“You say you don’t want to connect to Israel for x, y, and z reasons, but – tell me something: do you care about a conversation about Jews in power?”

You say you don’t want to connect to Israel for x, y, and z reasons, but – tell me something: do you care about a conversation about Jews in power? Do you care about the question of the intersection between Judaism and democratic values? Do you care about what Judaism has to say about human rights? Do you care about the idea of Jewishness in the public space? Do you care about Jewish multiculturalism and ethnic diversity and artistic production? If you care about all of those things and you say you don’t want to have anything to do with the state of Israel, you are basically saying “I am going to take the biggest data set where all of those questions are being negotiated and take them out of the story.” And then you’re not actually interested in those things.

Yehuda Kurtzer, “Homecoming and Arrival”, Judaism Unbound, ep. 121 (8 June 2018) [http://www.judaismunbound.com/podcast/2018/5/22/judaism-unbound-episode-121-yehuda-kurtzer]