In the 20th century the American Jewish community was the world’s largest and strongest, and helped establish and protect the Jewish state. The 21st century will be different.
In late fall 1940, as World War II raged in Europe and despite the parlous situation of the Jews in British-Mandate Palestine, their leader David Ben-Gurion spent three and a half months in the United States, returning again in November 1941 for a far longer stay of more than nine months. The wartime route from Palestine to the U.S. was lengthy and dangerous, but Ben-Gurion keenly understood not only the prime importance of relations with America but also the fact that the American Jewish community had now become the center of world Jewry.
Indeed, soon enough—and for decades to come—that same Jewish community, the world’s largest and strongest, would play a critical role in the establishment and subsequent support and protection of the first Jewish state in 2,000 years.
But that was the 20th century; the 21st will be different. That is the conclusion of my essay in Mosaic, “If American Jews and Israel are Drifting Apart, What’s the Reason?”
I’m grateful to Daniel Gordis, Martin Kramer, and Jack Wertheimerfor their kind words about the essay itself and especially for their thoughtful comments on its thesis. Taken together, those comments affirm but also broaden and deepen my argument.
All three of my respondents note the remarkable change in the relationship between Israel and American Jewry since 1948, some of which is due to sheer demographics. At the time of Israel’s founding, as Martin Kramer explains, its Jewish population was one-ninth the size of American Jewry, and was also largely poor and needy. Today, the population ratio is one to one, Israel’s economic situation has improved immeasurably, and its population is growing—even as our numbers in America are being reduced by low birth rates and intermarriage.
As Daniel Gordis puts it, “Israeli Jews have worked out a successful survival strategy,” while, by contrast, the “American Jewish survival strategy is struggling.” The trend lines are clear—which is why I suggested in my essay that we American Jews may end up needing what amounts to foreign aid, with the Israelis trying to rescue us, or anyway some of us, as best they can.