The Lies Upon Which Liberal Judaism Is Founded

21 February 2026, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

The self-contradictions within liberal Judaism nullify it as being anything other than its own self-annihilation and its existing only on the basis of its adherents’ refusal to analyze their own (actually self-annihilating) thoughts, so that these individuals, Jewish liberals, will not be able to understand themselves truthfully, and this will be documented and demonstrated here.

Most Zionists (supporters of the world’s only nation that is founded not only upon a religion but on an exclusionary basis that requires admission into citizenship ONLY upon an applicant’s passing a racist test that rejects all applicants who are NOT members of that religion) are believers in the Jewish holy Scripture that is required to be in every synagogue: the Torah — the first five books of the Christian Bible. It says, for just a few examples from it:

Genesis 15:18-21

“On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abraham and said, ‘To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt [the Nile] to the great river, the Euphrates, including the lands of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amoriotes, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.’”

Deuteronomy 7:1-2

“You must not let any living thing survive among the cities of these people the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance: the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. You must put them all to death.”

Deuteronomy 7:16

“Destroy every nation that the Lord your God places in your power, and do not show them any mercy.”

Deuteronomy 20:16-18

“When you capture cities in the land he Lord your God is giving you, kill everyone. Completely destroy all the people: the Hittites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, as the Lord has ordered you to do. Kill them so that they will not make you sin against the Lord by teaching you to do all the disgusting things they do in the worship of their gods.”

Exodus 34:11

I will destroy from before you the Canaanites, the Amorites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, and the Jebusites.

Exodus 34:24

I will destroy the nations from before you and will enlarge your borders.

However, it also includes the Ten Commandments, which include:

Exodus 20:13 & Deuteronomy 5:17: You shall not kill.

Exodus 20:15 & Deuteronomy 5:19: You shall not steal.

Exodus 20:17 & Deuteronomy 5:21: You shall not covet your neighbor’s house.

So: the Torah requires all Jews to exterminate the Palestinians (Perizzites, etc.) but once they have done so, not to kill each other or their “neighbors”; but, still, somehow, to “enlarge your borders” (which tends to require some killing, or at least displacement, of some of THOSE “neighbors”). So: the only “neighbors” that they are ordered by God NOT to kill (or rob, etc.) is each other, other Jews. They are commanded, by their God (which is also the Christian God, and the Muslim God), to kill and rob the residents in adjoining lands so as to “expand their borders.”

And that is precisely what Zionists are doing.

Naturally, therefore, the vast majority of Jewish Zionists are conservative Jews, NOT liberal ones. For a conservative Jew to be a Zionist is natural, because Zionism is very much from Judaism’s canonized Scripture, which is the basis of the entire Jewish faith, the Torah.

However, liberal Jews don’t accept the Torah’s authority but instead say they don’t believe in it, and that they are Jews who don’t believe in Judaism (theTorah). A good example of this liberal position is the highly respected American law professor Noah Feldman, who wrote a book, To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide, the only two reviews-summaries of which at Amazon I agree with, are these two, which were the only one-starred ones:

From the United States

Lori R.S.
1.0 out of 5 stars
Disregards fundamental principle of Judaism
Reviewed in the United States on October 17, 2025Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
The book advocates for a premise with which I vehemently disagree, and is typical of far left Jews and explains why Judaism is dying. Mr Feldman contends that one can be a Jew but not believe in Gd (see photo). This contention directly contradicts the Shema: Hear O Israel, The Lord is our Gd, the Lord is One. No belief in Gd?! You are not a Jew.

There is no way to reconcile this contradiction. This deviation from a fundamental belief of Judaism renders the book useless to me. I cannot trust an author who twists Judaism to sell books.

Oopsie Doodles
1.0 out of 5 stars
What would someone who proudly rejects Judaism know about being a Jew today?
Reviewed in the United States on March 28, 2024Format: Hardcover
It is farcical that a person who celebrates practices that have led to the loss of an incalculable number of Jews could consider himself a worthy commentator on the religion, tradition, and peoplehood he has rejected publicly and wholeheartedly. History’s most accomplished Jew slaughterers could only have dreamed of having a born-Jewish ally like Noah Feldman.

To make it abundantly clear: Noah Feldman does not represent Jews or speak for any of us. He speaks for himself; that is, one who has actively worked against the proliferation of Jewish values and practices.

It was obvious from the identity of the author that there would be no role for Torah-observant Jews in “today’s” Jewish life as he depicts it. The lack of blurbs from Jews who practice our religion was one major indicator of what lies between in the pages of this fluff.

One could also predict this book would be an embarrassing shambles if one was aware of the fact that Feldman publicly rejects the Torah (that is, Judaism) in favor of bagels-and-lox assimilation and all it encompasses. That includes intermarriage, which the author personally embraces — and boasts of in the pages of the New York Times, no less, while showing off the disgraced First Amendment opponent he deems his intellectual equal. (On that last point, he may be right — but it’s nothing to brag about.)

Instead of starting sentences with “As a Jew” while observing not a lick of Judaism, Feldman should have the intellectual honesty to be forthright about his utter lack of investment or interest in seeing the Jewish population grow or thrive. Reading this carbuncle of unabashed self-centeredness with an awareness of Feldman’s stance on literally life-or-death matters for the Jewish people sheds a revealing spotlight on his facile and intellectually bankrupt pursuit in writing it.

I presume the title of this shallow fish wrap is lifted from Rabbi Hayim Donin’s far superior book, To Be a Jew. I highly recommend buying that masterpiece instead, as it is as applicable to today’s Jews as was to all those who came before us.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Feldman’s play-acting as an insightful author while he masquerades as one concerned with “authentic” Judaism is an insult to Jews who practice our religion. While the rest of us try to ensure Jewish continuity and fight for our very right to exist, Feldman thinks he’s qualified to comment on what it means to be a Jew today.

How would he know?

I quoted those two whole here only because Amazon sometimes eliminates reader-reviews and other product-reviews that it decides it doesn’t like; and because I believe that these two reviews are worth preserving because the others are so opposite, overwhelmingly admiring that book (which I consider trashy).

Anyway, he also headlined on 27 February 2024 on the cover of the 11 March 2024 TIME magazine (the only words on the cover, other than the publication-date), “The New AntiSemitism by Noah Feldman”, as part of TIME’s propagandizing for Israel against the Gazans and equating support for the Gazans against Israel as being “anti-Semitic,” and to support America’s donating 70% of the weapons that Israel is using against Gazans (Germany donating the rest). The article inside the magazine was ordinary liberal nazism (the liberal version of what had been the German Nazi Party’s racist-fascism or “nazism,” except that now the racist hate is being directed against the Gazans (and their freely elected Hamas Government), NOT against Jews, but FOR Jews’ nazism to eradicate the Gazans). Feldman said (and these extracts are 1,088 of his article’s 3,511 words):

Historically, antisemitism has been a side effect of populism. …

It can be hard to think clearly and reason calmly about antisemitism. For 15 million Jews around the world, its resilience engenders fear, pain, sadness, frustration, and intergenerational trauma going back to the Holocaust and beyond. The superficial sense of security that many Jews feel on a daily basis in the contemporary world turns out to be paper-thin. …

Israel, the first Jewish state to exist in two millennia, plays a central role in the narrative of the new antisemitism. Israel is not an imaginary conspiracy but a real country with real citizens, a real history, a real military, and real political and social problems that concern relations between Jews and Palestinians. It is not inherently antisemitic to criticize Israel. Its power, like any national power, may be subject to legitimate, fair criticism.

It is also essential not to tar all critics of Israel with the brush of antisemitism, especially in wartime, when Israel, like any other war-waging power, is properly subject to the strictures of international humanitarian law. To deploy the charge of antisemitism for political reasons is morally wrong, undermining the horror of antisemitism itself. …

At the same time, Israel’s history and current situation confound categories that are so often used today to make moral judgments — categories like imperialism, colonialism, and white supremacy. And because people’s ideas about Israel typically draw on older, pre-Israel ideas about Jews, criticism of Israel can borrow, often unconsciously, from older antisemitic myths.

To understand the complicated, subtle character of the new antisemitism, notice that the concept of imperialism was developed to describe European powers that conquered, controlled, and exploited vast territories in the Global South and East. The theory of settler-colonial white supremacy was developed as a critical account of countries like Australia and the U.S., in which, according to the theory, the colonialists’ aim was to displace the local population, not to extract value from its labor. The application of these categories to Israel is a secondary development.

These borrowed categories do not fit Israel’s specificity very well. …

Israel … was brought into existence by a 1947 United Nations resolution that would have created two states side by side, one Jewish and one Palestinian. Its purpose, as conceived by the U.N.’s member countries, was to house displaced Jews after 6 million were killed in the Holocaust [not by Palestinians or even Muslims in Palestine but by Christians in Europe — though those Christians refuse to acknowledge their own culture’s genocidalism in order to support Israel’s/America’s/Germany’s eliminating the Gazans — nominally “Hamas” — for, now, Trump’s farcical ‘Board of Peace’].

The Palestinian catastrophe, or nakba, of 1948 was that when the Arab invasion of Israel failed to destroy the nascent Jewish state, many Palestinians who had fled or been forced out of their homes by Israeli troops were unable to return. Those Palestinians became permanent refugees in neighboring countries. Instead of ending up in an independent Palestine as proposed by the U.N., those who had stayed in their homes found themselves living either in Israel or under Egyptian and Jordanian rule. Then, in the 1967 war, the West Bank and Gaza were conquered by Israel. Palestinians in those places came under what Israel itself defines as an occupation. They have lived in that precarious legal status ever since despite the 1993–2001 peace process.

Notwithstanding undeniable Jewish prejudice and discrimination against Arabs in Israel, the paradigm of white supremacy also does not correspond easily to the Jews. Around half of Israel’s Jewish citizens descend from European Jews, as do most American Jews. But those Jews were not considered racially white in Europe, which is one reason they had to emigrate or be killed. Roughly half of Israel’s Jews descend from Mizrahi, (literally, Eastern) origins. They are not ethnically European in any sense, much less racially “white.” …

The upshot is that while a well-meaning person, free of antisemitism, could describe Israel as colonialist, the narrative of Israel as a settler-colonial oppressor on par with or worse than the U.S., Canada, and Australia is fundamentally misleading. Those who advance it run the risk of perpetuating antisemitism by condemning the Jewish state despite its basic differences from these other global examples — most important, Israel’s status as the only homeland for a historically oppressed people who have nowhere else to call their own….

During the Gaza War, some have argued that Israel, having suffered the trauma of the Holocaust, is now itself perpetrating a genocide against the Palestinian people. Like other criticisms of Israel, the accusation of genocide isn’t inherently antisemitic. Yet the genocide charge is especially prone to veering into antisemitism because the Holocaust is the archetypal example of the crime of genocide. [Not for Rwandans, it isn’t. Not for Gazans, it isn’t.] Genocide was recognized as a crime by the international community after the Holocaust. Accusing Israel of genocide can function, intentionally or otherwise, as a way of erasing the memory of the Holocaust. [That’s the opposite of the truth, which is that acknowledging the Israel-America-Germany genocide against Gazans is universalizing the meaning of the”Never again” phrase that even liberal Jews (if Feldman is a Jew in any other sense than the racist definition by Hitler) have chosen NOT to be a condemnation of ALL genocides but ONLY of the one by Hitler and other Christians against Jews.] …

The number of Palestinian dead, over 29,000 [probably under the 90% of Gaza’s buildings that are collapsed are around a million corpses] as of this writing, is heartbreaking. The rhetoric of some individual Israeli government officials cited by South Africa [That’s basically a lie by Feldman because Netanyahu’s entire cabinet is a coalition composed only of three ideological parties, ranging from hard-right to far-right and ultra-conservative; Feldman’s insinuation that it’s not composed only of right-wing extremists is insidious] is particularly appalling, both in its dehumanizing character and in referring to Palestinians as Amalekites, a group whom the God of the Bible called on the ancient Israelites to “erase.” [So, though Feldman doesn’t believe in the Torah, he knows the Torah.] …

The U.S. government has itself condemned far-right members of Israel’s Cabinet who called for Gazans to be pushed into Egypt. The repugnant policy of ethnic cleansing urged by the extremists would violate international law, even if it would arguably not count as genocide under the legal meaning of the term. [He elides that ethnic cleansing is ALSO criminal under international laws concerning crimes against humanity and war crimes.] …

Notwithstanding these serious concerns, Israel’s efforts to defend itself against Hamas, even if found to involve killing disproportionate number of civilians, do not turn Israel into a genocidal actor comparable to the Nazis or the Hutu regime in Rwanda. The genocide charge depends on intent. And Israel, as a state, is not fighting the Gaza War with the intent to destroy the Palestinian people.

Israel’s stated war aims are to hold Hamas accountable for the Oct. 7 attack on Israel. [Feldman states “Israel’s stated war aims” but not what its behavior clearly show to be Israel’s actual war aim — to eliminate Gazans from Gaza. Is that deception-technique equivalent to a lie? I think it is.]…

There is no single, definitive international-law answer to the question of how much collateral damage renders a strike disproportionate to its concrete military objective. Israel’s approach resembles campaigns fought by the U.S. and its coalition partners in Iraq in Afghanistan, and by the international coalition in the battle against ISIS for control of Mosul. Even if the numbers of civilian deaths from the air seem to be higher, it is important to recognize that Israel is also confronting miles of tunnels intentionally connected to civilian facilities by Hamas.

To be clear: as a matter of human worth, a child who dies at the hands of a genocidal murderer is no different from one who dies as collateral damage in a lawful attack [except that the former crime is intentional and so comports with the definition of “genocide” but the latter is not and thus does not — and often isn’t even a “war crime” at all — so, that is a HUGE “difference” between them]. …

So: the liberal Feldman proposes a ‘Judaism’ that — ironically like Hitler’s concept of Judaism — is a race (Feldman proudly being of that ‘race’ or “culture’” by birth), and he even says that no one can be a Jew today who opposes Israel. His To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide alleges that Israel today is central to Judaism, so that no one today can BE a Jew who supports the Palestinian cause against Israel. He alleges that no matter how evil Israel is or becomes, every “Jew” supports it; any who doesn’t is NOT a Jew — not even if their culture (Zionism — if Feldman is correct that Zionism is today the essence of Judaism) is. This view, equating Israel with “the Jewish people,” is, and has for over a hundred years HAS BEEN, the essence of Zionism, but it is not the view of even some orthodox Jews. (For some examples, see this and this and this.) He essentially writes those people off. There are plenty of good people who are jews, but he’s clearly not one of them. He’s instead a slick propagandist for the bad ones, the Jewish Zionists. (There are even more Christians who are Zionists, but that’s another issue, not the present matter.)

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.