For decades, Israel served as a beacon for organized Jewish life in the US. In his new book, Joshua Leifer traces the history of the American Jewish relationship to the country – and a growing rupture.
When I was a child, weekday mornings at my Jewish day school followed the same routine. We’d recite the pledge of allegiance, sing Hatikvah, Israel’s national anthem, and then recite the Shacharit, Judaism’s morning prayer service. Like a sizable, although perhaps now shrinking, segment of American Jews, I grew up in a traditional community where Israel was the geographic and spiritual center of the universe.
Judaism and Zionism were synonymous; I had no sense of where one ended and the other began. At lunchtime in school, we belted out the lines from the grace after meals – “May Jerusalem the holy city be rebuilt in our days” – and imagined not the celestial Jerusalem but the real, physical place.
In retrospect, the truculence of this ideology was a sign of its weakness. Those of us who lived in the heart of the Jewish consensus did not know it yet, but it was teetering toward collapse. The brutal reality of the occupation of the West Bank and siege of Gaza would soon be impossible to keep hidden or explain away.
