“MAYBE THEY are the thousands of young American Jews answering the Jewish call to pursue justice by teaching in inner city schools, advocating for the rights of prisoners or providing health care in the Third World? Perhaps they are the Jews who care so deeply about God’s creation that they bicycle to work, compost their waste and meticulously track their carbon outputs. Maybe they are the Jews who travel each summer to countries in Eastern Europe to help struggling Jewish communities thrive and grow. Or perhaps they are the thousands of Jews on college campuses, responding to “Never Again” who mobilized and advocated for stopping the genocide in Darfur. Are they the ones?”

Many of my Jewish cohort is now marrying and tend to espouse these universal values listed above. However, many of these are the same that are intermarrying and have little interest in exploring both their Jewish roots and heritage and connection with the State of Israel. What will be the fate of their children and grandchildren- A gradual distancing from any associations of their Jewishness.

We live in an era of Jewish dissociation and assimilation, and although this is a phenomena that has always occurred in Jewish History, one would argue that the degree in which it is taking place now is dramatic. I have many friends and know many more that are intermarried and have little connection with their Jewishness. You can put your own value judgement on this development, but it saddens me.

Gordis quotes,
“Two American Jewish sociologists, Steven Cohen and Ari Kelman, wrote that among American Jews aged 35 and younger, a full 50% said that the destruction of the State of Israel would not be a personal tragedy for them.”

If this is true (which I’m not sure it is) it is a telling statistic that no one yet on this comment board has mentioned yet.

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1256799041080&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull

Israel is not a drunken husband nor a poor sighted senior citizen. Israel is a nation trying to defend itself against an enemy that seeks it’s destruction. A better analogy would be Israel as surgeon; using surgery to extract tumors and cancer. And if the cancer has spread beyond a surgical response, extreme chemotherapy may be necessary, knowing full well that damage will be done to healthy tissue, but no action will lead to certain death.

Are you suggesting that the appropriate response to Hezbullah and Hamas attacks from civilian areas is surrender?

There is something very wrong when Col. Richard Kemp, the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, speaks up for Israel on Gaza, saying, “The Israeli Defence Forces Did More to Safeguard the Rights of Civilians in a Combat Zone than Any Other Army in the History of Warfare” and high minded Jews turn their back and say, “No, it can’t be true that we are good. How can the world be so wrong about us?”

Any Jew familiar with Israel knows that all these issues are debated and aired. We as American Jews, should stand for Israel’s right to decide its own fate and the future of its own children. It’s one thing to want to participate in that debate, and seek an appropriate venue for doing so, but it’s another thing to apply pressure through American politics to force Israel’s hand to do what we think is best for it.

I’m sorry to say that I find Rabbi Rosen’s posts on issues of Israel and the peace process very naive. Rabbi Gordis’ op-ed deserves serious reflection.

From your response above, you may be uninterested in whether I call myself a Zionist. In my earlier comment, I was silent on that question, though you assumed I did when you questioned the honesty of that assessment.

I think you are saying that encouraging Israel to undertake actions which its elected government does not currently favor can not be pro-Israel or Zionist. That strikes me as simplistic. What if a substantial segment of the Israeli voting public feels the way I do, even if their view is not espoused by the ruling coalition? Are they unpatriotic? The history of Zionism is one of multiple opinions, of numerous and sometimes opposing agendas and philosophies. Israel continues to enjoy vigorous and mutilfaceted political discourse. Why should Jews outside of Israel who agree with the current Israeli government be considered Zionist and pro-Israel, while those of us who agree with Israeli minority opinions not be so considered? If the next Israeli government is a left-leaning coalition including parties with whom I agree more than I do with the current coalition members, will I then be considered Zionist, while diaspora sympathizers with the right leaning Israeli new minority whom you might consider Zionist today will no longer be so considered? If we both agree that whichever party leads the Israeli government, the minority is by and large the loyal opposition, why should the diversity of political thinking end at Israel’s borders? It does a disservice to the rich history of Zionism to boil it down to a Bush-ian “you’re either for us or against us”.

Separately, a better fitting metaphor than the spouse who does only what I want or who has a drinking problem might be as follows: My father has failing eyesight and gets into repeated small fender benders. I tell him he should stop driving before anyone is more seriously injured, my brother thinks it is disrespectful and demeaning to say so, and my father worries about his independence. We can all be in the same family, love one another, and share many of the same concerns, but we each have different assessments of which concern outweighs another. Similarly, why should your focus on Israel’s security be more (or less) valid than my focus on its respect for human rights? We can each express our concerns to our Israeli cousins, and take those actions dictated by our respective consciences, while acknowledging the validity of each other’s concerns and of our shared concern for Israel’s future.

Exchanges of blog comments like these are not the ideal vehicle for respectful and candid discussion, particularly on as sensitive a subject as the relationship between American Jews and Israel. That discussion is taking place face to face in my community, with an emphasis on listening to and respecting one another. I hope it is taking place in yours and many other American Jewish communities as well.

I answer with the hope that your question is not rhetorical. In any case, lack of an answer would make it appear that I had no reply.

The great supporters of Israel, Bush-Cheney and their American-Jewish loyalists are responsible for putting Hamas in power in Gaza and letting the peace process end up in rigor mortis over the past decade. We won’t go into whether they are also responsible for dragging Israel’s world popularity down to its lowest low–I think so. To me, Zionism isn’t about waving the flag and cursing the Arabs. It’s about finding a practical way to insure Israel’s survival. George Mitchell managed to make it happen in Ireland, which has been at war for longer than Israel. But the will to find a way has got to be there, rather than the impulse to cave in to fear. There is no way to win by force in this case. All the Americans’ horses and men can’t defend Israel from the Muslim world in which it dwells. The only chance to live to see the Zionist dream into the next century is to find a way to live among them. The major Arab countries of the region have proposed ways to make that happen. If we let every extremist with a bomb derail that process, how will we ever go forward?

So what you are really saying is that Americans should have a right to weigh in on policies of any country that receives American aid, no matter how big or how small, right.

If I love my husband, and my husband gets drunk at bars and beats people up, when I give my husband a hug and some cash I am not expressing my love. I am enabling him to continue behavior that threatens other people, himself, and my whole family.

It is a silly metaphor because it is inaccurate in almost every way. It simplifies things without taking into account the real cause and effect of the matter.

Has Israel made mistakes? Yes. Should Israel be criticized? Yes, but it needs to be balanced.

We need to take into account things like Hamas’s charter which calls for the destruction of Israel. We need to account for discrepancies in number of civilians killed. They don’t wear uniforms. It is intentional so that when the dead are counted the numbers are skewed.

It is a known fact that not all of those who were killed in Gaza were civilians. It is a known fact that the rocket fire that was launched from Gaza rained down upon land that wasn’t in dispute, wasn’t considered occupied by anyone who accepts the state of Israel.

It is a known fact that Abbas and Hamas do not see eye to eye. How do you intend to negotiate with someone who doesn’t have the ability to speak or represent all.

I am not suggesting that peace talks should forever be suspended, but we need to be real. It feels uncomfortable to see some of the things that we have seen, but they do not operate off of the same value system we do.

Are there good Palestinians? undoubtedly, they are people. But again the leadership makes it quite difficult to try and negotiate terms

There are better ways to try to effect change than the critics of Israel are engaging in.

With regard to Israel, I am uninterested in your self-assessment of your Zionism and Jewish identity. What interests me is your willingness to support Israel in word, deed and through your associations. In particular, I am interested in what you are doing to prevent Israel from being isolated, terrorized and overrun by murderous savages, or obliterated with nuclear weapons by genocidal fanatics. To me, that is the bottom line for supporters of Israel.

I am not a blind supporter of Israel. I am keenly aware that Israel is not a utopia and not populated by saints. I would like it to be better (as I define “better”, of course), but as a Zionist I respect the choices of the Israeli people, because they have a lot more “skin in the game” than I do.

Eliot: You are certainly within your rights as an American to “urge the US government to reduce the amount of our tax dollars spent on aid to Israel?” There are any number of reasons to advocate such a course of action, some of which are not animated by animosity to Israel. But if you do so with the intent or effect of coercing Israel to do actions that its elected government thinks are detrimental to its security, then honesty demands that you cease to refer to yourself as pro-Israel or Zionist.