The Anthem is a concert hall by the waterfront in Washington DC. Upcoming performing acts include Ringo Starr and Vampire Weekend.
But on 7 October, it will be where three large mainstream Jewish organizations, pulling from across the city’s Jewish communities, will host an evening of remembrance. Attendees are invited to send in photo reflections – pictures of themselves and their community showing support for Israel – some of which will be shared at the event, an attempt to give the evening a feeling that’s both deeply personal and communal.
The Washington convening, hosted by the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington, Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington, and the Washington Board of Rabbis, will be one of many that will be held next week by Jewish groups across the US to mark a year since the attack by Hamas on Israel that saw over 1,100 people killed and 251 taken hostage. There will be memorials, vigils, prayers, lectures and panels held in synagogues, on campuses and public squares, and even concert halls.
But Hamas’s attack was followed by Israel’s war in Gaza, which has, so far, killed over 40,000 people, a figure some consider an underestimate. Over this period of time, hundreds of Palestinians have also been killed in the West Bank; Israel’s attacks in its campaign against Hezbollah in recent days also killed civilians in Lebanon.
The anniversary, then, confronts Jewish groups with the question of what, exactly, they’re commemorating; who the commemorations are for; and what they want their attendees to take from them.
The varying answers are another reflection of the growing fractures within and between America’s Jewish communities – which existed before 7 October and have been thrown into sharper focus since.
“Everyone’s just digging deeper wherever they were,” said Marc Dollinger, professor of Jewish studies at San Francisco State University. American Jews had their own beliefs and narratives about Israel and its role in their lives and American Jewishness before the war, he said; what has followed fit into those narratives.
Those narratives have clashed and bumped up against each other all year. They’ll collide as Jews head to synagogue, or don’t, for the High Holidays, which begin with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, on Wednesday evening. And they will shape how American Jews mark a year since Hamas’s attack.
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In their 7 October commemorations, mainstream Jewish groups will largely focus on Jewish pain and healing, with appeals to an increasingly elusive notion of Jewish unity.
“Overall the goal is to bring together the full breadth of the Washington Jewish community to be together on October 7, one year after the attack,” said Gil Preuss, chief executive of Washington’s Jewish Federation.
The event will be divided into three sections: on memory; on the resilience of the Jewish community; and on unity and renewal. There will be speeches, but not by politicians. It’s not about politics, he said. It’s about the Jewish community.
“Even with our broad voices, and different perspectives about the conflict, there is a critical idea … about us coming together as a Jewish community.”
Halfway across the country, in Chicago, Dan Goldwin, chief public affairs officer of the Jewish United Fund/Jewish Federation of Chicago, is planning a similar event. “We are acting as convener for a community-wide memorial,” he said, that is meant to be “one communal stop”. More than 45 organizations are co-sponsoring. Prayers will be led by rabbis, cantors will offer songs, and speakers will include Congressman Brad Schneider, but also the aunt and grandmother of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, a young man taken captive and killed by Hamas, and a survivor of the Nova music festival.
He hopes people are able to leave remembering the feeling of unity Jews felt on that day. “We have to be united. We have to be together,” Goldwin said.
But for others, the focus on unity means sidestepping hard questions and conversations.
“Folks who are really feeling deep emotional pain at the genocide in Gaza and seeing so many of our institutions not addressing that particular framing, and often completely leaving out the necessity of saving Palestinian life after so much has already been demolished – it makes it impossible for many Jews to feel they have an institutional space to process this really incredible moment in Jewish history,” said Rabbi Andrue Kahn, executive director of American Council for Judaism.
His organization was originally established to fight Zionism and is now dedicated to supporting Jewish spaces “with intentional resistance to the elements of nationalism, colonialism, imperialism and supremacy which have taken root in many of our Jewish communal homes”.
Most American Jews feel some emotional attachment to Israel: according to a 2020 Pew study, 58% of American Jews were very or somewhat emotionally attached, though 54% had never visited. A more recent Pew study, from April, found that American Jews are far more likely than the average American to support Israel’s reasons for fighting Hamas: 89% of American Jews said Israel’s reasons were valid, compared to 58% of Americans overall.
At the same time, younger American Jews were less likely than their older counterparts to say the way Israel was carrying out its response was acceptable: just 52% of American Jews ages 18-34 said so, compared to 69% of those ages 50 to 64.
While these divisions existed before the war, they have deepened in the last year, with arguments over Israel recurring at synagogues, family dinner tables, and between Jewish groups across the country. The split is evidenced, for example, in a Rabbis for Ceasefire directory of Jewish communities “eager to warmly welcome those in ceasefire movements, exactly as you are” for the High Holidays.
The difference isn’t only generational, of course, but younger American Jews are more likely than their elders to protest against the war, and have played a visible role in the movement against it. They are also less likely to view antisemitism as a “very serious” problem, perhaps in part because they are less likely to see protests against Israeli policy and even Israel itself as antisemitic.
Dollinger sees the different responses to the war, and even the different approaches to commemoration, as part of a broader shifting of tectonic plates within American Jewry and how it understands itself and its relationship to Israel.
American Jewish identity is largely a “pluralistic, liberal enterprise”, he said, while Israel represents illiberal, ethnic nationalism.
“I think a whole lot of American Jews have never appreciated the fundamental difference between American Jews and Israeli Jews.”
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The memorial events are all, of course, pegged to 7 October, but will tell stories that span very different timelines.
“We’re really trying to zero in on what happened that day,” Goldwin said. “October 7 was still a moment in time. That’s how we’re looking at this.”
More progressive groups see the day as a terrible milestone – but one that happened in a violent historical context that began much earlier.
Eva Borgwardt, national spokesperson of IfNotNow, a group of American Jews founded a decade ago and organizing to end US support for what they call Israeli apartheid, took this view. “We need to be capable of holding three things simultaneously.”
6 October, she said, was “a normal day for Israelis, but a day under occupation, apartheid, and siege for Palestinians with no end in sight”. 7 October was a massacre and a tragedy. And then, “starting October 8, the Israeli government has enacted a campaign of massacre and starvation that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians with a level of cruelty beyond our worst nightmares.”
“We wanted a place for our Jewish community to be able to grieve while holding all those truths simultaneously,” she said. IfNotNow is holding memorial vigils across the country for Israelis killed on 7 October and the Palestinians killed in the subsequent, ongoing war. The group’s memorial gathering in Manhattan will be put on along with other progressive Jewish groups. The group’s Instagram also advertises a separate Israelis for Peace vigil that will follow the progressive groups’ gathering.
“I think for a lot of Jewish communities, it’s still October 8,” said Rabbi Jill Jacobs, chief executive of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, which will be holding a Zoom prayer gathering on 7 October. She said she understands why.
“But in the meantime there have been horrific scenes from Gaza of tens of thousands of civilians who had nothing to do with anything who were killed, including thousands of children,” she said.
“I don’t think that we can pretend that it’s October 8 and we’re just in our immediate grief.”
