In my youth, Judaism and Zionism felt synonymous. Now the American Jewish consensus has collapsed

When I was a child, weekday mornings at my Jewish day school followed the same routine. We’d recite the pledge of allegiance, sing Hatikvah, Israel’s national anthem, and then recite the Shacharit, Judaism’s morning prayer service. Like a sizable, although perhaps now shrinking, segment of American Jews, I grew up in a traditional community where Israel was the geographic and spiritual center of the universe.

We were an outpost of Israel in New Jersey’s north-west Bergen county. Identification with the state of Israel was total, even if it was an Israel frozen in time, roughly the 1970s, the years of our Israeli teachers’ youth. We observed Israeli civil holidays with an ardor we never showed for their American equivalents. On Israel’s Independence Day, we marched in the town’s quiet, tree-lined streets. On Israel’s Memorial Day, the entire school assembled to sing maudlin songs mourning the handsome young soldiers who gave their lives for Israel – for us.

We learned we needed Israel because only a Jewish state could protect the Jews after the Shoah. Our teachers, many of them survivors or their children, imparted to us the inhumanity of the camps and exalted the courage of resistance – the doomed rebellion of the Warsaw ghetto, the partisans camped in the Lithuanian forest. We were imbued with the sense that Israel constituted not only the Jewish people’s rebirth out of literal ashes but also exemplified the only reasonable response to the Holocaust’s most fundamental message: that the Jewish people must be prepared to fight if we are to survive.

Judaism and Zionism were synonymous; I had no sense of where one ended and the other began. At lunchtime in school, we belted out the lines from the grace after meals – “May Jerusalem the holy city be rebuilt in our days” – and imagined not the celestial Jerusalem but the real, physical place. At home for Shabbat dinner on Friday nights, my sister and I made kiddush, the blessing over the wine, in our best approximation of Israeli-accented Hebrew. For her bat mitzvah, we traveled to Israel so that she could read Torah at the Western Wall and prayed with our hands pressed against the ancient stone blocks, which glowed pink in the early morning sun. A few days later, a guide took us to a firing range where we learned to shoot Uzis and emerged awed by the display of Jewish power.

An overly serious and earnest kid, I took this mix of religion and nationalism to heart. I fell asleep to long-unfashionable Israeli folk songs on cassette tapes, paeans to the early pioneers and the life of the kibbutz. I proudly sported an olive-green IDF T-shirt until holes formed in the armpits.

The Land of Israel, we were taught, was ours, and that meant we needed to defend it. As if to reinforce our sense of ownership, we learned to draw its outlines, including the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, almost with our eyes closed. Two states, negotiations, compromise – these were not part of the lexicon, let alone words like “occupation”, “siege” or “military rule”. I can hardly recall hearing the word “Palestinian” unaccompanied by the word “terrorist”.

I came to awareness of the broader world, and of America, only after the skies had darkened – I was in grade school on September 11, and as the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, against Israel entered in its bloodiest stage. America invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq. Fear and grief contorted my small community and hardened it against the outside world.

Those of us who lived in the heart of the Jewish consensus did not know it yet, but it was teetering toward collapse

In retrospect, the truculence of this ideology was a sign of its weakness. Those of us who lived in the heart of the Jewish consensus did not know it yet, but it was teetering toward collapse. The brutal reality of the occupation of the West Bank and siege of Gaza would soon be impossible to keep hidden or explain away. By the 2010s, the rigidity and simplicity of the hardline pro-Israel politics within which I grew up would make it fatally vulnerable to challenge.

Ours was, after all, a kishkes Zionism. Blunt, passionate, reactionary: a religious nationalism but with history in the place of providence. It was not a liberal Zionism. It was not a sophisticated worldview. It was a bellicose nationalism of people who, bound together by the trauma of the Holocaust, having only understood themselves as history’s ultimate victims, could not recognize that they now possessed power, who could neither acknowledge the means by which they had attained such power nor contemplate the ethical responsibilities that its possession required.

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American Jewish identity was not always like this. American Jews, of course, have never agreed about everything. Unlike most other countries, there is no chief rabbi of the United States, nor any body designated as the official representative of the country’s Jews. In the early 20th century, American Jewish life was marked by a dynamic, even conflictual, ideological diversity.

Yet by mid-century, a broad consensus began to crystallize. It emerged at the end of the second world war, and with Israel’s founding shortly afterwards. It was a product of the period that the Life magazine founder Henry R Luce famously deemed “the American century” – an era of national prosperity and optimism, of American stewardship of the new international order, and, for most American Jews, of integration and upward mobility.

Most American Jews today are the descendants of immigrants who arrived in the United States between 1880, when a wave of pogroms began in eastern Europe, and 1924, when the United States effectively closed its doors to Jews. Even as the Zionist movement had begun to gather strength back in Europe and in Palestine, these Jews came to this place because they believed in America’s promise: that even if they would need to work hard until the day they died, they, and certainly their children, would have a greater chance at a better life than in the old country.

America delivered on its promise. It provided the Jews who fled eastern Europe in the first decades of the century with a level of material and physical security that they had never known before. Although the US was not free from antisemitism, and forms of anti-Jewish discrimination would remain legal until after the second world war, the country’s commercial and meritocratic culture offered Jews the opportunity to ascend through the echelons of the class structure. In the postwar period, the elimination of limits on Jewish civil rights in the US made possible a once unthinkable level of prosperity and integration.

But while Americanization gave much to American Jews, it also exacted a significant and ultimately devastating cost. In practice, fully joining the American project entailed the suppression and surrender of what had been the dominant forms of eastern European Jewishness: traditionalist Orthodoxy (which would later be revived and reinvented) and leftwing Yiddish radicalism.

In the early postwar years, more fully accepted by American society than ever before, the shedding of Jewish difference proved almost effortless. American Jews began their out-migration from the city to the suburbs – in my grandparents’ case, from the Bronx to New Rochelle – where they molded their houses, their synagogues, their lives, on the prevailing style and form of the Protestant Modern. In their homes, they abandoned the restrictions of kashruth and the observance of Shabbat that they had maintained as children.

Of course, the new suburbanites had not forgotten that they were Jews. They were reminded of this inexorable fact of their being with each visit to immigrant grandparents in the old city neighborhood, by the folkways of humor and food. “About being Jewish there was nothing more to say than having two arms and two legs,” Philip Roth wrote of his own childhood in an almost entirely Jewish neighborhood in 1940s Newark. “It would have seemed to us strange not to be Jewish – stranger still, to hear someone announce that he wished he weren’t a Jew or that he intended not to be in the future.”

But by the 1960s, Jewish writers and communal leaders alike had begun to fret publicly about whether this all-encompassing Americanness threatened the future of Jewish life. “There will be no death camps in the United States that we live in,” the novelist Herman Wouk wrote This is My God. “The threat of Jewish oblivion is different. It is the threat of pleasantly vanishing down a broad highway at the wheel of a high-powered station wagon, with the golf clubs in the back.

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Against this backdrop – religious dissolution, embourgeoisement, and integration – Israel and Zionism would become a kind of substitute for faith. In the words of the great socialist literary critic Irving Howe, Zionism enabled American Jews “to postpone that inner reconsideration of ‘Jewishness’ which the American condition required”. Zionism rescued American Judaism at the very moment when a cultural and spiritual crisis seemed imminent. If meaning could not be found in liturgy or in synagogue, it could now be found in fundraising for pro-Israel organizations like the United Jewish Appeal, the American Jewish Committee, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac).

American Jews imagined Israel as a moral beacon and Zionism as the secular fulfillment of the faith in which they could no longer really believe.

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The 1950s and early 1960s were halcyon, white-picket times. Things were good; too good, some demographers worried. The old Yiddish line “ Shver tsu zayn a yid” (“It’s hard to be a Jew”) no longer seemed to ring true. Before the 1960s, American Jewish communal organizations had devoted themselves to eliminating the residual restrictions on Jewish civil rights: quotas at universities and medical schools, discriminatory hiring practices at elite law schools, redlining, restrictive covenants and other forms of housing discrimination.

For the first half of the century, America’s comparative freedom had been a balm to Jewish anxieties; in the immediate postwar years, it began to appear as a threat. The prolific scholar and writer Jacob Neusner would later ask: “Can Judaism survive in freedom?”

Most American Jews, however, expressed ambivalence more than alarm. After all, they were, as my grandparents were, not merely satisfied and grateful for America’s gifts; they embraced the myth of the American dream fully. They viewed their experience, the rise from the shtetl to the suburb in the span of one lifetime, as proof of its reality. Besides, as an awareness of what had not yet been named the Holocaust germinated through the collective mind suggested, it was not as if there had been another option.

My parents breathed as children this air of tentative comfort. Life for them was summer camp. It was Little League. It was the Boy Scouts. They pursued these activities surrounded, in large part, by other Jews, but this Jewishness was almost purely incidental, a mere fact of life. As kids, they thought little of it from the manicured lawns of Short Hills or Scarsdale, Edison (my mother’s childhood home) or New Rochelle (my father’s). The distance between the suburban idyll and the working-class Bronx of their parents’ childhoods seemed to indicate that all was, basically if torpidly, well.

Yet everything about American Jewish identity changed in the flash of an Israeli Mirage fighter jet scraping over the Sinai desert. In the span of six days in the summer of 1967, Israeli warplanes destroyed the Egyptian air force while it was still on the ground. Israeli tanks barreled into the Sinai. Israeli ground troops and armored divisions captured the Golan Heights from Syria and East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan. To many Israelis and American Jews, the lightning victory was nothing short of miraculous, even messianic.

In the United States, Jewish pride in Israel – strong Israel, tough Israel, victorious Israel – swelled into expressions of ecstasy and euphoria. There was dancing in the street and special prayers of thanksgiving in synagogues. Israel had not previously been such a widespread source of Jewish identification. While there had long been Zionist groups in the United States, they had never claimed the sympathies of anything close to the majority of American Jews, many of whom were not Zionists at all. In a matter of days, however, the meaning of American identity was redefined. Israel now stood at its center.

The Six-Day war , to be sure, did not convert all American Jews into militant Zionists overnight. Even later, when the American Jewish consensus was strongest, there were those who vigorously dissented from it. Some Jewish civil rights activists saw the racial-exclusionary limits of the American dream, while socialist and communist Jews viewed the Zionist project with skepticism, preferring the dream of internationalism to the concrete nationalism that Israel offered. But they never moved beyond the margins as objectors to mainstream notions of what it meant to be an American Jew. Especially in times of crisis, “the threshold of dissent”, as the scholar Marjorie Feld has called it, narrowed dramatically, and Jewish communal leaders cast out those who refused to toe the line.

Zionism as American Jews interpreted it did not force them to choose between their Americanness and their Jewishness

The intensity of the reaction also owed to the proximity in time – less than two decades – to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. It was during this time that the Holocaust received its name and became a central theme not just of Jewish life but of American culture. The publication of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem exploded into a controversy over the extent of Jewish resistance to the Nazi Final Solution. The subsequent flood of Holocaust films and TV specials reminded American Jews of the existential dangers from which the Jewish people had only recently escaped. In unstable and uncertain times, Israel rooted the Jewishness of American Jews firmly in its newly conquered territory and committed it to the defense of Jewish existence through force of arms.

Just as important, this new American Zionism was an undemanding faith. It required little daily activity or commitment. In the place of the divine commandments, all it asked of American Jews was that they feel a sense of closeness to Israel and, when they felt so inclined, donate money to pro-Israel philanthropies. This Americanized Zionism conformed fully to the liberal patterns of postwar life. A Jew might attend the local Hadassah chapter meetings the way a non-Jew would attend meetings of the Rotary; in some places, American Jews did both.

Zionism as American Jews interpreted it did not force them to choose between their Americanness and their Jewishness. Instead, it enabled them to fully embrace the former without relinquishing the latter. To observe the Sabbath required a certain separation from the American mainstream. Long-distance Zionism entailed no such sacrifice.

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While the Six-Day war marked the dawning of a new, triumphal phase in American Jewish life, the Yom Kippur war soon after, in 1973, imbued the new American Zionism with a feeling of desperate urgency. The war in 1967 was seen as the good war, the heroic war. It rallied American Jews enthusiastically to Israel’s cause. By contrast, the Yom Kippur war was the war that Israel might have lost if not for emergency aid from the United States. Nearly every American Jew of my parents’ generation can recall hearing of the war’s outbreak while in synagogue. Many bear with them still the memory of Judaism’s most sacred day shattered by the threat of Israel’s destruction.

The 1973 war alerted American Jews acutely to the precariousness of their new source of pride. And this fear that Israel might disappear ultimately accomplished what Norman Podhoretz called in 1974 “the complete Zionization” of American Jewish life and made criticism of Zionism tantamount to betrayal.

No corner of American Jewish life went untouched by this change. But it was the communal institutions that translated loyalty to Israel into politics and policy. In the 1950s and 60s, some of the most important Jewish establishment organizations – the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee and the American Jewish Congress – had been active, even central participants in the struggle for civil rights. Their rhetoric had been universalist, their outlook cosmopolitan. After 1967, they increasingly shifted their mandate to Israel advocacy. Their outlook became more unapologetically exclusivist, their rhetoric blunter in its defense of a narrow conception of Jewish self-interest. Once primarily concerned with shaping life at home in America, the new foci of their activities became “fundamentally vicarious”, in the words of the historian David Sorkin. The global center of Jewish gravity had begun to shift in Israel’s direction.

So great was the magnitude of this shift, so overwhelming the intensity of militarist fervor and Zionist ardor after 1967, that even Jewish anti-war activists and members of the new left, who until the day before had protested adamantly against the Vietnam war, now fell in behind in Israel. “Israel is the ultimate reality in the life of every living Jew today,” declared the erstwhile 60s radical MJ Rosenberg in an essay titled Israel Without Apology. “I believe that Israel surpasses in importance Jewish ritual,” he wrote. “It is more than the Jewish tradition; and, in fact, it is more than Mosaic Law itself.”

This equation of Israel with the essence of Jewishness remained the core catechism of mainstream affiliated Jewish life for more than half a century. In the 1980s, having reached political maturity during the previous decade’s inward turn – away from civil rights, liberalism, and universalism – a new cohort of Jewish institutional leaders staked out a more hardline interpretation of what commitment to Israel meant. In the last years of the cold war, neoconservative intellectuals merged support for Israeli territorial maximalism with militant anti-communism, synthesizing their version of Zionism with support for American militarism abroad. Establishment leaders often responded to those who objected to this worldview by casting them out of the communal tent.

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The postwar Jewish consensus did not collapse all at once. Indeed, we are still living amid the process of its disintegration.

The first serious cracks appeared in the early 1990s, during the negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization that would end in the signing of the Oslo Accords. At that time, it was the hardline, pro-settlement right that broke with the norm against criticizing the Israeli government. Rightwing groups in the US attacked Yitzhak Rabin’s Labor-led government for his openness to relinquishing land for peace, bucking widespread support among American Jews for a two-state solution, while establishment leaders turned a blind eye to increasingly violent rhetoric and threats coming from the right. “We are ashamed that you are not partners,” Rabin told American Jewish communal leaders at a closed-door meeting in October 1995 – a month before his assassination.

But with the near simultaneous eruption of the second intifada and the “war on terror” after the September 11 attacks, differences over a potential Israeli territorial compromise diminished in significance as American Jewish organizational life rallied around fighting what was perceived to be a common enemy: Yasser Arafat and Osama bin Laden merged as two faces of an identical, fanatical Arab Other.

It would take another decade for bigger cracks in the American Jewish consensus to re-emerge. Israel’s successive wars in Gaza – three between 2008 and 2014 – transformed the image of Israel in the American mind. Each additional war revealed the tremendous imbalance of power between the two sides. Israel increasingly appeared as the unambiguous aggressor, a nuclear-armed Goliath facing down a divided and enfeebled adversary. At the same time, Palestinians found new platforms for describing their ongoing dispossession and oppression after having long been denied what Edward Said called the “permission to narrate” their own experiences.

For a small yet growing number of Jews, especially younger Jews, each war raised new and more intense doubts about the morality of the pro-Israel consensus, the infallibility of Israel, and the fundamental injustices of Zionism on the ground in Israel/Palestine. An American Jew who felt horrified by the violence of Israel’s wars or ashamed by Israel’s seeming indifference to Palestinian suffering would have found little space within organized Jewish life to express such sentiments. The wars in Gaza rallied American Jewish institutions to Israel’s defense. But they also pushed any questioners out of the communal doors.

That was, in a way, what happened to me. In 2008, Israel launched its Operation Cast Lead, a massive aerial bombardment and ground assault on Gaza. Faced with TV news broadcasts of maimed children, collapsed houses, entire families wiped out, I had no ability to understand how the country I had been taught to love, that formed a part of my own self-understanding, could have done something like this. Worse, no one around me seemed particularly disturbed. If anything, my community’s attitude was the reverse. Level the Gaza Strip, one friend’s father said. Turn it into a parking lot.

Eventually, after years of conflict with family and family friends, late in my teenage years, and like many other young American Jews, I broke with the dogmatic, bellicose Zionism of my upbringing.

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Over the last decade, I have moved between Jewish communities in the United States and Israel, initially as a young anti-occupation activist, then, and ever since, as a journalist. Through my travels, I have met many other young American Jews. Some grew up like me, within what one might call mainline affiliated Judaism, and were on similar paths out of it. Others endured far more dramatic ruptures. They lost their faith in God or Zionism or both. Many lost much more than that.

The break with one’s home is a foundational Jewish motif, ever since Abraham wrecked his father Terah’s idols and set out for the Land of Canaan. But to me, the distinct contours of a contemporary phenomenon seemed to emerge: a widespread and profound disillusionment with the shape of American Jewish life and an intense yet unrealized desire for a Judaism awake to the injustices of the world, including, or perhaps especially, to those for which we, as Jews, were directly responsible.

It made sense to me why. Those of us in our twenties and thirties have come of age at a time marked by turmoil and even catastrophe. The September 11 attacks, the 2008 financial crisis, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, the Covid-19 pandemic and the ever-worsening climate disaster – these upheavals have given rise to a shared sensibility, not exclusively among young people, that our society and our communities require dramatic, fundamental transformation.

Israel has become the enduring source of the most intense intracommunal conflict among American Jews. The emergence of youth-led protests against Jewish communal institutions’ support for Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and siege of Gaza has reconfigured American Jewish politics. Disillusionment and anger toward the Jewish establishment fueled the creation of new groups, such as IfNotNow, and revitalized older, existing groups, like Jewish Voice for Peace.

Ten months into Israel’s ongoing, devastating war in Gaza, the Jewish communal consensus is closer to a final rupture than ever before. Brought to desperate grief by Israeli human rights abuses and the oppression of the Palestinians, many leftwing Jewish activists have shifted to taking their cues from the larger and ascendant Palestine-solidarity movement, deferring to a rhetorical strategy that does not merely challenge Israeli militarism but likens Zionism to Nazism. Some American Jewish anti-Zionists have even rejected the very idea of a transnational Jewish collectivity and oppose not just the concept of Jewish peoplehood but the idea that they ought to be concerned with what Israel’s destruction would mean for Israeli Jews.

For its part, the American Jewish establishment has fallen in lockstep behind the Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu, even though growing numbers of American Jews oppose this government’s conduct. Indeed, the American Jewish establishment is perhaps less representative of American Jewish life than ever. A recent survey commissioned by the Jewish Federations of North America found that 62% of American Jews say they “sometimes find it hard to support actions taken by Israel and its government”. Yet the perspective of those who are, at once, ashamed of Israel’s brutal prosecution of the war and committed to the safety and flourishing of Jewish life in Israel and the diaspora has found almost no representation within mainline institutional Jewish life.

Despite the acrimony of the contemporary intra-Jewish fight over Israel, there is also a certain symmetry between the pro-Israel establishment and its fiercest Jewish critics. Irving Howe’s observation that Israel became a stand-in for a form of Judaism that could exist in America’s secular, capitalist modernity still rings true today. Whether through affirmation and support or rejection and renunciation – and whether they like it or not – Israel remains at the center of the Jewish identities of both.

And while the collapse of the postwar American Jewish consensus means that intra-Jewish infighting is perhaps more bitter than at any point since the early part of the last century, that might not be a bad thing. A living community is a community that finds things worth fighting over. When we cease to fight, we begin to die.

• This article was adapted from Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life by Joshua Leifer, out 20 August from Dutton