A version of this story originally appeared on CincyJewfolk, an independent journalism and engagement site for Cincinnati’s Jewish community.
When Rabbi Ari Jun learned that faith leaders were invited to speak at a rally in Cincinnati against neo-Nazis and white supremacy, he quickly responded that he would be there.
As the former director of the local Jewish community relations council who recently took the helm of a progressive Reform synagogue, Jun has experience responding to antisemitism and a passion for social justice.
But a week later, he was told he was off the docket. The reason: He is a Zionist.
“Some of your values do not truly align with the values this protest is trying to represent,” Laini Smith, an organizer of the rally being held Sunday in the city’s Washington Park, told him via text message.
Billie Pittman, another organizer with Queen City United, a progressive group, spelling things out even more clearly: “Rabbi Ari Jun is a well-known Zionist, and while this event is intended to oppose Nazis and white supremacy, allowing Zionists to participate undermines the original goal of the demonstration.”
Pittman also posted on the event’s Facebook page: “We are in the works of having another speaker from the Jewish community.”
The about-face by Queen City United comes as progressive Jews around the United States and beyond continue to struggle with how they fit into the political communities they called home prior to the onset of the Israel-Hamas war on Oct. 7, 2023. Many progressive Jews have reported feeling excluded by litmus tests — often implicit, but sometimes explicit — that require them to denounce Israel’s very existence in order to be welcomed in political spaces.
Jun offers a case study in these dynamics. A graduate of the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College, he said as he assumed the role of senior rabbi at Temple Sholom in January that he was eager to rebuild interfaith relations and continue the synagogue’s longstanding tradition of social justice.
He has also been a vocal critic of the Israeli government and its right-wing U.S. supporters, even challenging some centrist orthodoxies in the immediate wake of Hamas’ attack on Israel. “If our empathy extends only to Israelis and Jews … we play into Hamas’s hands,” he wrote on his own blog in November 2023, in advance of the Jewish community rally in Washington, D.C. that drew an estimated 300,000 people. Last month, he wrote in an op-ed in the Cincinnati Enquirer last month that President Donald Trump’s Gaza plan is “nothing short of the dictionary definition of ethnic cleansing.”
He has also drawn scorn from some non-Jewish progressives, for example from the Cincinnati Socialists last year, for his attitudes about Israel and Zionism.
Those attitudes put him in the American Jewish mainstream. According to a 2021 Pew Research study, 80% of U.S. Jews say caring about Israel is an essential or important part of what being Jewish means to them. Nearly 60% said they personally feel an emotional attachment to Israel. Last year, the American Jewish Committee Survey of American Jewish Opinion found that 85% of U.S. Jews think it’s important for the United States to support Israel in the aftermath of Oct. 7.
“I would call myself a liberal Zionist,” said Jun. “I am attacked by people to the right of me in the Jewish community for being insufficiently allegiant to Israel, and I am attacked by progressives for having any association with Israel. I don’t consider all anti-Zionism to be antisemitism, but I do know there is a dramatic overlap between the two.”
The rally’s organizers did not publicly announce that they had disinvited Jun. As the news emerged on Thursday, both critics and supporters of his exclusion posted a flood of comments on the event’s Facebook page.
“This is a shameful march that’s a complete lie. I am a progressive, but progressives can’t stand for equality when you exclude Jews,” wrote Rabbi Sammy Kanter, director of Jewish learning at the local JCC. “Excluding a minority group is not a rally against hate, but rather breeds more!”
Mohammad Ahmad, who leads a pro-Palestinian group in Northern Kentucky, just across the Ohio river from Cincinnati, praised the decision to disinvite Jun.
“As a Palestinian, I want to thank the brave organizers of this event for taking a clear stance against Zionism and all forms of white supremacy in the Tri-State area. Bravo and well done,” he wrote. “Zionism is unequivocally racism and Zionism is, without a shadow of doubt, an ultranationalist, fascist, and far-right ethno-supremacist ideology that has inflicted so much harm not just on Palestinians in Palestine, but on so many other marginalized groups, including right here in Cincinnati.”
The organizers, too, weighed in on the Facebook page. Smith wrote they believe that “standing up against white supremacy, neo-Nazism, and other forms of oppression requires us to critically engage with the full scope of ideologies and actions that perpetuate harm,” and that they believe hate has no place in Cincinnati.
“The decision to not invite Rabbi Jun-Ballaban was not based on his Jewish identity, but rather on a fundamental divergence in values,” Smith wrote. “Our event is rooted in a commitment to challenging white supremacy, ethnic cleansing, and the ongoing harm against marginalized communities.”
Previously, according to private messages between Jun and Smith that Jun shared, his plan was to speak about the threat of white supremacy, which Smith said “would be perfect.”
Jun had even told his congregants that to “counter Nazism,” they would need to show up in spaces where they may feel uncomfortable. Since his dismissal by organizers, he said he feels differently.
“It’s one thing to go to a rally expecting different people with disagreeing viewpoints to show up as their full selves, and for that to create discomfort and to live with that discomfort,” Jun said. “It’s another thing for us as a Jewish community to be told, ‘You cannot show up as your full selves.’”
