A Breakdown of a Zionist Consensus Within American Jews: What Is Emerging Now.
Marking two years after that horrific attack of October 7, 2023, an event that deeply affected global Jewish populations like no other occurrence since the creation of Israel as a nation.
Within Jewish communities the event proved shocking. For the state of Israel, the situation represented a significant embarrassment. The whole Zionist project had been established on the presumption that Israel would ensure against things like this occurring in the future.
Military action appeared unavoidable. However, the particular response undertaken by Israel – the widespread destruction of Gaza, the deaths and injuries of tens of thousands ordinary people – was a choice. And this choice made more difficult the perspective of many American Jews processed the October 7th events that triggered it, and it now complicates the community's commemoration of that date. In what way can people mourn and commemorate a horrific event affecting their nation in the midst of an atrocity done to another people connected to their community?
The Difficulty of Mourning
The challenge in grieving lies in the circumstance where no agreement exists regarding the significance of these events. Indeed, among Jewish Americans, this two-year period have witnessed the disintegration of a decades-long consensus on Zionism itself.
The origins of pro-Israel unity within US Jewish communities can be traced to writings from 1915 written by a legal scholar and then future high court jurist Louis Brandeis titled “The Jewish Question; How to Solve it”. Yet the unity truly solidified following the six-day war during 1967. Before then, American Jewry housed a delicate yet functioning coexistence across various segments which maintained a range of views about the need for Israel – pro-Israel advocates, non-Zionists and anti-Zionists.
Background Information
This parallel existence persisted during the 1950s and 60s, within remaining elements of leftist Jewish organizations, in the non-Zionist American Jewish Committee, in the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism and comparable entities. In the view of Louis Finkelstein, the chancellor at JTS, Zionism was more spiritual instead of governmental, and he did not permit performance of the Israeli national anthem, the national song, at JTS ordinations in the early 1960s. Additionally, support for Israel the main element of Modern Orthodoxy until after that war. Alternative Jewish perspectives remained present.
Yet after Israel overcame adjacent nations in the six-day war during that period, taking control of areas comprising Palestinian territories, Gaza, the Golan and Jerusalem's eastern sector, the American Jewish relationship to the nation changed dramatically. Israel’s victory, coupled with enduring anxieties of a “second Holocaust”, led to an increasing conviction about the nation's vital role for Jewish communities, and generated admiration regarding its endurance. Language about the “miraculous” quality of the success and the “liberation” of territory provided Zionism a spiritual, almost redemptive, meaning. In those heady years, considerable the remaining ambivalence regarding Zionism disappeared. In the early 1970s, Publication editor Podhoretz declared: “Zionism unites us all.”
The Agreement and Its Boundaries
The Zionist consensus excluded Haredi Jews – who largely believed a nation should only be established through traditional interpretation of the messiah – however joined Reform Judaism, Conservative Judaism, Modern Orthodox and most unaffiliated individuals. The predominant version of the consensus, what became known as progressive Zionism, was based on the idea about the nation as a democratic and democratic – while majority-Jewish – country. Countless Jewish Americans viewed the control of Palestinian, Syria's and Egyptian lands following the war as provisional, assuming that a solution would soon emerge that would ensure Jewish demographic dominance in Israel proper and neighbor recognition of the nation.
Multiple generations of American Jews were raised with Zionism a core part of their religious identity. The state transformed into a central part within religious instruction. Israeli national day evolved into a religious observance. Israeli flags were displayed in religious institutions. Youth programs integrated with Israeli songs and learning of contemporary Hebrew, with Israeli guests and teaching American teenagers Israeli customs. Visits to Israel grew and achieved record numbers with Birthright Israel in 1999, providing no-cost visits to the nation was provided to Jewish young adults. Israel permeated nearly every aspect of US Jewish life.
Evolving Situation
Interestingly, in these decades after 1967, Jewish Americans developed expertise regarding denominational coexistence. Open-mindedness and dialogue among different Jewish movements grew.
Except when it came to the Israeli situation – that represented pluralism ended. You could be a conservative supporter or a leftwing Zionist, but support for Israel as a Jewish homeland remained unquestioned, and challenging that position categorized you outside the consensus – an “Un-Jew”, as Tablet magazine labeled it in a piece that year.
But now, amid of the ruin of Gaza, famine, young victims and outrage regarding the refusal within Jewish communities who decline to acknowledge their involvement, that agreement has broken down. The liberal Zionist “center” {has lost|no longer
