I am a progressive rabbi. I believe God stands with the oppressed not the oppressor, and so my faith commits ​me to ease human suffering. I believe God tempers judgement with compassion, and so I construct my ​rabbinate to support people through life’s struggles. Even so, my Judaism proclaims a distinction between ​right and wrong, and calls me to uphold and teach it.

As a composite of political, religious, and educational movements, American progressivism emerged at the ​end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries in response to an industrial boom benefiting a ​relative few, leaving the poor and the working class behind. As a political ideology, progressivism championed ​equity and shared responsibility to the collective good.

The social gospel of religious progressives preached every human being as created in the divine image and ​brought faith’s teachings to bear on society’s pressing needs through a commitment to social justice. ​Progressive educators similarly prioritized the application of knowledge to lived experience.

Thus progressivism inspired in politics, religion and education alike greater attention to society’s vulnerable, ​and focused theory and principle on real-world problems. I have always been proud to call myself ​progressive.

But progressivism has suffered a breakdown over Israel and Jews. Though originally a sophisticated ideology ​grounded in the philosophies of John Dewey and Walter Rauschenbusch among others, many adherents today ​view progressivism as the facile sorting of peoples and nations into two boxes: oppressor or oppressed. And ​many of them place Israel and Jews in the first.

Natan Sharansky, a former refusenik who understands oppression well, recently noted: “Above all, because ​progressives see Israel as an oppressor and Jews as members of the privileged class, they believe that we are ​necessarily on the wrong side of history.”

Like all nations, Israel is imperfect. I do not deny the injustice of its settlements on lands that should one day ​belong to a Palestinian state, or the hardships and suffering of the Palestinian people. I have travelled into the ​West Bank to shield Palestinian olive growers from Israeli settlers who sought to chop down their trees. I ​mourn the deaths of so many innocents in Gaza killed by the IDF. And I know that Israel’s 1948 War of ​Independence resulted in the expulsion of many Palestinians from their homes. But history is more than those ​snapshots. Israel did not start that war, and ever since has spent its existence fighting for survival. It should ​not be labeled an aggressor just because it exercises the power to fight back.

As for Jews being privileged, despite a legacy of discrimination and exclusion from education, business, ​housing, and other opportunities, the Jewish community today enjoys success in every field of endeavor. And ​many Jews have achieved enviable financial security. But it is also true that one in three Holocaust survivors ​live in poverty and one in four American Jews struggle to make ends meet. And since when is it a privilege to ​fear for one’s physical safety, or to fear wearing a head covering or Star of David in public? Jewish institutions ​invest millions of dollars in security that Christian institutions fortunately need not. Where is the progressive ​critique of this inequity?

Ironically, progressivism’s Israel-Jewish problem is manifest in certain Jewish organizations opposed to ​Israel’s efforts to incapacitate Hamas. By prioritizing Israel’s responsibility to protect innocent Palestinians ​over its responsibility to protect innocent Israelis, they deny Israel’s government the right to fulfill its most ​basic duty to its own people’s safety. Israel must do all it can to shield noncombatants in harm’s way. But to ​dismiss Israel’s need to defend its land and people is immoral. The Hamas threat renders a large swath of a ​small country uninhabitable. What other nation would tolerate on its border a terrorist regime committed to ​its destruction? What other nation would be asked to?

On campus and in the academy, progressivism’s educational failures around Israel and Jews have long been ​evident. Many students, who consider themselves progressive, arrive at college knowing little Mideast history. ​The Palestinian-Israeli conflict becomes, for them, a spectator sport for which to choose a side. To the ​apparent underdog they give their sympathy and support. Further, Israel’s campus detractors often conflate ​the conflict with other liberation struggles, implicating Israel’s supporters in those societal injustices, ​excluding Jews from efforts to address them.

Inside the lecture halls, too, intellectual dishonesty and political motivations often have colored the teaching ​of history. Israel has been judged by double standards, demonized as a purely colonial enterprise, and ​delegitimized as the historic homeland of the Jewish people whose presence there stretches back at least ​three thousand years.

Even before October 7, a concern existed at many colleges and universities for the safety of Jewish students. ​We already knew that a hateful obsession with Israel often descends into hatred of Jews.

But what we have witnessed since that day is shocking and alarming: not just the defense

of Hamas as freedom fighters, but a rejoicing in their atrocities and a rallying to their side, with hateful rhetoric ​defended on the grounds of free speech and free academic inquiry, as if the intimidation and fear felt by Jews ​did not undermine those very freedoms.

The testimony of the Presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania culminated two months ​of repeated failures by university leadership around the country to differentiate right from wrong with the ​safety of their own students at stake. To hem and haw about First Amendment nuance without first ​acknowledging the perils of a call for genocide is not just tone-deaf; it is negligent.

It also betrays a failure of many diversity, equity and inclusion programs to treat anti-Jewish bias with the ​same seriousness as other biases. Because Jews are perceived as privileged, we are often deemed beyond the ​reach of prejudice, and the attention rightly paid to microaggressions against other minorities is not paid to ​microaggressions against Jews.

Tension between particularism and universalism is common to most liberal religious faiths and ​denominations. Religious progressives, like me, believe their particular traditions should guide them to act for ​the betterment of all humanity. Nonetheless, as a Jew, I maintain the particularist right to defend myself and ​my people. And as a human being whose people are enduring hatred, intimidation, and violence, I expect ​other progressives to answer their universalist calling and extend to Jews and to Israel the same concern they ​rightly give to all peoples and nations who are oppressed.