"You get this sense in the Jewish community that we're under siege and anyone who challenges the consensus is a traitor who has to be purged," Bromberg says. "The right has the capacity to instantly inflate any expression of civil discourse, doubt or questioning into an act of disloyalty." Historian Michael Staub, author of Torn at the Roots: The Crisis of Jewish Liberalism in Postwar America, says this split in the Jewish community between an institutional mainstream and a liberal/left alternative dates to the early 1970s, when young Jews, who disproportionately populated the New Left, challenged the major Jewish organizations over Vietnam, urban poverty and assimilation. The difference, says Staub, is that then, when dissidents picketed a synagogue or stormed a meeting of the Jewish Federation, the mainstream leadership scrambled to set up meetings. Now, with dissent centered around Israel, mainstream communal leaders attack anti-occupation protesters as self-hating Jews or take steps to shut them out of the debate entirely. "There is a silencing going on at the local level by American Jewish institutions that is very unhealthy," says Brit Tzedek's Freedman.
