I believe, joined me in seeing something else: the crystallization of a long and costly mistake.

Mamdani – who Messinger endorsed and campaigned for – does not believe Israel should exist. That is not a characterization of his politics; it is a fair summary of his stated position. Israel, home to half the Jewish people in the world, is the location of a remarkable “return of the exiles.” More than half of Israel is made up of Jews whose ancestry is Middle Eastern or African. Much of the other half are descendants of Holocaust survivors and people whose Jewish identities survived seven decades of Soviet attempts to destroy its last trace.

Israel, facing regional enemies sworn to destroy it since its birth, continues to struggle with profound ethical dilemmas –and sometimes fails. It is also a place of incredible cultural richness, Jewish diversity, learning, and a dynamic politics. It is the most alive and intense Jewish place in the world. For a major American Jewish leader to accept a “Lifetime Achievement” honor from someone who believes that Israel should be undone is not a political difference of opinion. It is a statement about what, and who, matters.

Ruth Messinger is not a minor figure. As president of American Jewish World Service for two decades, she built an organization that mobilized thousands of young American Jews around global development, humanitarian aid, and human rights. Ruth raised many millions of dollars, which AJWS distributed to hundreds of local organizations in the Global South. She deserves credit for those achievements. Her understanding of the influence of global economic policy on the poor has been an inspiration for me.

But I have also found part of her intellectual legacy disturbing. When I was in her office once, I noticed a large framed photograph of Desmond Tutu — and I understood something about the world she inhabited. Tutu was a man of genuine moral stature in many ways. He was also someone whose attitude towards Jews often dripped with disdain. Among other libels, he claimed that Israel practiced apartheid,and that Israel’s apartheid was worse than what South Africa had lived through, a claim that is historically false and deeply offensive. But for Messinger, and for the movement she represented, Tutu was an ally and an icon. That photo told me something about which alliances she valued, and which she was willing to overlook.

The Binary That Broke Something

After the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, Zionism became central to American Jewish life –the understandable response of a people who had just witnessed what statelessness meant, and whose pride had been restored through Israel’s remarkable achievements. The State of Israel was not merely a political project; it was a theological and existential one, the living answer to the question of Jewish vulnerability.

But something else was happening for many American Jews in the decades following the post-war period as well: Assimilation and intermarriage. Embarrassment at Jewish particularity along with ignorance about Jewish practice and history. For a generation of American Jews who came of age in the 1960s and........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)