During the 19th and early 20th Centuries, Jews adopted many approaches to finding a place in the modern world, and to solving or at least mitigating the vicious antisemitism that they faced everywhere. One of these approaches was Zionism, the effort to invent a modern nationalist movement for the Jewish people.
During the first forty years of the Zionist movement’s life, a significant plurality of Jews in the United States opposed it. Orthodox Jews believed that the reestablishment of a Jewish homeland before the advent of the messiah was heretical. Reform Jews thought Zionism contradicted their aspiration to be, as their 19th-century Pittsburgh Platform put it, “no longer a nation but a religious community” within democratic America. Yiddishists resented the Zionist movement’s denigration of their beloved language, and most leftwing Jews viewed Zionism as a nationalistic distraction from what the Jewish Labor Bund called “doikayt,” “hereness,” their commitment to building socialism wherever Jews lived.
All of these objections were drowned out by the Holocaust, of course; then by the Zionist movement’s success at winning support for partition in Palestine from both the capitalist and communist blocs; and by the power and cultural vigor which the new state of Israel rapidly developed. In short order, support for Israel became the central rallying point for American Jews, and the Jewish state became seen as the shining star of Jewish identity, even within the Diaspora.
Still, many questions persist about Israel’s impact on diaspora Jews, such as:
How has the project of “normalizing” the Jewish people dovetailed with our “prophetic” identity as “a light unto the nations”?
How has the embattled existence of Israel influenced Jewish politics — and anxieties — within the U.S.?
What are the likely building blocks of Jewish life in the diaspora, today and tomorrow?
How has Israel enhanced — or denigrated — our varied Jewish identities?
Rabbi Jonathan Kligler, emeritus rabbi of the Woodstock Jewish Congregation, and Lawrence Bush, the emeritus editor of Jewish Currents magazine, will exchange thoughts on these matters and lead a discussion.