Roundtable Extra: “We Stand Divided” by Daniel Gordis
From National Jewish Book Award Winner and author of Israel, a bold reevaluation of the tensions between American and Israeli Jews that reimagines the past, present, and future of Jewish life. Enjoy this excerpt of “We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel,” by Daniel Gordis:
“The prevailing view… is that the root cause of the rift between American Jews and Israel is what Israel does: if Israel only behaved better, the relationship could be healed. There is only one problem with that explanation: it is wrong.
Why is the conventional wisdom mistaken? Let’s return to our marriage metaphor. When a couple quarrels over dishes left in the sink or socks dropped on the floor, the problem is rarely about kitchens or bedroom floors. The issues in the dynamic are generally much deeper, more profound and far-reaching, than the immediate issues that triggered the quarrel. The same is true with Israel and American Jews. That is not to say that Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians is not a critically important security, demographic, and moral challenge, the resolution of which may ultimately determine whether Israel can remain both Jewish and democratic. It absolutely is. In particular, millions of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation—even if it is an occupation that Israel did not seek and has tried to end—is terrible for the Palestinians and a threat to Israel’s moral and democratic core.
Nor is the suggestion that something deeper than the immediate triggers is at play meant to suggest that the Israeli rabbinate’s views of non-Orthodox Jews are not gratuitously offensive and callously dismissive of those with whom they disagree. Or that Israel’s handling of an African asylum issue is not key to the kind of country Israel will or should become. All of those are profound issues that everyone who cares about the Jewish state needs to take very seriously.
The proof that these explanations are insufficient lies in the fact that the fraught relations between American Jews and Israel predate by decades the conflict with Arabs and then the Palestinians; the tensions arose long before the ugliness of Israel’s treatment of non-Orthodox Jews. The real issue that divides the world’s two largest Jewish communities, as we have noted, is not what Israel does, but what Israel is. The essential issue, we will suggest, is that, at their core, America and Israel are exceedingly different: created for different purposes, they believe in and foster very different sorts of societies with very different values and different visions of Judaism.
For decades, American Jews have assumed that the more Israel emulates the United States the more admirable it will be. The more Israel acts in ways that highlight the differences between its values and those of the United States, however, the more difficult it becomes for American Jews to support it.
Yet American Jews misunderstand Israel when they assume that Israel’s founders wanted or expected it to mirror America’s core values. And Israeli Jews often wrongly read American Jews’ differences as disloyalty, or laziness, without appreciating that American Judaism has a profound, but very different, set of core values. Israel’s founders never hoped that Israel would be an imitation of America, and American Jewish leaders recognized from the outset that a Jewish state would threaten some of their deepest commitments. The divisions between American Jews and the Zionist project have always run deep, in large measure because the values and priorities of Zionism are diametrically opposed to many of the values that have made America the extraordinary country it is.
The United States and Israel were created for entirely different purposes, and as a result, they are fundamentally different experiments in how to enable humans to flourish. In the chapters that follow, we will look at several of the key commitments that make Israel and America so different.
To uncover the origins of today’s fraught relations between American Jews and Israel, we need to begin with the very origins of Zionism itself.”
