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RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

Unlike Israeli Jews, I grew up as a religious minority, among white Christians in Michigan. While I suffered from anti-Semitism, I also learned how to create my own Jewish identity. Regrettably, I was sent to the Jewish Theological Seminary of America for graduate studies. In 1987-88 I took a year in Israel and during that time asked my mother and grandmother to visit. 

I thought that having three generations of women in our family together in Jerusalem would be special. My mother and her mother declined. I did not understand how to interpret this at the time but now consider that Jewish nationalism may have been contrary to their Jewish identities. Neither had ever spoken with me about Israel. 

THRESHOLDS

I discovered The Threshold of Dissent: A History of American Jewish Critics of Zionism by Marjorie Feld and am waiting for the Byker Library to order this for me. What I’ve read about (but not in) the book is that Feld explores how each new generation of dissenters feels that it is the first to question support for Israel. 

The NYU Press introduction for Feld’s work states:

“Throughout the twentieth century, American Jewish communal leaders projected a unified position of unconditional support for Israel, cementing it as a cornerstone of American Jewish identity. This unwavering position served to marginalize and label dissenters as antisemitic, systematically limiting the threshold of acceptable criticism. In pursuit of this forced consensus, these leaders entered Cold War alliances, distanced themselves from progressive civil rights and anti-colonial movements, and turned a blind eye to human rights abuses in Israel.”

TRUE FOR ME

Following the betrayal of my family involving Jewish organizations, I feel that I don't belong in the Jewish community. When I think of being Jewish and what holds me, it is my parents alone. In some deep regard, my parents are the only community that I have ever had. If my parents did not have a Jewish star on their gravestone, I would walk away and never look back. 

In my lifetime, Jewish communal organizations have caused me more pain than joy. They have demoralized me, irreparably. And so-called leaders in Israel today are trading on Jews for a Christian Armageddon. Not my idea of safety -- nor of God. I needed Feld’s book decades ago, when I was marginalized in rabbinical school and earlier at JTS for not conforming to their empty and miserable expressions of Jewish life and ideology. And I needed her book before that too, so I could have been spared JTS altogether. 

THE HAILE SHUL

My discovery of Feld’s book dovetails with a proposal that I wrote between September and December 2024 to design, build, and launch a new non-denominational and non-partisan synagogue in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I want to name this after my mother, Haile Sandra Zuppke Plafkin, on a campus named for her and my father, Roger Allen Ginsberg Plafkin. This Shul will foster communal restoration and growth through Jewish liturgy and musical arts. [Posted: May 4, 2025]

UPDATE

Feld's book arrived at Byker on May 14th. Reading the first half reminds me that I don't need to walk away and never look back. I just need to walk away from ideologues who do not represent me. This brings me back to my emails to Israel's President in December, reprinted below. [Posted: May 17, 2025]

EMAIL TO PRESIDENT ISAAC HERZOG

December 2, 2024 3:00PM EST

Dear President Herzog:

It’s me again — still processing all the trauma that Israel has brought to my life, not just since October 7, 2023, but earlier, as I now see it. I am so bothered that it drove me to do more research into early Reform Jews who did not support the State and other figures like Israel Zangwill who at first collaborated with Theodor Hertzl but then turned tides to advocate for Jewish Territorial-ism. Since Zangwill died before the Nazi Holocaust, there’s no knowing if he would have comeback to the idea of Statism — replete with the military nightmares that define and imprison Israel. Here’s an article that I discovered.

My job isn’t to predict what Zangwill would or wouldn’t have done, but I do want you to know that I resent Israel reducing Judaism to military Zionism. I am a Zionist, but of a different order, class, phylum -- and Kingdom. My clarified feelings help me see why it is more crucial for me to build the Haile Shul on the Roger & Sandra Plafkin Campus than to do anything else in the rapidly decaying Jewish world. For what it is worth, my mother never once spoke to me about the State of Israel and when I studied in Jerusalem (1987-88) she and my grandmother (Diane Rubenstein Zuppke) chose not to visit me upon my invitation.  My mother and father did however travel to Italy with me the year after I returned from Israel. We attended a Passover Seder in Venice. Food for thought. [Posted: May 20, 2025]

[Follow Up Email at 6:34pm EST]

I want to say more about my parents (z’l).

When in Italy, we also travelled to other cities, including Rome where we visited the Vatican. 

It was a day when Pope John Paul II was speaking and praying in the court yard. We were far from the crowd or congregation, but we could see and hear the Pope. My parents did not attempt to go closer but stood quietly, listening and looking. Afterwards we toured one of the buildings. We walked huge rooms housing magnificent carpets that recalled histories of empire building: religious triumphalism, treaties, bloody conquest, and fateful submission. On a different day, we visited Pompeii where we walked on the graves of women, men and children who suffocated under volcanic ash.
If we had made it to Israel, I believe that my parents would have also been deeply moved by David’s Tower or the Western Wall — and yet more ancient settlements in Jericho which make Rome and Pompeii seem young. Yes, this would have impressed and touched my parents. 
But in their lifetime, this was not the trip that they made. 
And before they died, they did not ask me to bury them in Jerusalem. 
They asked me to bury them at our farm (in Ada), by the pond, where I played as a child. 

[Posted: May 21, 2025]