‘Israelis don’t understand how bad things are for Israel in the US’

 https://www.ynetnews.com/jewish-world/article/ry00mepergl

For decades, American Jews largely saw no contradiction between their Jewish identity and their place in the United States. Today, however, growing political polarization, changing attitudes toward Israel and rising antisemitism are making that relationship increasingly complicated.

Dr. Yehuda Kurtzer, co-president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, has lived in New York for the past 17 years with his wife, Stephanie Ives, and their three children. He says American Jewish identity developed differently from that of Jewish communities elsewhere in the Diaspora because Jews in the United States built an identity that did not force them to choose between being Jewish and being American.

“Over the past 100 years, American Jews built this identity around liberal democratic values,” Kurtzer told ynet. “That enabled us to integrate into American society and not be Jewish only at home, but also in the public sphere. Jews are partners in every area of American life. We developed a very strong Jewish identity that says I can be Jewish and also fully part of American society.”

For decades, support for Israel was broadly bipartisan. Kurtzer argues that this has changed dramatically as Israel has become part of the wider polarization dividing American politics, leaving Jewish Americans caught between parties that increasingly use Israel and antisemitism as weapons against one another.