American Jews Belong in Israel

American Jews Belong in Israel, Declare Israeli Authors Yehoshua and Halkin

By Allan C. Brownfeld

At a meeting celebrating the 100th anniversary of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua told the audience at the Library of Congress that American Jews belong in Israel.

According to the May 4, 2006 Washington Jewish Week, 'Yehoshua dominated the panel discussion on 'The Future of The Past: What Will Become of the Jewish People?--insisting that one could fully be a Jew only by living in the Jewish state. 'This is the success of Zionism-the Jews took responsibility,- Yehoshua said at one point, arguing that the everyday decisions of Israel-whether to withdraw from territory, or 'are we going to torture?--are the important 'Jewish decisions- of our time. 'You are not doing any Jewish decisions,- he told the crowd-'You are deciding, according to an American framework-You are playing with Jewishness.--

Yehoshua-s chief sparring partner was Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, who declared that -people are not stupid servants of the state.- Nor is it the case, he said, that everything a Jew does is a Jewish act. -What matters is whether [Jews] are actively engaged in one-s Jewishness,- he said. When challenged by Yehoshua to name -an act of Jewishness,- Wieseltier responded with such examples as teaching Hebrew and learning about the history of the Jewish people. -These are not meaningless activities,- he said. Without them, -Jews will not survive, even if the state of Israel will.-

Wieseltier argued that -territory is not what kept Jews alive. The civilization of Jews was formed after the exile, after the destruction of the Temple-My pride in being Jewish has nothing to do with where I live.-

Discussing Yehoshua-s declaration that Jewish life in America is -meaningless,- J.J. Goldberg, editor of The Forward, noted in its May 12, 2006 issue that -Yehoshua expresses, in extreme, distilled terms, an essential truth about Israeli Jewish identity. Israelis tend to know very little about the reality of Jewish life in America. It-s not taught in their schools, rarely appears on their television screens and is seldom discussed in their newspapers. For Israelis, being Jewish consists of living in a Jewish country, speaking a Jewish language, serving in a Jewish army. What, they wonder, can it possibly mean to live as a Jew in Cleveland?-
-Jewish life in America-indeed seems like a kind of play-acting.-

Writing in the May 7, 2006 edition of Haaretz, correspondent Amiram Barkat declared: -The heads of American Jewish organizations do almost nothing to alter the perception common in the Israeli public-They come here several times a year and then return to their country brimming with delight, having heard the prime minister, foreign minister and head of the Jewish Agency pay lip service in speaking about Israel-s obligation to the Jewish people.- Instead, he writes, they should be asking why Israel isn-t teaching its children about the Diaspora and -conducting a genuine dialogue between Israelis and Jews living overseas.-

Concluded Forward editor Goldberg: -It ought to be obvious to both sides that Israelis are not wrong in their way of being Jewish, any more than Americans are wrong in their way-joining organizations, attending events, giving to charities and trying to live by what they understand as Jewish values. The two ways are merely different.-

In Israel, author Hillel Halkin, who has long called upon American Jews to emigrate, wrote in The Jerusalem Post-s International Edition of May 19-25 that --deep down, I think that Yehoshua, manners aside, is more right than wrong. Israel is the only place in the world in which one can live a Jewish life that is total-in which, that is, there is no compartmentalization between the inner and the outer, between what is Jewish and what is not. It is the only place in the world in which Jews are totally responsible for the society they live in, for the environment that surrounds them, for the government that rules them. It is the only place in the world where Jewish culture is not a subculture in a greater culture but is rather that greater culture itself.-
-The Real Thing-

According to Halkin, Jewish life in Israel -is the real thing and by comparison, Jewish life in America, or anywhere else in the Diaspora, as dedicated and committed as it may be, indeed seems like a kind of play-acting. Why would a truly dedicated and committed Jew want to live anywhere but in a Jewish state?-

It is ironic that Yehoshua-s remarks were addressed to the AJC, an organization which in its earlier years was highly skeptical of Jewish nationalism. Indeed, in 1950 there was an historic exchange between the AJC-s then-president, Jacob Blaustein, and Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. As summarized by the AJC, the agreement stipulated that: -(1) Jews of the United States, as a community and as individuals, have only one political attachment, namely to the United States of America; (2) that the Government and people of Israel respect the integrity of Jewish life in the democratic countries and the right of Jewish communities to develop their indigenous social, economic and cultural aspirations, in accordance with their own needs and institutions; and (3) that Israel fully accepts the fact that the Jews of the United States do not live 'in exile,- and that America is home for them.-

Whatever David Ben-Gurion may have said in 1950, the fact is that, ever since, the State of Israel has persisted in promoting the idea that Jews living outside its borders are indeed in -exile- and that all Jews should emigrate to the Jewish state. What, at its 100th anniversary, does the American Jewish Committee now think about all of this? Why, knowing his views, did it invite A.B. Yehoshua to participate in its celebration?

What the entire Yehoshua incident makes clear is that the rift between American Jews and Israel is growing dramatically. This division is explored in an article, -Whatever Happened to the Jewish People?- by Steven M. Cohen, research professor of Jewish social policy at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York, and Jack Wertheimer, provost and professor of Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary.

Writing in the June 2006 issue of Commentary, Cohen and Wertheimer report that, -In 1989, a national survey conducted for the American Jewish Committee found 73 percent of Jews agreeing that 'caring about Israel is a very important part of being a Jew-; in 2005, a mere decade and a half later, the corresponding figure had fallen to 57 percent. Younger adults, moreover, exhibit weaker attachment to Israel than do their elders. Nor is it just a matter of Israel. According to the 2000/2001 National Jewish Population Study, younger adults are significantly less likely than their elders to agree strongly that 'Jews in the United States and Jews around the world share a common destiny- or that 'when people are in distress, American Jews have a greater responsibility to rescue Jews than non-Jews.--

Responses to the simple statement, -I have a strong sense of belonging to the Jewish people,- are especially telling. The proportions strongly agreeing drop steadily from a high of 75 percent among those aged 65 or over to a low of 47 percent for adults under 35.

According to Cohen and Wertheimer, -The late l980s, a period marked by the first Palestinian intifada, appear to have ushered in a period of creeping disaffection from Israel within sectors of the American Jewish community, and prior levels of support have never since been matched. During the second intifada, which began in 2000, a demonstration in Washington at the peak of the wave of Palestinian suicide bombings of Israeli civilians could muster only a relatively meager turnout.-

What is true of public displays of unity is also true of levels of giving on behalf of causes that explicitly address the needs of the Jewish people as a whole. The year 1985-a year characterized neither by an emergency in the Middle East nor by massive emigration to Israel requiring large infusions of aid-saw a total of $656 million raised by American federations of Jewish philanthropy. To have simply kept pace with inflation, this amount should have grown to $1.19 billion by the time of the 2005 annual campaign. Instead, total campaign receipts increased to only $860 million, a shortfall of l8 percent. In this same time frame, the total size of allocations to Israel dropped on an inflation-adjusted basis by almost two-thirds. In the decade 1990-2000, the proportion of Jewish households participating in the federations- annual fund-raising campaigns fell by a third.

Seeking to explain these trends, which they lament, Cohen and Wertheimer provide this assessment: -Several social forces are clearly operating at once; Most of them, ironically enough, reflect well on the openness of contemporary American society and the relatively secure situation of Jews within it. The most blatant is the dramatically higher rate of intermarriage as compared with earlier generations. Of Jews now marrying, nearly half are being wed to non-Jewish partners-The intermarried tend to have fewer Jewish neighbors, fewer Jewish friends, lower levels of membership in Jewish institutions, less attachment to Israel, and less allegiance to the Jewish people. As for Christians who marry Jews, they tend to understand Jewishness narrowly, as a matter of religious practice and faith rather than as an ethnic identity.-
A Faith or a Nationality?

The fact that the vast majority of American Jews view Judaism as a religious faith rather than a nationality or ethnic identity disturbs those who continue to maintain the traditional Zionist view that Israel is the -homeland- of all Jews and that those who live elsewhere are in -exile.-

Beyond this, however, even if American Jews were to view their identity as being largely ethnic, the contemporary American society is eroding the ethnic identities of all those who emigrated from Europe. Cohen and Wertheimer note that --despite the modish talk about multiculturalism and the requirement to honor 'diversity,- ethnicity is in fact a weak and weakening form of identification here. At least among white people of European descent-Over the past decades, internal solidarity among all American white ethnic groups has continued to fall off-Most of the once-traditional props of Jewish peoplehood in this country-large immigrant populations, neighborhoods, Yiddish-inflected folkways, a distinctive cuisine-have faded from the scene. American Jews are now regarded, and appear largely to regard themselves, as part of the undifferentiated mass of American whites, not as a distinctive group in the multicultural 'rainbow,- a term that in any case mostly encompasses blacks, Hispanics and Asian-Americans. Or worse, Jews are portrayed by critics of prevailing American arrangements as partners and allies of the 'hegemonic monoculture--today-s term for what was once known as the (white) ruling class.-

American Jews now volunteer less than they once did for communal endeavors, and they join Jewish organizations at consistently lower rates. The 2000/2001 National Jewish Population Survey found that the major Jewish membership organizations suffered a nearly 20 percent decline in affiliation over the decade of the 1990s alone.

Some Jewish groups are attempting to accommodate to the new reality. The slogan of the United Jewish Appeal used to be -We Are One.- Today, the collective rhetoric of peoplehood is soft-pedaled, if not quite abandoned. The United Jewish Communities, the renamed umbrella organization of federations of Jewish philanthropies, now raises funds under the new slogan -Live Generously: It Does A World of Good.- Rather than appealing to a donor-s sense of responsibility to the group, contributions are now solicited in the name of individual virtue.

In Israel, meanwhile, contempt for Jewish life in other countries continues to grow. In May, Israel-s government-sponsored rabbinic courts were ordered by the Chief Rabbinate to stop recognizing conversions and divorces performed by most Orthodox rabbis outside of Israel. The new rule means that persons who underwent an Orthodox conversion abroad will have to be converted again in Israel in order to be recognized as Jews by Israeli rabbinic courts. Jewish women who received an Orthodox divorce overseas and wish to remarry in Israel will have to ask their ex-husbands for another divorce certificate if the first one was approved by Orthodox rabbis not recognized by the Israeli rabbinate. In Israel, Reform and Conservative rabbis have no right to perform marriages or funerals. Now, even non-Israeli Orthodox rabbis have become suspect.

American ideas of religious freedom and separation of church and state-which groups such as the American Jewish Committee fully embrace-have yet to find their way to Israel.

Many American Jewish leaders have long claimed that Zionism was fully compatible with their own declaration of loyalty to the United States and belief in the religious values of Judaism. It may be that their own version of -Zionism- is indeed compatible with such values. But in Israel, a far different, more orthodox Zionist view prevails. The rift between these radically different worldviews is likely to grow as time goes on. Perhaps it was good that the American Jewish Committee heard what traditional Zionism really thinks. It is high time that, at the very least, both communities understand one another clearly.

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