JTA — For decades, liberal Zionism served the American Jewish majority as the ideological bridge between democratic and Jewish values: Support for Israel was based in, and justified by, a commitment to Jewish self-determination anchored in democracy, and animated by the promise of peace with the Palestinians.

On Tuesday night in Manhattan, a group of prominent rabbis and Jewish thinkers gathered to ask whether that bridge is now collapsing.

The conversation, held at B’nai Jeshurun in the heart of the famously Jewish and historically liberal Upper West Side, centered on what panelists described as a profound crisis in liberal Zionism — accelerated by the Hamas-led October 7 invasion of Israel and the devastating war in Gaza that followed, but rooted in decades of occupation, the rightward political drift in Israel and growing estrangement between American and Israeli Jews.

The panel brought together figures who have long wrestled publicly with Israel’s moral and political direction, albeit to different degrees: Rabbi Jill Jacobs, CEO of the rabbinic human rights organization T’ruah; Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove of Manhattan’s Park Avenue Synagogue; Peter Beinart, the writer and editor who lately has soured on the idea of a Jewish state in favor of a single, binational state of Arabs and Jews; and Esther Sperber, an Israeli-American architect and Orthodox activist critical of Israel’s shift to the right.

Representatives of the Zionist right were not invited to sit on the panel, said moderator Rabbi Irwin Kula, because “that’s [not] where the crisis is.”

“We are living through the collapse of a paradigm,” said Kula, describing a polarized Jewish community shaken by grief, fear of antisemitism, and, especially for liberal Zionists, despair that their vision of two states for two people will ever come about. Kula, who championed pluralism as the president of the Jewish organization CLAL, said the question was no longer how big the Jewish tent should be, but whether it had already been “shredded.”

Throughout the evening, Kula resisted turning the discussion into a debate over one state versus two states or competing historical narratives. Instead, he pressed panelists to articulate the fears and “nightmares” driving their positions — a strategy meant to surface “vulnerability” rather than certainty. For the most part, the audience — over 400 in the sanctuary, and another 882 who registered online, according to the synagogue — held its applause and jeers, as Kula requested, lending the evening the hushed air of a memorial service.

Cosgrove, who recently referred to himself as a “liberal Zionist disillusioned by the Israeli government,” framed his fears around internal Jewish fracture. Drawing on biblical imagery, he warned that........

© The Times of Israel