After dropping over a dozen bunker buster bombs on Iran’s Fordow and Natanz nuclear sites in June, President Donald Trump boasted that the Americans and the Israelis “worked together as a team like perhaps no team has ever worked before” and that “we have complete and total control of the Iranian skies.”
Trump talks about the U.S.-Israeli relationship in a way that goes beyond the terms of a regular alliance. Like American politicians before him, his words signal that when it comes to Israel, U.S. foreign policy means something different than it does with other countries. It is closer, more encompassing, deeper, timeless. It is a relationship that cannot quite be captured by the ordinary frameworks that political scientists use to make sense of U.S. foreign policy, whether through models of decision-making, national security or domestic politics. It needs to be understood differently.
U.S. foreign policy has deep religious roots, especially the assertive and expansionist currents of American history. A short list would include Manifest Destiny — the idea that the U.S. is divinely ordained to expand territorially and spread its values and system of government across the continent, albeit at the expense of Indigenous peoples and other groups; the notion of the U.S. as the light of the world and a shining “City on a Hill” (Matthew 5:14); the promise of American exceptionalism; and American providentialism, or the idea that the United States can do no wrong because it is uniquely protected by God. In June, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee wrote on Truth Social, “Mr. President, God spared you in Butler, PA to be the most consequential President in a century.”
In this rhetoric, to oppose America is to oppose God. These religious-political threads are evident today in, among other places, the bombing of Iran and U.S. policies toward Israel, including support for its killing and destruction in Gaza. These policies reflect and reinforce a profound moral, political and, indeed, religious commitment to the entangled destinies of the U.S. and Israel. It is as if the two states were a single entity — two nations merged into one. U.S. borders become ambiguous when it comes to Israel: Where does the U.S. end and Israel begin? Where is the border? Is there one?
It isn’t only Israel. The U.S. has always had a mysterious relationship with its borders. Long before the founding of the state of Israel in May of 1948, the U.S. had refused to contain itself within the limits of the international state system. The U.S. is defined, on one hand, by a ferocious defense of its own territorial borders and, on the other, by border defiance: that is, a willingness to defy and redraw borders in the name of something greater, something bigger, something better. Examples of border defiance include the settlement of the American West in the name of Manifest Destiny in the 19th century; the Monroe Doctrine, declared by James Monroe in 1823 and forbidding European powers from interfering in a U.S.-declared sphere of influence in the Western hemisphere; the construction of the Panama Canal in the early 20th century as means of projecting U.S. power and dominance across the region; and the imposition of U.S. power arrangements on the Middle East in the 21st century, including, preposterously, the proposal to turn Gaza into a beach resort.
At these moments, the U.S. anoints itself the indispensable nation among nations. It is the author of international rules, but not subject to them. Somehow, the U.S. manages to fit into and, at the same time, to break out of the confines of the nation-state. This is similar to the ways in which Protestant Christianity in the U.S. enjoys a capacity to conform to and simultaneously exceed the confines of the category of religion, as Winnifred Sullivan and I suggest in “At Home and Abroad: The Politics of American Religion.”
Scholars of religion and politics have ways of parsing this situation. In the case of unwavering U.S. support for Israel, it may be understood as a political religion. In my recent book “Heaven Has a Wall: Religion, Borders and the Global United States,” I refer to this state-sponsored orthodoxy as “AmericaIsrael.” In its dominant versions, this political religion requires that U.S. citizens express political support for Israel as a Jewish state. Dissenters are labeled antisemitic, sometimes punished by law, and made to carry the mark of political and religious insubordination. In the words of one such dissenter, Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate who was arrested in March and arbitrarily detained for three months by the Trump administration for his role in organizing student protests against the war in Gaza: “If you are abiding by the very narrow definition of what this administration is defining an American value to be, you may get rule of law. Otherwise you have to fight tooth and nail to get your due process and your rights.”
Opponents of this orthodoxy, such as Khalil and those who sympathize with him, are made to seem like they represent an insubordinate political religiosity. Thinking in these terms allows us to understand their predicament in new ways, using new words, and perhaps seeing new possibilities for action.
In this line of thinking, dissenters like Khalil appear, in a very meaningful sense, as heretics. Both the U.S. and Israel work furiously to silence those who oppose Israeli actions and American support for them. They want the heretics to be cast out. Dissenters are castigated not only for being anti-Israel but also maligned as antisemitic and anti-American. This involves the policing of words and actions that invoke the genocide in Gaza, as both governments reverse-launder speech that calls for democracy and justice into accusations of antisemitism.
While individuals who fear that their livelihoods are being threatened may be silenced through repression, the dissent is as old as Judaism itself. It long predates the state of Israel. It will not go away. Many Americans of all backgrounds are now openly questioning the increasingly desperate attempts to erase the distinction between support for Jews and Judaism and identification with the Israeli state.
An example of an attempt to collapse the two in the name of the political religion of AmericaIsrael is the Trump administration’s insistence that government bodies and U.S. universities rely on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism in assessments of alleged civil rights violations. The IHRA definition was adopted recently, and rather quietly, by my employer, Northwestern University, presumably under pressure from the federal government. At Northwestern, this development accompanied the introduction of a controversial mandatory antibias training module that requires graduate and undergraduate students to watch and “agree” with it as a condition of enrollment. For international students, refusing to agree could mean a loss of status and even deportation. The stakes are high.
The “Antisemitism: Here/Now” module, created by the pro-Israel advocacy group the Jewish United Fund (JUF), is deeply problematic. According to student critics, and based on my own observations having seen the video, it vilifies legitimate critiques of Zionism (including its harmful conflation with Judaism) by grouping them indiscriminately with unattributed and deeply offensive quotes about Hitler and concentration camps, as well as quotes by neo-Nazi David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. The video characterizes the unattributed antisemitic quotes as representative of the larger Palestinian rights movement, when, according to student critics, they appear to be derived from obscure and dated social media posts made by high schoolers who have no leadership role in the movement and do not represent its claims and demands.
The video also equates Judaism with Zionism and suggests that those who do not support the latter should automatically be suspected of antisemitism. It displays a hand-drawn map of Israel, accompanied by the statement that “Jews are from Israel,” when of course Jews have made their homes and contributed to thriving societies around the world for thousands of years. That same map displays Gaza, the West Bank and the Golan Heights as part of Israel (in a lighter shade of the same color), despite the fact that the occupied territories are not part of Israel. The module ignores widespread examples of antisemitism associated with far-right white supremacist movements and focuses exclusively on purported “left-wing anti-semitism,” which (it claims) “holds that Jews are the universal oppressor and pinnacle of white privilege, secretly responsible for all oppression — from racism to colonialism.”
A recent Guardian article opened with this description:
Near the end of an antisemitism training video that Northwestern University students are required to watch, the narrator urges viewers to play a guessing game. Six statements pop on to the screen – the viewer must choose whether they were made by “anti-Israel activists” or the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke. Among the statements: “Every time I read Hitler, I fall in love again.” The video reveals that the statement was made by an “anti-Israel activist.” The narrator then states: “The fact that you can’t tell the difference is terrifying.” He adds that for most Jews, being anti-Israel and antisemitic “are the same.”
The IHRA definition is a 38-word description that purports to help people and institutions identify antisemitism in statements and behavior so it can be excised or punished. However, its examples smuggle highly tendentious and biased characterizations into its ostensibly neutral quasi-legal language, illustrating the politico-religious rhetoric of what I am calling AmericaIsrael. The IHRA definition is “characterized by immense vagueness,” in the words of Peter Ullrich, a sociologist at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. “Every instance of the working definition’s adoption has taken place in the absence of a clear consensus regarding what ‘adoption’ actually means,” the literary scholar Rebecca Ruth Gould has argued. “Its capacity to motivate authorities to censor Israel-critical speech is linked to the imprecision of its legal status.”
Despite, and also in part because of, this lack of precision, the IHRA definition has become the central tool in the ongoing effort to redefine antisemitism in U.S. law and policy. It is used as a legal benchmark for defining antisemitism and has a growing presence in both state and federal law. This April, the state of Kansas adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism with bipartisan support, and Gov. Laura Kelly signed a bill declaring that antisemitism, as defined by the IHRA, is “against the public policy of this state, including, but not limited to, the purposes of public educational institutions and law enforcement agencies in this state.” Jack Goldstein of Jewish Voice for Peace of Kansas City explains, however, that “the main purpose of a bill like this is to shut down opposition to Israel on college campuses. Especially with the Republicans in power right now, that is within their interest, to silence dissent like that. Especially when our country is tied to Israel and still sending lots of money and weapons to the country.”
The tidal wave of state legislation weaponizing the definition of antisemitism in recent months is due in part to the growing national influence of Project Esther, an initiative of the Heritage Foundation targeting not only pro-Palestinian groups but a broad coalition of progressive and leftist organizations in an effort to “disrupt and degrade” these movements by smearing them with accusations of antisemitism and painting them as threats to national security.
Under the guise of the IHRA’s quasi-legal redefinition of antisemitism, American public life — including but not limited to life at colleges and universities — is being transformed. What appears to be a minor, technical change in terminology has become a draconian instrument of political control and repression, solidifying executive and legislative power to enforce a narrow, state-sanctioned definition of Judaism at the expense of others. As Israeli legal scholars Itamar Mann and Lihi Yona have emphasized, the IHRA definition “imposes a straitjacket of Zionist identity on American Jews, in effect telling them that certain political positions are incompatible with being authentically Jewish.” By adopting the IHRA definition into law, the U.S. government “has in effect taken sides in an intra-Jewish debate, recruiting Zionist Jews to side in a war against its ideological opponents,” they write. “The redefinition of antisemitism is therefore not only an attack on political dissent — it is an intrusion into Jewish religious life.”
Jewish communities have always held diverse and plural views when it comes to questions of nationality and relations to political authority. For the government to decide which views are authentically Jewish and which are not is to enact a form of state-sponsored religious establishment. For the government to tell Jews that they must be Zionist to be authentically Jewish is not only incompatible with democracy but also violates the right to free expression of eminent Jewish scholars such as the Israeli American Daniel Boyarin, the Hermann P. and Sophia Taubman professor of Talmudic culture in the departments of Near Eastern studies and rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of “The No-State Solution: A Jewish Manifesto,” and Shaul Magid, professor of modern Jewish studies in residence at Harvard Divinity School and the author of “The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance.”
Critics of the genocide in Gaza and of Israeli treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and Israel continue to speak out against the conflation of antisemitism with anti-Zionism despite the risks of criminalization. The sweeping application of the label “antisemite” to pro-Palestinian voices, many insist, violates the rights of American Jews to live out their religion as they see fit. Labeling anti-Israel positions as antisemitic criminalizes dissent and prevents honest discussion of Israel’s actions. UCLA literary scholar Saree Makdisi explains how we got to this place:
For years, organizations including Jonathan Greenblatt’s Anti-Defamation League (ADL) have worked assiduously to redefine the very concept of “antisemitism” in order to force criticism of Zionism or of the policies of the Israeli state into the dictionary meaning of that term—that is, racism against Jewish people. Thus, when the ADL tallies up reports of “antisemitism on campus,” or warns of “spikes in antisemitism” across the country—warnings that are picked up, read at face value, and amplified by The Guardian or The New York Times—it’s deliberately impossible to distinguish in its data instances of actual anti-Jewish sentiment from the protests against Israel’s war in Gaza that have “spiked” on campuses across the country.
And yet, despite the substantial risks of being tarred as antisemitic, or of having one’s studies disrupted (or worse), the dissent continues to grow among diverse constituencies. It is gathering momentum among Jewish Americans, particularly among younger generations whose endless variety of forms of attachment to Judaism and Jewishness have not led them toward unequivocal support for a Jewish state. Some see the state of Israel as doing violence to Judaism. Of course, the assumption that because one is Jewish one must support Israel is itself antisemitic. As a group of Jewish scholars at Harvard argued recently, such allegations “violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by subjecting Jews to harmful stereotypes about what constitutes ‘authentic’ Jewish identity.”
The break with AmericaIsrael orthodoxy is also gathering momentum among many of my own students at Northwestern, both undergraduate and graduate, for whom state-sponsored and university-sanctioned political religion is anathema to their understanding of academic and personal freedom. These students refuse to countenance the idea that a university administration can force them to acknowledge as fact the misrepresentations, political propaganda and distorted histories purveyed by the mandatory “antibias” training.
The administration has implemented the mandatory training and restricted the campus demonstration policy in the name of protecting other students (and their off-campus supporters) from being made uncomfortable. Yet the dissenting students are refusing to acquiesce. It is thanks in part to their tenacity that it is now possible for me to publicly articulate a position that deviates from the strict orthodoxy of AmericaIsrael for the first time in more than two decades teaching at Northwestern.
That such spaces for dissent from AmericaIsrael are also opening up beyond Northwestern became evident this June during a Democratic mayoral debate in New York City, in which the candidates were asked which foreign country they would visit first after becoming mayor. Andrew Cuomo answered immediately: Israel. His challenger, and the winner of the primary, Zohran Mamdani, said he would stay in New York. What he said next deserves more attention than it has received: “As mayor,” Mamdani said, “I will be standing up for Jewish New Yorkers and will be meeting them wherever they are across the five boroughs, whether it’s at their synagogues and temples or in their homes or at the subway platform.” His words centered Jewish New Yorkers as first-class citizens of New York, rather than as would-be Israelis or as outsiders. They platform Jewish individuals and communities that choose to live outside the state of Israel. Mamdani is careful not to presume that the first loyalty of Jewish New Yorkers is to another state, another nation, another political religion.
Contrast Mamdani’s statements with President Trump’s treatment of Jewish Americans as outsiders, or even clandestine Israelis. The essentialization and denigration of Jewish difference lies just below the surface of Trump’s 2019 speech to Jewish Americans in which he referred to Benjamin Netanyahu as “your prime minister,” implying either that Israel is an extension of U.S. Jewish communities or that Jewish Americans are a satellite of Israel. Jewish Americans are presumed to have dual loyalties — itself an old antisemitic trope. Those who vote Democratic, Trump asserted, are disloyal to Jewish people and to the state of Israel. In 2024, he went so far as to assert that “any Jewish person that votes for democrats hates their religion.”
Antisemitic pro-Zionism is nothing new, though in the U.S. it has mostly fallen out of polite conversation. In her book “Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance,” the late historian Amy Kaplan reminds us that “even advocacy for Zionism often had antisemitic undertones, a connection that has now been largely obscured by the mainstream story that, in championing the Jewish state, Americans … were rejecting anti-Semitism and trying to make amends for the Holocaust.”
Kaplan explained that early American Zionists, such as American civil rights attorney Bartley Crum, believed that Jews raised in Palestine were stronger, blonder, bluer-eyed, more Western and whiter than earlier generations raised in Eastern Europe. White supremacy is central to antisemitic pro-Zionism. Atalia Omer, a professor of religion, conflict and peace studies at the University of Notre Dame, explains, “The Alt-Right’s longing for an ethnic state analogous to Israel (where whites can live securely) is, in effect, entirely consistent with modern anti-semitism. It reflects a rearticulation of the ‘Ein Volk, Ein Reich’ [One people, one realm] Nazi principle and the aspiration to relocate the Jewish diaspora away from the sites of white European societies where they supposedly, activating familiar antisemitic tropes, masterminded the decay and collapse of patriarchal values, and forms of authority.”
Yet there have always been alternatives and dissenters. The historian Lewis Siegelbaum describes flourishing traditions of non-nationalist Jewish thought and practice that are “legatees of a long Jewish tradition going back to the 17th-century Portuguese-Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza and carried forward by the German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, by Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, and Leon Trotsky.” Today, this tradition is carried forward by groups representing alternative Jewish collective and communal aspirations such as Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow and the magazine Jewish Currents, among others. It informed certain corners of Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, in which U.S.-Israel relations were not taken as a unified politico-religious project but as an opportunity to reconsider what it means to be American, Jewish, Christian, or just a human being, in relation to Zionism. It is revealing that an increasing number of Americans now oppose U.S. military support for Israel.
Successful legal challenges to legislation targeting the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, increasingly vocal criticism of the Israeli treatment of Palestinians, a voluminous body of critical scholarship (much of which emanates from Israel and is written by Israelis), the path-breaking work of artists and educators such as Israeli-born Tali Keren, and a series of powerful documentary films including “Israelism,” “Lyd,” “No Other Land” and “Shivtown” are all moving the needle.
The costs that come with the political religion of AmericaIsrael are high. They are paid in diverse currencies: McCarthyite policing of speech and thought, corruption of open inquiry in universities, fine-grained destruction of the essentials of life in Gaza, and a brutal campaign to erase Palestinians, both past and present. It is possible to stand outside the prevailing rhetoric, to escape the rip current that merges Zionism and Americanism. The alternative is easy to find: It is with the heretics and dissidents.
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