One nation under God: The American rabbis split from their flocks by politics

In the past, Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz would walk into American progressive settings feeling like everyone was on the same page. When he attended synagogue, he figured everyone held pretty much similar values.

“I rarely experience that anywhere now,” says Yanklowitz, a modern Orthodox Jew and a liberal Zionist who’s concerned with racial justice, immigrant rights, women's rights, climate change, and other progressive causes. “My politics don’t fall perfectly into partisan politics,” he said.

He is not alone. With Donald Trump back in office for his second stint as president, America is more politically divided than ever, and many Orthodox and Reform rabbis whose congregations voted primarily in a different direction are struggling to find community.

“Orthodoxy has shifted so much to the political right over the last decade,” Yanklowitz said. “Prior to the Obama-Trump era, Orthodoxy was largely concerned with getting its own piece of the pie.” In other words, securing its future, without worrying too much about the mainstream political debate.

In the past, the Orthodox community sought politicians who promised funding for their schools and to support Israel, Yanklowitz said, but now they are assimilating into right-wing Christian America, taking extreme stances on abortion and immigration and wearing Trump’s Make America Great Again kippot to temple.

Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz says his fight for a number of progressive social causes has alienated him from his modern Orthodox flock (Image: Shmuly Yanklowitz)[Missing Credit]

This past election, according to a November Jewish Electorate Institute poll, 74 per cent of Orthodox Jews voted for Trump.

Historically, Israel has been seen as a bipartisan issue in American politics, with both Democrat and Republican support, but over the past decade Trump pushed people to take sides, referring to himself as Israel’s “protector” and saying that Democratic Jews “hate their religion” and “everything about Israel”.

Yanklowitz’s views were shaped by his time in the “yeshivah black hat world” as well as teaching in Africa and Central America. His advocacy is “Torah rooted,” he said, “in the concern of ger, yasom and almanah, the vulnerable child, the stranger and the widow as categories of defending the vulnerable.”

In 2007, he founded the Orthodox social justice organization Uri L'Tzedek (“Awakened to Justice”). “That continues to be the social justice voice and Orthodoxy,” he said. “Sadly, kind of the lonely one.”

South Florida-based Rabbi Alan Sherman has seen a similar shift to the left in the Reform movement during the same time period, he told the JC, when the movement became “married” to the politics of President Obama, a president who had a tense relationship with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Then it “snowballed,” he said.

This past election, according to the same Jewish Electorate Institute poll, 84 per cent of Reform Jews voted for Kamala Harris. In Sherman’s view, the Reform movement’s Religious Action Committee, which is its advocacy and activism arm, has become just a mouthpiece for the Democratic Party.

Many within the Reform community are becoming less connected to Israel, he said, and are willing to partner with organisations who are outright antisemitic.

Although Sherman became more liberal religiously over his lifetime (growing up attending an Orthodox yeshivah, being barmitzvahed Conservative, then becoming a Reform rabbi) he grew up politically conservative and that never shifted.

Rabbi Rachel Schmelkin (L) has spent years fight 'toxic polarisation' after her congregation was caught up in the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally (Image: Rachel Schmelkin)[Missing Credit]

Over the years, he became more outspoken about his politics, which has alienated him from his peers, especially within the Palm Beach Board of Rabbis, of which he had been executive vice-president of for 25 years.

Sherman has spoken at events endorsing Trump and filmed commercials for the Republican Jewish Coalition, of which he was a member, along with the Judeo-Christian Republican Club. He even used to wear an “Israel Supports Donald Trump” yarmulke, signed by the President.

In 2017, he left the Reform movement after the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the core organisation of Reform Rabbis, refused a Rosh Hashanah call with then-President Trump, which he felt “was a lack of manners, or what we call in Hebrew, derech eretz.”

Today, he identifies as “a liberal independent rabbi,” he said, and attends the Central Synagogue in New York virtually. If he doesn’t agree with a sermon, he can just flip his computer off.

As a former Army chaplain and Lieutenant Colonel who served in Operation Desert Storm (which liberated Kuwait after the Iraqi invasion), he was appalled by the January 6 riots at the Capitol, after Trump lost the 2020 election. “I broke with Trump as an individual,” he said, “not necessarily with his policies.”

Sherman still feels respected and comfortable in the Florida Jewish community and doesn’t go out of his way to instigate confrontations. “It's the rabbis that are a problem,” he said, “not the congregants.”

Throughout American politics, “people feel they are given constant litmus tests,” Rabbi Rachel Schmelkin, an associate rabbi at Washington Hebrew Congregation, a Washington DC Reform temple.

People believe they need to agree with every statement a political movement makes, which “doesn't leave a lot of room for nuance,” she said. “It doesn't leave a lot of room for questioning. It doesn't leave a lot of room for dialogue and out-loud wondering.”

Because of this, she said, Americans feel you have to either fully embrace one side’s views, or “keep your mouth shut”

In 2017 Schmelkin was the associate rabbi at Congregation Beth Israel in Charlottesville, Virginia when white nationalists blustered through town for the “Unite the Right” rally, carrying torches and screaming that “Jews will not replace us”. It was “the most terrifying experience of my entire life,” she told Religion News. “It changed me.”

In the years that followed, she became director of Jewish programs at the One America Movement, an interfaith initiative that fights “toxic polarisation”. Today, she teaches classes on empathy, listening, and asking questions at her temple.

Her Judaism, she said, is one that values hearing differing opinions, as seen by the example of the sages Hillel and Shammai, who saw things differently but both wanted what was best for the Jewish people. Hillel was said to even explain Shammai’s opinion to make sure he heard it correctly before speaking his own.

But after the October 7 massacres in Israel, many politically progressive Jews feel unheard and uncared for by their own movements. Many progressive leaders have denounced Zionism and accused Israel of genocide while overlooking attacks on Israeli citizens.

Rabbi Mike Moskowitz describes himself as 'left wing' despite his Orthodox religious beliefs (Image: Mike Moskowitz)[Missing Credit]

For Rabbi Mike Moskowitz, an Orthodox rabbi who identifies as “left wing, Yeshivish,” other progressive’s actions don’t impact his. He is going to do the right thing no matter what, because he comes from “a place of faith”.

As the scholar-in-residence for Trans and Queer Jewish Studies at Manhattan’s Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, the world’s largest LGBTQIA+ synagogue, even if other liberals aren’t acting in ways he agrees with, his support for the oppressed is not “transactional,” he said.

But for many progressive Jews, watching the protests rage through American campuses have affected their connection to liberal movements, especially at Congregation Jewish Community North, a Texas Reform synagogue whose congregants, according to the estimates of their rabbi Jonathan Siger, voted 70 per cent Democrat and 30 per cent Republican in the last election.

He joked that the Reform movement has been called “the Democratic Party with holidays,” and he identifies as liberal, “but I am far from a leftist.”

He avoids discussing partisan politics from the bimah, but admits that he has spoken out about concerns about an unnamed politician’s character.

“I have had congregants that have left our congregation because of either the sense that we locally are too progressive for them” he said, “or they just don't like where the movement is in terms of its statements and what it chooses to emphasize.”

Although he’s lived in Boston and New York, he can’t help but view certain issues from a Southern perspective, especially gun ownership. In the South, houses are farther apart, so if someone breaks into your home there are no neighbors to help and police will take ten minutes to arrive, he said. “It’s a very different view of terms of self-reliance.”

He’s proud of the Reform movement’s progressive stances, especially related to LGBTQIA+ inclusion and supporting African Americans during the Civil Rights Movement.

His congregation was planning its first trip to Israel on October 8, 2023, which was cancelled at the last minute after the Hamas attacks, and he feels it’s his duty to speak outwardly on Israeli politics, he said, “because all Jews are responsible for each other”. He also wants attendees to feel invested in and informed about Israel.

He’s had attendees thank him for speaking up about settler violence against Arabs in the West Bank, he said, but he’s also had attendees who refused to wish him “Shabbat shalom” after a speech.

Rabbi Jonathan Siger hailed the Reform movements assistance in the Civil and LGBTQIA+ rights campaigns, but is also a strong advocate of gun ownership (Image: Jonathan Siger)[Missing Credit]

Post October 7, more people are attending his synagogue, and there are more converts, which is “very reassuring,” he said. With all the tumult in the world, people are choosing Judaism. Although tradition says rabbis should turn away a potential convert three times before welcoming them, he just tells them to “read the newspaper for three days in a row,” he said. “It hasn't deterred them.”

Moskowitz said that even with the schism ripping through America, people want the same things: to pursue their dreams, be safe, and care for their families, they may just go about itdifferent ways and not recognize how their actions are affecting others, including family members they care for. Often, they may go along with bigoted ideas, without realising how they don’t line up with their own values.

Screaming won’t solve problems, he said, but sometimes you have to, just because you are in such pain and need to let it out.

Recently, he met with a friend from yeshivah who he has gone vast periods of time not speaking to because they disagree on politics. “Somewhere around Yom Kippur this year, we said, ‘Listen, it's too much. Let's just get together,” he said. “We don't have to talk about anything that's upsetting for either one of us.’”

Both recognised that they may have different perspectives and preferences, but that they cared for one another. Even when they didn’t see eye to eye, they didn’t have malicious intent. “People are lovable even though they disagree with us,” Moskowitz said.

In fact, when you care for people with different perspectives, you acknowledge their humanity.

In the Torah, he said, Joseph’s brothers see him from afar and plot to murder him. “From a distance, it's much easier to dehumanise.”

Because everyone is walking around triggered, Schmelkin said, they are ready to attack one another, asking aloud: “How do we move forward with all the pain and hurt that has happened? How do we live with it, and how do we actually use it for something good?”

For Yanklowitz, it’s important to stay hopeful.

“I have very little interest in the doom and gloom Jewish narrative that the Holocaust is about to happen again.” Although there are legitimate threats, he said, Jews in America and Israel are more secure than ever. He appreciates that both Republican Jews and Democrat Jews have alliesacross the spectrum.

Young Jews have been searching him out, feeling “homeless” in other Jewish communities and on campus. They believe in a “Torah of compassion and empathy,” but have seen Jewish leaders who “feel completely unable to demonstrate that, even as it relates to any level of concern for humanity in Gaza, regardless of what one's policy views are… We can be a refuge for them.”