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.
Kurtzer is not quite correct. Initially the liberal deal with the Jews was "You can be American and Jewish as long as the Jewish doesn't trump the American". Liberal Jewish Americans, being mostly non-religious, had no problem with that. They would be good liberal Americans and still get to have latkes and humentaschen. The public Jewish identity was indistiguishable from American liberalism. What they call "tikkun olam" is just social justice with a Yiddish accent.
ReplyDeleteWhat Jewish liberals didn't foresee was the mutation of social justice for all into DIE ideology for some. They didn't see liberalism adopted a pseudo-religion in which all Whites are collective guilty of sins they never committed, are automatically racist and are colonialist apartheid land thieves. They didn't see DIE then deciding that the whitest of the White were the Jews.
And now it's reached that point - you can be a good liberal American which includes hating Judaism and Israel - or you can be a good Jew but no longer both.
This truly has nothing to do with the Gaza war. That's just the excuse. The ideology labelled Israel as a genocidal aggressor state years ago and is using Israel's refusal to let Iran wipe it out as fuel for that hatred.
Jewish Americans now have a simple choice. They can drop the Jewish and line up to scream "Death to Israel!" or they can retreat back into the community with American Jews.