Examining the Increasingly Troubled Relationship between American Jews and Israel

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. •