Published: 10 March 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
FOR YEARS, THERE HAS been a perception that American Jews are becoming increasingly distant from their Israeli brethren. Issues such as the rise of the Right in Israel, the country’s growing friendship with Trump, and the suspicion of its religious tilt have all been brought up as potential dealbreakers for American Jews, who are largely liberal and non-Orthodox.
However, a recent study by the Ruderman Family Foundation, a Boston-based Jewish philanthropic group with a strong focus on civil rights, appears to contradict these results. Rather than drifting from Israel, the study found “70% of US Jews feel that their personal relationship with Israel has remained the same or is stronger than it was five years ago.”
American Jews seem to have an understanding that the government of Israel does not define their relationship with the state, with a majority claiming they were pro-Israel but critical of the government.
“It appears doomsday talks about an irreversible chasm between Israel and the American Jewish community were mistaken,” said Jay Ruderman, president of the foundation.
This approach, however, reveals a fundamental problem with how we think of unity among the Jewish people. The danger of accepting it at face value is that it obfuscates a deeper divide, one we haven’t contended with or fully understood.
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The deeper divide
For the past decade, I’ve found myself in a situation that has stretched my awareness of the Jewish people and led me to research whether my experience was translatable to others.
I grew up a first-generation American, the son of Israeli immigrants who considered themselves secular and liberal. They brought me up with a vision of a world where all people deserved dignity and liberty, and a belief that Zionism, American values, and Jewish identity were all deeply connected to that vision. To me, they all fitted, and they all worked.
In college, I discovered Chabad. Like most Jews, my first connection with Chabad was through a Chabad house.
Although the basic mission of Chabad is to encourage all Jews to do more mitzvahs at whatever level, true success is largely seen as a full conversion of sorts to Orthodoxy.
Even in the Chabad house, but especially as I moved on to yeshiva and then a Hasidic community, it became clear that this conversion was not a simple one: it required a shift in world view. The essence of the change was of going from a universalist to a particularist mindset - one where the primacy of Jewish life was first and foremost, where Jews saw themselves as having a specific mission and status in the world.
As a Jew who has stayed Orthodox but left Haredi and Chasidic Judaism, I believe they must be combined into a pluralist mindset that values the uniqueness of both my own identity as well as that of others.
For a person from a universalist background, accepting the particularist nature of Orthodox, and especially Chasidic, Judaism, is a big change. And it’s not just ideological: you commit to only marrying other Jews (not as a familial obligation, but a deeply religious and cultural one), you send your kids to Jewish schools, almost all your friendships are with other Jews, and so on.
It was only after I decided to become an Orthodox Jew that my views on Israel shifted from Left to Right. When particularity sets in, seeing other Jews in pain from rocket attacks hits a core part of you, the familial part, and it activates a part that inherently chooses your people over others.
I am not making a judgment between this perspective and universalism. As a Jew who has stayed Orthodox but left Haredi and Chasidic Judaism, I believe they must be combined into a pluralist mindset that values the uniqueness of both my own identity as well as that of others.
This reality is not ideological. It is, rather, a deep cultural difference that is widening between two deeply different world views in the Jewish world. In the US it has translated into a combination of growing (or steady) identification with the idea of Israel, but with growing distance from Israel’s current government.
Thus, the divide is not between American Jews and Israeli Jews, but between two certain kinds of American Jews, one in the majority and the other in a minority.
There is, in fact, a group of American Jews who poll quite similarly to their Israeli counterparts, and thus are in complete contraposition to other American Jews: they are Orthodox Jews.
While most American Jews are deeply anti-Trump (to the point where it has worsened their relationship with Israel) , 71% of Orthodox Jews support Trump, and there is much evidence that among Haredi Jews the number is significantly higher. This is essentially the mirror version of non-orthodox American Jews. And it appears the gap is widening.
It’s for this reason that you have, on one hand, all non-Orthodox Jewish clergy who had been invited to a conference call with Trump for the High Holidays refused to join, while on the other hand you have a raucous, almost worshipful Jewish audience at a pro-Israel event in Miami to celebrate the US President.
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The average Haredi Jew has more in common in the beliefs of a white nationalist than the beliefs of a liberal Jew, and the average liberal Jew has more in common with other liberals than Haredi Jews.
These are symptoms of a widening gap between particularists and universalists. One group sees Trump as the antithesis of their values, the other sees him as an affirmation of their values.
With this lens, we can understand why the gap exists, and why some Jews, even the leader of the only Jewish nation on earth, are willing to align with white nationalists. The Western world is becoming increasingly divided between authoritarian nationalism and democracy. One claims that each group of people has its rightful place, and the other argues that the only way forward is through liberal democracies that give rights to all.
Thus, the average Haredi Jew has more in common in the beliefs of a white nationalist than the beliefs of a liberal Jew, and the average liberal Jew has more in common with other liberals than Haredi Jews. As politics continues to raise the stakes, the divide will continue to grow.
Which explains why there isn’t a divide between American Jews and Israeli Jews.
It’s worse than that: the divide is between all Jews, one which is playing out differently in different locations. For example, it seems that the divide in Israel is reversed from that in the US. As Zionism comes under further attack from outside, the investment of energy in the particularism of Israel becomes more important to those who envision Israel as Jewish ahead of it being a democracy.
Where to from here?
There does not seem to be any clear way forward. We cannot simply wish for the Jewish people to become more united or start organising challah bakes and trips to Israel in the hope that Jews will come together. There is a deep divide in how we look at the world.
This is affecting us so deeply that Jews are beginning to see each other as traitors if they are on the opposite side of the divide. There is perhaps no bigger example of this than the way right-wing Jews are can casually accuse Bernie Sanders of being an anti-Semite, token Jew and/or traitor.
The question American Jews, and Jews the world over, will have to ask themselves is what the cost of this divide will be, and whether it’s worth even trying to bridge it. From the end of World War 2 up to today, in one of the greatest eras for Jews, facing less anti-Semitism than we ever faced, we were able to shore up our power by creating big tent institutions that fought for us and on behalf of us.
Now, these same organisations increasingly cannot balance the factions they claim to represent, and their work is being hobbled.
This divide puts Jews in danger and creates a dynamic where we are less effective at organising ourselves at a time when anti-Semitic incidents have doubled in just a few years.
Illustration: John Kron
