The practice of exile is deeply rooted in Jewish history, stretching back to ancient times and traversing context and place. Its backdrop has been forced dislocation, suffering and death. Today a new exile is being created and practiced, but this time against the backdrop of Jewish affluence and power. The Jewish exile of our time seeks to address the empowerment and expansion of Israel and the silence of Jewish leadership in the United States in the face of that. Indeed, a civil war has broken out within the Jewish community over the issues of empowerment, expansion and silence, even as they become the central question of Jewish identity, history and the future. Against the Jewish establishment in Israel and America, Jews of conscience speak boldly this truth: the dislocation, denigration and destruction of Palestinians and Palestine bears the same consequences for Jewish life. For speaking this truth, Jews of conscience are exiled-within power and affluence–to a place beyond geographic designation and with out destination. It is an exile at the end of Jewish history as we have known and inherited it.

There are many elements to this exile, some ironic, others paradoxical:

Jews in exile are almost to the person completely secular, though, as it turns out, in a peculiarly Jewish way. Many of these Jews of conscience are within Israel or, reversing the theological claim of ingathering, have left Israel and enliven the Jewish diaspora. And yet the haunting question remains: are these secular Jews of conscience carrying the covenant into exile with them?

Jewish academics, once denied employment and status, and programs of Jewish and Holocaust studies, only coming into being within the last decades, rather than critically evaluating Jewish power and ideology, are in the vanguard of disciplining Jewish dissenters, preventing their employment and censoring speech on campuses across the nation.

Christian renewal in the West, so indebted to Jewish scripture and reflection on the Holocaust, has become silent on the Jewish civil war, and liberation theologians, including most feminist theologians, are more concerned about their own empire building–as it turns out the same kind of empires they correctly criticized their patriarchal foes for building and maintaining–than they are about Jews of conscience.

In the academy the double standard toward women and people of color now applies to Jews and often is enforced by those once-insurgent and now established women and persons of color. Name one Jewish thinker at a major academic institution involved in the study of religion who places the possibility of solidarity with the Palestinian people at the center of his or her concern? Name one Jewish thinker at a prominent Christian seminary who thinks through and articulates the violence and militarism that has come to be at the center of Jewish life or seeks a way of creating a future for Jews and Palestinians beyond the cycle of violence and atrocity?

The ecumenical dialogue, once an avenue for Christian renewal, has become the ecumenical deal. The ecumenical deal is simple yet with profound implications: Jews demand that Christians in the West repent for the sin of antiJewishness; the main vehicle for Christian repentance is uncritical support for the state of Israel and its policies. Uncritical support for Israel renders Palestinians and Palestine invisible. Critique of Israel’s policies vis-a-vis the Palestinian people is deemed anti-Jewish and a return to the previous understanding of Jews within Christian theology and practice. Conservative, moderate and radical Christian academics uphold this ecumenical deal. Though in private they may be critics of Israel, yet even amid the resentment and pressure exerted to enforce the ecumenical deal, they remain in public silent.

The Holocaust has become a safe haven for Jews and Christians. Instead of raising questions about power and oppression, the Holocaust often becomes a barrier to speech and activity. For Jews, the Holocaust becomes a place of unaccountability, a fire-wall against critical thought; for Christians, the Holocaust becomes a place of silent retreat, excusing their silence, as another crime is committed in the name of the Holocaust.

That Jews and Christians, worshiping the same God, sharing the Hebrew bible, and embracing a mutually binding covenant are working together to establish God’s reign on earth, is, it turns out, more of a myth than a reality. Jews employed in universities and seminaries are for the most part used to lay a deeper and more expansive groundwork for Christians’ belief. Thus Jews in the field of Hebrew bible, the study of Hebrew, medieval Jewry, even modern Judaism and Holocaust, are employed to romanticize Jewish history as a vehicle for Christian renewal. Jewish innocence and suffering become a way for Christians to recover their innocence through repentance and self-sacrifice.

Critical Jewish thought–especially about the evolving Constantinian Judaism of our time and use of Jewish religious imagery and identity to oppress another people and preserve a sense of innocence and purpose, the very same reality that Jews experienced under Constantinian Christianity and rightly criticized and rejected as hypocritical–is rejected by many Christian academics as an unwelcome and unnecessary intrusion into their religious enterprise. Jews of conscience feel this Christian self-involvement as a power against them and a betrayal. It confirms to Jews that Christians have used them in the past for their own sense of triumphalism and now Christians use them to buttress a sense of humility and innocence. Jews were defined and are defined today in the Christian imagination and for Christian needs. As persons and as a community, in their beauty and limitations, Jews are not important enough to Christians to speak boldly and unequivocally about what is being done to the Palestinians and to the Jewish community itself. Hence Jews are not with Christians; they are alone.