What it means to be a leftist Jew

What does it mean to be a Jew shaped by memory, not nationalism? Michael Cohen reflects on identity, integrity and inherited conscience.

I’M THE SON of a Holocaust survivor. I grew up not in theory but in the shadow of genocide, among the silence and stares of those who survived it. I carry it with me, not as a banner but as a birthmark — unavoidable, inherited, deeply imprinted. And from that shadow, I learned something that now marks me in another way: I am a leftist Jew.

That phrase is too often met with a sneer — “self-hating Jew”. As if compassion were betrayal. As if refusing to fall in line with nationalism or zealotry means you’ve turned your back on your people.

But no. To be a leftist Jew is not an act of self-loathing. It is, in fact, an act of self-definition. An affirmation of a Jewish identity rooted not in ethno-nationalism or dogma, but in something older, deeper and inescapable: a moral inheritance.

Semitism goes far beyond Jewish culture

With a lot of focus on anti-Semitism in the world today, the term has often been mistaken as exclusive to Jewish people.

There’s a reflexive assumption that when Jews criticise Israeli policies or express solidarity with Palestinians, it must be out of some internalised shame. But that’s projection. For many of us, our outspokenness doesn’t come from disowning our Jewishness, it comes from owning it too deeply to see it warped.

We don’t support justice in Gaza despite being Jewish. We support it because we are Jewish. Because we remember what it means to be stateless, occupied and reviled. Because our history is not a license to dominate others but a warning against ever doing so.

We are not traitors. We are not confused. We are not trying to please outsiders. We are trying to live authentically within the values that shaped us — values that don’t reduce our identity to flags or faith or force.

We are, quite simply, humanists, but with a memory. A Jewish memory. A memory that includes ghettos, camps, pogroms, exclusion and exile. And in that memory is a seed: a refusal to become what we once feared.

That’s not betrayal. That’s integrity.

Being a leftist Jew is not a deviation. It is not a side current in Jewish identity. It is a stream with a long, proud history: from the Bundists of Eastern Europe to the civil rights marchers in America, from Israeli peace activists to diaspora writers and thinkers who never surrendered their Jewishness to chauvinism.

Stop pretending Jewish anti-Zionists don’t exist

From New York to Bristol, Jewish communities have organised globally in protest over Israel’s brutal and ongoing displacement of Palestinian people.

We are not failed Zionists or lapsed believers. We are something in and of ourselves — a whole identity. We can’t be nationalists. We can’t be supremacists. We can’t be unseeing. It’s not a stance we adopt. It’s a way we are nearly wired.

And for many of us, it’s the only kind of Jewishness we can live with.

To those who say we are self-hating, you misunderstand the self we are loyal to.

We don’t hate being Jewish. We hate being told that Jewishness must mean shutting our eyes, hardening our hearts, or staying silent in the face of suffering — especially when that suffering is inflicted in our name.

We are not here to erase the past. We are here because the past taught us what not to become.

We are still Jews. We just believe our history obliges us to stand with the oppressed, not over them.

Michael Cohen is a Sydney-based Jewish Australian writer who previously contributed extensively to international newspapers, offering both articles and conceptual material. He now focuses on human rights issues.