Tonight is the second night of Shavuot, the rabbi says.
It is customary for Jews to eat dairy on Shavuot, a holiday commemorating the receipt of the Torah atop Mount Sinai. Perhaps this explains why there are three round cheesecakes on the Oneg table, each one looking like a milky full moon.
In Palestine, Shavuot is celebrated for one night, but in Diaspora we celebrate it for two. Why is that?
The rabbi looks around the room at us, some 30 Jews huddled inside a Quaker meeting house in Durham, North Carolina. We’re seated in a circle around a small wooden table with two Shabbat candles. The walls of this wood-paneled sanctuary have absorbed our voices for the past hour as we sing our way through Kabbalat Shabbat—in Hebrew, English, and wordless nigguns. We are queer, trans, Ashkenazi, Jews of Color; we use canes, wheelchairs, and hearing aids; we are a gray-haired septuagenarian and a crying infant; we are Southerners.
We are Makom, an anti-Zionist Jewish community.
In Babylonia, the rabbi continues, early Diasporic Jews struggled to keep time. At first, they sought to follow the centralized religious authority of Jerusalem’s timekeepers by means of a complex system of signal fires lit upon mountaintops, the light of which danced across hundreds of miles. But this didn’t work. So, the Diaspora’s Jews began to celebrate their holidays with an extra night thrown in, hoping that at least one of those nights might be the correct one.
Why not just look at the moon? a congregant interjects.
All eyes turn toward their voice.
I mean, couldn’t the Babylonian Jews just look at the sky and tell what day of the month it is?
The rabbi smiles. We live, he says, in the liminality of Diaspora, which is a very powerful place to be.
All eyes return to the rabbi.
He then quotes Black feminist philosopher bell hooks on how “being on the margins” can be a wellspring of creativity and power. Just as it was for the Babylonian Jews, we can invent our own way of doing things. New ways of being Jewish.
We can practice a Judaism without centering Jerusalem.
The room takes a straw poll: Should Makom celebrate one or two days of chag, or holiday? The result is an overwhelming “two.”
It affirms what some in this community call Diasporism, a Jewish way of life rooted in the margins.
A constellation of Jewish non-Zionist, anti-Zionist, and Diasporist communities such as Makom has emerged in the South over the past decade. These include half a dozen havurot, or autonomous religious collectives, from Little Rock, Arkansas, to Richmond, Virginia, as well as over a dozen Southern chapters of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), one of the largest Jewish anti-Zionist organizations in the world.
In a widely circulated 2025 essay, Jewish Currents editor-in-chief Arielle Angel argued that “we need new Jewish institutions” to meet the needs of this growing Jewish anti-Zionist population.
What does it look like to build these new institutions? To support a way of life that spurns the center, just as the Babylonian Jews turned away from Jerusalem, in favor of the margins, leaning into mutual safety, solidarity, and kinship with the erev rav—the mixed multitudes—where we live?
It looks like the South.
The world to come
Three hundred miles west of Durham, North Carolina, in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains, JVP-Knoxville is one of the only anti-Zionist groups in Tennessee. Julie Elfin, a chapter leader, says last fall the group celebrated Sukkot in a member’s backyard. A multigenerational cohort, including a 3-week-old baby, huddled in the homemade Sukkah.
“We called in martyrs, and ancestors who were lost in the Holocaust, and we sat with them in the dark,” she said. “It wasn’t melancholy. It was actually really beautiful.”
These gatherings are not just spiritual, said Makom’s rabbi, Noah Rubin-Blose. They’re political. “[We’re] trying to create the Judaism of our dreams and a Judaism of liberation,” he told me.
There’s a growing audience for it.
According to a March 2025 survey by the Jewish Federations of North America, 15% of Jewish Americans surveyed identified as either anti-Zionist or non-Zionist. Anti-Zionism refers to active opposition to Jewish statehood, while non-Zionism signals a more neutral position of decentering statehood. Among the 18-to-34-year-old cohort, that number lept to a combined 32%. Roughly one-third of all Gen Z Jews reject Zionism, according to the survey.
“Anti-Zionist Jews in the South are hungry for learning and ritual,” said Kat Macias, a Georgia-based Jewish activist and founder of the Diasporist havurah Lefty Jews of Athens. Yet few Southern cities have such gatherings.
Anti-Zionist Jews are a “diaspora within diaspora,” explained Rabbi Eli DeWitt, an anti-Zionist leader in Durham. In rejecting both Zionism and the metropolitan Judaism of major American cities, we have to build everything here for ourselves, they told me.
As a journalist and a Virginia-based Jew, I wanted to know more about how Southern anti-Zionist Jews are building these spaces of protest and belonging. Over four months, I traveled across four Southern states, attending Shabbat services and potluck dinners with dozens of activists. I interviewed rabbis, professors, and front-line organizers with the pro-Palestinian movement.
I learned that the region’s anti-Zionist movement faces great challenges. The largest Zionist organizations in the world are also based in the South. Southern anti-Zionism is a David versus Goliath story: a minority within a minority pushing back against the evangelical behemoth that is Christian Zionism, a powerful religious and political movement in the U.S. that unwaveringly supports Israel.
The Southern Jewish movement also has its own troubled past, marked by historical alignments with white supremacy and Jim Crow. As Jewish activists wrestle with these complexities, they simultaneously confront the present-day realities of anti-Black, anti-immigrant, anti-women, anti-queer, and anti-trans politics in Trump Country.
Yet, like hooks said, there is tremendous power on the margins. Far from coastal, metropolitan hubs of anti-Zionism, Southern Jews are creating their own religious texts and political playbooks, building upon the region’s already-manifest liberation theologies and movements.
Multiracial coalition building is Southern movement organizing 101, said Rubin-Blose, who before he became a rabbi was an activist with JVP’s North Carolina Triangle chapter. “There’s such a deep history of that in Black-led movements [here], and also with faith communities, which are mainly Christian. We get to be part of that story, of that lineage.”
Still, today’s political landscape can feel so overwhelming. Gaza lies in ruins. The Trump administration continues to bomb Iran. MAGA is ripping American democracy to shreds. Yet, Southern Jewish organizers told me, they are doing the work of building a movement for olam haba—the world to come.
Building power in the South
Three years ago on a chilly autumn evening, dozens of Jews marched into rush-hour traffic on a major freeway in downtown Durham. They chanted and sang while seated on the cold pavement of NC Highway 147. Organizers unfurled a large black banner with white lettering: “NC Jews Say Ceasefire Now! Call Rep. Foushee 919-967-7924.”
As the sun went down, the activists made hundreds of phone calls, but Democratic Rep. Valerie Foushee never picked up.
Several months later, North Carolina’s Republican legislature responded by enacting heightened penalties for blocking traffic and wearing a mask while engaged in a crime.
“This has created a political context in which the consequences of doing a street demonstration are potentially much more,” said Sandra Korn, a long-time organizer with JVP-Triangle. These laws are seemingly “designed to discourage people from taking civil disobedience and from demonstrating in the streets for Palestine.”
If Rubin-Blose’s approach at Makom represents the more spiritual side to Southern Jewish anti-Zionism, Korn’s activities occupy the movement’s complementary flank: politics.
“I get really in my brain about analyzing things and movement strategy,” Korn told me. Singing at Makom helps her “access feelings and grief about the situation that we’re in,” she said—and then she’s back to work, organizing with JVP for a free Palestine.
Upon its founding in Berkeley, California, in 1996, JVP didn’t initially make a huge impression in the South, said Amy Jaret, an anti-Zionist organizer in Atlanta and co-founder, with DeWitt, of Simchat Diaspora, a Diasporist Jewish education project. Jaret recalled how in 2008, when she first came out as an anti-Zionist, she found a political home in harder-hitting groups such as the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN). JVP, on the other hand, “was the people with the peace dove flag, singing ‘Lo Yisa Goy.’”
“I had no interest in JVP for a long time,” she said.
North Carolina’s Triangle chapter, founded in 2013, ultimately changed Southern perceptions of JVP. Triangle became “one of the most politically effective JVP chapters across the U.S.,” said DeWitt, “with some of the biggest wins and the boldest moves that have been made.”
Sometimes that has required pushing ahead of the national organization, said Beth Bruch, one of the chapter’s co-founders. “We felt like JVP was overlooking the South; was not organizing properly in the South; was not taking advantage of the strength of the South; and did not understand the needs or opportunities of organizing in the South,” they said. So the chapter did things their own way, “kicking ass and taking names in a very different [way], like using really different strategies,” added Jade Brooks, another co-founder.
Triangle did this by building power through local, multiracial, coalition-based organizing, building on Southern movement traditions. Its first campaign, Durham, Drop G4S, successfully pressured Durham County to end a $1 million contract with a private security firm that also operated at Israeli prisons and military checkpoints in the West Bank. This grew into Demilitarize! Durham2Palestine, a coalition of Black-, Palestinian-, and Jewish-led organizations that successfully lobbied the Durham City Council to pass a resolution banning exchanges between the Durham Police Department and the Israeli military, the first American city to do so.
“We won that campaign,” Korn said, “and we learned something about how to stage an effective campaign that was going to achieve both a local abolitionist victory as well as an internationalist victory for Palestine.”
Last year, organizers mobilized an even broader coalition, including an endorsement from the state public employees’ union, to pressure the state treasurer to divest over $6 million of Israeli bonds from North Carolina’s pension fund.
There’s a lot of power in the South. …
We’re winning. We’re building power, and we’re expanding.Ari Rosenberg, “Break the Bonds” campaign organizer
Ari Rosenberg, an organizer with the “Break the Bonds” campaign, said these victories show that “there’s a lot of power in the South.”
“We’re winning. We’re building power, and we’re expanding,” Rosenberg said.
Yet three years into Israel’s genocide in Gaza, organizers are exhausted. “It’s hard to stay engaged. It’s hard to stay motivated. We need to be able to have stories of people who have been doing this work for decades so that we can [also] see ourselves doing it for decades,” said Rosenberg.
For this, organizers often look to the past. What they find there isn’t always pretty.
“This is your set of problems now”
To understand the Southern Jewish past, we have to talk about race and violence, said Shari Rabin, a professor of Jewish studies and religion at Oberlin College and author of “The Jewish South.”
In a region defined by racial slavery and Indigenous dispossession, some Jewish Southerners sought belonging in the region by aligning themselves with white power, according to Rabin’s book. This took on many forms.
For example, in the 1820s, the average Jewish household in Richmond, Virginia, owned three enslaved people. Some synagogues were built with enslaved labor. Many Jews served in the Confederacy, including the Louisianan Judah Benjamin, who rose to the rank of the Confederacy’s secretary of state. His Jewish face even adorned the Confederate $2 bill. In the 20th century, many Jewish Southerners maintained a claim on whiteness by upholding Jim Crow segregation.
Debates over the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, a safe haven for the world’s Jews, were viewed through a distinctly Southern lens. In the early 20th century, most Jewish Southerners practiced Reform Judaism, a lineage rooted in the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment. They adopted modern, secular dress; held English-language services; and listened to organ and choral music. As assimilated white Southerners, many rejected Zionism.
In one Texas synagogue, the temple leadership joined the American Council for Judaism (ACJ), an organization of anti-Zionist Reform Jews founded in 1942. The ACJ’s membership at that time was disproportionately Southern. In their 1943 “Basic Principles,” congregation Beth Israel boldly stated, “Our religion is Judaism. Our nation is the United States of America. Our nationality is American. Our flag is the ‘Stars and Stripes.’ Our race is Caucasian.”
This sentiment was common within the ACJ, said Rabin. “They were concerned with maintaining an American and white identity.”
A kind of white nationalism continued to define Southern Jewish anti-Zionism into the 21st century. In the 2000s, the ACJ still featured the stars and stripes on its website and published articles highlighting Jewish participation in the Confederacy, as well as the Durham author Eli Evans’ account of receiving a standing ovation from the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
Rabbi Andrue Kahn, the ACJ’s executive director since 2024, said this history “mirrors the way that most American Jewish institutional life has functioned” over time, “which is a de facto white religiosity.” Today’s work, he said, is “to build an ACJ in which we’re combatting the ongoing blight of racism here and in Israel-Palestine.” That “here” includes a Richmond-based affiliated havurah that Kahn currently mentors.
But Southern Jews of Color say there’s still repair work to be done.
Nasiyah, who is only using their first name for safety reasons, is a Black queer Jewish organizer in Central Virginia who identifies as a Zionist. They experience frustration with white anti-Zionists and their litmus tests about who counts as a Jew and what Jewish values are. “You are not exempt from being racist [just] because you also are an oppressed and marginalized group,” they told me.
Macias, the Georgia-based Jewish activist, who is of Puerto Rican and Cuban ancestry, added that there are problems with the way many Southern white Jews talk about racial solidarity. In these discourses, “you’re always thought of as an ally in fights against racism,” they said, “rather than someone with maybe a personal stake in it.”
But don’t let the complexities of Southern Judaism stop you from speaking out, Macias said.
“You’re here. Claim it. This is your set of problems now. Dig in.”
“A Christian nationalist takeover of government”
The problems are manifold.
From restrictions on bodily autonomy to government cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, many statehouses in the South are deep-red bastions of Christian conservatism.
“We’re up against a pretty intense Zionist bloc of clergy and politicians here in North Carolina,” said DeWitt. “There’s been a deep Christian nationalist takeover of government for the past 10 to 15 years.”
Some anti-Zionist Jews wonder what can be done to challenge the region’s Christian Zionism. In North Carolina, the legislature, led by a Southern Baptist speaker, recently passed the “Shalom Act,” categorizing certain expressions of anti-Zionism as antisemitism. This spring, Tennessee’s legislature passed a bill defining the occupied West Bank as “Judea and Samaria,” a term used by Israel to describe the region.
“We’re pawns in [their] story,” said Zach Kopkin, JVP’s first-ever Southern chapter organizer. Yet he reiterates that JVP’s mandate, as articulated by the organization’s Palestinian partners, is to confront and challenge Jewish Zionists, not Christians.
Some Southern organizers also question JVP’s larger strategy. Last year, the organization underwent a massive restructuring to become a 501(c)4 membership-based organization. This restructuring allows JVP to apply membership dues toward more explicit political organizing. JVP’s hope is that the organization might challenge larger Zionist organizations such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
Rosenberg is skeptical. She said Republican gerrymandering and the U.S. Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act mean that “if you live in a rural community, almost anywhere in the South, your vote literally doesn’t matter. So, how are you going to show power? It’s going to be through organizing. It’s going to be through activism, being in community together.”
In other words, all we’ve got is each other.
Braiding challah
I’m standing in Julie Elfin’s front yard in Knoxville on a sweltering summer afternoon. She has barricaded her one-story rental in with wildflowers, like a moat. The landlord doesn’t mind, she says, showing me all the different petals and pollinators. One of her favorite things about the South are the fireflies. In East Tennessee, there’s a type of lightning bug that flashes its signal in synchronicity with all of its comrades. A kind of mass protest against the darkness.
I’ve joined Elfin to make fresh challah for tonight’s JVP-Knoxville Shabbat. She shows me how to separate the dough into six braids, rolling each lump until it forms a serpentine strand. We braid them from left to right, and when we’re done, she covers the loaves with printed tea towels and keeps an eye on two mischievous cats.
This is the Jewish South. For anti-Zionists such as Elfin, it’s bittersweet. In rejecting Israel, and in rejecting diasporic capitals such as New York and California, she has committed herself to the conviction that Jews can live full, safe, happy lives in the South—even in deep-red Tennessee.
Southern Jewish creativity is on full display just down the street at her neighbor’s house where we gather for Shabbat. Someone has set up a grill in the driveway. Elfin takes a turn, grilling marinated tofu, meat, and veggies on wooden skewers. Others mingle on a large wooden deck, a huge tree growing right through the middle of it.
Around 9 p.m., the sun goes down, and a full moon rises above the yard. By the phase of the moon, I can tell we’re in the middle of the Jewish month of Tammuz, a time of grief.
Elfin gathers us around the old tree. Under the darkening sky, punctuated by luminescent fireflies, we light candles, drink Manischewitz and grape juice, and bless the challah that we braided.
After prayers, we all admire the moon, rising above the silhouetted hills. The moon helps us keep time—diasporic time. We know who we are and where we stand. We don’t have to look east to Jerusalem. We just look up.
Editorial Team:
Tina Vasquez, Lead Editor
Carolyn Copeland, Top Editor
Rashmee Kumar, Copy Editor
G. Samantha Rosenthal is an award-winning independent journalist and historian based in Roanoke, Virginia. Her most recent book is “Living Queer History: Remembrance and Belonging in a Southern City.”
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