Reclaiming Judaism from Zionism

By Shareen Singh 

Jews who publicly advocate for a free Palestine and criticise Israel face backlash, including vitriolic condemnation, shunning by friends, family, and their community.

While many Jewish people are afraid to speak out, some bravely do, and they have shared their stories since childhood –  growing up believing everything they learned was true until they found out that much of it was based on lies.

Their stories below reveal cracks in the insular Jewish Community of around 50 000. The five women whom I interviewed separately come from accomplished backgrounds and are members of  SA Jews for a Free Palestine (SAJFP), an organisation that is gaining traction, especially amongst younger people in the community.

One of the  founders of  SAJFP, Shereen Usdin, says she was “breastfed Zionism.” Israel and Judaism were intrinsic. Her father’s family was rooted in Betar, the ultra-right-wing, nationalist movement whose followers included Benjamin Netanyahu’s father, Benzion Netanyahu, and former Prime Minister Menachem Begin.

Shereen Usdin

On Holocaust Day, she watched films showing “hollow sunken eyes staring from the bunkers of concentration camps, corpses shovelled in mass graves…” Images of horror were etched in every Jewish student’s mind. The history of the persecution of Jews and the fear that it could recur was entrenched. 

In 1972, she was appalled at the UN debates on ‘Zionism is Racism’. “It is ridiculous. The Palestinians were killing us. They hated us.” She and her friends wore ‘Zionism is not Racism’ badges.

Her perspectives shifted gradually when she found herself in the midst of the anti-apartheid struggles at university – and she began joining the dots. “I felt something was not right about what was unfolding in Israel. I engaged other people and started asking questions.”

Literature by anti-Zionist Jewish historian Avi Shlaim, Palestinian author Edward Said and meetings with a Palestinian activist, whose accounts of living under Israeli occupation were an eye-opener. “Intellectually, I knew then that I had been duped – the narrative that shaped me was based on lies. When that really sank in, I felt overwhelming anger.”

She joined the global Boycott, Sanctions and Disinvestment and informal organisations that led to the formation of SAJFP.  Usdin’s backlash came from  within her family, community, and Christian Zionists in the US who issued death threats. Some of her extended family shunned her, and she was no longer invited to attend any family get-togethers.

Her courage has remained undiminished, and she draws comfort from her mother’s words. In her frail state days before she passed, Ros Usdin said: ‘I did not always agree with what you were doing, but I respect you for doing it.”

Another founder of SAJFP, Merle Favis, was an anti-apartheid activist who was arrested in 1981 and detained without charges under the Terrorism Act. She was released after five months.

Merle Favis 

She says Zionism was like the natural order of the universe, unspoken but ever-present when she was growing up. It was normal for everyone to toss money into the blue boxes for the National Jewish Fund (JNF) to help green the desert. She learned later in life that planting trees in Lubya was meant to cover up the fact that Palestinians once lived there. 

King David in Linksfield, which she attended, provided a space for critical thinking in those days. The late Sociology Professor Eddie Webster and his wife, historian Luli Callinicos, taught at the school. Favis’s history teacher was a member of the Liberal Party. “Today it (King David) is a different kettle of fish – like comparing chalk and cheese.”

Her father, a liberal Zionist who supported the peace movement in Israel, wanted to see a space in the Middle East where everyone could live together. She spent a few weeks in Israel at Ulpan to learn Hebrew, and returned as a 15-year-old, very happy to be a Zionist, she says.

Favis became conscientized through her older brother, who was in the anti-apartheid movement, her anti-apartheid activism, and her studies in sociology, politics, and philosophy at Wits University.

She began working with others in an informal organisation, trying to conscientize withing the Jewish Community before the decision was taken to form SAJFP. She was an atheist for much of her life and never explored Jewish spirituality until she was in her 40s. She attends a reform synagogue periodically. 

Favis understands that many are questioning their support for Israel, especially younger people, and many feel alienated. “Doing Palestine solidarity work feels like it’s in my DNA. Speaking for Justice is inherently in Jewish values,” she says.

One of the young members of SAJFP, Jo Bluen, was the head prefect at King David Primary School and Redhill High School, and she aced matric. Her educational resume is impressive, with an imminent PhD from the London School of Economics.

Jo Bluen 

She became anti-Zionist over a long process of what she calls “unlearning and then relief”. She came to her anti-Zionism long before 2023, moved by engaging with many courageous people, Mahmoud Darwish’s poems, and her studies in International Law, International Relations, and genocide. She could not remain silent when genocide was unfolding, she says.

Bluen says her anti-zionism is the most Jewish thing about her. She regularly hosts Shabbat at her house and invites friends and comrades. With so much shunning happening in families and the community, Shabbat has become more about friends and like-minded individuals from different cultures embracing one another’s traditions.

Her signature was amongst the 800 scholars and experts of genocide that signed a 17 October 2023 letter warning of the risk of genocide in Gaza. She was one of the drafters of a January 2024 open letter in support of SA’s case of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice, signed by over a thousand international lawyers and scholars.

She has frequently challenged the SA Jewish Board of Deputies and SA Zionist Federation, which had opposed and actively campaigned against the case. 

Bluen was on the legal support team for the Global Sumud Flotilla, which sailed to Gaza, laden with food and medicine. “Struggles are interconnected – if we fight one, we fight for all. It is a moral imperative of all people with a conscience”.

Jews have lived all over the world before Zionism emerged, she says. Israeli propaganda manufactured the conflation of Zionism and Judaism. It is this powerful disinformation that infuriates her. Israel has “corrupted’ Judaism, vandalised our faith.”

The backlash and threats against her have been vicious on social media, in Israeli, South African and British mainstream media and in right-wing sites and Zionist publications. But it has not broken her – she has a lot of support and knows that her place in the world is to stand with the oppressed, not the oppressor.

Amongst the most on-the-ground SAJFP activists in Johannesburg is Rina King. She was in Israel for her nephew’s wedding when the Hamas 7 October attack happened. Apart from sirens blaring, people going to bomb shelters, and reservists being called up, life carried on as normal.

Rina King 

“Yet 40 km away, people were being bombed to hell and gone. I was there when the 40 beheaded babies story came out, and it had the exact effect on the population that it was designed to. They probably planned this lie. It is really sick.” 

King says that by the time she was 12, she had become an exemplary Zionist who observed her Orthodox faith to the T. Her father was a revisionist Jew, a follower of Menachem Begin who believed that Judea and Samaria were biblical inheritances.

Her mother, who was born in Palestine, told her stories. “The Arabs attacked us. The Jews did not have arms, so they took stones in tins and went to the village. The leaders told them that the stupid Arabs would then run away and leave their village, and they would win the war. It was a miracle that they won the war.”

King regrets that it took her so long to learn the truth. It was a process of questioning, engaging with people, and reading. After a lot of ambivalence and doubt, it was Avi Shlaim’s literature that crystallised the lies. Breaking away from Zionism after that was a no-brainer.

She is ever-present at protests and is not shy about taking the microphone and shouting “Free Free Palestine”.

Several people in her family have shunned her. Gone are the days of joint-family holidays, she says, but knowing she is doing the right thing helps. 

The most vocal SAJFP member is Megan Choritz, a playwright, writer, and actor whom the SA Jewish Report has both celebrated and denigrated. When the paper needed a Jew it could brag about, Megan delivered, with appearances in a TV series, plays, and a novel. When she protested Zionism, she became the punching bag.

Megan Choritz 

Choritz’s parents went to Israel after they got married in their early 20s and lived in a kibbutz. They returned to SA after nine months because her mother was not happy with doing manual labour, she says. While going through family photographs, she had come across a picture of her father standing with Moshe Dayan. 

After graduating from King David School, she and four friends went to Israel, where she stayed with relatives, Michal, her cousin, was doing conscription at a kibbutz. At some point, she met an Arab Israeli and did not understand that concept until he told her his story about being ostracised and being raided by the Israeli Defence Force.

On a later visit to Israel for a family wedding, her cousin Michal showed her the handbook that dictated what an Israeli soldier needs to be. “It was literally the same thinking as the Nazi Aryan race.”

There was a lot of confusion about what she had perceived Zionism to be and the reality. Going to UCT was the best thing, she said. For the first time, she was amongst people of different cultures and racial groups.

When the genocide started, she attended a Shabbat for Palestine at Sea Point promenade and joined SAJFP. While her family has shunned her, she has found support amongst Palestinian activists. 

The Jewish Literary Festival in Cape Town, despite her debut novel, Lost Property, having been featured in the SA Jewish Report with an interview, did not invite her. She responded by sitting on a chair with a pile of books outside the festival with a big sign: “I am Jewish. I am not Zionist.” If the intention was to crush Choritz, it has been counterintuitive. She had become the ‘poster child’ for Palestine solidarity.

These five women are a small group within a small community, but their sentiment echoes far and wide. When the South African Jewish establishment has largely closed ranks, their visibility matters. They insist on a distinction between Judaism, ancient and diasporic and plural, and Zionism, a political project of the last century. As Jo Bluen says bluntly, Zionism corrupted the faith – these women are trying to take it back.

Shareen Singh 

Freelance Writer and Social Justice Activist 

Johannesburg

Shareen Singh is a writer/freelance journalist. Follow her on shareen.substack.com

and on X @shareensingh8