Most American Jews are Ashkenazi. Most Israeli Jews are not. American Jews are a tiny minority. Israeli Jews are a dominant majority. American Jews live in a huge country flanked by oceans on each side and 2 peaceful neighbors. Israeli Jews live in a tiny country flanked by foes.
American Jews are habituated to pandering to mainstream ideas and fashionable pieties, even at the risk of harming the interests of Jews. Israelis have to pander to the implacable reality of a surrounding region defined by lack of democracy, totalitarian ethos and Islamist rage.
The two communities are one people who are divided into two parts, each having to deal with very different realities and natures and adapt. The two parts will grow apart, as surely as the early Christians detached from the Jewish people due to political convenience.
As sure as most conversos in Inquisitional Spain distanced from their Jewish families when their life and well-being depended on the good graces of the Inquisitional pieties. And it didn't matter that they were FORCED to convert.
AS sure as during the 19th century many European Jews decided to break from the Jewish community because they realized the the values of the enlightenment didn't cure the societies in which they dwelt from the pathology of antisemitism.
As sure as many post-Holocaust Jews decided that there is no upside to remaining Jews and converted to other religions, in the hope of avoiding any special scrutiny or obstacle to their life. @madeleine is one example. It doesn't always work.
In a seminar in a Canadian U in which her example was brought up, the presiding prof cdn't restrain herself from saying in a class of whom 50% were Jews: I don't understand how Albright didn't know she was Jewish. She only had to look in the mirror!
This is not an experience many people have the stomach for; Jews are no different. So if they can melt into a throng of opinion, join madding crowds, yell the loudest when it comes to beating on Israeli Jews, if that gains them a few brownie points, they'll go that way.
American Jews have not been taught to stand up for themselves. American Jews prefer to denigrate themselves if it means antisemites will reassure them they are different, loftier, more righteous Jews, as good as Christians or Muslims or whatever ethnicity is the flavor of the day
I'm not angry with them for being like that. How can they understand the beauty of being true to and easy in one's skin if nobody bothered to teach them? Do you think many conversos were interested in returning back to Jews two generations after their forced conversion?
After you've been indoctrinated -one way or another- into hating the people your society hates, why wd you want to belong to that people? Young American Jews are as much vulnerable to antisemitic propaganda against Israelis as anybody. They drink from the same information source.
They regard their teachers, their media outlets, the @nytimes @MSNBC @jdforward etc etc as reliable sources for unfiltered truths, objective analyses, and these lies, these narratives, these perversions of history, reside in their minds and shape their worldview.
They will be lost to everything that is good and moral and noble about Judaism and its manifestation in the state of Israel, in their terrible need to belong and to become one in a crowd. The Jewish people is down to barely 10% of what it wd have been, if left to our own devices.
Much of these losses are due, indeed, to a history of nonstop persecution, massacres, exterminations, expulsions. But much of it is also due to the exhaustion from this war of attrition waged on Jews through perpetual demonization.
Israeli Jews are immune to this exhaustion. We are as happy being Israelis as Italians are Italian, or Swiss are Swiss, or Swedes are Swedes. It's not a project. It's a natural birthright, an affection and pride in our culture, language, music, aesthetics, history.
So, we Israeli Jews, will not go gently into the night. We will be friends with those want to be friends and we will defend against our ill-wishers. We will not pander to our enemies' darkest libels of us, and we will not give up our place under sun.
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