Examining the Increasingly Troubled Relationship
between American Jews and Israel
Allan C. Brownfeld
Issues
Fall 2016
Trouble in the Tribe: The American Jewish Conflict over Israel
By Dov Waxman,
Princeton University Press,
316 Pages, $29.95
American Jewish opinion concerning Israel is increasingly divided. The fact
that non-Orthodox streams of Judaism are not recognized means that Reform
and Conservative Jews have fewer rights in Israel than anyplace in the
Western world. Israel’s nearly 50 year occupation of the West Bank and East
Jerusalem sharply divides American Jewish opinion. The nuclear agreement
with Iran was opposed by leading organizations which promote themselves as
speaking for American Jews while the vast majority of American Jews
supported the agreement, and most Jewish members of Congress voted to
approve it. While Jewish religious bodies proclaim that Israel is “central”
to Judaism, American Jewish opinion seems to challenge this understanding.
“There are really two Jewish Americans,” the journalist Peter Beinart has
written. “One is older, more Republican, more Orthodox and more interested
in shielding Israel from external pressure than pressuring a two-state
solution. The other is younger, more secular, less tribal, overwhelmingly
Democratic, less institutionally affiliated and more troubled by Israel’s
direction.”
Polls show that only a quarter of Jews aged 18-29 (compared to 43% of those
over 50) believe that the government of Israel is making a sincere effort to
make peace with the Palestinians. A quarter of young Jewish Americans
(compared to 5% of their elders) say U.S. support for Israel is excessive.
In his book, Trouble In The Tribe: The American Jewish Conflict Over Israel,
Professor Dov Waxman of Northeastern University, argues that for younger,
non-Orthodox American Jews, who have grown up in a country in which Jews are
powerful and privileged, and have married non-Jews in large numbers,
solidarity with Israel and an “us versus them” worldview has diminished
drastically. Indeed, only 30% of them think that “caring about Israel is
essential to being Jewish.”
Age of Unquestioning Support Is Over
According to Waxman, his book’s central thesis is “that a historic change
has been taking place in the American Jewish relationship with Israel. The
age of unquestioning and unstinting support for Israel is over. The pro-
Israel consensus that once united American Jews is eroding, and Israel is
fast becoming a source of division rather than unity for American Jewry … A
new era of American Jewish conflict over Israel is replacing the old era of
solidarity. In short, Israel used to bring American Jews together. Now it is
driving them apart.”
The depiction of American Jews as a monolithic lobby or voting bloc
committed to promoting Israel, Waxman argues, is wrong: “While this is
certainly true of some American Jews, for others Israel may be a distant
concern, or an object of sharp criticism. The consensus about Israel that
prevailed … in the 1960s and 1970s has long since disappeared. Instead,
there is now a rancorous and divisive debate pitting left against right,
critics against defenders of Israeli government policies. Jews against
Jews.”
It is difficult for American Jews not to have an opinion about Israel and
its policies and claims. “Since Israel claims to speak and act in their
name, not only on behalf of its own citizens, it is almost impossible for
Diaspora Jews to ignore Israel, even if they wanted to,” states Waxman.
The relationship between American Jews and Israel, Waxman shows, “… is
primarily driven by American Jewish needs and desires … Israel is an
‘imaginary homeland’ for American Jews — ‘imaginary’ not just because it is
not their actual home, but also because it exists primarily in their
imagination. American Jewish attachment to Israel is based upon an
imaginary, not real, Israel. Few of them know much about, let alone
experience, the real Israel, even if they do visit the country (which most
have not). For most American Jews, Israel has been more of a mythic land
than an actual place. It functions, therefore, as a kind of screen on which
American Jews may project their hopes, fantasies, and fears.”
Division over Zionism
Division about Zionism in the American Jewish community, Waxman points out,
is nothing new. The current debate, he notes, “… echoes earlier debates
about Zionism that occurred before 1948. Then, as now, there were fierce
disagreements among American Jews and the American Jewish establishment … It
was only after Israel’s founding that the communal consensus came to
dominate American Jewish politics. Thus, from a historical perspective, the
pro-Israel consensus that once reigned within the American Jewish community
is the aberration, rather than the rule. Jewish division on Israel is
historically the norm.”
The author would have done well to explore the prophetic vision of those
within the American Jewish community who sharply criticized Zionism from the
start. In 1885, a group of Reform rabbis met in Pittsburgh and wrote an
eight point platform. It emphasized that Reform Judaism denied nationalism
in any variety. It stated: “We recognize in the era of a universal culture
of heart and intellect, the approaching of Israel’s great Messianic hope for
the establishment of the kingdom of truth, justice and peace among all men.
We consider ourselves no longer a nation but a religious community, and
therefore expect neither a return to Palestine nor a sacrificial worship
under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning
the Jewish state.”
In 1897, the Central Conference of American Rabbis adopted a resolution
disapproving of any attempt to establish a Jewish state. The resolution
stated: “Zion was a precious possession of the past … as such it is a holy
memory, but it is not our hope for the future. America is our Zion.” In
1904, “The American Israelite,” edited by Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, the leader
of American Reform Judaism in the 19th century, noted: “There is not one
solitary prominent native Jewish American who is an advocate of Zionism.”
Jews Are Not a Nation
In a speech to the Menorah Society Dinner in New York City in December 1917,
Chief Judge of the New York State Supreme Court Irving Lehman, brother of
Governor Herbert Lehman of New York, stated: “I cannot recognize that the
Jews as such constitute a nation in any sense in which the word is
recognized in political science, or that a national basis is a possible
concept for modern Judaism. We Jews in America, bound to the Jews of other
lands by our common faith, constituting our common inheritance, cannot as
American citizens feel any bond to them as members of a nation, for
nationally we are Americans and Americans only, and in all political and
civic matters we cannot recognize any other ties. We must therefore look for
the maintenance of Judaism to those spiritual concepts which constitute
Judaism.”
When Zionists urged President Woodrow Wilson to embrace the idea of a Jewish
state in Palestine after World War I, in 1919 a petition was presented to
Wilson entitled “A Statement to the Peace Conference.” It reflected the
dominant American Jewish position on Zionism and Palestine. It criticized
Zionist efforts to segregate Jews “as a political unit … in Palestine or
elsewhere” and underlined the principle of equal rights for all citizens of
any state upon the basis of religion or race. The petition asserted that the
“overwhelming bulk of the Jews of America, England, France, Italy, Holland,
Switzerland and the other lands of freedom have no thought whatever of
surrendering their citizenship in those lands in order to resort to a
‘Jewish homeland’ in Palestine.”
Among those signing were Rep. Julius Klein of California, Henry Morganthau,
Jr., former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey, Simon Rosendale, former Attorney
General of New York, Mayor L.H. Kempner of Galveston Texas, E.M. Baker,
president of the New York Stock Exchange, Jesse L. Strauss, president of
Macy’s, and New York Times publisher Adolph Ochs.
Establishment of American Council for Judaism
As Reform Judaism embraced the Zionist idea in the wake of the rise of
Hitler, the American Council for Judaism was established in 1942, to
maintain the older idea of a universal, prophetic Judaism shorn of
nationalism. It proclaimed that Judaism was a religion of universal values,
not a nationality. American Jews, it declared, were American by nationality
and Jews by religion, just as other Americans were Catholic, Protestant or
Muslim. In his keynote address to the Council’s June 1942 meeting in
Atlantic City, Rabbi David Philipson declared that Reform Judaism is
religious while Zionism is political: “The outlook of Reform Judaism is the
world. The outlook of Zionism is a corner of eastern Asia.”
An early leader of the Council, Rabbi Morris Lazaron, who served from 1915
to 1946 as rabbi of the Baltimore Hebrew Congregation, was originally a
supporter of cultural Zionism but later altered his views. Slowly, he
discovered that Zionist nationalism was not different from other forms of
nationalism. He said: “… Behind the mask of Jewish sentiment, one can see
the specter of the foul thing which moves Germany and Italy. Behind the
camouflage of its unquestioned appeal to Jewish feeling, one can hear a
chorus of ‘Heil.’ This is not for Jews — Reform, Conservative or Orthodox.”
Speaking in 1937 at the annual convention of the Union of American Hebrew
Congregations in New Orleans, Lazaron declared: “Judaism cannot accept as
the instrument of its salvation the very philosophy of nationalism which is
leading the world to destruction. Shall we condemn it as Italian or German,
but accept it as Jewish?”
One of the leading Jewish theologians and philosophers of the 20th century,
Abraham Joshua Heschel, who marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
for civil rights for all people, said: “Judaism is not a religion of space
and does not worship the soil. So, too, the State of Israel is not the
climax of Jewish history, but a test of the integrity of the Jewish people
and the competence of Israel.”
“The mirage of Jewish nationalism”
It was not only among American Jews that Zionism had little appeal. In
response to Theodor Herzl’s plea for a Jewish state, enunciated at the First
Zionist Congress held in Basel, Switzerland in August, 1897, the chief rabbi
of Vienna, Moritz Gudemann, criticized what he called “the mirage of Jewish
nationalism.” He declared that, “Belief in one God is the unifying factor
for Jews,” and that Zionism was incompatible with Judaism’s teachings. “The
Jewish Chronicle” of London judged that the Zionist scheme’s lack of
religious perspective rendered it “cold and comparatively uninviting.”
Adolf Jellinek, who became the greatest Jewish preacher of his age and a
standard bearer of Jewish liberalism from his position as rabbi at the
Leopoldstadt Temple in Vienna, deplored the creation of what he called “a
small state like Serbia or Romania, outside Europe, which would most likely
become the plaything of one Great Power against another, and whose future
would be very uncertain.” He argued that, “Almost all Jews in Europe would
vote against the scheme if they were given the opportunity. We are at home
in Europe and feel ourselves to be children of the lands in which we were
born, raised and educated, whose languages we speak and whose cultures
constitute our intellectual substance.”
Indeed, prior to the mid-20th century, the overwhelming majority of all Jews
rejected Zionism. In 1929, Orthodox rabbi Aaron Samuel Tamarat wrote that
the very notion of a sovereign Jewish state as a spiritual center was “a
contradiction to Judaism’s ultimate purpose.” He declared: “Judaism at root
is not some religious concentration which can be localized or situated in a
single territory. Neither is Judaism a ‘nationality,’ in the sense of modern
nationalism, fit to be woven into the three-foldedness of ‘homeland, army
and heroic songs.’ No, Judaism is Torah, ethics, and exaltation of spirit.
If Judaism is truly Torah, then it cannot be reduced to the confines of any
particular territory. For as Scripture said of Torah, ‘Its measure is
greater than the earth.”
Ethical Monotheism Is Core of Judaism
The most articulate spokesman for the German Reform movement, the
distinguished rabbi and scholar Abraham Geiger (1810-1874), argued that
Judaism developed through an evolutionary process that had begun with God’s
revelation to the Hebrew prophets. That revelation was progressive; new
truth became available to every generation. The underlying and unchangeable
essence of Judaism was its morality. The core of Judaism was ethical
monotheism. The Jewish people were a religious community, destined to carry
on the mission to “to serve as a light to the nations,” to bear witness to
God and his moral law. The dispersion of the Jews was not a punishment for
their sins, but a part of God’s plan whereby they were to disseminate the
universal message of ethical monotheism. Geiger deleted all prayers about a
return to Zion in a Reform prayerbook he edited in 1854.
In the years after Israel’s creation in 1948, the organized American Jewish
community embraced it, with dissenters largely ostracized. But, Dov Waxman
points out, the overwhelming majority of American Jews, while supporting
Israel and wishing it well, were never really Zionists. He writes that,
“Classical Zionism … has never had much relevance or appeal to American
Jewry. Indeed, the vast majority of American Jews reject the basic tenets of
classical Zionism — that Diaspora Jews live in exile, that Jewish life in
Israel is superior to life in the Diaspora, and that Diaspora Jewish life is
doomed to eventually disappear. American Jews do not think that they live in
exile and they do not regard Israel as their homeland (except in so far as
they might believe that it is the place from which their distant ancestors
originated).”
In 1950, Jacob Blaustein, the president of the American Jewish Committee,
wrote in a famous “exchange of views” with David Ben-Gurion: “American Jews
vigorously repudiate any suggestion or implication that they are in exile.
American Jews — young and old alike, Zionists and non-Zionists alike — are
profoundly attached to America … To American Jews, America is home.”
America as a Kind of Zion
Indeed, writes Waxman, “For many American Jews, America is more than just
home; it is itself a kind of Zion, an ‘almost promised land.’ The United
States is not just an alternative to Zion, but in many respects an
alternative Zion. Zionism has never succeeded in winning over the majority
of American Jews. From its establishment in 1898 right up until World War
II, the American Zionist movement failed to gain mass support among American
Jews, and encountered a lot of resistance from the … leadership of American
Jewry who were concerned that Zionism might jeopardize the position of
American Jews by calling their national allegiance into question. Throughout
this period anti-Zionism was a widely held and respectable opinion within
the American Jewish community (a fact that has been largely erased from the
collective memory of American Jewry).”
In order for Zionism to gain support in the U.S., it was fundamentally
reformulated. Louis Brandeis, then a Boston lawyer, later a Supreme Court
justice, was the leader of the Federation of American Zionists from 1914-
1921. He set forth the idea that Zionism was the solution for European Jews
who faced persecution, not for American Jews who were at home in the United
States. Instead of urging American Jews to move to Palestine, then and now
an intrinsic ingredient of Zionist philosophy, he merely encouraged them to
philanthropically support the efforts of Jewish pioneers there. Neither
Brandeis nor other Zionist leaders expressed any awareness of the indigenous
population of Palestine or of what its fate would be in the future.
In Waxman’s view, the focus on Israel on the part of America’s Jewish
establishment really dates to the 1967 war. He notes that, “Israel also
became an ‘object of secular veneration’ for many American Jews, the
centerpiece of what Jonathan Woocher termed ‘the new civil religion of
American Jews.’ So intense was the devotion to Israel among American Jews
during this time that it was characterized by David Elazar as
‘Israelolatry,’ implying that it was a kind of idolatry. This Israelolatry
was marked by unequivocal popular support for Israel, near total unanimity
of opinion concerning the Arab-Israeli conflict (according to which Israel
was the innocent victim of Arab animosity and aggression) and a massive
grassroots mobilization in Israel’s behalf.
Love Affair with Israel Is Short-Lived
If American Jews fell in love with Israel during the 1960s and early 1970s,
it is Waxman’s view that by the end of the 1970s and throughout the 1980s,
this support was wearing off: “The American Jewish love affair with Israel
was short-lived, lasting only about ten years. What followed it was not so
much disaffection, but disillusionment and dissent over Israeli government
policies … For more than three decades, the American Jewish relationship
with Israel has been marked more by ambivalence, unease, and an almost
constant chorus of criticism than unequivocal support.”
Under right-wing Likud governments, Israel became a different kind of place
than the one most American Jews imagined it to be. “Of particular concern,”
writes Waxman, “was Likud’s settlement policy in the West Bank and Gaza
Strip, which seemed aimed at preventing the possibility of any kind of
territorial compromise in the future… A turning point in American Jewish
attitudes to Israel came following Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in June
1982. At first, most American Jews supported the war in Lebanon … But this
quickly changed in the wake of the massacre of hundreds of Palestinian
civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut by Israel’s
Lebanese Christian Phalangist allies … The Sabra and Shatila massacre was a
watershed in American Jewish attitudes to Israel, as it undermined their
idealized image.…”
The first Palestinian intifada, which began in December 1987 and lasted
until 1991, generated an unprecedented amount of American Jewish criticism
of Israel, as well as international condemnation. The largely nonviolent
mass uprising met a harsh crackdown. Albert Vorspan, one of the lay leaders
of Reform Judaism, expressed the disillusionment many American Jews were
expressing at the time: “Beyond any issue in recent years, American Jews are
traumatized by events in Israel. This is the downside of the euphoric mood
after the Six Day War when we felt 10 feet tall. Now, suffering under the
shame and stress of pictures of Israel’s brutality televised nightly, we
want to crawl into a hole. This is the price we pay for having made of
Israel an icon — a surrogate faith, surrogate synagogue, surrogate God.
Israel could not withstand our romantic idealization … Now Israel reveals
itself, a nation like all others.”
“Israel. Right or Wrong”
The organized American Jewish community, however, continued to adopt an
“Israel, right or wrong” philosophy and sought to censor, or silence,
critics. Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, a Conservative rabbi and scholar, wrote in
1979: “One can no longer be excommunicated in Modern America for not
believing in God, for living totally outside of the tradition, or even for
marrying out. Instead, a new heresy had now emerged to mark the boundaries
of legitimate Jewish identity, the heresy of opposition to Israel and
Zionism.” Jews who spoke out against Israel’s behavior could find themselves
ostracized and stigmatized as ‘self-hating’ Jews (a charge that is
tantamount to calling them anti-Semitic). Thus, though there were always
some critical voices within the Jewish community, dissent was largely
stifled.
In the aftermath of the 1973 war, a group was formed called “Breira (meaning
‘alternative’ in Hebrew): A Project of Concern in Diaspora-Israel
Relations.” This, writes Waxman, “was a completely new phenomenon — a Jewish
and explicitly Zionist organization that claimed to support Israel. But was
also strongly critical of its policies … Breira called for the establishment
of a Palestinian state in the Occupied Territories (both major political
parties in Israel at the time opposed this) and even more controversially,
it called for Israel to negotiate with the PLO … Breira broke the taboo on
public criticism of Israel within the American Jewish community … It
directly challenged the organized American Jewish community, accusing its
leadership of muzzling communal debate over Israeli policies, and called for
‘the creation of a grass-roots democratic structure for American Jewry.”
The organized Jewish community moved quickly to destroy Breira. Its members
were removed from boards of local Jewish Federations, rabbis identified with
Breira were fired, and Breira members working for Jewish organizations like
B’nai B’rith were pressured by their employers and faced with the threat
that they could lose their jobs if they continued their activities. The
group was forced to disband after its first and only national conference in
March 1977. Breira had about 1,500 members and nearly one hundred
Conservative and Reform rabbis on its advisory council, which was chaired by
Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf, the director of the Yale University Hillel Society.
It included such prominent rabbis as Eugene Borowitz, Everett Gendler and
Balfour Brickner and had the support of prominent intellectuals such as
Irving Howe and Nathan Glazer.
From the Heart of the Jewish Community
Dov Waxman provides this assessment: “Although Breira was small, it was not
a marginal, fringe organization. It came from the heart of the American
Jewish community and, as such, it threatened to overturn the status quo and
legitimize Jewish dissent about Israel at a time when such dissent was still
forbidden in mainstream Jewish circles. Breira’s members could not easily be
dismissed as ‘self-hating Jews,’ and their active roles and prominent
positions in the organized Jewish community meant that they were well placed
to spread their dissenting opinions to other American Jews.”
By the 1980s, a host of liberal Jewish groups emerged, such as New Jewish
Agenda, Americans for Peace Now, Project Nishma and the Jewish Peace Lobby.
More recently, groups such as J Street and Jewish Voice for Peace have
emerged, and have attracted much support. Established in 2008, J Street, by
2013, had around 180,000 registered supporters, 20,000 donors and over 45
local chapters. Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) was established in Berkeley,
California in 1996. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) publicly listed JVP as
one of the “ten most influential anti-Israel groups” in the U.S.
Efforts to prevent Jews who are in any way critical of Israel from speaking
at Jewish events continue to be widespread. The organized Jewish community
seems prepared to continue to promote the illusion that American Jews
overwhelmingly support Israel and its government’s policies. In November
2010, J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami’s scheduled speaking appearance at a
Reform synagogue in Newton, Massachusetts was cancelled because of pressure
from right-wing members of the congregation. In November 2012, journalist
Peter Beinart was disinvited by the organizers of a Jewish book festival
held in the Jewish Community Center of Atlanta, reportedly after complaints
from some of its members. Even individuals who have been invited to speak or
perform in Jewish venues, and where opinions about Israel have nothing to do
with their talks or performances, have had their invitations rescinded
because of critical statements they have made about Israel or Zionism. In
January 2014, David Harris-Gershon, author of a memoir about his response to
his wife’s injury in a Palestinian terrorist attack in Israel was disinvited
by the Jewish Community Center of Washington, D.C. because of comments he
had made in a blog post that were deemed to be supportive of boycotting
Israel. The performance of a Jewish feminist rock group at a music festival
organized by the Washington, D.C. JCC was also cancelled because its lead
singer was critical of Zionism.
Censorship in the Jewish Community
Pages can be filled with examples of censorship within the organized Jewish
community. In July 2009, the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco
issued guidelines about the kind of “Israel-Related-Programming” it would
fund. It would not provide funding to any group that has programs about
Israel that “undermine the legitimacy of the State of Israel” or any group
that co-sponsors programs with groups that undermine Israel’s legitimacy.
What these guidelines mean is not defined. Writing in The Forward, Alan
Snitow and Deborah Kaufman charged that these guidelines would have “a
chilling effect on the San Francisco Bay Area’s Jewish community.”
In the fall of 2013, a group of right-wing Zionist activists waged a public
campaign to stop the Washington, D.C. JCC’s Theater J from performing the
play The Admission by the Israeli playwright Motti Lerner. The play deals
with claims that Israeli soldiers carried out a massacre of Arab civilians
in the village of Tantura during the 1948 war. The scheduled performance of
the play was canceled and replaced with a workshop about it. The next year,
the JCC canceled Theater J’s annual Voices from a Changing Middle East,
which had previously staged plays that were critical of Israel. After
issuing a statement criticizing censorship at Theater J, its longtime
artistic director Ari Roth, a celebrated figure in local theater, was fired.
In 2010, Hillel International, the organization that oversees Jewish student
life on college campuses, issued guidelines similar to those issued in San
Francisco. Among other things, the Hillel guidelines barred Jewish student
groups from cosponsoring events or conducting activities with Palestinian
student organizations, since most supports boycotts of Israel. This led the
Hillel at Harvard University to pull out of hosting a planned talk by
Avraham Burg, a former speaker of the Knesset and former chairman of the
Jewish Agency, because a pro-Palestinian group at Harvard was involved in
sponsoring the event. “The ambiguity of Hillel’s guidelines,” writes Waxman,
“what, for instance, constitutes ‘demonizing Israel’ or applying a ‘double
standard’ to it — has also made it harder for some campus Hillels to host
speakers from the left-wing Israeli NGO Breaking the Silence, since it was
accused of being ‘anti-Israel.’ It even became problematic to screen Israeli
films that are critical of the Occupation, such as the Oscar-nominated
documentaries Five Broken Cameras and The Gatekeepers.”
Efforts to Silence Critics Have Backfired
The Jewish establishment’s efforts to silence dissenting views have
backfired. A group of Harvard students started a campaign called “Open
Hillel” and distributed an online petition, signed by more than 1,200 Jewish
students, calling upon Hillel’s leadership to change its Israel guidelines.
In December 2011, the Hillel chapter at Swarthmore College declared itself
an “Open Hillel,” and announced that it would not abide by Hillel’s
guidelines. Open Hillel chapters have formed on other campuses and in
October 2014 the first Open Hillel conference was held at Harvard. They
heard from prominent critics of Israel such as Judith Butler and Rashid
Khalidi, who are prohibited from speaking in Hillels and other mainstream
Jewish venues.
It is Waxman’s view that the American Jewish establishment “only represents
a small segment of American Jewry, which is more right-wing and religious
than the majority of American Jews. Most American Jews, especially younger
ones, are largely, if not entirely, disconnected from the American Jewish
establishment, and thus effectively disenfranchised … Social, cultural,
economic, and technological changes within the Jewish community and the U.S.
in general … threaten the very survival of the American Jewish
establishment, and by extension, its ability to represent and collectively
mobilize the Jewish community.”
What makes the American Jewish establishment especially subject to
criticism, declares Waxman, “is the fact that its leadership is not elected
by the American Jewish community. At best, only a handful of American Jews
get to vote on the leadership of Jewish organizations, and even when
elections do take place they are rarely competitive. Most of the leaders of
the most prominent organizations … are unelected and some have been in place
for decades (Abraham Foxman, for instance, headed the ADL for 28 years
before his retirement in 2015, and David Harris has been in charge of the
American Jewish Committee for more than 25 years). The organized American
Jewish community is not a democracy. It is run by an oligarchy.”
Cultural Creativity, Spirituality and Social Justice
While the organized Jewish community has focused its attention on supporting
Israel and fighting anti-Semitism, younger American Jews, Waxman reports,
“are more concerned with cultural creativity, spirituality, social justice
and the environment than with Israel and anti-Semitism. A generational
divide … is at the heart of the estrangement of young American Jews from the
Jewish establishment … While younger Jews mostly steer clear of Jewish
establishment organizations, they have flocked toward Jewish social justice
and environmental groups (such as American Jewish World Service, Bend the
Arc, Avodah, and Hazon) … The Jewish establishment can no longer
legitimately claim to express a communal consensus over Israel since that
consensus is unraveling.”
For more and more non-Orthodox Jews, especially younger ones, Judaism and
Jewishness is a source of personal meaning and spirituality. Being Jewish,
for them, is a matter of personal choice and they define their Jewish
identities and Judaism itself in their own individual ways. “More than ever
before,” writes Waxman, “non-Orthodox Jews are choosing not only whether
they want to be Jewish or not, but also the content and meaning of their
Jewishness … They are becoming less committed to what is known as ‘Jewish
peoplehood.’ … American Judaism itself is becoming ‘post-ethnic’ in the
context of a wider multicultural and multiracial society.… For younger, non-
Orthodox Jews … their Jewish identity is just one of their many identities,
with the whole concept of ‘Jewish peoplehood’ seeming to many of them too
tribal and exclusivist, even racist … Since they do not see the world as
such a threatening and hostile place for Jews, they are much less inclined
to divide the world into ‘us’ and ‘them’ (Jews and non-Jews), as older
generations of Jews have done.”
Among the reasons for the decline of “Jewish peoplehood” among non-Orthodox
Jews, Waxman notes, “is surely the simple fact that so many of them are
intermarried or the children of intermarried couples.” Since the early
1970s, intermarriage rates among American Jews rose from less than 20 per
cent to almost 60 per cent between 2005 and 2013, according to the Pew
survey. Among non-Orthodox Jews it is even higher, at 71 per cent. Nearly
half of Jewish “millennials,” those born after 1980, have one Jewish parent.
Sociologists Steven Cohen and Ari Kelman write that, “Intermarriage
represents and advances more open and fluid group boundaries along with a
commensurate drop in Jewish tribalism, collective Jewish identity and Jewish
Peoplehood.” They argue that increasing intermarriage is largely responsible
for undermining American Jewish attachment to Israel, especially among the
young.
Partisan Divide over Israel
Supporting Israel may, in the future, become merely an Orthodox cause, not
one that unites most American Jews. Waxman believes that this will have an
impact on U.S. Government support for Israel, “… as it would exacerbate the
partisan divide over Israel that is already developing. Since Orthodox Jews
tend to support the Republican Party (as do evangelical Christians, who are
also staunch supporters of Israel), supporting Israel could become a
Republican cause, and no longer a bipartisan one … The potential erosion of
support for Israel among non-Orthodox American Jews is thus ultimately a
long-term threat to U.S. Government support for Israel.”
A particular challenge to the Jewish community at the present time, declares
Waxman, “is the incivility and intolerance that frequently accompanies the
debate over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In some local Jewish
communities, this debate has become so nasty that a moratorium on talking
about Israel has effectively been put into place … .There is a pervasive
atmosphere of trepidation, even intimidation, within the organized American
Jewish community today when it comes to Israel … Such intolerance … only
serves to alienate a younger generation of American Jews, who are more
critical of Israel and less interested in joining the organized Jewish
community. If their views are ignored and their voices silenced, they will
simply walk away from the organized Jewish community, as many have already
done.”
In the end, Waxman states, “Censorship, red lines and blacklists cannot put
the proverbial genie back in the bottle … The days when Israeli governments
could count on the unequivocal support of American Jews are long gone … Even
leaders of American Jewish establishment organizations have become
frustrated by what is widely perceived to be the tendency of Israeli
governments to ignore American Jewish concerns and feelings … American
policymakers must remember that no single group speaks on behalf of American
Jews … just as most American Jews have come to believe that one can care
about Israel and criticize its policies, so too should American policymakers
… It is hard to believe that any Israeli government, including the present
one, is completely immune to criticism, and that an increase in this
criticism, by American Jews and others, will not eventually encourage, if
not compel, Israeli policymakers to alter Israel’s present course. If that
happens, then the American Jewish conflict over Israel, though divisive and
often acrimonious, may turn out to have been productive.”
Impossible to Have an Honest Discussion
Dov Waxman has been harshly criticized for his analysis. Responding to
critics in an article in The Forward (June 20, 2016), he writes: “Instead of
addressing the claims and evidence I actually present, these critics have
misrepresented my arguments or even deliberately distorted them. They have
also resorted to ad hominem attacks. I have been accused of being a self-
hating Jew … Sadly, the American Jewish conversation about Israel has not
only become argumentative and angry … It has become a dialogue of the deaf.
Nowadays, it seems impossible to have an honest, non-politicized discussion
of Israel … Rather than address the real challenges facing American Jews and
Israel today, it’s easier to simply shoot the messenger.”
Shooting the messenger does not alter the importance — or accuracy — of the
message. By any standard, this book is essential reading for an
understanding the growing divisions within the American Jewish community
about Israel. Zionism is in retreat and, as Waxman shows, never really
enjoyed the widespread support is advocates claimed. •
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