Reporting on the state of American Jewish relations with Israel, Time ran a headline announcing “The Diaspora’s Discontent.” For its part, Newsweek saw fit to inform us that American Jews who “loved Israel blindly” were now “learning to ask hard questions.” The New York Review of Books offered an analysis entitled “The Illusion of Jewish Unity” that limned the growing distance between the established American Jewish organizations and “the reality of Jewish opinion in America” about Israeli policies. These articles were published not in the wake of the recent Israeli incursion into Gaza but two decades ago.
Now, as then, the narrative of American Jewish disaffection continues to dominate public discussions about the relationship between the largest Diaspora Jewish community and the Jewish state. It has become the journalistic cliché of our time to portray American Jews as shifting, in response to this or that event, from uncritical adoration of Israel to profound disenchantment. For the past three decades, this trope has recurred with increasing frequency, particularly when the nationalist Likud party has attained power and whenever Israel has engaged in military action.
It is certainly true that American Jews do not hold monolithic views about Israeli options and policies, any more than there is uniformity of opinion within Israel itself. But the intra-Jewish rift that has been heralded for decades has not occurred. In fact, the great untold story is that in some respects, the connection between American Jews and Israel has never been more intimate. To the extent that divisions over Israel are growing, they stem less from disagreements over Israel’s policies on war and peace than they do from a far-reaching transformation that is remaking American Jewish society.
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To appreciate just how much things have changed, we need only return to the early years of statehood, when Jewish leaders in both countries struggled to define the rules of engagement. American Zionist leaders found themselves without a cause once their stated objective—the creation of a Jewish state—had been attained. “What shall I do with my Zionism?” asked the young Arthur Hertzberg in these pages. “The Diaspora has chosen to live on as such. How to make it live on creatively and how to maintain inner identity between it and Israel—these are the most important questions that face us today.”
Meanwhile on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, Israeli leaders were far less interested in the future vitality of Diaspora communities than in fostering a mass immigration (or “aliyah”) of well-educated and skilled Western Jews who could join in the historic task of building an autonomous Jewish state after nearly 1,900 years of exile and political dependence. David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, bluntly told visiting American Jews that if they personally could not manage to immigrate, at the very least they should send their children. Calls for a mass immigration angered leaders of large Jewish organizations, particularly those without a strong Zionist orientation, and more generally alarmed American Jews who feared being tarred with charges of dual loyalty.
Matters grew so tense that Jacob Blaustein, in his capacity as president of the American Jewish Committee, insisted on a formal understanding with Ben-Gurion as to the mutual responsibilities of each community. Just two years after Israel’s founding, the two men exchanged a series of statements clarifying the relationship. The primary role of American Jews, they agreed, was “to do their share in the rebuilding of Israel, which faces . . . enormous political, social, and economic problems.” They would do so through philanthropic and political support for the fledgling state, but there would be no more calls for mass immigration. As to the question of loyalty, Ben-Gurion acknowledged the allegiance of American Jews to the United States and pledged not to “interfere in any way with the internal affairs of Jewish communities abroad.”
That the political leader of a sovereign nation would have issued a statement of this kind directed at citizens of another country, the preponderant majority of whom had never set foot in his land, is but one of the remarkable features of this exchange. For Blaustein had insisted on the issuance of something akin to a formal understanding between the Israeli government and a population that had no political or legal connection to the Jewish state. It is hard to conjure other instances of a head of state issuing such a document to citizens of a foreign country.
The statement thereby foreshadowed the extraordinary ties that would bind American Jews and Israel for many decades to come. Since Israel’s creation, American Jews have directed huge amounts of dollars to educational, cultural, religious, social, and health institutions in the Jewish state (funds, we may add, that have aided all of Israel’s citizens, regardless of their religion). They have also invested a great deal of political capital to win friends for Israel within their nation’s corridors of power.
Ben-Gurion’s non-interference pledge was, in the final analysis, naïve, because he did not envision a time when American Jews would routinely and without a moment’s discomfort interfere in Israeli internal affairs. Such interference is now routine, as is evident from the financial contributions flowing from the United States to a variety of Israeli political parties and NGOs of all ideological hues, thus ensuring that American Jewish philanthropy would have a significant impact on Israeli public policy. Perhaps even more striking, the agreement did not envision a time when American Jewry would cease to act solely as patron to an impoverished Israel but rather would turn to the Jewish state for help in solving some of its deepest problems. The agreement did not heed a fundamental premise of spiritual Zionism: the conviction that the Diaspora would be transformed by Zionism and the Jewish state that was born from it.
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Indeed, over the 61 years since its founding, Israel has come to play a pervasive, if unacknowledged, role in virtually every sector of American Jewish public culture. Take the religious sphere: With the noteworthy exception of many Orthodox synagogues, congregations recite all Hebrew prayers using the Sephardic pronunciation adopted by Israeli Hebrew, even though American Jews overwhelmingly are of Ashkenazic ancestry. Jewish congregations of almost all varieties routinely recall Israel in their liturgy and holiday calendar by reciting a prayer for the state on Sabbath and holiday morning services at the pivotal moment before the return of the Torah(s) to the ark and by marking Israel Independence Day and Yom Yerushalayim (Jerusalem Day, marking the city’s reunification). More subtly, passages of the liturgy are sung to Israeli melodies, as when references to the restoration of the Jewish people to Zion are chanted to the tune of the “Hatikva,” Israel’s national anthem, or the iconic song of the Six Day War, “Yerushalayim Shel Zahav” (Jerusalem of Gold). As for public discourse, rabbis across the spectrum routinely deliver sermons about conditions in Israel designed to inspire their flock to identify with Israel and to mobilize them at times of crisis.
References to Israel also come in more material form: men and women wear knitted kippot (skullcaps) and talitot (prayer shawls) imported from Israel; numerous synagogues have faced a portion of their sanctuary or other precincts in Jerusalem stone, the distinctive building block of Israel’s capital; and the flag of Israel is displayed prominently along with the Stars and Stripes in sanctuaries and social halls of synagogues. Israeli products, particularly religious items, are ubiquitous in synagogue gift shops; through those items, synagogues have served as cultural mediators, bringing a part of Israel into American Jewish homes.
The ubiquity of Israel is also apparent in educational institutions, which have gradually included more information about Israel in their curricula. A survey conducted in the 1980s found that a staggering 98 percent of responding congregational schools said they taught about Israel. The more intensive and immersive settings of Jewish education offer even greater exposure to Israel. Even the casual observer visiting any of the hundreds of Zionist-inclined day schools will notice walls festooned with reminders of Israel—maps, photographic collages, Hebrew signage—even as time is set aside for learning Israeli songs and dance, and attention is paid to modern Hebrew and Israeli culture.
Summer camps with a strong Jewish orientation reinforce the connection to Israel by sprinkling Hebrew and references to Israel into camp conversation, and teaching campers Israeli dances and folk music. Housed in rustic settings and evoking an ambience of communal living, “camp settings actually come closest to suggesting our idealization of Israeli life,” observes ethnographer Riv-Ellen Prell. All of this has been reinforced by trips to Israel sponsored by youth movements, the religious denominations, schools, and synagogues, which have given young people first-hand exposure to Israeli life.
The connection is not confined to youth; it suffuses much of American Jewish culture. Jewish music offers a case in point. The repertoire of popular Jewish music is heavily Israeli, as is evident from songbooks, choral performances, festivals, and recordings with Jewish themes. In fact, it is often difficult to identify a clear demarcation between American Jewish and Israeli music. Symptomatically, when some representation of Jewish music is needed at baseball stadiums whose sound systems broadcast various types of ethnic music, the snappy “Jewish” tune tends to be “Hava Nagila” or “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena,” both imported from Israel.
If anything, the influence of Israeli dance has been even greater. What, after all, is Jewish dance if not either neo-Hasidic steps or imported Israeli folk choreography? Writing about “Hora Hootenannies and Yemenite Hoedowns,” the historian Emily Katz has traced how American Jews eagerly seized upon Israeli dance as their own distinctive ethnic style in the 1950s when a rage for folk dance gripped American society. Since then, American Jews have danced the Hora and other Israeli steps at family celebrations, in synagogues, at communal events, and at staged performances.
Israeli imports figure in other areas of cultural expression too. In the culinary sphere, falafel, hummus, and tehina are ubiquitous in kosher pizza parlors; of late, Israeli-style grills vie with other kosher eateries. When Jewish communities sponsor Jewish film festivals, most of their offerings are from Israel. Translations of Israeli books don’t seem to sell as well in the U.S. as in some European countries, but there are pockets of interest in leading Israeli writers. And with the explosion of offerings on the Internet, American Jews now connect to Israeli cultural programs and up-to-the-moment news with a click. Though we have no precise measures, there is evidence that a portion of the American Jewish population, most notably among leaders of Jewish institutions, regularly visit Israel online. The full dimensions of this connection, if not dependence, are only gradually becoming known, but the general direction of cultural influence is quite clear.
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None of this is to suggest that American Jews necessarily have a deep understanding of Israel. Quite the contrary: though Israel’s influence on American Jewish life is pervasive, knowledge about how the country really works remains for the most part shallow.
There is a severe language gap, to begin with. True, pockets of Hebrew literacy may be found in some day schools, a few extraordinary supplementary schools, a sprinkling of early-childhood programs that immerse toddlers in a Hebrew-speaking environment, and college-level language programs, but much of the American Jewish population has little familiarity with modern Israeli Hebrew. Among those who identify themselves as Jewish by virtue of their adherence to Judaism, the most engaged sector of the American Jewish population, only a bit more than one-third claim they understand a Hebrew sentence. As to understanding the nature of Israeli society, a survey conducted by sociologists Steven M. Cohen and Ephraim Ya’ar early this year found that a sample of American Jews graded their own knowledge of Israeli personalities and key features of Israeli society low, a finding confirmed by their incorrect responses to factual questions. Perhaps most surprising are the comparatively low percentages of American Jews who actually have traveled to Israel: whereas two-thirds of adult Canadian Jews and nearly three-quarters of French and Australian Jews have been to Israel, only 35 percent of American Jews have visited even once.
These dismal facts have placed a great burden on educators who regard Israel as a central feature of modern Jewish identity. Even in the post-Six Day War euphoria, when Israel education grew exponentially in Jewish schools, educators struggled to find points of commonality between the American Jewish and Israeli experiences. The result, more often than not, was a facile portrayal of Israel as a facsimile of America. Israel’s ingathering of Jews from across the globe was presented as analogous to America’s hospitality to the downtrodden; the immigrants of the early-20th-century Second Aliyah were preposterously compared in one popular textbook to the “hippies who make their appearance more than half a century later in the industrial societies of the West”; and the idealists who drained the swamps were said to have shared the ethos of America’s pioneers. Reading such accounts, students understandably might have imagined David Ben-Gurion sporting a coonskin cap. The result of such distortions has been a persistent knowledge deficit that impeded American Jews from understanding Israel on its own terms, as a separate and very different Jewish society.
If anything, the intractable conflict with the Palestinians and the ensuing bad press Israel has received since the first intifada of the late 1980s further complicated efforts to educate American Jews about Israel. With the passing of the heroic age of Israeli military exploits, it has become far more difficult to draw young people into engagement with the Jewish state. Teachers confess bewilderment as to the proper focus of Israel education: Is it to prepare young Jews to respond to hostile criticism of Israel and advocate in its behalf? Is it to foster future contributors to fundraising campaigns? Is it to engage young Jews in the life of the Jewish people, with Israel serving as a, if not the, crucial focal point? Or is it to raise a generation of literate Jews for whom Hebrew is the language of Jewish religious service and culture, and connection to Israel is an essential dimension of Jewish living?
Recognizing the limitations of previous educational efforts, American Jewish leaders have launched a series of programs to encourage more young Jews to spend time in Israel. The Orthodox sector has been the most ambitious and successful in this regard. Soon after the Six Day War, it became increasingly common for Orthodox high school graduates to spend a so-called “gap year” at an Israeli yeshiva or seminary program before beginning college. The prestige associated with this experience is evident from ads Jewish high schools take out each June, proudly enumerating the Israeli religious schools their alumni will frequent in the coming year. Still, there is a more complex side to this story. Most gap-year programs isolate visiting Americans in separate yeshiva programs that create a bubble, where English is the language of instruction and Israeli society is kept at bay. They seem designed primarily to immerse young Orthodox Jews in intensive religious study in order to fortify them before they go off to their university studies. The gap year, in short, is treated as an inoculation against assimilation in the United States, not necessarily as an opportunity to engage with Israeli society.
The same can be said of the best-known Israel experience, Birthright Israel, which to date has sent nearly 175,000 young American Jews between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six on free ten-day trips paid for by Jewish philanthropists and the Israeli government. Observers of Birthright tours have characterized participants as “pilgrim tourists,” who are exposed to a Disneyland version of Israel and are largely shielded from the jagged edges of Israeli society. As the program’s organizers candidly admit, Birthright aspires to create “links to Israel,” but its primary goal is to “launch young, unaffiliated Jews on a ‘Jewish journey’ that would lead them to a lifelong involvement with Jewish life.” The trip to Israel is principally an identity-building experience intended to deepen Jewish commitment.
Birthright is therefore designed to address a fundamental flaw in American Jewish society. Since the majority of Jewish families do not take the trouble to enroll their children in enriched programs of Jewish education, including family and educational trips to Israel, at a level comparable to Jews in other communities around the world, Israel itself has become the last desperate hope to undo what ails American Jewry. In a few days’ time, the state must, in the words of Birthright’s organizers, “reach a sector of young American Jewry (popularly known as the ‘unaffiliated’) that has become detached or alienated from Jewish life.”
Once the poor relative, Israel now is called upon to rescue a struggling American Jewish community in its difficult efforts to retain the allegiance of its young.
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To be sure, American Jews also reciprocate the favor by focusing much of their organizational activity on support for Israel. Where once there were clear lines dividing Zionist and non-Zionist organizations, it is hard to think of any large national American Jewish organization that does not include Israel in its portfolio, a point highlighted by the membership of no less than 55 “major Jewish organizations” in the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the umbrella body for agencies heavily invested in issues having to do with Israel and Jewish communities abroad. To these must be added a few thousand synagogues and even more schools that work to strengthen the ties of American Jews to Israel. There is also a significant apparatus of “friends of” agencies engaged in fund-raising for all kinds of institutions in Israel, as well as umbrella funds and foundations that provide much of the budgets of some 18,000 NGOs in Israel. Beyond their financial contributions, American Jews have developed organizational mechanisms to advocate and lobby in support of Israel, reaching out to sectors of American society and reaching in to the Jewish community to educate about Israeli conditions.
There is no question that altruism and a sense of solidarity with Israelis motivate a great many of these efforts. A large swath of engaged Jews care about the fate of Israel and want to lend a hand in the greatest collective project of the Jewish people in modern times. No doubt, American Jews also feel some residual guilt for not having done enough during the Holocaust to aid coreligionists at their time of most desperate need.
For their part, Jewish organizations across the spectrum continue to expend resources helping Israel because they know their constituents expect them to channel American Jewish know-how and dollars to the Jewish state. But they have also come to recognize how vital Israel is to their own institutional health. Dedication to Israel absorbs a great deal of their time, even as it has enhanced their credibility with their members. Moreover, their connection to Israel has catapulted them onto the international stage.
American Jewish leaders not only work cooperatively with Israeli government officials, they also travel the globe to meet with heads of state, foreign ministers, and leaders of industry and finance, fulfilling their self-defined roles as advocates for Israel. It is hard to think of any other American ethnic group whose organizations command so much attention from the most powerful world leaders, attention they attract because of their involvement with Israel. “Contrary to the often-asserted anti-Zionist charge that Israel owes its strength to American Jewish power,” argues the historian and diplomat Michael B. Oren, perhaps too broadly, “in fact, American Jewish power was forged by Israel.”
Even more important, Israel has also given Jewish organizations a specifically Jewish purpose. As ever more of their attention is riveted on public-policy questions of little direct consequence to Jewish life in this country, on activities in support of non-sectarian causes, on the battle against anti-Semitism or on welfare-related activities, Jewish organizations are drawn back to specifically Jewish functions by their work for Israel. Dollars channeled to Israel also build the social capital of Jewish organizations by engaging their members in the positive task of building Jewish life and by mobilizing leaders in behalf of distinctly Jewish functions. That American Jewish organizations have done much good for Israel is by now well known; the unacknowledged reality is how much Israel has provided them with a positive Jewish mission and an opportunity to exercise leadership.
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Taken as a whole, then, American Jews maintain a multi-layered and remarkably reciprocal relationship with Israel that could not have been imagined by Ben-Gurion and Blaustein or their contemporaries at the time of Israel’s founding. The complication in this story of mutual influence and support is that not all sectors of American Jewish society participate equally. It is well and good to acknowledge the pervasive influence of Israel on American Jewish culture and the many ways American Jews connect to Israel through their organizations. But what about all the Jews who stand aloof from those institutions and have little involvement with organized Jewish life?
The lamentable reality is that attachment to Israel is part of a web of Jewish association rapidly unraveling in our time. In a trenchant analysis, the sociologist Steven M. Cohen has recently drawn attention to the “inconvenient truth” of current American Jewish life: “Underlying the population-wide averages,” he wrote, “is a decided movement in two opposing directions by the more and less engaged portions of American Jewry.” American Jews are rapidly polarizing into two camps—one with considerable, if not increasing, levels of Jewish attachment, and one with eroding connections.
The latter is far larger in size than the former. And when it comes to connection to Israel, this split is growing apace.
What accounts for the army of American Jews who are divorcing themselves from engagement with Israel? One factor is a marked decline in the population of Jews who identify with the Jewish religion. A set of studies co-authored by Barry Kosmin and Ariela Keysar has traced a steady slippage in the number of Jews who claim to be religiously Jewish, with a concomitant rise in those claiming to be either “culturally Jewish” or “just Jewish.” This is significant because Jewish religious activity directly correlates to strong attachment to Israel. Orthodox Jews who evince the highest levels of synagogue participation and ritual observance also are the most apt of all American Jews to claim a strong attachment to Israel and to visit frequently. (They also make Aliyah at far higher rates than other American Jews.) More generally, members of synagogues across the spectrum of Jewish denominations also report having vibrant ties to Israel.
Conversely, Jews who claim not to participate in religious activities tend to have weak involvement with Israel. The same pattern can be observed when we consider the population of Jews affiliated with other institutions of the American Jewish community. Eighty-five percent of highly affiliated Jews maintain strong connections to Israel, as compared with fewer than half of the unaffiliated. As larger percentages of American Jews eschew religious and organizational participation, we can expect a further decline in attachment to Israel.
Educational experiences also correlate strongly with levels of connection to Israel. Those American Jews who as youths enjoyed the most intensive opportunities for formal and also informal Jewish education—participation in Jewish summer camps, youth movement activities, teen trips to Israel—evince the highest levels of connection to Israel as adults. Conversely, those who have a meager Jewish education claim the lowest levels of attachment.
A new cycle of involvement develops when young Jews return from study in Israel and involve themselves actively in Jewish activities upon their return. A study of religious prayer groupings (minyanim) established by and for Americans in their twenties and thirties found that in the most participatory services, an astounding 96 percent had been to Israel at least once, and high percentages had enrolled in half-year or longer programs. Through their exposure to the Hebrew language and Jewish textual study in Israel, young Jews have gained the facility to participate actively and also to lead their own religious services. Presumably, those who have not benefited from such learning opportunities find it far more difficult to join in. A chasm is opening between young Jews who have spent considerable time in Israel and those who have not.
The most important trend shaping the connection of American Jews to Israel, the one that outweighs all other factors, is intermarriage. Jews who marry other Jews are far more likely than those who intermarry to maintain a personal connection to Israel, and that is true for their children too. Nearly 60 percent of in-married Jews with children have been to Israel, as compared with just 15 percent of Jews who intermarried. And when it comes to feelings of connection, 46 percent of the intermarried have a low level of attachment to Israel, compared with 21 percent of the in-married. As for their children, only small percentages of Jews raised in intermarried families travel to Israel.
In Boston, where the Jewish community prides itself on its strong outreach programs to intermarried families, children with two Jewish parents are 20 times more likely to have been to Israel than those raised in intermarried families. Community planners who worry about these trends speak of a race between Birthright Israel and intermarriage for the allegiance of children raised in intermarried families. Yet, even though it welcomes anyone who identifies as Jewish, Birthright Israel continues to attract a population in which young people raised by mixed-married parents are heavily under-represented. If it is a race to win allegiance, only a small minority of youths raised in intermarried families seem interested in the offer of a free trip to the Jewish state.
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The deepening chasm between the Jewish “haves”—those who are attached to Judaism, received a strong Jewish education, and were encouraged by their parents to identify unambiguously with Judaism—and the more alienated “have-nots” will profoundly shape all aspects of American Jewish life in the decades to come. To be sure, these categories are not hard and fast. A minority of the have-nots through serendipity or coaxing may find their way to greater involvement; and some who have been given rich Jewish nurturance will opt out. But in the aggregate, two populations of Jews are forming, with vastly different outlooks and experiences.
As we contemplate these two trajectories, a worrisome scenario looms. With a large sector of American Jewry already evincing tenuous connections to Israel, domestic political allegiances may come to trump solidarity with Israel. Mounting evidence over the past few years demonstrates that the ideological camp with which large portions of American Jews identify—the self-proclaimed liberal wing of the Democratic party— is harboring sizable numbers of Americans with little sympathy for Israel. The trend has been evident for the past number of years, but most recently, as the Gaza war was winding down in January of this year, a Pew Research Center study found that over one-quarter (26 percent) of liberal Democrats professed more sympathy for the Palestinians than for Israel, a balance of support found in no other political sector. (By comparison, only 5 percent of Republicans voiced greater sympathy for the Palestinians than for Israel.)
Up to now, social scientists have remarked on how the political allegiances of American Jews seem to have little or no effect on their connections to Israel. How long this will last, though, is anyone’s guess. As social pressures from their non-Jewish peers mount and if the so-called progressive forces in America increasingly turn hostile to the Jewish state, as they have done in Europe, there is sound reason to worry that American Jews with the weakest links to Israel and poorest Jewish education will, at best, become indifferent to Israel—or perhaps side against it. Even at present, it is not uncommon to hear younger Jews speak of how socially inconvenient Israel has become as they struggle between conformity to the new political correctness and dissent when their peers denounce Israel for all sorts of alleged crimes.
Little wonder, then, that Israeli leaders have become more vocal in their pleas for greater investment in programs designed to strengthen American Jewish life. Ignoring Ben-Gurion’s pledge of non-interference in internal American Jewish affairs, several recent prime ministers and presidents of Israel have looked for ways to shore up Jewish education in the United States. Though material on Israel, in their view, is to be one facet of the curriculum, they have spoken in far broader terms about the vital need for increased Jewish literacy.
How ironic: although American Jews have long bemoaned Israeli ignorance about their communities and achievements, it appears that Israeli leaders fully grasp the danger to the Jewish state should large swaths of the Diaspora population remain ignorant of its own traditions. Meanwhile, an American Jewish community that once moved mountains in support of Israel now seems paralyzed in the face of internal forces that are weakening engagement with the Jewish state and eroding the vitality of its own culture.
