"Jewish Left" conference cares about everyone - except Jews ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Wednesday, January 14, 2026

"Jewish Left" conference cares about everyone - except Jews

A conference will take place next month at Boston University, the "Conference on the Jewish Left." It will host many anti-Zionist voices, Jewish and non-Jewish, from Peter Beinart to Yousef Munayyer. (The poster has the wrong date.)

It is already telling that the organizers treat anti-Zionism as the default meaning of “the Jewish left.” David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir were part of the Jewish left, yet no one associated with this conference would regard them as ideological ancestors. The term has been quietly redefined to exclude the very people who once embodied it.

But what interests me most is not the guest list. It is the slogan under which the conference is being held, a phrase we have all heard countless times: “None of us are free unless all of us are free.” Is this an authentically Jewish idea? Is it even a coherent one?

As a description of reality, it collapses almost immediately. There has never been a moment in human history when all people were free, and there never will be. Freedom is always partial, uneven, contested, and fragile. To claim that no one is free unless everyone is free is to define freedom out of existence. It means that until North Korea falls, until China has a different regime, until the Arab world grants equal rights to Jews and gays, until every prisoner everywhere is released, no one is free. Impossibility becomes the moral standard.

Ethical systems that render all incremental good meaningless tend to end either in paralysis or in performance. Why bother improving conditions in one place if the rest of the world remains broken? If none of us are free anyway, moral action becomes symbolic rather than substantive.

Judaism rests on the opposite premise. Moral action matters precisely because the world is broken. Saving one life matters even if others cannot be saved. Reducing suffering here matters even if suffering persists elsewhere. Obligation does not wait for universal resolution.

The slogan also smuggles in a false moral symmetry. It implies that all unfreedoms bind all people equally at all times. No one actually lives this way. The phrase is never applied universally. It is invoked selectively, aimed at particular causes, and quietly ignored everywhere else. No one believes their own freedom is negated by the existence of political prisoners in every dictatorship on earth. The slogan sounds absolute only because it is never meant to be enforced as such.

One can say that it is “just a slogan,” but slogans are not neutral. This one is used as a weapon. It pretends to be universal while being applied only to causes that happen to align with the anti-Zionist left. If the conference is to be taken seriously, its ethical commitments have to be taken seriously as well, and this slogan does not survive even cursory examination.

This is where Jewish ethics parts company most sharply with the sentiment. Jewish moral reasoning is structured rather than flattened. Responsibility radiates outward in concentric circles. You are more responsible for those closest to you, not because distant suffering is unimportant, but because moral obligation without prioritization becomes incoherent. Ethics requires triage. It requires proximity. It requires acknowledging limits. Choosing to chant “free Palestine” while ignoring “free Iran” when you live nowhere near either is not a moral stance. It is political selectivity. Jews claiming to care deeply about Palestinians while dismissing fellow Jews who live under the threat of Palestinian terror is not universal ethics. It is antisemitism, thinly veiled in the language of Jewish values.

The slogan is not a guide to moral action. It is a credential.

Only then does the setting of the conference reveal the deeper hypocrisy. This ostensibly Jewish conference is being held on Saturday, February 28.

Most Jews today are not observant, but historically Jewish communal leaders understood that Jewishness carried obligations beyond personal practice. They accommodated observant Jews even when they themselves were secular. They avoided scheduling conferences on Shabbat, or they made genuine efforts to make participation possible by arranging minyanim, securing a sefer Torah, and working with hotels to accommodate people who cannot use keycards or automatic doors. It is not simple, but it was once considered part of communal responsibility.

This conference makes no such effort. It defines Jewishness in a way that excludes anyone who takes Jewish observance seriously.

If “none of us are free unless all of us are free” is meant to affirm the dignity of every person, it necessarily implies respect for the deepest commitments of others, especially those within the community one claims to represent. Yet this conference marginalizes Jews for whom Shabbat is not a technical rule but a core expression of Jewish freedom and identity.

Seen this way, the contradiction is unavoidable. A slogan that claims universal dignity is paired with an institutional choice that disregards the dignity of Jewish tradition itself. A message that pretends to honor everyone begins by signaling that some forms of Jewish life are disposable. The first freedom it denies is internal.

Judaism has a very different understanding of freedom, and Shabbat sits at its center. Freedom is not the absence of obligation. It is the presence of meaningful limits. It is the refusal to let human worth be defined by urgency, usefulness, or ideological alignment. Shabbat is not a restriction imposed on freedom. It is freedom made concrete.

When a Jewish conference ignores that while wrapping itself in slogans about universal liberation, the problem is not ordinary hypocrisy. It is something deeper and more structural. Universalism that cannot respect its own roots becomes hollow. Moral language detached from lived obligation becomes performative. And a movement that cannot extend dignity inward has no serious claim to dispensing it outward.