American Jewry, Zionism, and Israel
By the middle of the nineteenth century, there were about 250,000 Jews in the United States, most of them immigrants from Germany. The strongest religious movement was the liberal Reform movement, whose roots also lay in Germany. From the 1880s until the early 1920s, more than two million Jews immigrated to America, transforming the nature of the community. These immigrants were more religiously traditional than their German predecessors, and though most shed their religious Orthodoxy, they formed the backbone of the centrist Conservative movement, which became the largest religious movement in twentieth-century American Jewish life.
Zionism: From the Periphery to the Consensus, 1885–1948
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, as the Zionist movement emerged in Europe, major elements of American Jewry adopted an anti-Zionist stance. Thus, the Reform movement’s 1885 Pittsburgh Platform declared, “We consider ourselves no longer a nation but a religious community and therefore do not expect a return to Palestine.”3 The Reform movement’s rejection of Jewish peoplehood informed its anti-Zionism.Two additional factors served to shape their anti-Zionism. First, a fear that the foundation of a Jewish state would lead to charges that American Jews had dual loyalties, which in turn could lead to a rise in anti-Semitism that could threat Jews’ civil and political rights in America. Second, the Reform movement’s liberal universalism inclined it against the idea of Jewish statehood, which seemed to them at the time a particularistic project. In a similar vein, a little later, the National Conference of Jewish Labor, influenced by the Bundist Jewish socialist party in Russia, also adopted an anti-Zionist position.
During the First World War, the situation began to change and by 1918 membership in the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) had reached 120,000. By the end of World War II, the combined membership of American Zionist organizations was more than 700,000. Three factors lay behind this pro-Zionist shift. First, a large proportion of the new immigrants from Russia had a strong attachment to Jewish peoplehood. This informed the newcomers’ support for fellow Jews who sought to return and build up the ancient Jewish homeland. Second, the first major American Zionist leader and first Jewish Supreme Court justice, Louis Brandeis, developed a specifically American Zionist ideology, which cast Zionism as an expression of progressive American values, and which succeeded in muting concerns about particularism and dual loyalty. Unlike classical Zionism, Brandeis’s American version did not advocate the immigration of American Jews to the Jewish homeland; rather, it supported the creation of such a homeland as a refuge for Jews suffering from persecution in other countries. A major theme of American political culture has always been the country’s democracy as an exemplar, a model to emulate. Brandeis applied this theme to Zionism by promoting the idea that American Zionists should work to make the Jewish homeland a model of progressive democracy. Against this background, Brandeis presented Zionism as a patriotic American act involving the promotion of American values, such as that of national self-determination proposed by President Woodrow Wilson.4
Against the background of these twin factors, American Jewry became increasingly supportive of Zionism. The largest religious movement, Conservative Judaism, was strongly pro-Zionist. Among the much smaller Orthodox movement, opinion was split. Modern Orthodoxy’s support for Zionism was strong, but the Ultra-Orthodox minority was predominantly non-Zionist or anti-Zionist. Meanwhile, there was a dramatic reversal of positions in the Reform movement. In 1930 a survey of students at Reform’s Hebrew Union College found that more than 90 percent either favored or were neutral regarding Zionism. By 1937 the movement’s Columbus Platform affirmed “the obligation of all Jewry to aid in its [i.e., Palestine’s] upbuilding as a Jewish homeland.”5
The shift in Reform attitudes to Zionism in the 1930s was also related to a third factor that was extremely important: the growing threat to Jewish survival, specifically European Jewry. In the 1930s support for unlimited Jewish immigration into Palestine as a refuge grew exponentially in the wake of the rise of Hitler and the closing of America to mass immigration. But the idea of Jewish statehood was still controversial. It was not until the end of the Second World War, in the shadow of the Holocaust, that American Jewry became mobilized en masse to lobby for the creation of a Jewish state, including the largest non-Zionist organizations such as the Jewish Labor Committee and B’nai B’rith. Support for the creation of a Jewish state had become the consensual position of American Jewry. The anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism had only 2 percent of the membership of the American Zionist movement.6
The Six Day War: Israel as a Symbol of American Jewish Identity
Following the creation of the State of Israel, the focus of American Jewry shifted away from Zionism toward a domestic agenda of synagogue construction and support for civil rights. Membership in the ZOA declined substantially, but at the same time American Jews donated money to Israel, instituted regular synagogue prayers for the welfare of Israel, and developed programs to study Hebrew.7 On the eve of the Six Day War, with Israel surrounded by states threatening its destruction, American Jews feared that another Holocaust was imminent. The sense of impending disaster awakened very deep feelings of Jewish solidarity with Israel. As one young volunteer wrote, “Two weeks ago Israel was they; now Israel is we.” At the height of the war, polling showed that 99 percent of American Jews expressed strong sympathy for Israel.8 Whereas in 1966 the United Jewish Appeal (UJA) raised $64 million, in 1967 it raised $240 million, $100 million of which was raised in the first three weeks of the crisis.9 The effect of the Six Day War on American Jewish identification with Israel was profound. As Thomas Friedman put it, “After the 1967 War, the perception of Israel in the minds of many American Jews shifted radically, from Israel as a safe haven for other Jews to Israel as the symbol and carrier of Jewish communal identity.”10 Daniel Elazar, an American Zionist who immigrated to Israel, even went so far as to call this sensibility: Israelolotry.11
Indeed, the Six Day War represents the high watermark of American Jewish attachment to Israel. All the key elements underlying support for Israel were present. There was a strong sense of Jewish peoplehood, a strong sense that Israel was under serious threat, and a strong sense that Israel was a good liberal American cause, being surrounded by authoritarian enemies backed by the totalitarian Soviet Union. Moreover, the rapid decline of anti-Semitism meant that American Jews felt more confident about publicly demonstrating their support for Israel, without fear of being charged with dual loyalty.
Controversies in the 1980s
In the latter half of the 1980s Israel’s heroic, pristine image among American Jews began to erode in the wake of a series of controversies. In 1986 Jonathan Pollard, a Jewish intelligence officer in the U.S., was convicted of spying for Israel. U.S. Jews were extremely angry as they felt that Israel had raised the spectre of an anti-Semitic backlash on the basis of dual loyalty. Moreover, by the 1980s, Israel’s existence was no longer perceived by American Jews to be as threatened as it has once been. Indeed, Israel was clearly the stronger party in the 1982 Lebanon War and the first Palestinian uprising (intifada), which began in December 1987. Moreover, in the eyes of many American Jews, Israel’s liberal credentials were challenged due to the massacre of Palestinian refugees by Israel’s Lebanese allies in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps during the 1982 Lebanon War.12 The outbreak of the intifada had a more sustained and a more traumatic effect than the Lebanon War. One symptom of this was the growing public criticism of Israel by well-known Diaspora Jews such as Woody Allen. The most emotionally charged of these controversies was the “Who is a Jew” crisis of 1988, which tarnished the image of Israel as the symbol of Jewish peoplehood among many American Jews. At that time, Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir agreed to change Israel’s Law of Return, which allowed automatic immigration to Israel for Jews, so that it applied only to persons defined as Jewish by Orthodox Jewish law. While the overwhelming majority of American Jews are af
filiated to non-Orthodox streams of Judaism, in practice this change would have affected only a handful of Diaspora Jews each year. However the non-Orthodox saw the proposed amendment as the delegitimization of their Jewish identity by Israel. Israel was, in a symbolic sense, rejecting their Judaism and their family members.13
These controversies led some to suggest that the American Jewish love affair with Israel was waning. American Jewry, they claimed, was distancing itself from Israel. Indeed, this issue has not gone away; rather, it attracts ever-increasing attention.14 It is addressed directly after the following section on the trends within the contemporary American Jewish community and their effect on American Jews’ attachment to Israel.
American Jews in the Twenty-First Century: Increased Polarization, Decreased Peoplehood
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, an estimated 5.2 to 6.4 million Jews live in the U.S., with the best estimate likely to be closer to the higher end of the spectrum.15 Synagogue membership is the most widespread form of communal affiliation. Among the different religious movements, the Reform movement is the largest, followed by the Conservative and then the Orthodox. But among the children of synagogue members, the Orthodox constitute a plurality (see Tables 6.1 and 6.2). At the other end of the religious spectrum, the number of self-defined nonreligious Jews almost doubled from 1990 to 2008.16
Table 6.1. American Jews by Religious Denomination, 2000 (%)
* * *
AdultsChildren
Orthodox 10 23
Conservative 27 24
Reform 35 30
Reconstructionist 2 3
Just Jewish 26 21
* * *
Data from United Jewish Communities, National Jewish Population Survey 2000–2001. (From Jonathon Ament, American Jewish Religious Movements [New York: United Jewish Communities, 2005], table 2. Reprinted with permission from Jonathon Ament and the Jewish Federations of North America.)
Table 6.2. American Jews, Synagogue Members, 2000 (%)
* * *
AdultsChildren
Orthodox 23 38
Conservative 32 25
Reform 37 32
Reconstructionist 2 3
* * *
Data from United Jewish Communities, National Jewish Population Survey 2000–2001. (From Ament, American Jewish Religious Movements, table 9. Reprinted with permission from Jonathon Ament and the Jewish Federations of North America.)
All of this adds up to a process of religious polarization. In the center, the previously dominant Conservative movement is in decline. On the Right, the Orthodox movement, which has become more right-wing in religious and political terms,17 is the fastest-growing religious movement. Meanwhile, about a third of American Jews are married to non-Jews, with the rate of intermarriage rising from 13 percent before 1970, to around a third by the early 1980s, to 58 percent in 2013.18
This religious polarization overlaps to a significant extent with a wider pattern of polarization regarding Jewish communal and educational engagement. The more engaged group is quite religiously observant, and its members tend to have many Jewish friends. They are evenly divided among Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and nondenominational Jews; but their most dynamic and committed segment is the Orthodox. The non-Orthodox are more likely to be a part of the unengaged segment than the Orthodox, but the core of the unengaged segment are the intermarried.19 Overall, increased intermarriage has served to decrease the number of Jews committed to an ethnically based sense of Jewish peoplehood.20
However, it is not only among the intermarried and the Jewishly unengaged that an ethnically based sense of Jewish peoplehood is in decline. This is also the case among the younger generation of non-Orthodox Jews who are engaged in Jewish matters. Here there has been a generational shift in the meaning of Jewish identity. Surveys indicate that around 75 percent of Jews more than sixty-five years old agree with this statement: “I have a strong sense of belonging to the Jewish people,” but the proportion strongly agreeing drops steadily with age to only 47 percent for adults under thirty-five.21 Previous generations were characterized by a strong sense of ethnic Jewish identity – peoplehood. This informed a strong commitment to protect the welfare of all Jews, including those abroad. It also found expression in strong opposition to intermarriage, charitable donations focused on Jewish causes, the dominance of the Conservative movement, and centralized communal “defense” organizations like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the American Jewish Committee (AJC). Support for these orientations is significantly lower among the younger generation of non-Orthodox American Jews. They are less committed to aiding Jews abroad, less committed to specifically Jewish charitable giving, less concerned by the need to combat anti-Semitism, and more open to intermarriage.22
Younger non-Orthodox Jews have shifted from communally orientated normative constructions of being Jewish to more individualistic, aesthetic understandings. Fewer Jews regard being Jewish as a matter of norms and obligations; fewer relate personally to the very notion of the Jewish people, and most have a weaker sense of Jewish peoplehood. This “expressive” orientation is accompanied by a “progressive” orientation identified with promoting universal moral causes, mainly focused among non-Jews (or not specifically targeted at Jews), including environmentalism and social justice, which are viewed as more important than communal needs. The old sense of ethnicity has not disappeared, but it is no longer dominant among the younger generation. Again this trend is not confined to the less Jewishly engaged. It is also true of many young non-Orthodox Jewish leaders who have received more Jewish education and have better knowledge of Hebrew than the older generation of leaders and communal professionals.23
This general process of polarization among American Jews is also reflected in differences regarding the degree of attachment to Israel among various segments of American Jewry.
Mind the Gap: American Jewish Attachment to Israel
According to regular AJC surveys, a majority of between two-thirds and three-quarters of American Jews feel close to Israel and between 70 and 80 percent cares about the Jewish state.24 Furthermore, an absolute majority across all age cohorts “strongly agree” that “Israel is the spiritual center of the Jewish people.”25 Nonetheless, there are substantial gaps regarding the extent of attachment to Israel among different Jewish groups.
Religious Movements
Historically, the Conservative movement had the strongest connection to Zionism and Israel. However, since at least the late 1980s, Orthodox Jews have much stronger Israel connections than other Jews. Conservative Jews come next, followed by the Reform and “Just Jewish” groups who have a similar level of attachment.26 Theologically, the Orthodox differ from the other movements in that they view themselves as being in exile in America. The Orthodox have a stronger sense of Jewish peoplehood, they are generally more knowledgeable about Israel, and they travel to Israel far more than the other groups. Indeed, it is almost the norm for Modern-Orthodox teenagers to study in a religious seminary in Israel for a year between high school and college. At the same time, as is made clear in Table 6.3 and Figure 6.1, a majority of all the religiously defined groups feel attached to Israel.
Table 6.3. Attachment to Israel, 2000 (%)
* * *
Very/Somewhat AttachedVery Attached
Orthodox 92 68
Conservative 80 39
Reform 64 21
Just Jewish 55 24
* * *
Data from United Jewish Communities, National Jewish Population Survey 2000–2001. (From Jonathon Ament, Israel Connections and American Jews [New York: United Jewish Communities, 2005], report 12, table 5. Reprinted with permission from Jonathon Ament and the Jewish Federations of North America.)
Figure 6.1. Close to Israel, by Religious Denomination (From, Sasson, Kadushin, and Saxe, Trends in American Jewish Attachment to Israel, p. 10. Reprinted with permission from Theodore Sasson and the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies.)
Affiliation
According to the National Jewish Population Survey in 2000, 28 percent of American Jews are highly affiliated, 28 percent are moderately affiliated, and 44 percent are unaffiliated. As is illustrated in Table 6.4, highly affiliated Jews have the strongest connections to Israel and unaffiliated Jews have the weakest.
Table 6.4. Communal Affiliation and Attachment to Israel, 2000 (%)
* * *
Level of AffiliationVery/Somewhat AttachedVery Attached
High 85 47
Moderate 75 34
Unaffiliated 55 20
* * *
Data from United Jewish Communities, National Jewish Population Survey 2000–2001. (From Ament, Israel Connections and American Jews, table 5. Reprinted with permission from Jonathon Ament and the Jewish Federations of North America.)
Intermarriage
Intermarriage has a strong effect on attachment to Israel, especially among the under-35s, where it is far more prevalent.27 This is illustrated in Table 6.5 and Figure 6.2. Among the intermarried, those with low attachment to Israel are more than double the number with high attachment. Among the in-married and unmarried, under 5 percent qualify as “alienated” from Israel compared to 15 percent for the intermarried.28 Similarly, the children of the in-married were twice as likely to feel connected to Israel, compared to those of the intermarried.29
The Arab_Israeli Conflict Page 21