Articles
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, November 2008, page 48
Israel and Judaism
When It Comes to Israel, American Jews Are “Not One,” But of Many Minds
By Allan C. Brownfeld
The myth propagated by many in the organized American Jewish community that there is a consensus with regard to Israel is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain as more and more prominent American Jews are rising to dispute this proposition.
“Jews are perhaps the world’s most famously disputatious people,” noted Eric Alterman, professor of English and journalism at Brooklyn College and of journalism at City University of New York’s graduate school, in the July/August 2008 issue of Moment. “How is it possible, then, that on what is perhaps the most contentious issue of all—the shape and solution to the endless wound that is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—we are ”˜as one’?”
Alterman went on to point out that “the unanimity on key questions among official Jewry is as impressive as it is depressing. Try to find a spokesperson in good standing from a Jewish organization who would be willing to say that the West Bank settlements are the primary obstacles to peace, or that Israel ought to negotiate with Hamas, or that the Palestinians who lost their homes in 1948 deserve a ”˜right of return’ (however unworkable that may be in practice), or perhaps Israel would benefit from a little tough love from the U.S. when it comes to moving forward...Perhaps all of the above notions are indeed morally, intellectually and politically mistaken. But unspeakable? Needless to say, this is not only intellectually indefensible, it’s also impractical, given that most people—including most Jews, according to survey after survey—don’t buy it.”
To the repeated declaration that all Jews—whether Orthodox or Reform, Americans or Israelis—”are one,” Alterman responded: “This, too, is nonsense...We don’t even agree on what a Jew is, much less what a Jew believes.”
Nothing is more basic to Talmud principles, he argued, “than to embrace the reality of multiple voices in any significant conversation, and even were that not the case, it would still be reality. We are not one. We are many. And thank God for that.”
Indeed, the classic Zionist proposition that Israel is the Jewish “homeland,” and that all Jews living outside of Israel are in “exile,” is rejected by the vast majority of Jewish Americans, even many of those who call themselves “Zionists.”
“Most of us are very much at home in America.”
Leonard Fein, a longtime leader in Reform Judaism and Moment’s first editor, wrote in the Aug. 22, 2008 issue of The Forward that “Israel...represents a radical change in the historic Jewish condition. That change is so profound that we tend to pay less attention to the radical changes the American Jewish experience involves. Those changes include both a keener appreciation of pluralism than was available to Jews of an earlier time, as well as a quiet revolution in our sense of ”˜home.’
“Most of us are very much at home in America,” Fein declared. “That is how it is, and I dare say, how it should be. It would be strange, indeed, if we sat in Los Angeles or Chicago or Teaneck and pined for Jerusalem, much less for Zichron Ya’akov (and still less for Ariel). It is America’s mountains and America’s rivers and America’s cities that frame our sense of place, and America’s politics, for all the turmoil they involve, that command our attention.”
The notion of “exile” for those who advocate a prophetic and universal Judaism is quite different from the traditional Zionist perspective, Fein pointed out: “To be a Jew is to know, fundamentally, that this world is not working the way it was meant to, or the way it is supposed to. It is badly broken. In that sense, we are all—all of us—in exile, whether we live in Jerusalem or in New York. Exile is not a place; it is an existential condition. And the meta-understanding that Jews bring to that condition is that we are implicated in the world’s repair. The most obvious challenge to such a formulation is, simply, ”˜What’s so Jewish about that?’ After all, you don’t have to be Jewish to like Levy’s real Jewish rye or to be passionate about tikkun olam (repairing the world). (Given our paltry numbers, that’s good news for both the Levy’s people and for our compoundly fractured world.) The good news is that the challenge can be met.”
There can be no doubt—despite the protestations of establishment Jewish organizations which regularly proclaim themselves the “voice” of Jewish American opinion—that when it comes to Israel, American Jews are, in fact, of many opinions—and no one is entitled to speak in their collective name.
Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.
