Enough! Stop Worrying About Jewish Disunity in the USA!

To note the demographic implosion of Reform and Conservative Judaism is not to assert that Jewish life and support for Israel among American Jews are on the verge of becoming extinct. Though still a small minority, Orthodox Judaism—whose adherents tend to be supportive of the Jewish state—is growing in the United States. Those elements of the non-Orthodox majority who are resisting the lure of assimilation are more interested in Jewish learning and consequently deeply involved with Israel. But it would be foolish to pretend that pro-Israel activism as expressed by groups like AIPAC is not increasingly alien to most liberal Jews.

Although Gordis’s book gives a thorough account of why the divide is growing, his recommendations for how to counteract this trend offer little hope for those who still seek to recapture the Zionist fervor of the post-Holocaust era.

Gordis is right to point out that both communities need each other. Yet, as he writes, “the roots of the discord are so deep” that they are “too foundational to be engineered.” All he can recommend is that both sides make a fundamental decision to not let the relationship founder and to make an effort to see each other in the best light. This means both sides accepting their differences rather than raging against them. He’s also right to recommend letting go of the expectation that either American Jews or Israelis will somehow magically transform themselves into the other’s mirror image. Each group is the product of experiences and beliefs that are radically different from each other.

These anodyne suggestions should be followed, but the problem is baked too deeply into the identity of the two communities to do more than limit the damage. This provides little comfort, sadly, for those who understand that promoting a common sense of Jewish peoplehood is essential to the Jewish future in both America and Israel. As Gordis correctly argues, the lessons of Jewish history teach us that such divisions can have devastating consequences for a people whose numbers are still small and whose existence, for all of Israel’s vaunted military and economic strength and American Jewry’s influence and affluence, is still essentially fragile.