Are American Jews Slowly Moving Away from Israel?

Are American Jews Growing Less Attached to Zion?

In a recent widely-read essay, writer Peter Beinart argued that young American Jews are slowly moving away from Israel and feel less connected to the Jewish state than their parents. The reason: they feel alienated from 1) the policies of occupation and war that define Israel and 2) the nationalism, militarism and tribalism which defines Zionism in a world where Jews are mostly liberal, many have Arab and Muslim friends, and consider humanism and not tribal nationalism to be the noble ideal.

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In 2003, several prominent Jewish philanthropists hired Republican pollster Frank Luntz to explain why American Jewish college students were not more vigorously rebutting campus criticism of Israel. In response, he unwittingly produced the most damning indictment of the organized American Jewish community that I have ever seen.

The philanthropists wanted to know what Jewish students thought about Israel. Luntz found that they mostly didn’t. “Six times we have brought Jewish youth together as a group to talk about their Jewishness and connection to Israel,” he reported. “Six times the topic of Israel did not come up until it was prompted. Six times these Jewish youth used the word ‘they‘ rather than ‘us‘ to describe the situation.”

That Luntz encountered indifference was not surprising. In recent years, several studies have revealed, in the words of Steven Cohen of Hebrew Union College and Ari Kelman of the University of California at Davis, that “non-Orthodox younger Jews, on the whole, feel much less attached to Israel than their elders,” with many professing “a near-total absence of positive feelings.” In 2008, the student senate at Brandeis, the only nonsectarian Jewish-sponsored university in America, rejected a resolution commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the Jewish state.

And polling shows that support for Israel has indeed declined amongst Jews, especially young Jews.

And recently they may have been two prominent defections:

Jay Rosen, the influential journalism prof at NYU (and a Jew), at twitter a few days ago:

My alienation from and disgust with the "organized Jewish community" (and the polity of Israel) is close to complete

And Princeton Noble-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman:

First, this has been building for a very long time. I remember my first visit to Israel, in 1981; even then older Israeli academics, veterans of an earlier era (literally — many of them had fought in 1967 and 1973), would talk grimly about the Likud government and its harsh policies, saying things like “I feel as if we’re living under a foreign occupation.” And it’s only gotten worse since then.

The political consequences of a post-Zionist Jewish establishment, if it even or ever will exist, remains to be seen. But the opening up of the debate in the Jewish community certainly will have an effect on the broader national debate and eventually U.S. policy toward Israel.

Beinart's New York Review of Books essay.