Parading Jews

I am, as readers new and old may have gathered, a woman of many fixations, not all of them productive. I am therefore now obsessed with the illustration accompanying a JTA article I wrote about for my latest The CJN column. First, though, what my column was, which just might be helpful for context.

I wrote about how the big annual Jewish events in the two cities I know best, New York and Toronto, are Israel events. It’s a bit curious, if you stop and think about it. Some, including Rabbi Jill Jacobs, author of the JTA article in question, say that a Jewish-not-Israel event would be preferable, and would still be able to include shows of support for Israel from whichever participants felt moved in that direction.

While I agree with this in principle, particularly in light of the presence of right-wing politicians at the NYC event this year, I have some questions about whether, in effect, the views of qualm-havers could plausibly matter. The number of pro-Israel Jews interested in attending a huge Jewish event like a parade almost certainly vastly exceeds the number of anti-Israel and Israel-ambivalent Jews who wish to do such a thing. Throw a different sort of event, one that decenters Israel (but is not explicitly antizionist) and not only do fewer people show up but also…

Even Jewish events that don’t centre Israel get treated as pro-Israel rallies by their anti-Zionist/antisemitic detractors. Take The Great Nosh, a Jewish food festival in New York that the JTA also covered. It is effectively the culinary version of what Rabbi Jacobs proposes. It is not an Israel event, but rather an all-purpose Jewish one that doesn’t exclude Israeli elements. That was still ‘Zionist’ enough for Breads Bakery employees to organize in part because of the chain’s participation in that festival…. Replacing an Israel Day Parade or Walk With Israel with something called Bundism, Bagels, and a Smidge of Zionism would not pass muster. Anyone who was going to be mad at a gathering of Jews whose purpose was anything other than renouncing Israel is going to have that same sentiment.

But it’s this populism/class angle I keep returning to. With the exception of Pride, though even this may be changing, a big parade is not chic. They’re family events, attended by people who have hung around a city on a weekend when the upscale would be at a summer home. Attendees tend to be the common man. Ordinary if sometimes unusually zealous members of the community in question. The cultural-elite outliers aren’t there en masse (as if there were a masse for them to be en to begin with), and nor are the economic elites (see again, summer houses, exotic vacations…).

The illustration accompanying Rabbi Jacobs’s article, by Grace Yagel, is faultless in its conveying of the gist of the piece itself. As such, it helps illustrate a tension in the argument.

The image is of a Jewish gathering that is half (?) visibly non-white, where Pride-with-star-of-David flags outnumber Israeli ones, and where a remarkable number of participants are in traditional Jewish (?) garb from India? Yemen? Ukraine? or otherwise wearing clothes that you quite simply do not see on Jews in New York City in 2026. This visibly diverse, vibrant portrait of what an event decentering Israel would look like, as though making things less Israel-ish would also bring about increased melanin and decreased Ashkenormativity.

But is that how it would go? Or would it mean brokering a split between the relatively white-and-privileged Jews who wound up in places like New York and Toronto, and the relatively brown-and-poor ones who found their way to Israel? If North American Jews wash their hands of Israel, is this a show of solidarity with Palestinians and colonized peoples generally? Or is it snootily (and maybe even racist-ly) rejecting one’s embarrassing relations?

The illustration looks like nothing so much as long-2010s fantasy of diversity, the sort found in the marketing materials of something being marketed at a not-particularly-diverse audience.

Rabbi Jacobs’s described replacement event sounds great! It also sounds… posh:

At the afterparty in Central Park, you could taste food ranging from blintzes to bakhsh, from sabich to sambusak, from kugel to kubaneh. There would be fried artichokes, sufganiyot, sfenj, bumuelos and anything else Jews have ever dropped in sizzling oil. Michael Twitty, Molly Yeh, Michael Solomonov, Joan Nathan and Beejhy Barhany would offer cooking demonstrations.

At one booth, you might learn a few letters of Hebrew calligraphy, and at another, you could study a piece of Talmud. Rabbis and educators would teach people of all genders to lay tefillin and tie tzitzit. And there would be art projects galore — you might design a tzedakah box, paint a mezuzah or make an embossed foil hamsa. At the largest ever Jewish book exchange, anyone could swap books they’ve read and go home with even more books.

This is this hard-to-explain thing, this you-know-it-when-you-see-it, where diverse meets upscale. It is Woke Baby in the window of an upscale boutique in a liberal white neighborhood. I mean, “fried artichokes” at a big parade, and yes I know they are a traditional Italian Jewish food, and yes, they are delicious, but also, have you seen the price of artichokes?

So maybe the ideal is not a parade decentering Israel, but rather one that’s something like a July 4th gathering that is not specifically honoring Donald Trump. Maybe keep the Israel focus, but not use it as a showcasing moment for the worst that modern-day Israel has to offer, namely its right-wing political leaders. But most of all, maybe what I think it should be is irrelevant.