On March 30, Rabbi Brant Rosen of Tzedek Chicago, a synagogue on the heimish North Side of the city, made the unusual announcement that his congregation had “just voted to adopt anti-Zionism as a core value.” The proclamation arrived within days of 11 murders in a wave of terrorist attacks across Israel. On April 7, three more Israelis were killed on Dizengoff Street in the heart of Tel Aviv in this new wave of violence. It’s not often that an established synagogue declares its antipathy against the Jewish state as a core part of its identity—but then again, this wasn’t out of step for Rabbi Rosen, who’d been working himself up to this very moment for the better part of the past decade.
As it happens, I’ve known Rabbi Rosen since before “I was a man.” I grew up in Skokie, Illinois, and attended the Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation in neighboring Evanston, where Rabbi Brant held the rabbinate. Back then, he was, I suppose, a kind of liberal Zionist. I didn’t have much of an impression of him, other than that he seemed kind and Jewish. In 2002, when I became a bar mitzvah, Rabbi Brant led the service. In his notes on my d’var (which I recently read again), he seems reasonably sympathetic to Israel.
By the time Rabbi Brant left JRC in 2014, my father and I had heard through the grapevine that he’d become a radical pro-Palestinian activist, and in our family, “Rabbi Brant” became a catchall for a certain kind of Jew we simply could not understand. When I moved back to Chicago this past year, I couldn’t help but go back to the source. I wanted to know: Who are these people? What even is a “non-Zionist” synagogue during the most spiritually elevated time of the year?
To try to find the answer, I attended Tzedek’s 2021 High Holidays services over Zoom.
