The UUA deepens its rift with mainstream Jews

The UUA passes a new one-sided and inflammatory statement

This issue is not new. I wrote about it last year and authored a 2020 paper on antisemitism in the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) and progressivism. In the late 2010s, Jews protested Unitarian Universalist congregations in Massachusetts and Washington State for showing a film they felt was antisemitic. In 2016, Rabbi Rick Jacobs, President of the Union for Reform Judaism, the largest Jewish denomination in North America, told UUs that the passage of a Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction (BDS) proposal and the accompanying imbalanced debate at the UUA’s annual General Assembly would cause a rift between UU and mainstream Jews.

Most members I know at the UU congregation I attend are reasonable and have nuanced views on political and social topics. However, in recent years, the UUA leadership, some national UU groups and ideological ministers and activists have become politically extreme, self-righteous, and doctrinal. The UUA leadership now issues fringe political positions as moral mandates.

The issue for this post is that in June of 2024, a UUA Action of Immediate Witness (AIW) was passed on the Israel-Gaza war which is, sadly, as expected, one-sided and filled with inflammatory language. The statement includes terms like "ethnic cleansing," "genocide," and "apartheid” and associates Zionism with “supremacy.” The sponsor, a member of the extremist anti-Israel groups Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and Unitarian Universalists for Justice in the Middle East (UUJME), introduced it with the controversial anti-Zionist slogan “From the river to the sea.” The one national UU Jewish group, Unitarian Universalists for Jewish Awareness, was not consulted.

Ronald Friend, a Jewish Holocaust survivor and a retired Stony Brook University psychology professor, wrote, “I’ve re-read the AIW and in my view it’s an appallingly biased, badly argued, and mostly unsubstantiated statement. The AIW genocide charge is institutional antisemitism as far as I’m concerned.”

In the discussion forum on the AIW, Rev. Marlene Walker, a Jewish UU minister, wrote, “This AIW is so lacking in any kind of in-depth understanding of the full history that I find it an embarrassment.” Rev. Jay Wolin, another Jewish UU minister and the Treasurer for Unitarian Universalists for Jewish Awareness, wrote, “I think it is important that you understand how harmful this AIW is to many Jewish people within Unitarian Universalism. This AIW could have been written without demonizing Jewish people and Zionism.” Rev. David Horst wrote, “I fear, however, if member congregations support this proposal, we will drive away many of our Jewish members and create a rift between Unitarian Universalists and the mainstream Jewish community.”

The Middle East, Israel, and Palestine are complex issues with various legitimate perspectives and positions. In a liberal church, the UUA and congregational leadership should provide UUs with diverse perspectives so the laity can form their own opinions. However, as Mark Perloe, an Ashkenazi Jew who left his UU congregation in Atlanta, wrote, “They are more interested in telling people how to believe than working to build consensus. They do not realize the power they possess and their ability to promote discord.”

Further, my experience is that most congregants and people in general in my city are ignorant about Jews and Judaism. This is why I wrote Jews and Judaism: A Primer. My late mother believed that most antisemitism is due to ignorance rather than outright malice and that many people do not understand why certain characterizations and one-sided statements, such as with the AIW, are so offensive to most Jews.

The national UU church now has a narrow socio-political creed and is intolerant of those who question it and offer different perspectives. As with all groups, Jews and Jews within UU have a diversity of views, but the UUA leadership welcomes and centers only the voices of people, including minorities, who march lockstep with its brand of progressive identity politics and postmodernist ideologies.

I am a political moderate with views in the Jewish mainstream. I support the UUA’s goal of the church welcoming people of different ethnicities and cultures (I am Sephardic of Turkish, Egyptian, and Iraqi ancestry). I hold numerous politically liberal positions such as supporting criminal justice reform, voting and disability rights, feminism, and gay and lesbian rights. Yet, because I speak up against aspects of current UUA orthodoxy including its dogmatism and illiberalism, and because I support freedom of belief and expression, my concerns have been summarily dismissed, censored, and ad-hominem attacked by ideologues in the church. I would tell other Jews considering joining the church to expect similar treatment.

It is just stating a fact that official statements like the new AIW, along with the national church’s increasing extremism and narrow-mindedness, signal to most Jews that Unitarian Universalism is not a church for them.