Can Liberal Zionists Count On Hillary Clinton?
Daniel Zemel first visited Israel fresh off his bar mitzvah, in 1966. A bookish Jewish kid from Chicago, Zemel had a love for Israel inherited from his grandfather, Rabbi Solomon Goldman, a friend of Albert Einstein’s who was president from 1938 to 1940 of the then left-leaning Zionist Organization of America. With the other members of his Jewish education group, the 13-year-old Zemel spent two weeks in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa. He lunched in cafeterias with the kibbutzniks he idolized, ate frozen treats on the beach and climbed a lookout tower, peering into Jerusalem’s still forbidden Old City. A year later, Zemel was ecstatic when Israeli forces captured everything he had surveyed and beyond, including the Temple Mount, the West Bank and Gaza, in the Six-Day War with Egypt, Syria and Jordan. Over the decades, as Israel matured and began to wrestle with the occupation, Zemel did, too. He visited Israel again and again, as a college student, a rabbinical student and an assistant rabbi in Minnesota.
In 1983, Zemel became the head rabbi of Temple Micah, in the Northwest section of Washington. In the constellation of liberal American synagogues, there are a handful that stand out for their political engagement and the influence of their members — Leo Baeck Temple in Los Angeles, Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and KAM Isaiah Israel on Barack Obama’s old block in Chicago. But none have more connections to Capitol Hill.
In the fall, Zemel, a contemplative 62-year-old with horn-rimmed glasses, a bushy mustache and a bald dome from which his skullcap incessantly slips, stood before his congregation in a state of unrest. It was the start of the Jewish New Year, and he had decided to express his anguish over Israel in the form of a sermon about the direction his beloved country had taken. All summer, during the war in Gaza, Zemel and many of the members of his progressive congregation had been racked with worry. In his book-lined office, decorated with an Israeli flag and a poster of Yoda holding a Hebrew bible, emails from congregants had been regularly popping up on Zemel’s computer screen, railing about Israelis “killing children.” Zemel sat with congregants as they wept on his couch.
The entire year 5774, in fact, was a trying one for Zemel and other liberal Zionists, who increasingly find themselves torn between their liberalism and Zionism and stranded in the disappearing middle between the extremes of a polarized American Jewish community. Micah’s liberal Zionists remained wedded to a two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians and estranged from the policies of a right-wing Israeli government, along with the reflexive Israel-can-do-no-wrong sentiment on Capitol Hill. But they also felt alienated by Jewish groups to their left, some of which chanted, “Stop the murder, stop the hate, Israel is a racist state.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/magazine/can-liberal-zionists-count-on-hillary-clinton.html