Today at 4:30pm in the Konover Auditorium, Jewish Voice for Peace – UConn and UConn Jewish Collective will co-host a screening of the documentary film Israelism. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion at 7pm moderated by Dr. Michael S. Young and featuring Erin Axelman, co-director of Israelism, as well as Sam Pudlin and Sarah White, co-founders of Hartford Jewish Organizing Collective.
“Jewish Identities and the Question of Zionism: Film Screening and Discussion,” will offer a space for critical examination of the contemporary relationship between US Jewish identities, Zionism, and the State of Israel. The documentary film Israelism follows “two young American Jews raised to unconditionally love Israel,” as they “witness the brutal way Israel treats Palestinians” and “join a movement of young American Jews battling the old guard to redefine Judaism’s relationship with Israel, revealing a deepening generational divide over modern Jewish identity.”
Over the past 18 months, the State of Israel has been committing genocide against the Palestinian people of Gaza. While the relationship between Jewish identity and Zionism has always been contested, it has seen a significant rupture in recent years. A growing number of Jewish people are disavowing Zionism and joining the broad movement for Palestinian liberation.
Still, Jewish people who reject Zionism often face exclusion from established Jewish organizations, including on college campuses. Several writers for the Daily Campus have touched on the tension between Judaism and Zionism at UConn and in establishment Jewish Zionist organizations, such as UConn Hillel, which features in the documentary.
Far from a rejection of Jewish identity, many Jewish non-Zionists and anti-Zionists understand their stance to be an embrace of Jewish identity, values and histories. Our panelists will offer insight into diverging Jewish attitudes towards Zionism and the State of Israel, and how non- and anti-Zionist Jews are forming community around their shared values and Jewish identity.
During the ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people, a critical reexamination of the relationship between the Jewish identity, Zionism and the State of Israel is needed now more than ever.
We would like to thank the Undergraduate Student Government, the Department of Social and Critical Inquiry, the Department of Journalism and the Department of History for sponsoring this event. We again invite you to attend today at 4:30pm in the Konover Auditorium.
What does “Palestinian liberation” look like? If you read the founding documents of the State of Palestine, you can see that it intended to be a Arab supremecy state, with no room for Jews who were not (I guess in their estimate) in the area before 1948. There is not even a provision for the Jews or other ethnic minorities who were ethnically cleansed from Arab countries and Iran before and after 1948. Meanwhile, the Arabs and other minorities in Israel enjoy full citizenship and equal rights. The only genocide in that small piece of land would happen if the State of Palestine were fully empowered to carry out their charter. From this op-ed, it’s clear and unfortunate that a diversity of views on the topic will not be presented. Smells like propaganda and ill steer clear…
So Zionism is not a Jewish value, but Nasserist ethnonationalism is? You’re just advocating to replace one ethnostate with another. If Judaism, as you say, does not promote a Jewish state, it doesn’t promote an Arab state either. (And please spare me your one-state talking point. It is the definition of orientalism and political imperialism for westerners to impose their governing ideals onto foreign lands.)