When Will the Woke Wake Up?

A growing number of Jews have joined the cohort of woke partisans turning, in a rush to judgment, on Israel. It serves as ideal punching bag for progressive-minded advocates of Jewish Diaspora existence - those seeking to ingratiate themselves with gentile host societies historically predisposed to look with disfavor on us.

The “enlightened” impulse to slough off identification with the Jewish State dovetails neatly with insecure Jews’ wish to belong in a proverbially, and these days increasingly, hostile social environment. The need for approval often impels people to act against their own interests and turn their back on family, friends and community.

In the making is a cautionary tale warning of how Jews can be their own worst enemies: the political career of California State Senator Scott Wiener. Front-runner in a San Francisco Congressional campaign (to succeed Nancy Pelosi), Wiener effectively flip-flopped over support for Israel.

After hesitating during a debate, he saw he had to do damage control and, kowtowing to antizionists in his base, capitulated under pressure into reciting the Gaza genocide litany.

Despite being gay, supporting LGBTQ+ and Palestinian rights, and advocating for socially progressive economic policies, he is persona non grata anyway with some of the progressives whose votes he counts on. He has faced vitriol and threats from them.

Wiener’s policy positions on Israel overlap significantly with those of antizionists’. Even before falling in line with the genocide libel, he passed the litmus test of abjuring AIPAC money; doing that wasn’t enough to fend off “guilt” by association with other Israel-friendly thinking. He supports Israel’s right to exist and condemned Hamas’s October 7 massacre.

But his genocide statement crossed a red line. Wiener resigned as chair of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus.

One report states the issue as follows: “[H]is evolving—or, as critics argue, opportunistic—stances on Israel reveal a pattern of political calibration that has left many in his hyper-progressive base uneasy and alienated segments of the Jewish public that once viewed him as an ally.1”

Will Wiener win his electoral race? Current polling shows he’s leading against primary runner-up Connie Chan, who’s to his left on Israel and Palestinians. She fought back against and defeated a third candidate, extreme in his antizionist views, who tried to tie her to the pro-Israel lobby - a charge her campaign vociferously denied.

Anti-Israel stances are now de rigueur in deep blue districts.

With both pro-Israel Jews and Israel’s enemies on his case, Wiener is in a tight spot.

If he proves victorious in November, victory will carry a price tag: In his ambition to rise in national politics, he placated antizionists, sacrificing his previously solid relationship with many liberal Jewish constituents.

The uncomfortable, unstable ground on which he stands is the exilic Jew’s predicament: not fully accepted by the gentile world he yearns to fit into; while alienated from, no longer at home in, a Jewish world whose value of peoplehood he won’t unreservedly uphold. Trusted by neither.

Neither fish nor fowl, he can’t turn right or left. He has nowhere to go but up, but to what end?

The ever-present temptation to dissociate from our roots and commitments has always had its appeal. Yet, from Moshe and Esther in the Tanakh/Bible to Theodor Herzl and Franz Rosenzweig in modern times, our story is filled with examples of Jews who at first seek refuge in safe anonymity or flirt with assimilation and religious conversion, then ultimately muster courage and come out of hiding to openly embrace and champion Jewishness.

A wake-up call - from God, or conscience - pulls them back.

Others tune out the wake-up call.

I wish I could speak with Scott Wiener, heart to heart, for five minutes. I’d ask him if rubber-stamping the phony charge that Israel is guilty of genocide - a blood libel as bad as what Christians cooked up during the Middle Ages; a racist smear as ugly as what modern antisemites spewed forth in their demonization campaign paving the way for the Shoah - just to ensure his viability, and advance his career, in politics was worth the cost of forfeiting his integrity as a human being and dignity as a Jew.

From the classic Zionist hymn “Hava Nagila”: “Uru Uru Achim…” “Awake, Awake, Brethren!” The song exhorts us to wake up from spiritual paralysis and negativity and make an active commitment to embrace Jewish living and peoplehood with confidence and joy.

Will Wiener and others who’ve buckled under woke antizionism do teshuvah - “return” from spiritual exile? Will they wake up, reject the hateful propaganda, and reengage with am yisrael?

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