40 The New York Review
preoccupy scholars and commentators.
In We Stand Divided, Daniel Gordis
offers a very different analysis from
Beinart’s of why the alliance between
American and Israeli Jews is fraying,
which focuses not on Israel’s misdeeds
but on American Jewish mispercep-
tions. By contrast, Amy Kaplan’s Our
American Israel looks beyond Ameri-
can Jews to Americans in general and
asks how there was ever such a strong
bond between a superpower with hun-
dreds of millions of citizens steeped in
Christian tradition and a speck on a
map half a world away with nine mil-
lion people, the vast majority of them
Jews. Something untoward, she argues,
has been going on.
Gordis and Kaplan represent two
main strands of the uneasy, polar-
ized discourse about Israel that has
emerged in the past decade. Gordis,
an American-born-and-educated Is-
raeli scholar and a Conservative rabbi,
scolds American Jews for criticism he
views as either misguided or naive.
He wants them to find common cause
again with Israeli Jews. Kaplan, a pro-
fessor of American studies at the Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania and a critic of
Israel, wants virtually the opposite. By
exposing the cultural forces that have
drawn the two countries close, Kaplan
hopes that Americans, Jewish and oth-
erwise, will stop seeing their bond with
Israel as unbreakable.
There can be little doubt that the left,
including American Jews on the left,
increasingly rejects not only the occu-
pation but the very concept of a Jewish
state. It sees Israel as an antidemocratic
and colonialist country where white
Europeans expropriated the land of
its Arab residents and continue to dis-
criminate against them. By “the left,”
I don’t mean the Democratic Party, at
least not yet, but the activist left, much
of it on campuses.
Most Jews view themselves as a peo-
ple driven from their land two thou-
sand years ago who kept their identity
and ties to one another in the diaspora
through religious practice. Secular
American Jews, however, have always
walked a fine line in their sense of peo-
plehood. They make up barely 2 per-
cent of the US population and want the
Christian majority to treat them well.
This has meant championing minor-
ity rights and freedom of religion and
speech. American Jews have worked
assiduously to gain acceptance as as-
similated patriots who may worship on
Saturday rather than Sunday and cele-
brate Hanukkah rather than Christmas
but whose needs and concerns fit easily
and entirely into the American ideal.
The Jews of Israel, by contrast, have
designed their public life and national
calendar to reflect and celebrate their
history, culture, and religion. That is
the point of having their own coun-
try. While equal rights for non-Jewish
minorities matter both on paper and
in practice, they are secondary to the
Zionist project, which is about Jewish
redemption, sovereignty, and power.
Zionism calls on all Jews to move
to Israel, which it views as the only
place they can be truly safe and ful-
filled. In the classical Zionist outlook,
Jews who remain in the diaspora are
lulling themselves into a false sense
of safety. Zionist discourse, especially
in the early years, sometimes echoed
anti-Semitic disdain for the pale,
weak diaspora Jew while lionizing the
tanned, sinewy farmer-soldier reestab-
lishing the historic homeland. David
Ben- Gurion, the country’s first prime
minister, called diaspora Jews rootless
cosmopolitans, and Chaim Weizmann,
the country’s first president, expressed
understanding for the limited appe-
tite of other countries to absorb them.
Jew-hating European governments and
Zionists found a common interest: one
wanted to get rid of Jews, the other to
gather them in.
For many American Jews, this all
felt foreign and threatening. They had
already found their promised land.
In 1897, at the time of the first Zion-
ist conference in Basel, the Reform
movement’s Central Conference of
American Rabbis passed a resolution
to “totally disapprove of any attemptfor the establishment of a Jewish state.”
Zionism, it said, misinterpreted the
universal words of the Jewish prophets,
turning them into something parochial
and nationalistic. It endangered Jews
around the world by suggesting their
loyalties lay with another country. The
object of Judaism, it added, is the ad-
vance of peace, justice, and love.
It took a few decades for the Reform
movement to warm to the Zionist proj-
ect, but in 1937 it issued a statement de-
claring that “Judaism is the soul of which
Israel is the body” and endorsed the
Jewish homeland in Palestine. The late
1960s are widely regarded as a turning
point: Israel’s show of force in the 1967
Six-Day War came as American society
was shifting toward a politics of identity
and ethnicity and as its military was
sinking into the Vietnam quagmire. The
young state’s stunning and decisive vic-
tory made it a source of unity, pride, and
concern for organized American Jewry.I first visited Israel as a boy in 1965,
when my father spent a summer sab-
batical at the Weizmann Institute. It
was a very foreign country then, quasi-
Soviet in many respects, with lousy
food, scrappy people, no TV, and little
wealth. For at least another decade,
we sent over packages of instant cof-
fee and nylon stockings to relatives andfriends. In the years since, I have vis-
ited numerous times and spent twelve
years there as Jerusalem bureau chief
for three news organizations: Reuters,
The Boston Globe, and The New York
Times.
As late as the 1980s, Israel remained
a relatively poor and isolated place.
But by the 1990s, it was on a remark-
able path to prosperity. It has some of
the world’s best food and wine and a
mobile, ambitious population with a
deep sense of family and belonging.
It has also become much more explic-
itly Jewish. The Labor Zionists who
founded and ran the state until the late
1970s rarely spoke of their Jewishness
and had a near disdain for religious
observance. (Jews were the ones in thediaspora; they were Israelis.) That dis-
dain is partly what led to the victory in
19 77 of Menachem Begin, whose Likud
party has largely governed the country
since. Likud has offered more power
to religious parties, while more Israe-
lis today are observing religious rituals
and evoking their Jewishness.
At the same time, Israel is much more
Middle Eastern than ever before. Half
of its Jewish population immigrated
from Muslim countries or descend from
those who did, and while these Jews
were onc e made to feel a sha med of thei r
origins, that is far less true now. I have
increasingly felt that by shedding its
European socialist roots and embrac-
ing a political culture with a stronger
religious component, Israel has be-
come not only more like its neighbors
but perhaps easier for them to accept.
In fact, today it bears some resem-
blance to the other non-Arab Middle
Eastern powers: Turkey and Iran. In all
three, a Westernized, secular elite that
once governed has had trouble finding
the votes to stay in power.
As Israel has turned more to the
r ig ht , b e c ome wea lt h ier, m ade c om mon
cause with right-wing autocracies such
as Poland and Hungary, added steadily
to settlements in the West Bank, and
engaged in military operations in Gaza,
liberal American Jews who felt a close
bond with the Israel of Labor Zionismand egalitarian kibbutz culture have
grown uncomfortable with it. Today,
however, the American Jewish com-
munity may be undergoing changes
that seem likely to mitigate the rift with
Israel of the past two decades. Many
liberal secular American Jews who do
not send their children to religious or
Zionist schools and camps, teach them
Hebrew, or have them spend time in
Israel are watching them abandon not
only Israel but organized Jewish life.
The majority intermarry and have few
children (1.7 per family on average).
By contrast, the Orthodox and ultra-
Orthodox have large families (four or
more children) and devote themselves
to Israel in ways they did not in its
early decades. The Ultra-Orthodox
shunned it because they deemed the
Jewish state premature before the ar-
rival of the Messiah; the Orthodox did
not feel welcomed by Labor Zionism.
Now both are growing in numbers and
importance. As Steven M. Cohen, a
demographer of American Jews, noted
in a 2017 study, “27 percent of Jewish
children under seventeen are born into
Orthodox families, with as many as
35 percent under five years old.” This
means that the secular liberals who
have dominated American Jewish life
may find themselves replaced by more
religious and conservative Jews who
have strong connections to Israel.
But there is another trend underway
that has not been carefully studied and
that I believe is strengthening ties be-
tween Israeli and American Jews. In Is-
rael’s first four decades, American Jews
may have kept Israelis in their hearts,
but they had little interaction with
them. Some 15–20 percent of them
visited Israel at least once through the
1960s and 1970s. Israeli Jews were bur-
dened with exit taxes, low incomes, and
bad English, and few came to the US.
Today, the traffic in both directions is
heavy and steady. According to Pew
data from 2013, more than 40 percent
of Israeli Jews have been here and 40
percent of US Jews have been there.
Those numbers keep going up. The or-
ganization Birthright Israel has taken
hundreds of thousands of young Amer-
ican Jews for a free visit. And the ultra-
Orthodox are now among the busiest of
travelers back and forth.
Just as Jews who immigrate to Is-
rael are described in Hebrew as mak-
ing aliyah, “going up,” those who move
away make yeridah, going down. In
previous decades, those who left Israel
were called yordim, which was not an
expression of praise. That word has
fallen out of use. Israelis seem increas-
ingly unbothered when their friends
and cousins spend time in the US, and
some end up staying. Nor do Israelis
talk about expecting all Jews to join
them. When I put the question to a
twenty-five-year-old recently, she re-
coiled and said, in perfect English, that
there wasn’t enough room for all the
American Jews to come to Israel.
In addition, an estimated 400,000
Israelis now live in the US and are in-
tegrated into Jewish communities. Is-
raelis are on college faculties, in Silicon
Valley, and on synagogue boards. They
own real estate and businesses. Their
children remain devoted to Israel, add-
ing another dimension to the relation-
ship. In Israel today, nearly everyone
speaks English and absorbs American
culture. Over here, Israeli films and TV^
series such as Shtisel, Our Boys, and
Fauda are popular on Netflix and HBO.Immigrants approaching the recently founded State of Israel, circa 1950Robert^Capa/ICP/MagnumPhotos