You could hear the cameras clicking before the blessing even began.

The Shehecheyanu—long, loud, and painfully out of tune—lingered awkwardly through the room as photographers fought to capture every angle. The millennia-old blessing, recited by generations of Jews to mark moments of gratitude and continuity, echoed through the bar, its low ceilings brightly lit for the occasion. Beneath the stage lights stood an antizionist Jewish politician beside an antizionist transgender rabbi. They smiled. The photographers kept shooting. The campaign got the image it was looking for.

The cameras weren’t photographing a prayer. They weren’t photographing a Jewish celebration. They were photographing Jews saying what non-Jews wanted them to say.

Who were these Jews? Where did they come from? And how did they come to stand on a stage turning Jewish identity into political theater?

Though it is tempting to dismiss antizionist Jews as simply “self-hating Jews,” the reality is both more complicated and more revealing. Believing they know better than more than 95 percent of the world’s Jews, they convince themselves that they are smarter than generations that endured exile, persecution, and expulsion. Thinking they are somehow wiser than Jewish history itself, they convince themselves that they are the exception to it. Placing their political identity above their Jewish identity, they separate themselves from the Jewish people even as they continue to speak in the Jewish people’s name. Some do so knowingly. Others have convinced themselves they are acting in the name of justice. The anti-Jewish ideology benefits either way.

Jewish history has seen this misplaced confidence before. Every generation had its Jews who thought the forces of history somehow no longer applied to them.

Jewish history has seen this misplaced confidence before. Every........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)