WATCH: Jews explain how they were exiled from their woke synagogues
In 2021, APT co-sponsored a one-of-a-kind webinar with the Conference of Jewish Affairs, headed by Rabbi Aryeh Spero, on a growing and disturbing trend: Jews who are fed up with their communal and religious leaders celebrating the values of “woke” (sometimes anti-Israel) leftism and not Tanakh’.
Politically moderate to conservative American Jews, members of mainly Reform synagogues, are discovering that their places of worship have been invaded and occupied by woke leftist ideology. Many have been forced to leave their congregations out of a sense of betrayal and abandonment by their religious leaders.
Adrienne Skolnik, a freelance writer and member of the Conference of Jewish Affairs’ advisory committee, solicited testimonies from Jews who have become troubled by and disillusioned with their increasingly leftist and openly political synagogues.
The 22 presented testimonies include accounts of everything from rabbis celebrating the anti-Semitic Black Lives Matter movement to synagogue educational programs demanding that congregants admit to their “white privilege.”
The testimonies presented here are a saddening reminder of the human cost of Jewish leaders’ failures. Having embraced leftist universalism instead of Judaism, they not only allowed this Marxist takeover of the American rabbinate, but are completely deaf to its victims’ cries for help and spiritual acceptance.
Jewish souls have lost their prayer and community homes and are in pain because all-too-earthly Jewish leaders have discounted their worth in favor of partisan politics clothed in religious garb. In a time of rapidly growing anti-Semitism, this kind of failure cannot be any more unacceptable.