Playing the Blame Game
April 7, 2016 § 5 Comments
Everywhere you look, there are signs that Israel and American Jews are drifting apart, whether it be the Pew surveys on American Jews and Israeli Jews, the involvement of American Jews in organizations like Jewish Voices for Peace that support the BDS movement, or the general angst about Israel that is becoming more prevalent in the American Jewish community. There is little question that from a 30,000 foot perspective, American Jews as a whole are in ways large and small more conflicted on Israel than they once were. So it is only natural to ask, who is to blame for this state of affairs? Is it Israel, for policies that are driving away American Jews, or is it American Jews, for shedding their sense of ethnic solidarity and their support for Israel along with it?
Dov Waxman – who wrote on this topic for Matzav a few weeks ago – has a new book out on the subject called Trouble in the Tribe, which elicited an interesting response in Mosaic from Elliott Abrams. Abrams characterizes Waxman’s book as distilling the conventional wisdom in liberal American Jewish circles, which is that rightwing Israeli governments, growing nationalism within Israeli society, and above all the occupation have turned off younger American Jews, and that only a shift in Israeli policies will turn this situation around (disclaimer: I have not yet read the book so I cannot definitively assess whether Abrams’ summation is accurate, but it seems to be from what I have seen). Abrams then goes on to argue that this conventional wisdom is wrong, and that the real driving force here is not Israel but American Jews themselves; as a sense of Jewish peoplehood and Jewish community has eroded, American Jews relate less and care less about their Israeli cousins. In Abrams’s words, “But the beginning of wisdom is surely to understand that the problem is here, in the United States. The American Jewish community is more distant from Israel than in past generations because it is changing, is in significant ways growing weaker, and is less inclined and indeed less able to feel and express solidarity with other Jews here and abroad.”
I vigorously agree with some of Abrams’ conclusions, and just as vigorously disagree with others. Abrams is certainly correct in my view that there is a crisis of Jewish identity in the U.S. that is backed by the Pew statistics, and that support for Israel among American Jews is going to continue to slide by some degree so long as intermarriage rates rise and the proportion of “Jews by background” versus “Jews by religion” goes up. Israel is the world’s only Jewish state, and there is no reason beyond ethnic or religious solidarity to specifically identify with it and support it in a stronger or special manner above other democracies or U.S. allies. If Judaism is only ancillary to your identity, then you likely have no particular reason to care about Israel one way or another. In discussing this identity gap, Abrams writes, “A deeper analysis suggests that we are dealing here with a far broader phenomenon, and one in which sheer indifference may count as much as or more than critical disagreement with Israeli policies or an active desire to disembarrass oneself of association with an ‘ethnonational state.’” The point about indifference is a smart one, and it follows from an erosion of Jewish peoplehood.
But this same sentence penned by Abrams also demonstrates where he goes wrong. One can argue that a lack of Jewish identity leads to apathy about Jewish causes, including Israel, or one can argue that a lack of Jewish identity leads to active disagreement with Jewish causes, including Israel, but it cannot be both simultaneously. The former suggests someone who doesn’t care; the latter suggests someone who deeply cares. And this is where Israel itself comes in, because unless you want to argue that American Jews who are critical of Israel are all self-loathing – and to be clear, I do not think that Abrams is arguing this at all – then the fact that many of them are put off by specific Israeli policies is incredibly relevant. It actually points to the very opposite conclusion at which Abrams arrives, since the greater likelihood is that someone whose American Jewish identity is extremely important to him or her will react viscerally to Israeli policies with which he or she disagrees than someone whose Judaism is well in the background. Abrams’s mocking contention that American Jews today cannot possibly know more about Israel than their parents or grandparents is surprisingly obtuse; despite the fact that Bernie Sanders somehow got it into his head that Israel killed over 10,000 Palestinian civilians in Gaza in 2014 during Operation Protective Edge (Hamas itself puts the figure at 1,462, which is surely inflated too), American Jews today can read half a dozen daily Israeli news sources in Hebrew or English and literally get up-to-the-minute updates via Twitter, and they don’t like much of what they see. This is not the same phenomenon as Jews who are drifting away from Israel on the tide of assimilation.
Identity can manifest itself in different ways. Some American Jews who maintain a strong Jewish identity will support Israel right or wrong out of ethnic and communal solidarity. Others who maintain a strong Jewish identity will feel the need to criticize Israel precisely because their identity creates an unbreakable bond with Israel that makes them feel personally invested in and responsible for what Israel does. And somewhere on that spectrum will be others who feel ashamed and embarrassed by Israel and want to do everything they can to bash it, not out of affinity but out of hate. Finally, there is the category that Abrams importantly identifies of those who are simply apathetic because their Jewish heritage is relegated to the background. Some criticism of Israel is driven by anti-Semitism and blatantly discriminatory double standards, but much is not, and it also isn’t coming exclusively from those whose Jewish identity or sense of ethnic solidarity is weak. The point is that there are many moving parts here, and to draw a broad sweeping conclusion that applies to all of these segments of American Jewry misses the different phenomena that are working in tandem. To suggest that the effect of Israeli policies is negligible in driving American Jews away from Israel is either myopic or willfully blind, and it betrays a black and white vision of an issue that is slathered in shades of gray.
Dithering Over Dani Dayan’s Diplomacy
March 31, 2016 § 1 Comment
There was a revealing debate that played itself out in the pages of Ha’aretz earlier this week after the Israeli government announced that it was appointing Dani Dayan to be the consul general in New York. For those unfamiliar with him, Dayan is the former chairman of the Yesha Council, a position that is the de facto leader of the settlement movement, and he has become in many ways the international face of the settlements through his willingness to write, speak, and engage with foreign audiences. Prime Minister Netanyahu had initially appointed Dayan as Israel’s ambassador to Brazil, but the Brazilian government was not willing to accept his credentials due to his settlement advocacy, so Dayan is now headed to the U.S., where many are looking at him askance.
Bradley Burston captures why Dayan is walking into a situation where he is already behind in the count, cataloguing the new consul general’s rejection of the two-state solution and his desire to annex the West Bank without any corresponding plan to grant the Palestinians living there any political rights. Burston consequently thinks that the American Jewish community should, like the government of Brazil, refuse to accept Dayan’s appointment and demand that he be replaced with someone who reflects American Jewish politics and values and is more in line with the outlook and communal mood of the majority of American Jews. As Burston writes, “To a Jewish community with grave reservations about the consequences of the settlement enterprise and its destructive impact on democracy and economics in Israel, and on peace, security, and human rights throughout the Holy Land, Israel is sending a man who declared, ‘The settlements of Judea and Samaria are not the problem — they are part of the solution.’”
Burston’s colleague Chemi Shalev takes a different tack. Shalev argues that the right way to approach Dayan’s appointment is not by looking at his audience, but by looking at his client. In Shalev’s view, since Dayan is being sent to New York to represent the government of Israel rather than the other way around and since Dayan accurately reflects the government’s views, he is in some ways the perfect envoy. Rather than pretending that the Israeli government embraces policies that American Jews would like to see, having Dayan as consul general in New York will make it clear that the government is not really interested in two states and put an end to the notion that the Netanyahu government is going to eventually come around.
I side with Shalev in this debate for a number of reasons. First, I don’t think it is appropriate to judge Dayan as a diplomat before he has even spent one minute in the job, and it is possible that he will surprise. I have observed Dayan in action on a few occasions, and while there is no question that he is an inveterate rightwinger, I found Burston’s description of him as vindictive and quick to anger as oddly off-base. Having watched Dayan address rooms where he is not only the most rightwing guy there but the only rightwing guy there, he is actually extremely diplomatic; he listens to the other side and then responds in a respectful and cogent way, with a heavy dose of humor. A diplomat isn’t supposed to nod and agree with everything his interlocutors say, but to listen well, argue well, and behave diplomatically. Perhaps Dayan’s intemperate and ill-timed comments on J Street being “un-Jewish” will turn out to be representative, but my limited observations of him point to the opposite.
More saliently, Shalev is right about what Dayan is here to do. A diplomat is supposed to reflect and advance his government’s positions rather than mold him or herself to fit the place where he or she is sent. The fact that Dayan may not be popular with American Jews doesn’t change the fact that he is a perfectly appropriate representative of the current government, and in some ways it would be more insulting to send a consul general to New York who would constantly dissemble and tell American Jews what they want to hear. There is a line between respectfully presenting unpopular positions, and obnoxiously asserting that you know better than everyone else. Some of Israel’s senior diplomats fall into the latter category, which is what makes them so ineffectual, but I don’t think Dayan is of the same ilk.
But the real lesson of Dayan’s appointment is a deeper one. His appointment is the clearest message that the Israeli government has sent yet that it does not view its policies as a problem, but rather the way in which they are presented. Dayan will not pretend to be anything but a rightwing one-stater who views the two-state solution as naïve and unrealistic. He will perfectly represent the current Israeli government as an unapologetic realist who views the bulk of American Jews as out of touch with the reality of Israel’s situation and neighborhood. Yet, the Israeli government sincerely seems to believe that forcefully and consistently presenting this message will change minds here, and that American Jews will eventually come around. Dayan as consul general lets us know that the Israeli government is blind as a bat to the damage caused by its policies, and that it is the naïve party here by assuming that it has a messaging problem rather than a policy problem. Israeli diplomats don’t need to be more forceful in pushing their message; they need a different message to push.
Nothing could illustrate this point better than yesterday’s news that Senator Pat Leahy and ten House Democrats have sent a letter to Secretary of State Kerry asking that he review U.S. military assistance to Israel and Egypt in light of alleged gross violations of human right by both countries. The fact that a relatively miniscule number of legislators signed a letter questioning military assistance to Israel will not matter in the scheme of things, but what is remarkable – and a bad harbinger of things to come – is that eleven members of Congress saw no problem lumping Israel with Egypt on the subject of human rights. It is a grossly inappropriate comparison, even if the intention was not to equate the two but to link their aid status as a legacy of the Camp David agreement, and there is no universe in which Israeli missteps are on the same plane as Egyptian killings and torture of political opponents. But Israel is not in Congressional crosshairs because its message needs to be more finely honed. It is in Congressional crosshairs because its policies in the West Bank are corrosive and inevitably lead to actions that no democracy should commit and that sully Israel’s reputation. This letter is a consequence of Israel mistakenly believing that it only has to explain itself better and give no quarter to its critics in order to make its problems go away. I wish Dani Dayan all the luck in the world, but he is sidling up to the table having already been dealt a losing hand.
Two Peoples, One Tribe
March 17, 2016 § 2 Comments
I meant it when I wrote last week that I could easily mine the Pew study of Israeli society for a year’s worth of material, but I’ll try to make this week the last post on the subject for awhile. Perhaps the most interesting part of the study to me is the section comparing Israeli Jews and American Jews. As Dov Waxman noted in a long breakdown yesterday on Matzav, there is a yawning chasm on many issues between Jews in Israel and Jews in the U.S., to the extent that anyone looking at the numbers without any identifying information on the two groups would have a difficult time guessing that they were members of the same family, so to speak. What issues the two groups of Jews differ on is fascinating in itself, but the more fascinating aspect for me isn’t the what, but the why.
Breaking down the numbers, it’s clear that Israeli Jews tilt more towards the political right than their American counterparts, but it isn’t political differences that illuminate what is going on. Rather, Israeli Jews and American Jews are separated by a fundamental difference in worldview that transcends the political sphere. It is much more of a philosophical divide that is driven by the divergent historical and present day experiences of Israeli Jews and American Jews. For shorthand, let’s call this divide universalism versus particularism.
American Jews are very well integrated into the larger American milieu. Because of this, they view their Judaism as part of a universal system where wider rules and values are more important than in-group relationships. They are unquestionably happy about their heritage – 94% are proud to be Jewish and 75% feel a strong sense of belonging to the Jewish people – but the history of Jews in America is one of cultural assimilation. While anti-Semitism will always exist everywhere, the United States in 2016 is largely devoid of it, and Jews face very little discrimination overall (I reserve the right to revisit this point should we face the apocalypse ushered in on January 20, 2017, by President Donald J. Trump). American Jews are not treated as a minority, and are not thought of as one in many circles. American Jews themselves do not behave as religious minorities in their willingness to transcend group boundaries in unusually large numbers. The intermarriage rate for non-Orthodox American Jews is over 70% and 44% of married American Jews currently have a non-Jewish spouse; American Jews are likelier than any other religious minority group to have close friends of another religion and only 32% say that all or most of their close friends are Jewish; and American Jews are generally much less religious than their Israeli counterparts. The universal perspective of American Jews makes their Judaism less omnipresent and in some ways less important, so that even while being proud of their Jewish heritage it does not dominate their identity. As Michael Oren pointed out in his memoir Ally, it is no accident that alone among minority groups, American Jews place the “American” clause first.
Israeli Jews have a much more particularistic worldview that is rooted in Israel’s reality. Israelis live with a siege mentality emanating from the fact that they are in a neighborhood that does not accept them, which makes group relationships and solidarity more important. Furthermore, the fact that Israeli Jews are a majority in their own country creates a bubble filled with constant reminders that they are Jews, which reinforces the tribal sense that external hostility creates. Judaism shapes Israeli identity in a way that is almost impossible to replicate in the current American Jewish experience, and thus Israeli Jews are more attached to their Judaism. Israeli Jews are more observant and theologically religious by every measure than their American cousins, and view their Judaism as such a dominant and influential presence that more Israeli Jews describe themselves as Jewish first than as Israeli first (46% to 35%). Israeli Jews do not see themselves as ensconced in a wider system in the way that American Jews do; their Judaism is necessarily a narrower one that is not focused on what Judaism has to offer to the rest of the world. The history of Israel’s creation and fight for existence, along with its ongoing quest for legitimacy and normalcy, lead to a Jewish community that is more inward looking and bound by elements that are unique to Jews.
This is seen most acutely when comparing the responses of Israeli and American Jews on what it means to be Jewish. Both rank remembering the Holocaust as first on the list of essential parts of being Jewish, but after that the answers diverge. For American Jews, four out of the next five responses have nothing to do with Judaism as a religion or culture, but espouse universal values that can apply to anyone (leading an ethical life, working for justice and equality, being intellectually curious, having a good sense of humor), with the one outlier being caring about Israel. Israeli Jews prioritize items that are exclusively Jewish, with observing Jewish law coming in third at 35% (only 19% for American Jews), living in Israel coming in fourth at 33%, and eating traditional Jewish foods sixth at 18%. When Israelis were not limited to the eight choices provided by Pew but were allowed to mention anything they wanted, Israeli Jews’ priorities were even starker. The biggest group of 53% gave an answer in the category of providing Jewish education to or sharing Jewish traditions with their children, and the second biggest group of 45% gave an answer in the category of following religious traditions or being religious. While American Jews and Israeli Jews share a religious, cultural, and ethnic heritage, what it means to be Jewish is vastly different for them.
The direct implications of this are difficult to foresee, although it has the potential to affect everything from the U.S.-Israel relationship to the practice of Judaism itself. One element that is encouraging is that both groups rate the importance of caring about Israel highly – 33% for Israelis, 43% for Americans – and more crucially, the two groups care about each other. 68% of Israeli Jews say they have something in common with American Jews, 75% say there is a common destiny, and 59% view American Jewry’s influence on Israel as good. As Joel Braunold wrote in Ha’aretz, these results show that American Jews and Israeli Jews aren’t yet sick of each other. While the way in which the two sets of Jews view their Judaism seems like it is at odds, Israeli views on American Jews ratifies and demonstrates the need for continued engagement, not shying away from controversial issues while being careful not to impose on Israelis, and jointly working toward the best version of Israel that can be.
Why the Israeli Government Ignores American Jews
January 28, 2016 § 4 Comments
Israel has an American Jewish problem. This problem manifests itself in different ways, but it seems unquestionable that varied segments of American Jewry do not support Israel in the all-encompassing and largely uncritical way that they once did. This can be seen nearly anywhere one looks, whether it is on college campuses where J Street student groups dominate the scene, or in the string of articles by American Jews – including this American Jew – that take the Israeli government to task on a number of issues, or in the criticism from prominent Jewish intelligentsia that left former Israeli ambassador Michael Oren so disappointed in his memoir. This is not to say that there are not large segments of American Jews whose relationship with Israel has remained the same over time, and making broad characterizations about an entire group is always going to miss the nuance inherent in a detailed examination. But suffice it to say that Israel’s status with American Jewry writ large, while still very strong, is not quite as strong as it once was.
Yet, in ways large and small, the current Israeli government oftentimes gives the impression that it just doesn’t care. Take the Iran deal, for instance. The Jewish community in the U.S. was bitterly divided over its merits, but Prime Minister Netanyahu and other members of his government gave the impression that anyone who cared about Israel must oppose the deal, which divided the American Jewish community even further. The prime minister then insisted on coming here to campaign against it before Congress over the objections of myriad American Jewish groups – reportedly AIPAC included – who knew that the speech and overall campaign would put American Jews in an uncomfortable position. None of this, however, managed to change Netanyahu’s calculus, and so events proceeded apace. Other examples abound as well. It would not be a stretch to suggest that Israel’s current ambassador to the U.S. is controversial, to say the least, among many American Jews, and yet Netanyahu is content with the status quo. The overwhelming preponderance of American Jews are not Orthodox and are alienated by Israel’s position on religious issues that affect them directly, from conversion to being able to pray at the Western Wall in an egalitarian tradition, but such issues are consigned to the sidelines. One of the things that was so remarkable about Netanyahu’s recent partial about-face on the NGO bill was that it came after weeks of hammering away by American Jewish groups (although there is no evidence that this was dispositive, rather than pressure from Western governments). So why doesn’t the Israeli government care what we think?
One important factor is of course the one that I wrote about last week, which is that American Jewish organizations – in contrast to ordinary American Jews – are more willing to give the government leeway on most issues. The Israeli government knows that even if support is softening among significant numbers of American Jews as individuals, the organizations are going to remain a lot less critical of the government. This is an enormous mitigating factor, and there is no question that for very practical and understandable reasons any Israeli prime minister cares more about what AIPAC’s position is on an issue than the position voiced by your representative American Jew on the street. The irony is that so long as American Jewish groups are more supportive of Israel than American Jews, the wishes of many American Jews will be subsumed to the wishes of the organizations tasked with representing them.
There is another important factor that has nothing to do with groups but with demographics. The group most supportive of Israel in the U.S. is Orthodox Jews, who have the strongest ties to Israel that are inculcated in a variety of ways, from day schools that put a premium on Zionism to students spending a gap year in Israel before college. As the Pew study demonstrates, the farther away from Jewish observance and Jewish identity one gets, the less supportive of Israel one tends to be. Israeli officials look at the rising intermarriage rate among non-Orthodox Jews and the growing proportion of Orthodox Jews in urban centers such as New York, and assume that the numbers are on their side. What looks like a growing trend of eroding support for Israel becomes little more than a squall that Israel only needs to wait out for the next couple of decades, since the intermarried and non-observant will likely cease to have much Jewish identity and a more Orthodox American Jewry is a more supportive American Jewry. This thinking is erroneous on a number of fronts – among other things, it ignores the influence disproportionately wielded in American Jewry by pockets of non-Orthodox Jews in places like Wall Street and Hollywood and also assumes that Orthodox Jews will remain uniformly supportive of rightwing Israeli policies forever – but it does explain a lot about why American Jewish voices often go unheeded.
So is this a battle cry for American Jews to abandon Israel until the Israeli government becomes more felicitous of its desires? Absolutely not. Any Israeli government has to worry first and foremost about its own constituents – who in this case are more politically conservative and more religious than their American Jewish brethren – before it worries about Diaspora Jews. More saliently, there are some small but encouraging signs that things may be changing a bit, from Netanyahu’s new position on the NGO bill to the reports of an emerging deal on egalitarian prayer space at the Western Wall. The relationship between American Jews and Israel has often resembled a one-way street since the state’s founding, and it is naïve to believe that this will change wholesale overnight, but if the Israeli government’s sudden responsiveness on the NGO and pluralism issues were affected by American Jewish concerns, it reiterates the importance of keeping our voices up. Even if unrequited love is more often than not going to continue to be American Jewry’s lot in life, we should make sure that we are heard in order to make a difference wherever we can and continue to give the Israeli government a way of listening to the American Jewish community’s disparate parts rather than just the ones that reinforce its current policies.
Maureen Dowd and Anti-Semitic Imagery
September 16, 2012 § 14 Comments
Maureen Dowd’s column in this morning’s New York Times going after Dan Senor and other neoconservatives has made a lot of people upset. Titled “Neocons Slither Back,” it employs a number of disturbing classical anti-Semitic tropes and images. After quoting from Paul Ryan’s hawkish foreign policy speech to the Values Voter Summit, Dowd writes, “Ryan was moving his mouth, but the voice was the neocon puppet master Dan Senor,” and later describes him as the “ventriloquist” for Ryan and Mitt Romney. In talking about GOP foreign policy, she says, “After 9/11, the neocons captured one Republican president who was naïve about the world. Now, amid contagious Arab rage sparked on the 11th anniversary of 9/11, they have captured another would-be Republican president and vice president, both jejeune about the world.” Senor is Jewish and the term “neocon” has become an unfortunate shorthand for Jews in many circles, and the idea that Jewish advisors are pulling strings behind the scenes and controlling world events and weak-minded actors is as classically anti-Semitic as it gets.
I read the column last night and have to confess that none of this crossed my mind at all until Senor’s wife, Campbell Brown, tweeted out this critique of Dowd’s column alleging that it was anti-Semitic, at which point I re-read Dowd and it came across in a new light. I never call things out as as anti-Semitic unless they are extremely egregious since I do not think it is useful to water down the term so that the charge rarely carries much weight anymore, so perhaps my radar for this kind of thing needs to be recalibrated. My original inclination was that Senor’s Judaism was incidental in this case, and that there is an important distinction to be made between criticizing Jews because they are Jewish vs. criticizing people who happen to be Jewish. I was willing to give Dowd the benefit of the doubt because that is how the column read to me and because I have never had any sense from stuff that she has written that she is anti-Semitic or goes after Jews in particular. There is, however, the unfortunate fact that many people use the term neocon as a code of sorts to refer to Jews, and Dowd did not stop at criticizing Senor but brought neocons writ large into the picture. So after thinking about it overnight, I am still not prepared to tar Dowd as an anti-Semite, but there is no doubt that the column is deeply troubling to many and rightly so.
There is an issue this raises though, which is to what extent certain criticism of Jews should be off-limits given the sordid history of anti-Semitism. Had Dowd written a column without the marionette imagery, or if Senor were not Jewish, the anti-Semitism charge would have never been raised, but has been given the combination of the specific type of criticism leveled here along with the idea of Senor manipulating his Gentile bosses. Does that mean that criticizing Senor for pushing a hawkish interventionist policy as part of his advice to Romney and Ryan is completely out of bounds? It certainly shouldn’t be if you are a liberal columnist concerned with the possible return of George W. Bush’s first-term foreign policy agenda. I also think that as Jews, we do not want to arrive at a place where people think that they cannot direct legitimate criticism at us just because we happen to be Jewish and they do not want to run afoul of anti-Semitism. Some criticism is anti-Semitic but much is not, and it will not benefit the Jewish community long term if we hurl around the anti-Semitism charge in any but the most clear cut case. I know there are many who will argue that Dowd’s column meets that standard and I understand why. I just think we need to make sure that if someone wants to call out a Jewish public figure’s bad actions or poor policy prescriptions, there is a way to do it without it turning into a maelstrom of bigotry charges. Dowd should have been a lot more careful and sensitive to what she was implying, but I genuinely believe that this was a case of her coming down on Senor’s ideas rather than his ethnicity or undue influence.
