At the recent World Congress of Jewish Studies, held in Jerusalem in August, Israeli philosopher Eliezer Schweid gave an impassioned response to a panel on Judaism, Zionism, and the Diaspora. He began by claiming that the election of Barak Obama forever changed America. He did not weigh-in on what he thought of Obama’s policies but implied that whatever happens – to Obama – to his administration, America is now, and forever, a different place. He then extended this jeremiad to Israel, suggesting that the consequences of globalization to Israeli identity and culture require a radical re-thinking of Zionism’s role in the construction of Israeli/Jewish identity in the twenty-first century. While Schweid did not overtly link his assessment of these two civilizations, such linkage is reasonable. And while he did not mention Obama’s June 4th Cairo speech in his remarks, I suggest it fits into his declaration.

Jews have been accused of dual-allegiance, or been suspected of it, at least since Napoleon’s Count Mole questioned a Jewish council of elders on July 29, 1806. (“Napoleon’s Instructions to the Assembly of Jewish Notables”). Mole asked how the Jews, who openly consider themselves members of a separate people with a separate culture and identity, could be trusted to be loyal citizens of the French Republic. The elders assured the council that while they considered themselves members of the Jewish people, their allegiance to Jewish collectivity was religious and not nationalistic and thus does not in any way infringe upon their patriotism to the French Republic. The Jews of France were granted citizenship soon after. The French motto of emancipation “for the Jew, everything, for the Jewish people, nothing,” became the pact of the French Republic and its Jews to this day.

As the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, and as the Jews steadily shifted from Europe to America, the Jews never quite liberated themselves of the suspicion of dual-allegiance even as they largely remained loyal citizens of European nation-states, and perhaps the most well-integrated minority in the United States. Zionism created new challenges for Jews in America who now had to face the potential conflict between their American citizenship and their religious or ethnic allegiance as Jews that had now become politicized in a “Jewish” nation-state in which they were all, according to the Right of Return, virtual citizens. But even here, for most of Israel’s history, Israeli and U.S. interests were so aligned that dual-allegiance rarely surfaced as a topic of examination and discussion outside the university seminar room. But it is there, always there, especially as American Zionism morphed into a purely statist movement. As one historian suggested “there is no longer any Zionism in America, Zionism has become pro-Israelism.”

The following is a true story. I have changed the names and places to protect those involved. Jason just graduated from college in Los Angeles. He grew up in a Modern Orthodox home, went to a Modern Orthodox day school and spent his post high-school year in Israel as is the custom among many Modern Orthodox youth. He is smart, talented, and well-educated. He talked about applying to law school. One day he approached his parents and revealed something he had been hiding for some time: he wants to join the army. The US Army. His reasons were clear enough. He was raised in an upper middle-class American home and received all the benefits America had to offer. He felt the need to do service in thanks for that gift. He did not want to be a combat solider; he had no visions of heroism. With a college degree he could go straight to officer training. He wanted to work in intelligence. He also believed the military would be a worthwhile experience. All noble reasons. He parents were perplexed. They couldn’t understand; why would an American Jew raised Modern Orthodox and a Zionist want to join the U.S. military? They could accept, reluctantly, or at least understand if he chose to become non-religious. But joining the US armed forces? In many segments of American society, that is an honor. But it is not common among upper-middle class Jews from Los Angeles.

More interesting than his parent’s bewilderment was his community’s reaction. Many asked him, “Why don’t you join the Israeli army?” His response was blunt and to the point. “Because I am not an Israeli!” That is, his desire for doing service was to pay back the gifts he had received growing up in America. While he defined himself as a Zionist, Israel had given him nothing like that –  how could it? His questioners nodded but did not really understand. If he had said he was joining the Israeli army he would have been viewed with pride, perhaps even been honored at his local synagogue before his departure. With his present aspirations, he was at best a curiosity, at worst, an anomaly. This was not always the case. Jews of all stripes served courageously in the U.S. in all of its wars. And it was considered an honor in the Jewish community to have served. But as our questioners have shown, this no longer seems to be the case.

What exactly did his American Jewish questioners not understand? This is where things become interesting, and troubling. His questioners were, of course, American citizens. They may have relatives in Israel, they may not. They may have spent time there, or not. All support Israel. Some are probably wealthy enough to live there (albeit they would have to downsize considerably) but choose to live here. They choose the Diaspora where they benefit from living in the most prosperous country in the world. And yet they ask Jason, with little or no reflection, why not fight and risk your life for a foreign army instead of the country in which you are a citizen, the country whose embassy you would take refuge if you were in danger on foreign soil.

There are, of course, many answers. For example, Israel’s law of return makes all Diaspora Jews virtual citizens. All a Jew has to do is arrive at Ben Gurion airport or enter an Israeli embassy anywhere in the world and state one’s desire for citizenship. But coming under the protectorate of the Israeli state requires an act, without which a Diaspora Jew is not the responsibility of Israeli authorities. Or, perhaps, according to one strain of Zionism, Israel’s very reason for existence was to provide a haven for Jews under persecution. Fighting in the IDF is fighting to protect that. Fair enough. But the Jews in the U.S. are not being persecuted. And more than ninety-five percent of the world’s Jews now live in democratic countries where they are free to practice their religion and culture. And if this is all about anti-Semitism, we all know that Israel has not solved that problem. Quite the opposite. Israel may want them to immigrate, even need them to immigrate, and they may choose to immigrate, but Israel’s existence is not saving them from anything, at least not now. 

Perhaps it is the case that their Zionism is stronger than their American patriotism. In principle, this is not troubling. Multiethnic American does not deny dual-allegiance in principle. It has diplomatic agreements with numerous countries – Israel included – enabling its citizens to be dual-citizens. But when this Zionism is expressed as something more than religion or culture, more than identity, when it is expressed as choosing the country one wishes to serve regardless of whether one chooses to live there, this is another matter entirely. Here, I suggest, the specter of dual-allegiance raises its head in a new way.

The question of dual-allegiance has a long history for Jews. Its latest instantiation in the US was not Obama’s Cairo speech but a few years prior with the publication of John Mersheimer and Stephen Walt’s The Israel Lobby in early 2007. The book itself, good or bad, right or wrong, is more important for what it generated than what it argued. It generated three distinct but related responses:

First, a vociferous American Jewish defense of AIPAC including the precipitous growth of Israel advocacy organizations and Pro-Israel watchdog groups around the country; second, the emergence of J-Street, a progressive Israel lobby in Washington that seeks to re-define the very contours and parameters of “Pro-Israel” that were the exclusive property of AIPAC and its supporters; and third, a more serious review of American policy in regards to Israel and the Middle East outside the doctrinal precept coined by Louis Brandeis that “to be a good Zionist is to be a good American.”

This is perhaps better formulated by the cultural theorist Randolph Bourne in his essay “The Jew and Trans-National America” published in the Menorah Journal in December 1916. “The Zionist does not believe that there is a necessary conflict between the cultural allegiance to a Jewish centre and political allegiance to a State…[he can be a complete Jew] and at the same time..a complete citizen of any modern political State where he happened to live and where he work and interest lay…The Jew is proving every day the possibility of a dual life.” Bourne, of course, was writing long before the establishment of the State of Israel and a year before the Balfour declaration. His remarks were aimed at the idea of the melting pot that was sweeping America immediately following the mass immigrations from Europe (1880-1920) and the Great War. Both Bourne and Brandeis express a largely unspoken theme of American Zionism that extends to the present day, a theme that may be experiencing new resistance.

The fact that Abraham Foxman, president of the Anti-Defamation League, published a book-length refutation of The Israel Lobby in The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control that same year (September 2007) only strengthens my point. The claims in The Israel Lobby were significant enough to merit an immediate and full-throttled response. I find Foxman’s title quite suggestive. By using “Lies,” “Israel Lobby,” and “myth of Jewish control” in the title he draws a subliminal connection between the book’s approach and anti-Semitism, “Jewish control” gesturing to the claims made in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the fabricated vicious anti-Semitic tract that has caused so much damage to Jewry. I do not think Foxman intended to openly accuse Mersheimer and Walt of anti-Semitism. That would have been both unfounded and irresponsible.  Rather, it was to suggest that the whole notion of disproportionate Jewish influence in Washington is different only in degree and not in kind from the anti-Semitic rhetoric of The Protocols. The irony of all this is that Mersheimer and Walt are claiming – critically – that AIPAC has been too successful as a lobbying group whose job it is (like any lobbying group) to influence government officials in Washington. In defense of AIPAC, Foxman and others had to claim that AIPAC is actually less influential, and thus less successful as a lobbying organization, than The Israel Lobby suggests.

Setting aside the claims and counter-claims, the question of dual-allegiance stands as the center of The Israel Lobby’s thesis. Even if one discounts The Israel Lobby’s analysis and conclusions, this should be taken seriously. The recent accusation by a Netanyahu aide that Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod were “self-hating Jews” feeds frighteningly into the (anti-Semitic) dual-allegiance myth. That is, to question the Jewish allegiance of Jews influential in the US government for advocating the interests of their country when they counter the policies of the Israel state is invoking the rhetoric of The Protocols.

But perhaps the first tangible indication that dual-allegiance may once again be an issue for American Jewry was Obama’s  Cairo speech, probably the most important speech by a US president in a generation. Obama’s speech changed the rules of a game that has been played in the Middle East since the 1960s. From another angle, Obama’s Cairo speech showed us all that some of the claims made in The Israel Lobby could actually become a reality. I say this non-judgmentally. Perhaps this is good, perhaps not, that all depends on one’s political perspective. In any case, after the Cairo speech, The Israel Lobby no longer mattered. The move had already been made. U.S. policy had changed in practice if not also in principle.

What was so troubling about Obama’s speech for the “Israel Lobby”? His comments on Israel and Palestine essentially leveled the playing field. Israelis and Palestinians each have a tragic narrative that solidifies both their national aspirations. On the Jews he said, “the recognition that the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied.” Of the Palestinians he said, “On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people – Muslims and Christians – have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than sixty years they have endured the pain of dislocation.” The locution “on the other hand” was hotly contested by Jews in the weeks following the speech because of its implication of moral equivalency. But this was precisely the point. As long as the hierarchy of suffering remains part of each people’s discourse, nothing just can be achieved. The dissolution of hierarchy, even as one may continue to maintain its validity as a matter of principle, history, or theology, is the pre-requisite for any just settlement. It is not as much a statement of moral equivalency as a claim that the whole notion of hierarchy and equivalency is unproductive.

Obama addressed the discomfort of the Jews by acknowledging that the sustained tragic history of the Jewish people, explicitly mentioning the Holocaust by name, is unassailable. This was then followed by a three-pronged tragic history of the Palestinians: dislocation, humiliation, and occupation. The mention of the Holocaust was, of course, as much directed at Muslims as Jews. Not said, but implied, is that the Jews suffered primarily under Christendom, and the Palestinians suffered under the Jews (represented by Israel, Christianity as “colonialism” perhaps implicated here as well). And the Palestinians (representing themselves and the larger Arab world) have victimized both Christendom (Europe and the U.S.) and the Jews (Israel) through the violence of terrorism (a word he intentionally avoided). All three are perpetrators. All three are victims.

The speech acknowledges by implication that on every scale imaginable, the Holocaust outweighs the suffering of the Palestinians, in scope and breadth, in numbers and in structure, but Obama claims this is, and must be, politically irrelevant. To a mother holding her dead son it does not matter if there are 1,000 like her or 1,000,000 like her, if her ancestors held their dead children for four generations or four thousand.

In addition, Obama remarked quite significantly that while formal occupation of the Palestinians may have begun in 1967, their “dislocation” (the first prong of their tragic history) began in 1948, legitimizing, or at least acknowledging, the Palestinian commemoration of the Nakhba (Catastrophe) as a day marking the establishment of the State of Israel. He said, “It is easy to point fingers – for Palestinians to point to the displacement brought by Israel’s founding…”. This is significant in part because the Israeli Knesset is now debating contentious legislation that would make open commemoration of the Nakhba illegal. Implied here, without any indication it can be fully rectified, is that Palestinian “dislocation” was not solely the result of the Six-Day war. The “tragic history” of the Palestinians did not begin in 1967 but in 1948. Obama simultaneously acknowledged the viability and justness of Israel’s existence and the Palestinian narrative about Israel’s founding.

Many Jews who support present-day Israeli policies were deeply, and understandably, troubled by this speech. By extension, the speech also raised the specter of dual-allegiance. Dual-allegiance becomes manifest as a political matter only when the interests of two countries to which an individual is aligned are in conflict, “unbreakable historical and cultural ties” notwithstanding.

Today this dual-allegiance has a twin origin. On the one hand, Obama’s speech made it quite clear what he envisions for Israel/Palestine. Many of the settlements must go. Israel must relinquish significant territory on which a Palestinian state will be created. Many American Jews support this. Many do not. My assumption is that the Jason’s Modern Orthodox questioners largely do not.  Obama’s approval rating among Modern Orthodox Jews is quite low. To disagree, even vociferously, with American policy is part of our democracy. But for an American Jew to suggest another American citizen enlist in a foreign army (I use this term intentionally as the IDF is, for any American, a foreign army) instead of the army of his own country, this merits investigation.

Let me be clear. Every Diaspora Jew has the right to choose to enlist in the IDF, even if he or she does not use it as a path toward Israeli citizenship and absorption (kelita). There are numerous programs where American Jews volunteer in the IDF for a period of time. This is not the issue. The issue here is the logic underlying Jason’s questioners, the inability, or unwillingness, to understand that a young man would feel the obligation to give back to his country and yet encourage him to risk his life for another country.  In my mind, Jason had the correct response, “I am not an Israeli.” Jason lives as a Jew, even a Zionist, and an American, in a way Randolph Bourne had hoped. But his questioners did not seem to comprehend “Israeliness” as an operative category. They felt he should serve in the IDF as a Jew, not as an Israeli.

This is where dual-allegiance becomes problematic. Israel is country, a nation-state, even if defined as a “Jewish” state. It must act according to its best national interest even if they conflict with the interests of its largest supporters, even, I might add, at the risk of losing some of that support. But “Jew” is not an identity linked to a nation-state. Twenty percent of Israelis are not Jewish and close to fifty percent of Jews are not Israelis. To collapse the category of “Jew” and “Israeli” in a way that makes serving in the Israeli (not “Jewish”) army an honor and serving in the U.S. army an anomaly points to a troubling dimension of Zionism in America.

The Israel Lobby, right or wrong in its analysis, brought to the surface the specter of something that always challenged American Jews. Obama raised the stakes. The popular bumper sticker “I Love New York but Jerusalem is my Home,” is not innocent. It points to a problem American Jewry has yet to face head on.

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Yet, starting in the 1950s, and continuing today, Jews have expressed an anxiety about the nature of American inclusivity. Even as individual Jews have become increasingly integrated into the American mainstream, Jews have warned that integration on a collective level is a myth. American Jews have instead insistently clung to the stories of Jewish exclusion, above all, to the tragic story of the Holocaust, as a touchstone for the "truth" about the meaning of the hyphen in Judeo-Christianity            . At the same time, however, as the Holocaust has represented the very old story of Jewish exile, it has become something quite different in America. The willingness of Americans to accept the Holocaust as the ultimate genocide, the americanization of the Holocaust or what can be called the "American" Holocaust, has called into question the ur-story of Jewish difference. By affirming the unique suffering of Jews in the Holocaust, America has, oddly enough, affirmed the integration of Jews into American society. The very acceptance of the Holocaust as an ur-narrative of Jewish Americans thus simultaneously arouses all the anxiety and passion of Jewish Americans’ hyphenated status. A Judeo-Christian Society? In the postwar period, when "Judeo-Christian tradition" came into vogue as a term, many Jews were not entirely happy with this new embrace of their tradition by secular society. Some, still wary of a lurking South Beach Holocaust Memorial: by Allie Caufieldanti-Semitism, claimed the very notion of a "Jewish-Christian tradition" had, and has, sinister intentions. The strongest case against the term was made by the Jewish theologian Arthur Cohen in a series of essays collected in his book The Myth of the Judeo-Christian Tradition (New York: Harper & Row, 1957). Cohen argues that the term Judeo-Christian, consciously or not, swallows Judaism whole, undermining its distinctiveness and robbing it of the very rich texture of its tradition. He notes  that the idea was invented by German Protestants "to come to terms with the Jewish factor in Christian civilization… We can learn much from the history of Jewish-Christian relations, but one thing we cannot make of it is a discourse of community, fellowship, and understanding. How, then, do we make of it a tradition?" (xiii). For Cohen the "Judeo" in the Judeo-Christian Tradition (what he calls a myth) is an ostensibly conciliatory gesture of tolerance that masks an attempt to finally, and permanently, undermine Jewish distinctiveness by making Judaism simply a part of Christianity. "The emphasis fell not to the communality of the word ‘tradition’ but to the accented stress of the hyphen. The Jewish was Latinized and abbreviated into ‘Judeo’ to indicate a dimension, albeit a pivotal dimension, of the explicit Christian experience. It was, rather more a coming to terms on the part of Christian scholarship with the Jewish factor in Christian civilization." (xviii) It is significant that Cohen’s antipathy to the Jewish-Christian tradition is not about the erasure of the Jew qua individual. He knew that, as individuals, Jews have flourished in America and will likely continue to do so. His concern, rather, is with Jewish collectivity. He implies that if the Jewish collective is portrayed as simply part of the Christian story, it will lose any sense of distinctiveness that is required for the continuation of the Jewish people. Cohen’s position is reminiscent of Gershom Scholem’s thesis in his short essay "Against the Myth of the German-Jewish Dialogue" (Jews and Judaism in Crisis, 61-64) that this ostensible "dialogue" was a liberal Protestant means to applaud themselves and placate liberal Jews. Writing about the Weimar Republic, Scholem claimed Germany was never really interested in a dialogue where both sides could be changed by the other. Instead, such dialogue was a way to give Jews a voice but no authority. For both Scholem and Cohen, in Weimar Germany and in twentieth-century America, tolerance was deployed as a tyrannical tool of ethnic erasure. In many ways, Cohen’s criticism of Judeo-Christianity stems from his assumption that there is no difference between  the Judeo-Christian tradition in Germany and in America, that the desire to erase Judaism completely that became evident under the Nazis is still at its hidden or "Weimar" stage in America. Cohen wrote his essays in the late 1950s, at a time when Jews and Christians were beginning to face the painful reality of the Holocaust and its affect on American society. From a half century’s remove, at a moment when we can watch the inauguration of an African American president from the front lawn of the official Holocaust Museum, it seems clear that  the Jewish experience in America has been profoundly different from the Jewish experience in Europe. Yet Jews have trouble letting go of this past. They have trouble believing that American Jewry is not simply a new chapter of an old story but a new story altogether. Anxiety of the Hyphen Holocaust Memorial Museum: by Son of GrouchoThe anxiety that remains today is Cohen’s anxiety: an anxiety about Jewish continuity. What if Jews as individuals thrive but Judaism as a religion and culture dies? It is an anxiety of assimilating too much. Perhaps the most poignant expression of this anxiety may be found in a haunting video from the YIVO archives of the Hasidic rebbe of Muncatcz, Hayyim Elazar Shapira. In the 1930’s, Rebbe Shapira warned his listeners not to go to America because in America one cannot properly observe Shabbat. Tragically, those who heeded his words were most likely dead within a few years; ironically, those who survived and immigrated to America proved Shapira wrong. However, precisely because America has been so welcoming of individual Jews, American Jews continue to worry about the viability of their collective identity. We constantly wrestle with the dilemma of acculturation and difference, with maintaining cultural distinctiveness in the theatre of accommodation. It is an example of what the Jewish historian Gerson Cohen called "the blessing of assimilation." (Cohen, "The Blessing of Assimilation in Jewish History" in Jewish History and Jewish Destiny). It is what Jews living in a "Judeo-Christian society" may call the anxiety of the hyphen. To counter the anxiety of assimilation, Jews most frequently turn to a narrative of difference. That Arthur Cohen chose to express the anxiety of the hyphen by alluding to the position of Jews in Germany reflects one common and acute articulation of the American-Jewish experience. It is part and parcel of an old Jewish story, a story that served Jews throughout most of their history. It is a story about the margins of existence that extended from curiosity (Rome) to rejection (Medieval Christendom and Islam) to sober toleration (Enlightenment and emancipation). In one telling of this story, a telling echoed by Arthur Cohen’s reference to Weimar, the Holocaust was a piece of this larger history in its most grotesque form. In his 1986 Holocaust Remembrance Day address, "The Face of God: Thoughts on the Holocaust," Orthodox thinker and past president of Yeshiva University Norman Lamm said that the Holocaust must conform to traditional notions of theodicy and is a "continuation of the ancient question of evil and suffering." Even for the post-Holocaust theologians who argue that the Holocaust is a sui generis event, unprecedented in Jewish and world history, its uniqueness is not in the Nazi anti-Semitism that produced the genocide-that fit the old story–but in the very irrational nature of "The Final Solution" as a political reality, that is, the willingness of Hitler and his circle to kill Jews against their own national interest. Or, for some, the uniqueness stems from the overwhelming quality of the suffering-but not from the fact of suffering itself. In almost every Jewish narrative of the Holocaust, the genocide represents an extension of the old story of Jewish suffering. From a theological perspective, the uniqueness of the Holocaust was a tear in the covenental history that predicted, expected and, in some cases, even anticipated Jewish suffering as an act of purification in preparation for redemption. In the case of the Holocaust, the rabbinic category of "the birth pangs of the messiah" as an explanation for Jewish suffering could not bear the weight of this event. For these theologians, the covenant collapsed under the weight of its own doctrine. "Because of our sins we were exiled/punished" was no longer an adequate response to the Jewish suffering in the Holocaust. American Jewry, I suggest (with others), is not part of this story; the story of suffering, alienation, and persecution. There was surely anti-Semitism in America, but the fact that the Jews came as emancipated citizens ultimately protected by the Constitution made a categorical difference, even in the nature of that anti-Semitism. This underlies the Reform Movement’s call in the nineteenth-century to erase the notion of "exile" in reference to America. Jews in Colonial America were respectfully addressed by George Washington in his famous and oft-cited letter to the Jews of Newport, Rhode Island in 1790 whose final paragraph included these words laced with biblical imagery: "May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid." Even when  anti-Semitism arose in America, the society seemed to have the tools to control it. This is depicted fictionally in Philip Roth’s uncharacteristically optimistic Plot Against America. This is not necessarily due to positive policies and structures. One reason for the temperate nature of American anti-Semitism, as opposed to the rest of Christendom and Dar ‘al Islam, is that America has always been plagued by the question of race more than the question of the Jew. Thus, once the Jew becomes "white," a process that was only fully complete in the post-war period, they are no longer the primary focus of attention. America may be a "Christian" country but the excluded "other" is the African-American and not the Jew. In America, racism trumps anti-Semitism. In America (to paraphrase Cornell West) race matters most. This is an integral part of American Jewry’s new Jewish story. If, however, the American Jewish experience cannot conform to the Jewish "story" of exile, marginalization, and anti-Semitism, what is the nature of its self-fashioning? How can a people who understood themselves in light of a narrative whose very structure was non-acceptance (the very epicenter of its exilic experience, the very core of the rabbinic – as opposed to biblical –  covenant) re-configure its story to include some kind of a non-messianic transformation of itself as an integral part of, in this case, a Christian, or perhaps post-Christian, whole? How can American Jews today own the Judeo-Christian tradition and re-formulate it in a way that conforms to its own collective identity? This is the fundamental struggle that has marked modern American Jewish identity. It is a struggle that can be read most easily in the  developing notion of the "American" Holocaust. Identity Politics and the Holocaust As Peter Novick suggests,America and American Jews were reluctant to own the Holocaust until the 1970’s. This does not mean there were no Holocaust memorials, commemorations, or efforts at Holocaust education among American Jews. There surely were. Synagogues, survivor groups, summer camps and other community groups engaged in Holocaust recognition beginning in the early post-war years. However,  the Holocaust as a defining event, a watershed that would change the collective identities of Jews and Americans, did not emerge in the mainstream until much later. This conceptualization of the Holocaust as a paradigm-shifting event in the American mainstream may have began,  in 1973 with the television airing of the documentary Holocaust and concludes in 1993 when the National Holocaust Memorial Museum was officially dedicated. These twenty years mark the birth of what some have called the American Holocaust, the unique way in which this seminal event of Jewish history became assimilated into the American Jewish experience. The period from the 1970s to the 1990s was the era of identity politics. African Americans had Roots, the 1972 miniseries that dramatized their journey from slavery to freedom. Women, gays and lesbians, chicanos, and other minority groups within the United States also strove, during this period, to define a special identity for themselves (and often to claim special rights). It is perhaps not surprising that American Jews did the same, and that a critical step in this process was to  adopt the Holocaust-an event that had already redefined world Jewry via the creation of the State of Israel– as part of its own "story."  The "facts on the ground" demonstrate that claiming the Holocaust proved a wildly successful means of asserting Jewish identity during an era of competing claims for ethnic uniqueness. The dedication of the  Holocaust museum on the Washington Mall, a sacred American space exclusive to memorializing only the most central moments in American history, became the sign of the success of the American Jewish project of forging its own unique place in American life. There was, however, a downside to using the Holocaust as a lever to raise Jewish identity to the stature of a defining American identity during this era.  The old story of Jewish history, the story of marginalization that had its most grotesque manifestation in the Holocaust, had enabled Jews to have exclusive ownership of their tragedies. But the Holocaust in America was different. In being chosen as the genocide that would define all genocides, the American Holocaust had to be something more than the attempt to systematically annihilate European Jews. It had to become a semiotic sign, an ‘event’ in human (and not just Jewish) history that would teach humanity about itself. American Jews were confronted with a kind of devil’s bargain: to feel fully American meant, in some way, to relinquish sole ownership of its most horrifying tragedy. Universalized Suffering The truth of this devil’s bargain can be found in the way this compromise was resisted, sometimes strongly, by some of the very individuals who advocated for the museum in the first place. Accusations of trivializing the Holocaust came from various camps. The most notable example is that of Elie Wiesel. There is no one individual who did more to bring the Holocaust to the world than Elie Wiesel. The appearance of his short but searing book Night, published in English in 1960 (longer Yiddish and French versions were published earlier), brought the Holocaust to millions of American high school and college students from the 1960’s until today. Among many second-and-third generation American Jews it sparked a renewed interest in their Jewish identity. For the millions of non-Jewish readers, it evoked sympathy for their Jewish neighbors.
A committed humanitarian, Wiesel spend much of his career in what some could call universalizing the Holocaust. By "universalizing" I mean that Wiesel was one of the first, followed by Primo Levi and others, who presented the Holocaust as more than an event of Jewish suffering but as a cipher through which one could experience the deep human anguish of what may be the most barbaric moment in human history. This universalizing tendency  culminated in Wiesel’s keynote address at the dedication of the Holocaust museum. With millions listening to this historic speech, Wiesel could have focused on the Nazi genocide of the Jews. He could have spoken about the precarious nature of the State of Israel and its "existential threat." Instead the highlight of his address was about Sarajevo. He concluded by turning to president Clinton and saying "President Clinton, go to Sarajevo." I found Wiesel’s move stunning. It was as if to say, this museum does not merit this sacred real estate if it is only about the Jews. Yes, it is about the Jews, even primarily so, but it is also about human being’s capacity for evil. And that evil is not only, or even primarily, about anti-Semitism. Today, Wiesel said, that evil is being perpetrated in Sarajevo. Tomorrow, somewhere else. To those suffering, starving, tortured, it simply does matter that the evil source of their pain is not as egregious as the Nazi’s war against the Jews. I mention Wiesel not only because of his stature, but because the courageous work he has done to publicize, and in doing so, universalize, the Holocaust is coupled with an equally committed passion to maintain the Holocaust as sui generis and thus the exclusive property of the Jews. He is quite open about his desire to universalize and simultaneously particularize the Holocaust. For him, the Holocaust is "a unique Jewish tragedy with universal implications." (cited in Walter Goodman, "Israeli Clashes with American Jews about Persecution Past and Present" New York Times, September 9, 1984 I:46). The paradox of this statement is intentional and in my view reflects the American Jewish story more generally.  The same man who stood at the Holocaust Museum and spoke to Clinton about Sarajevo, the same man whose book Night introduced millions of non-Jews around the world to the Holocaust, this same man argued just as passionately about the uniqueness of the Holocaust as a-historical and thus incomparable event in human history. In a New York Times article on April 16, 1978 "Trivializing the Holocaust: Semi-Fact and Semi-Fiction" about the NBC miniseries Holocaust that aired on the same day, Wiesel wrote with a sharp pen about the failures of what he calls a "docu-drama" to do justice to something that cannot be depicted in any form, in any media. Criticizing this docu-drama in particular, but also, criticizing any attempt to dramatize the Holocaust, Wiesel wrote, "But the Holocaust is unique; not just another event…Auschwitz cannot be explained not can it be visualized…The Holocaust transcends history." Toward the end of his essay he continued, "The Holocaust. The ultimate event, the ultimate mystery, can never be comprehended or transmitted. Only those who were there know what it was; the others will never know." Novick writes about Wiesel that for him,  "the Holocaust was a holy event that resisted profane representation, that it was uniquely inaccessible to explanation or understanding…That the Holocaust was, in some undefined way, sacred and mandated some sort of special rules for its representation." (Novick 212). Novick cites a very telling question posed to Wiesel that he seemed unable, or unwilling, to answer, his silence (understandable to me) a sign that he stands precisely in the fissure that is the American Jewish experience.  When asked if the non-Jews who were killed by the Nazis were victims of the Holocaust or in addition to the Holocaust, Wiesel did not respond. And he could not. To say they were victims would be to view the Holocaust as not exclusively a Jewish event. To say they were not would undermine his humanitarian sensibilities. This is perhaps best captured by Alvin Rosenfeld when pondering the six million (Jews) verses eleven million (Jews and non-Jews) who perished at the hands of the Nazis between 1939 and 1945, "This discrepancy  in numbers is of no small matter, for it reflects a conceptual difference in what the Holocaust was  and who is to be included among its victims – only the Jews or all those who perished under the Nazi tyranny, including Polish political prisioners, Soviet soliders, gypsies, homosexuals, the handicapped, the mentally ill, jehovah’s Witnesses, and others." ("The Americanization of the Holocaust" American Jewish Identity Politics, Deborah Dash Moore ed. 2008, p. 47). The tension implicit in the trajectory of the "Americanization" of the Holocaust as something that extends beyond the "war against the Jews" (or at least that it can be used as such) is expressed by many. For example, the Israeli Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer writes, "It was unclear how the uniqueness of the Holocaust and its universal implications (i.e., its Americanization, sm) could be combined in a way that would be in accord with the American heritage and American political activity. (Yehuda Bauer, "Whose Holocaust?" Midstream, November 1980, p. 42). While Bayer’s sentiment is understandable, his desire for exclusivity does not consider the price of such exclusivity in the American Jewish project of constructive acculturation. Closer to home, the Holocaust scholar Alvin Rosenfeld, in his "The Americanization of the Holocaust" argues that the Americanization of the Holocaust, including some programs at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, the focus on survivors, rescuers (Schindler’s List et.al.), and the Simon Weisenthal Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles all undermine what he determines should be the sole focus of any Holocaust education: the attempt by the Nazi’s to annihilate the Jews. For him, any attempt to widen the scope beyond the victims and their perpetrators is a de-facto de-judaiziation, and thus dangerous distortion, of the Holocaust. Bauer and Rosenfeld, unlike Weisel, do not seem tortured by humanitarianism when it comes to the Holocaust. While Weisel remains wed to the uniqueness of the Holocaust but unlike Bauer and Rosenfeld he is not paralyzed by it. In this sense, it is Weisel who best captures the dilemma of the American Jewish experience. If the Holocaust is a sui generis event exclusive to the Jews, why construct a Holocaust museum in America on the Washington Mall? How can a museum explain, or educate, an inexplicable event? Isn’t the point of such an institution to educate and isn’t education founded on the belief that something can be learned, that there are lessons one can draw that extend beyond the genocide of European Jews? Like Sarjevo? Like Darfur? This is what I heard in Wiesel’s dedication speech and admire in his humanitarian work. But his inability, or unwillingness, to bracket, much less question, his uniqueness claim speaks to the unsettling nature of the 1978-1992 trajectory that gave us the American Holocaust. I do not challenge Wiesel’s claim of the incommensurability of the Holocaust if only because he experienced it first-hand. What I challenge is the way his position is adopted, often reflexively, by those who did not. Unique or Universal? The specifically American tension between the Holocaust as unique to Jews or universal to human suffering became even clearer in 1989, whenAmerican Jews Elie Wiesel, Alan Dershowitz, and Arthur Hertzberg withdrew from a Tel Aviv conference on genocide because the organizers refused to remove a session dealing with the Armenian Case of 1915. Commenting in a letter in The Washington Jewish Week, December 7, 1989, Mark Epstein reflected the views of many others when he wrote that comparing the mass killings in Armenia in 1915 to the Nazi genocide of the Jews threatens to subvert the distinctiveness (he does not say uniqueness) of the Holocaust. While there may have been good reasons to contest the inclusion of the Armenian Case, I think given Epstein’s explanation (I do not know whether Wiesel, Dershowitz, and Hertzberg agreed) we can once again see the dilemma of American Jewry’s desire to attest to the universalization (and thus  the Americanization) of the Holocaust while at the same time wanting to maintain exclusive rights to it as a particular, and exclusive, Jewish tragedy. I can understand the danger of reflexive comparisons. But if the Holocaust is categorically incomparable, how can it be "American." And if it is not American, why is there a commemorative and educational museum on the Washington Mall?
The inexplicability of the Holocaust, its uniqueness, keeps it inside the realm of the Jewish community. Never before have any people fallen victim to anything like "The Final Solution." Fair enough. But is "The Final Solution" part of, or the totality of, the Holocaust? This is the basis of the question to Wiesel that went unanswered. And here I suggest Wiesel’s unwillingness to answer reflects the American Jewish experience – they want it both ways: they want an American Holocaust, but they do not want to pay the price of losing exclusive rights to it. They appreciated the ways in which the miniseries Holocaust raised the consciousness of America about the Holocaust, but they were uncomfortable that the miniseries should become the definitive depiction of an event that cannot be depicted. In some sense, once it is depicted, it becomes public property, part of America’s collective imagination. It is no longer exclusive to the Jews even though the Jews were its primary victims. The Price of Americanization Because Jews came to America already emancipated, the story of American Jewry and Judaism has always been about Americanization. This is largely manifest as accommodation in practice, ideology and belief to the contours of the American political, social, and religious reality. By the 1960’s, this process had reached a kind of completion. Second and third generation American Jews felt fully American. Take, for example, the 1980 re-make of the The Jazz Singer starring Neil Diamond. The figure of Diamond assuming the posture of the Statue of Liberty singing the theme song "America" illustrates how far American Jews had come from the original 1927 version of the "ethnic" immigrant Al Jolson singing Kol Nidre in his father’s Lower East Side tenement Orthodox synagogue. Finally, the Americanization of the Holocaust is an inverse example of Jewish Americanization. The Holocaust as trope allowed Jews to become more deeply integrated into American society, not by their accommodation to America but rather by America’s accommodation to them. By taking on the Holocaust as an American "event," the United States is more than gesturing to its Jews, to all Jews – it is adopting the Holocaust as part of its history. To become an American event, however, requires that the Holocaust cannot exclusively be about the Jews–it must be more broadly about the fight against tyranny, fascism, and evil in all human societies. The Jewish genocide – under Jewish urging – was chosen as a template for that battle of good and evil, and, as such, the Jews have become the quintessential victims in the American imagination (why the Negro slaves were excluded from that particular story is another matter). But the incommensurability, the uniqueness, the incomparable nature of the Holocaust that keeps it exclusively in Jewish hands cannot, in my view, survive its Americanization. Whether the Americanization of the Holocaust is good for the Jews or not depends on one’s perspective. But, it does speak to the way in which Americanization has a price, part of which is to acknowledge that full integration into a host culture requires the reconfiguration of old claims of distinctiveness and separation. Today, many Jews live and thrive in the new story that is America as they simultaneously resist abandoning the old story of oppression and persecution as the basis of their identity. This is, given the sordid history of the Jews, understandable. But if we want to re-visit the "Judeo-Christian tradition" in twenty-first century America where the erasure of Jewish distinctiveness is not an issue partly as a result of Judaism’s successful integration into American society, it is worth looking more closely at the pride Jews take in the Holocaust Museum in Washington and the implications of the good work that it does. We should consider that the museum’s very existence is part of the Americanization of the Jew via America’s adaptation of Jewish history and not visa versa. And, that such a gesture requires a creative Jewish response that is not bound by the old Jewish story of fear, suspicion, and exile. Ironically, it may be the Holocaust and its "Americanization" that frees Jews to think outside the old story, the Holocaust being its most horrific example.  Thanks to Gabrielle Berlinger, Jessica Carr, Jo Ellen Green Kaiser, and Devorah Shubowitz.

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Cohen and Kelman's study shows the first signs of erosion in unflinching American Jewish support of Israel. It's a trend that may have started in the aftermath of the first Lebanon War in the mid-1980s and is, in many ways, predictable, perhaps inevitable.

The generation of Jews who experienced the establishment of the Jewish State is now over the age of sixty-five. Those with memories of the war in 1967 are approaching fifty. Jews under the age of forty only know Israel as a much more complicated, and compromised, country: an occupying power engaged in a bloody struggle with a largely disempowered and stateless population. Such a battle, while intense and dangerous, is quite different from the more straight-forward struggle of fending off invading Arab armies. Whatever one may think of the present dilemma, or even whether "occupation" is an accurate description of what Israelis call "the situation" (ha-mazav), the experience of Israel for American Jews under the age of forty is, and should be, categorically different from their parents.

The reality of this change can be illustrated in various ways. When I show my students Otto Preminger's 1960 film version of Leon Uris' Exodus I am made conscious of how different Israel is for them than it is, and was, for me. Not only do they find the film horribly propagandistic (it surely is), overly sentimental (no doubt), boring (a matter of opinion), and unrealistic (uh…yes); it does not seem to evoke in them any feelings of sympathy toward the 1948 generation. Few, if any, are drawn to tears, as are many in my generation, by the music or the beautiful panorama of the Israeli landscape. Few get choked up by the scenes of young orphans dancing the hora on a kibbutz.

Exodus is not really a film about Zionism and surely not about Israeli Zionism. It is about the construction of the Jewish State in the American Jewish imagination, propaganda for a Jewish community comfortable but not yet secure in its new-found freedom. For my students, present day Israel is simply too complex (and too middle class) for them to make a connection between the romantic vision they see on the wide-screen and what they read daily on their computer screens.

Which Birthright?

This change in how Israel is viewed by the under-forty set has sparked programs such as Taglit: Birthright Israel and Israel advocacy movements on American campuses such as The David Project in an attempt to bandage depleting American Jewish support for Israel.

Birthright Israel is an innovative initiative to enable young American Jews to take a free trip to Israel. On the face of it, Birthright appears clearly to have a Zionist agenda. Yet, the Birthright mission explicitly aims "to strengthen participants' personal Jewish identity and connection to the Jewish people," and for many of the young people who experience these trips, those connections are decidedly Diasporic.

While Cohen and Kelman's study indeed shows that young Jewish men and women who visit Israel (either on Birthright or some other way) are less alienated from Israel than those in a similar age-group who have never been to Israel, they are still more alienated than those over sixty-five who have never visited Israel. In other words, visiting Israel is productive toward curbing alienation from Israel but cannot close the generational gap.

What the study does not document, but what in fact may be more significant (we have no hard evidence yet as to the long-term impact of Birthright on American Jews) is the extent to which Birthright may be succeeding in its Diasporic agenda, that is, creating conditions for Jewish identity in America where attachment to, alienation from, or ambivalence about Israel may be a marginal part of a much larger and complex formulation of American Jewish identity.

What are the implications if, in fact, this Diasporic agenda proves to be more successful than its Zionist agenda where Birthright contributes to a more robust Diaspora not necessarily built on the foundations of Zionism? Does this tell us that Israel serves American Jews largely as their spiritual theme-park where they go to get a large does of "Jewishness" that makes them more Jewishly identified at home? That is, where homeland serves as simply a vehicle for home? Is Israel a means to a Diasporic end? And if so, is this good or bad for the Jews?

A Different Diaspora

For American Jews living in a free society, the age-old Judenfrage has internalized into a kind of Israelfrage–what do, and should, American Jews think about Israel? I summon the spector of the "Jewish Question" not as it was used against Jews from Augustine to Hitler, but as it was used by Theodore Herzl and the early Zionists to present Zionism as a solution to the European Judenfrage. Just as nineteenth-century American Jews debated Zionism or the Zionismusfrage, contemporary American Jews are confronted with "the question of Israel."

Israel as a Jewish State exists; this is, at present, undeniable. However, what role that state should play in American Jewish identity has been an issue since the first idea of a Jewish state sprang into being in the mid-nineteenth-century, and has only become a more complex matter.

In the mid-1800s, many American Reform rabbis sermonized vociferously against Zionism. By the 1920s, the American Zionism we know today emerged through the work of such charismatic figures as cultural theorist Horace Kallen, Rabbi Judah Magnus, and Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. While that Zionism took some twists and turns over the next half-century (particularly a hard-right turn in the 1960s under the influence of Rabbi Meir Kahane and the Jewish Defense League), the actual birth of the State of Israel and its valiant David vs. Goliath battle during the Six-Day War in 1967 erased any remaining ambivalence that may have remained among American Jews towards Israel. By the 1970s, Norman Podhoretz was probably correct when he wrote of American Jews "we are all Zionists."

That American Zionism is now weakening, as demonstrated by Cohen and Kelman's study, may not necessarily be due to a growing ideology against Zionism (although there is a developing Diasporism in certain academic circles and on the far left). The situation on the ground has changed dramatically. Whatever one may think about the Palestinians or even Hamas, they are surely no Goliath to Israel's David. Younger American Jews may see less need to protect Israel and less willing to unequivocally defend it.

Just as significant, however, if not more so, is the possibility that young American Jews may not need Zionism or Israel the way their parents did. Throughout the history of Zionism, the dichotomous poles of Jerusalem and Babylonia often have served to frame the relationship between Israel and the Diaspora. This is perhaps best encapsulated in the title of the little known but significant work by Simon Rawidowicz (written in Hebrew in America) entitled Bavel ve Yerushalayim (1958) or the contemporary educational project Bavli ve Yerushalmi that has two adult learning communities, one in Israel and one in the United States, studying the same Talmudic texts and gathering a few times a year in Israel or America. While the comparison is easy, since it mirrors the two different versions of the Talmud, I suggest it is not apt.

Instead, the contemporary American Diaspora is closer to the situation of Jews in Alexandria than Babylonia. During the Second Commonwealth there was a thriving and creative Jewish Diaspora in Alexandria that was not a product of forced exile, like Babylonia, but rather a community that chose the Diaspora over Erez Israel. American Jewry, like Alexandrian Jewry of old, is a volitional Diaspora; there are few impediments preventing Jews in the United States from immigrating to Israel; the law of return (whatever one may think of it) makes all Diaspora Jews "virtual citizens" of the Jewish State. This volitional rather than forced Diasporic framework, coupled with the fact that Jews in America are free to practice (or not practice) Judaism in whatever form they choose, creates a different dynamic between home and homeland than the one that existed between Babylonia and Jerusalem. In the twenty-first century Diaspora Jews, whatever their stance on Zionism, choose home over homeland.

Reframing Jewish Identity

For the over-fifty generation, Israel and Zionism were both viewed as pillars of Jewish identity after 1948 and thus the highest levels of attachment to Israel in Cohen and Kelman's study are those in the over sixty-five age group, even those who have never been to Israel. This may have had less to do with Israel per se and more to do with the resonance of Jewish feelings of marginality in the wake of identity politics and the continued perception that, as Jews, they were not fully a part of the American mainstream. For some, it is driven by memories of the Holocaust (and America's less than firm commitment to prevent it), for others love of Israel may derive from the distant yet perceptible echoes of being immigrants or children of immigrants.

Russian Jew at Ellis Island: Photographed by Lewis W. Hine,1905. As a young child living in New York (and almost part of the fifty and older age-group), having my immigrant grandmother take me to Ellis Island where she arrived in the United States from Russia around 1920 was one of my most formative childhood memories of Jewish identity. That is, to a previous generation, Zionism was to some extent an expression of, or a response to, a protracted sense of insecurity in America. Moreover, for my generation, Zionism was always "statist" Zionism; it was always about the Jewish State and not about a renaissance of Jewish culture.

As a result, support of the "state" of Israel became the civil religion of many secular American Jews and a fourteenth article of faith (in addition to Maimonides' previous thirteen) for religious Jews. The state alone became the end, and not the means, of Jewish identity [see note below*]. This was surely not the case in pre-state Zionism but a combination of the Holocaust and the establishment of Israel swallowed up the more interesting, and robust, debates about Jewish collectivity of which statist Zionism was only one voice among many.

Most Jews in America under the age of thirty-five are third and fourth generation Americans. They live in a society where alienation from the mainstream is less than in previous generations. They live in a world where the intermarriage rate for Jews has hovered around 50 percent for a few decades. Among other things, this has increasingly changed the very way in which many American Jews view intermarriage and their host culture more generally. In 2000, the American Jewish Committee's Survey of Jewish Opinion cited about half of its respondents saying that "it is racist to oppose Jewish -gentile marriages." Most young American Jews today have non-Jewish relatives and most have close friends who are not Jewish. Exogamy and Amercian pluralism have all but erased the age-old ethnic myth of Jewish separateness.

Cross-Over Judaism

Moreover, Judaism has become fashionable in America, from Kabbalah to Klezmer to John Zorn and Tzadik records (Zorn won the prestigious MacArthur Genius Fellowship last year), to Andy Statman, the Moshav Band, and Mattisyahu (who, as one of the first real cross-over musicians who play "Jewish" music, last year signed with a major record label). This is quite different from the Jewish musicians (Gershwin, Irving Berlin Leonard Bernstein et al) and comedians (from Al Jolson to Milton Berle, Alan King, and Buddy Hacket) who made it into the American mainstream in a previous generation. The older generation of Jewish entertainers did not carry with them an overt Jewishness (after all, Berlin wrote "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas"). Even Woody Allen, Phillip Roth, and Jerry Seinfeld, all geniuses in their craft, offered nothing particularly Jewish other than Jewish male neurosis.

Similarly, in the political sphere, Jews as Jews are actively involved in movements such as Darfur, world hunger and poverty relief in third-world countries, the anti-Iraq war movement and AIDS outreach. In Los Angeles, the Progressive Jewish Alliance, soon to become a national organization, is working with the LA district courts in an initiative called The Jewish Community Justice Project founded on the principles of Jewish restorative justice devoted to criminal/victim mediation according to talmudic sources and values. While one could argue Jews were also deeply involved in the 1960s Civil Rights movement, they often were not organized around Jewish initiatives but functioned heroically as individuals within the more diffuse American counter-culture.

Even Judaism as a religion has gained a new following from outside the fold. Many non-Jewish college students are aware of Chabad Houses on campus, some attend services with friends, and Artscroll books are read by both Jews and non-Jews alike. Christians are converting to Judaism in increasing numbers and the maverick Rabbi Harold Shulweis in Southern California has advocated actively proselytizing to unchurched Christians–with much success. In short, American Jewry, broadly defined, (and not simply American Jews) is solidly part of mainstream American culture, popular, political, and intellectual.

Given the way young Jewish Americans in increasing numbers have chosen to express their Jewish/American identity around national and global concerns, it is no surprise that Israel is becoming more marginal in the lives of many young American Jews. The "negation of the Diaspora" ideology of Zionism, even in its new form espoused by the Israeli author A.B. Yehoshua, has no real teeth for many in this generation. Their regional, national, and global activism lived as an expression of their Jewishness illustrates the empirical vacuity of Yehoshua's claim.

A Mixed Blessing

While in the old paradigm, attachment to Israel was viewed as an anchor of Jewish identity in a less-than-fully-stable and confident Jewish community in America, this new paradigm sketched above suggests that the "distancing" Cohen and Kelman's study documents may be a mixed blessing. That is, if it is true that this distancing from Israel is coupled with a new sense of identity not wed to the ethnic attachment to a Jewish State, Jewish identity in American may be healthier than imagined. On the one hand, it may be showing us that the doctrine claiming Zionism is the glue that can hold non-Orthodox American Jewry together is becoming obsolete and that, in fact, what we may be witnessing is the beginning of a new Jewish secularism in America that hasn't existed since the demise of the socialist and Yiddishist movements in the early twentieth century.

One sign of this may be seen in the changing nature of the intermarried Jew. While in a previous generation the assumption was that the Jew who "married out" was basically lost to the Jewish community, at present many intermarried Jews are bringing their non-Jewish spouse to the synagogue and other Jewish communal activities. That is, today an increasing numbers of intermarried Jews (admittedly still the minority) do not view their choice to marry a gentile as severing them from the Jewish collective. In some cases, it is even the gentile spouse who encourages his or her Jewish partner to become more "Jewish."

One recent product of this new tendency can be seen in a pamphlet published by a group of Conservative rabbis entitled, A Place in the Tent: Intermarriage and Conservative Judaism. (2005). This booklet serves as a guide for rabbis, in halakhic and non-halakhic matters, of how to integrate the non-Jewish spouse into synagogue life. There is also a support group in Atlanta connected with the Jewish Outreach Institute run by Rabbi Kerrey Olitsky that serves gentile women married to Jewish men who want to bring their children up Jewish (according to Reform Judaism one Jewish parent is sufficient to consider a child Jewish) . The literature of this group contains interviews with some of these non-Jewish women about why they choose not to convert to Judaism yet want their children to be raised as Jews. Viewed in the context of Jewish history, the fact that a non-Jewish woman would choose not to convert to Judaism (many of these women feel deeply connected to their familial roots) yet choose to raise her children Jewish is quite remarkable.

In short, in conjunction with American Jews re-envisioning their markers of identity, there may be paradigm shift in America's attitudes toward Jews, Jewishness, and Judaism. I think the Cohen and Kelman study, viewed as part of a much larger shift in American Jewry, yields a complex picture that is not, by definition, "bad for the Jews."

In 1966 Gerson Cohen, then a professor of Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary who later became its chancellor, gave a commencement address at Hebrew Teachers College in Boston that was later published as an essay entitled "The Blessing of Assimilation." (collected in Cohen, Jewish History and Jewish Destiny New York: JTS, 1997, 145-156). In this essay Cohen argued that it is both inaccurate and historically short-sighted to view assimilation as, by definition, "bad for the Jews." He writes, "A frank appraisal of the periods in which Judaism flourished will indicate that not only has a certain amount of assimilation and acculturation not impeded Jewish continuity and creativity, but that in a profound sense, this assimilation and acculturation was a stimulus to original thinking and expression, a source of renewed vitality. To a considerable degree, the Jews survived as a vital group and as a pulsating culture because they changed their names, their language, their clothing, and their patterns of thought and expression."

Twenty-first century America has thus far offered Jews many new avenues of expressing their identity as ethnic or post-ethnic Jews. Statist Zionism remains one avenue among them. To conclude that since this road is now less traveled we are witnessing a diminishing identification with the complex and transitional thing we call "Jewishness" in America is, in my opinion, a myopic view of the changing world around us.

This essay is dedicated to GZG, in friendship.

*I want to thank Professor David Myers of UCLA for a series of lectures he gave at Indiana University in April 2008 where he developed his ideas about “statist” Zionism in relation to a broader collectivist notion of Jewish identity. His comments greatly enriched my thinking on this point.

Art Credits: Lead image is a t-shirt design from www.jewtee.com.

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