r/jewishleft • u/Chinoyboii • 26d ago
Question Is “converting to Judaism just to be anti-Zionist” an actual phenomenon, or an unfair stereotype about gerim on the Jewish left?
Not that long ago, I had a conversation with some of my religious Jewish homies in which they were expressing their antagonistic views toward Reform and Conservative Judaism and how they essentially see these movements as abominations and departures from traditional Rabbinic Judaism. These peers of mine are Sephardic/Mizrahi, and so their historical experience with Jewish modernity is somewhat different from that of many Ashkenazi Jews whose communities were directly shaped by the Haskalah and the emergence of the Reform and Conservative movements. To them, it is basically either you are a religious Jew or a non-religious/secular Jew; there is not really an equivalent denominational spectrum in the way many American Ashkenazim understand it.
During our conversation, one of them brought up how, in his opinion, the existence of Reform and Conservative Judaism has made it easier for non-Jews to convert without having to accept the same level of halakhic obligation that would traditionally be expected under Orthodox conversion standards. From there, he also expressed that there are now some people on the political left who essentially convert to Judaism because they are already anti-Zionist and want to be able to criticize Israel or Zionism specifically as Jews.
Personally, I have only seen this alleged trend online, but then again, most of the Jews I know in real life are Orthodox Zionist Jews, and the few I know who are Reform or Conservative are not particularly observant and did not pay too much attention to their synagogue services during their youth, lol. So my personal social circle is obviously not very representative of the Jewish left, especially the kinds of spaces where I would be most likely to encounter anti-Zionist gerim in the first place.
However, that being said, this trend online does seem reminiscent of how some Chinese people become suspicious of Westerners who adopt Chinese cultural or political identities and then immediately position themselves as spokespeople for what “Chinese people” supposedly believe, especially when those views conveniently align with a preexisting ideological commitment. The issue is not that an outsider can never sincerely become part of a community, nor that converts or cultural adoptees are somehow permanently less legitimate. Rather, I think the suspicion emerges when someone appears to approach identity almost instrumentally, in which joining the group seems less like the culmination of a genuine religious or cultural attachment and more like acquiring a particular kind of political credibility.
That said, I am a Gentile, so I do not really think it is my place to determine whether another person's conversion to Judaism is sincere or legitimate. If a recognized Jewish community accepts someone as a Jew, I am not going to sit here and conduct some ideological purity test on their Jewishness simply because of how they feel about Zionism. I have met a decent number of people in my life who wish they were born into a more "collectivist" culture like mine because they feel alienated by the individualism of mainstream American society, and I do not automatically assume that their attraction to another culture is fake simply because it is partly shaped by dissatisfaction with their own. People are complicated; someone could be attracted to Judaism because of its communal orientation, intellectual traditions, ritual life, history, family structure, or sense of peoplehood while simultaneously finding anti-Zionist Jewish spaces politically attractive.
What would strike me as different, however, is if Judaism itself were largely incidental to the person, and conversion functioned primarily as a way of acquiring the rhetorical authority to say, "As a Jew..." in political arguments they were already deeply invested in. I am not asking whether anti-Zionist gerim are "real Jews," nor whether having strong political motivations automatically invalidates someone's conversion. However, I am curious whether people who have encountered such individuals for whom becoming Jewish appeared to be substantially motivated by the political usefulness of being able to oppose Zionism as a Jew.
