Can you be critical of Israel and not be anti-Semitic? You might as well ask whether you can oppose the war in Iraq and not be anti-American. Oh, wait. The equation between criticism of the Iraq war and anti-Americanism is exactly what supporters of our reckless Iraq policy have been promoting for years.

These are political questions, not religious questions, and the answer of hard-line Jewish conservatives has been a continuing attempt to pin the anti-Semitic label on anyone who questions Israeli policies. If the critic is a Jew, he or she must be a "self-hating Jew" or a "Jewish anti-Semite." If the critics are gentiles, like Jimmy Carter, just call them anti-Semites and be done with it.

Some years ago, I was told to my face by a prominent right-wing Jewish political commentator that I have no business writing anything about Jewish life, or saying anything about Israel, because I am only a Mischling. Mischling was the term invented by the Nazis to classify degrees of Jewishness under the Nuremberg Laws. I would have been considered a "first-degree Mischling"--that is, the child of one Jewish and one non-Jewish parent--in Nazi Germany. Guess what? Half-Jews wound up in the gas chambers along with every other Jew. Who appointed right-wing American Jews the arbiters of what it means to be a good Jew, a bad Jew, or a Jew, period?

A bit of background is in order here for those unfamiliar with the politics of the organized American Jewish community. In December, the American Jewish Committee (AJC) published an essay on its Web site titled, "`Progressive' Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism." Note the ironic quotation marks around the word `progressive.' The essay was written by Alvin H. Rosenfeld, an English professor and director of the Institute for Jewish Culture and the Arts at Indiana University. The AJC, once an umbrella organization that represented many elements and viewpoints in the American Jewish community, now takes a conservative posture on most international political issues and brooks no criticism of Israel.

In his essay, Rosenfeld attacks a number of Jewish writers and scholars, including the historian Tony Judt, the playwright Tony Kushner and Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen. Rosenfeld argues that "one of the most distressing features of the new anti-Semitism" is "the participation of Jews alongside it." This smarmy piece of slander manages to imply that Jews who criticize Israel are anti-Semitic without exactly coming out and saying so. It also uses selective quotations to lump together writers who fall on very different points of the political spectrum in their attitudes toward the Israeli government. Judt, for example, goes too far in his criticism of Israel for me, while my former Post colleague Dick Cohen--whose columns I still read regularly--is, in my view, a supporter of Israel who calls it as he sees it when Israeli government policies cross the line into human rights violations.

I have news for the American Jewish Committee: there are no sacred cows in Jewish tradition--religious or secular.

In an excellent article on the brouhaha over the Rosenfeld essay, published in The New York Times on January 31, writer Patricia Cohen (no relation to the Post's Cohen) correctly referred to the AJC as "conservative." (Commentary, long the flagship magazine of the AJC, has been the leading voice of neoconservatism since 1970, when its editor, Norman Podhoretz, presided over the publication's sharp and permanent turn to the right. This January, the magazine became an independent nonprofit company for financial reasons--not because of disagreement with the AJC about Commentary's political stance.) On Feb. 3, however, the Times ran a correction disavowing the adjective "conservative" and stating that the AJC's "stance on issues ranges across the political spectrum." Ms. Cohen had it right the first time, and the Times deserves a Stephen Colbert "wag of the finger" for allowing itself to be pressured into running an incorrect correction.

One of the worst things about the kind of thinking represented by Rosenfeld's essay, and the AJC's self-congratulatory promotion of the essay, is that it really does imply that Jews who criticize Israel are traitors to their people. The subject of Israel is a very painful one for most Jews--for liberals no less than for conservatives. I absolutely believe that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state, and when I see the Israeli army and Hezbollah collaborating in a dance of death one more time--a dance that will probably lead, again, to the destruction of Lebanon, it reduces me to impotent anger.

As an atheist (and yes, both secularism and atheism belong to Jewish tradition, even though atheists do not believe in religious Judaism any more than they believe in Christianity), I cannot help but reflect upon the fact that all of this blood is being shed over the right to occupy a particular piece of land supposedly given by God to two different peoples in two different sacred books.

Unlike former President Carter, I no longer believe there is real hope for a permanent peace settlement that guarantees the security of Israel and establishes a Palestinian state. I think that hope really died on the day Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by an ultra-Orthodox Jewish terrorist. If there was any hope left, it has since been erased by the explosion of Islamist terrorism and by the war in Iraq, which will make it difficult for America to be seen as an honest broker for a biblical amount of time. An armed truce is probably the best that can be expected, and truces in the Middle East exist to be broken.

The personal nature of the attack on Jewish critics of Israel seems to be the aspect of Rosenfeld's essay that most distresses liberal Jews. I am not surprised by the vehemence of the assault, and I am not distressed. This is in fact a sign that the American Jewish right is afraid that it is losing ground within the Jewish community. In their political alliance with the Christian Right over all issues related to Israel--forged, ironically, because Protestant fundamentalists regard Israel as the place where Jesus will return on Judgment Day--ultra-conservative Jews have broken with the best Jewish traditions of social conscience and social consciousness.

Liberal Jews are a reminder of another kind of Jewish community--the community of our grandparents, who listened to Franklin D. Roosevelt's fireside chats and dreamed of social and economic justice not only for themselves but for others. Right-wing Jews have had to deny this vibrant, socially compassionate part of the Jewish past to justify their politics. So they promulgate the idea that liberal Jews, Jews who raise any questions about Israeli policies, are bad Jews. They hate us. And, as FDR once said of his right-wing critics, I welcome their hatred.