From Hotdogs to Hummus: 
Understanding the evolution of American Jewish identity through the prism of Modern Zionism and the State of Israel
by Rabbi Tom Samuels

Introduction: Identity and its Discontents
Contemporary American Jewry suffer from a crisis of meaning and purpose, harboring deep-seeded self-doubt as to the authenticity of both their Jewish and American identities. They exist in a purgatory-like state straddling total acculturation to a post-modern universalistic American ethos on the one hand, and a particularistic and tribal Jewish historical experience on the other. (Cheng, 2004, 87) This is a relatively recent, and specifically an American experience. For most of the past two thousand years of the Jewish Exile, Judaism (i.e. Jewish life and culture) and Jewishness (i.e. beliefs and practices) were structured around a core set of beliefs (Halakah) and cultural frameworks. (Kaplan, 2005, 1) There existed clarity of purpose and identity as a Jew as determined by one’s levels of compliance to assumed norms of beliefs and behaviors. (Liebman, 2005, 133) Contemporary American Jewry questions such essentialist assumptions. (Kaplan, 2005, 1) Extant rubrics to determine identity (i.e. religion, culture/history, nation, race/ethnicity) have little relevance. (Cheng, 2004, 95) For example, distinctions pertaining to religious identity cannot be assumed given that most American Jews identify as secular. (Mayer, 2002, 46) Ethnic identifiers have been lost in the mire of political and social controversies such as “Who is a Jew.” Jewish cultural and historical assumptions of identity have been relegated to a “quasi-nostalgic cultural archeology” (Cohen/Kelman, 22) of “latkes and blintzes, of Funny Girl and Fiddler on the Roof, of Klezmer music and Borscht Belt” kitsch. (Cheng, 2004, 88) No single individual, institution, ideology or theology holds the cache of Jewish authenticity. Theological and ritual canons which had been assumed by previous generations of American Jews have been either out-rightly rejected, or in most cases, simply disappeared in to the ether of the dominant secular American culture. American Jews have become the “imaginary Jews” that Alain Finkielkraut describes whose affliction is the deprivation of a “sense of real Jewish culture and specificity, comfortably secure in diasporatic culture.” (Cheng, 2004, 104) Desperate to find a stabilizing anchor, American Jews have formed ‘filler’ ideological and theological myths and narratives to serve as temporary respite from the tempest of their precarious sense of self. 1 Of particular note, and the subject of this paper, is their relationship with Zionism and the State of Israel throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. All too often this relationship is misunderstood as unidirectional with the seemingly endless machinations of Israeli politics and the like myopically serving as the sole prism through which it is refracted. This paper argues that this relationship is far more complex and nuanced. Critical to its understanding is an appreciation for the evolution and nuance of American Jewry’s identity both as Jews and as Americans. (Rosenthal, 2005, 209) The paper traces the various narratives and mythologies that American Jewry has adopted in pursuit of an authentic identity, through the prism of Zionism and Israel. Ahad Ha’am harsh criticism of the Haskalah movement for its reactionary and inorganic methodology is apropos to American Jewry: “Coming into Jewish life from outside, Haskalah found it easier to create an entirely new mold for its followers than to repair the defects of the Jewish mold while preserving its essential characteristics. (Hertzberg, 1997, 255) The nature of this relationship has historically been informed by au currant attitudes towards ethnicity, tribalism and religion. For example, during periods when American cultural ethos rejected ethnic particularism in favor of a universalistic post-ethnic identity, allegiance to Zionism and to a Jewish state posed a threat to American Jewry’s acculturation process. At other times, the Zionist narrative, steeped in the mythologies of freedom, justice and religious sovereignty, served as a mirror for their adoption process of an American self. This theme manifests in: a post-Holocaust fixation on the Jewish peoples’ biological survival; a civil identity rooted in the mythology of a collectivist Jewish peoplehood throughout the 1950’s to the 1980’s; an exclusive individualism during the 1990s and early millennium; and most recently, the quest for a personal spiritual-authenticity devoid of tribal and ethno-centered commitments. The paper concludes with a critique of many of the mythological assumptions and narratives which have, and continue to inform American Jewry’s relationship with Israel. Of note is the Passover invocation “Next Year in Jerusalem” which no longer functions as a reflection of ascension to an idealized state of being. Rather, it is recited by rote in a “vacuous trope” or more likely than not, all but purged from the framing process of Jewish-identity. (Finkielkraut, 1994, 122) There remains a need for a serious and no-doubt difficult process to clearly define American Jewry’s purposes, roles and future towards an authentic identity as both Americans and as Jews. The paper draws upon both contemporary as well as historical thinkers and innovators towards forming a viable construct upon which to erect this duality of identities. Ultimately, Israel and Zionism can – and should – serve as inspirations for An American Jewry who continue to plod along the continuum of their ever-evolving, multi-layered and multi-faceted identities.

From Jerusalem to Babylon: the New Zion
Towards the end of the Nineteenth Century, and on to the early Twentieth, American society’s primary determinant for authenticity and allegiance to the state was predicated on the removal of even the barest remnant of ethnic identifiers. This included all particular forms of nationality, language, and culture. (Kaplan, 2005, 61) American Jews immersed themselves in this pursuit. They took various routes to reconcile an American ethos predicated on the mythology of social egalitarianism and liberalism, alongside Judaism’s millennial history of exclusivism and tribalism. (Kaplan, 2005, 61; Whitfield, 2002, 1135) For example, their relationship with what was at the time a relatively nascent modern Zionist movement was at best an afterthought. (Whitfield, 2002, 1133) At the time, European Zionists aggressively promoted a narrative which negated the “inevitability and prevalence of anti-Semitism” in the Diaspora as a harbinger for the Jewish people’s ultimate demise. (Rosenthal, 2005, 209-210) American Jewry out-rightly rejected this prediction, and instead embraced what was for the most part positive experiences in America’s pluralistic society: “Beginning in the nineteenth century, European Zionists and American Jews were diametrically opposed in spirit, ideology, worldviews, and lifestyle. Classical Zionism saw anti-Semitism as all pervasive, ineradicable, and impervious to the liberalism in which American Jews had placed their trust… Zionist ideology had little effect on American Jews, who optimistic pragmatism and half-fulfilled hopes in America contradicted the jeremiads of European Zionism.“ (Rosenthal, 2005, 209-210) Europe’s Modern Zionist movement, and in particular its call for the immediate actualization of Jewish statehood, was feared as a potential cinder block which could implode with accusations of dual loyalty. Calls for financial and political support were met with outrage and indignation. Major American Jewish organizations, such as the American Jewish Committee, responded with overt derivation of the movement. Political Zionism was depicted as the revival of “an atavistic Jewish nationalism” which was both theologically anachronistic, as well as potentially damaging to their Americanization process. (Grossman, 2005, 83) To the contrary of their European counterparts, American Jewry embraced their newly adopted home as the ‘New Zion’. For them, America signaled the historical culmination of a two thousand year galut, exile. The dream for a messianic redemption through the establishment of a Third Jewish Commonwealth in the Holy Land, they believed, had, in fact, already actualized, albeit with New York replacing Jerusalem as ‘the city on the hill where the light of hope and freedom would forever shine’:  “…(America was seen as the) promised land of liberty and destiny, a moral beacon, a ‘light unto the nations.’ From the pilgrims through contemporary presidents, Americans have understood themselves as a new chosen people, playing a salvific role in human history.” (Woocher, 1986, 101) Efforts of Supreme Court Judge Louis Brandies in the 1920s radically altered American Jewry’s relationship with modern Zionism for the following half-century. Brandies promoted the narrative that Americanism and Zionism shared a compatible ideological platform steeped in the shared ideals and principles of freedom, justice, and ethnic and religious sovereignty. Support for Jewish nationalism was, according to Brandies, not a compromise of American Jewry’s primary loyalty to and identity with America. To the contrary, it was a movement to be embraced as a critical portal to fully actualizing an authentic American identity and citizenship. Furthermore, he argued that the very survival of the Jewish people was in fact dependent on maintaining a strong and steadfast presence in the Diaspora: “For Brandeis, the Zionist ideal was a reflection of both the American spirit and of the progressive political and social programs with which he identified in the larger society. A Jew became a better American as he or she worked to further the principles of freedom in Palestine.” (Rosenthal, 2005, 210). American Jewry projected on to Israel the very same American-bred ideals they themselves aspired to including the mythologies of “a bulwark of democracy,” the “salvation of…refugees…(seeking) freedom and security,” and a “haven for the oppressed.” (Woocher, 1986, 57) Israel took on an “almost mystical aura” (Woocher, 1986, 57) for American Jewry through the prism of what was for the most part an emotional and sentimentalist Zionist identity: “They (American Jewry) perceived the Jewish state as a collection of clichés – as a secular nation of go-getters who made the desert bloom, as religion in progressive action, and as a Middle Eastern outpost of American values…An even more powerful 8 myth for American Jews was the Zionist notion that Israel was the culmination of Jewish history.” (Rosenthal, 2005, 212) Steeped in Biblical symbolism and theology, America assumed the mantel of the New Promised Land, of the New Zion. While Israel was embraced as historically conclusive homeland for the Jewish people, American Jews remained in America fully confident as both authentic Jews and American citizens. Two decades after Brandeis, and with the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, this modus operendi continued to define American Jewry’s relationship with Zionism. This was most apparent in their unwillingness to participate in modern Zionism’s call for a massive immigration to Israel from the Diaspora: (Hertzberg, 1989, 342) “ …the relationship (between American Jewry and Israel) may have been less deep than broad. Aliyah (Jewish immigration to Israel), the sine qua non of Zionist commitment, was so low as to be a source of embarrassment to the Zionists.” (Rosenthal, 2005, 213) Ultimately, what Brandeis accomplished was the reformulation of Zionist ideology and intention in to an ideal balance between American Jewry’s tendencies towards tribal and ethnic particularities, and the post-modern universalistic ideals of the modern American society. The key ingredient to assure this balance became the mantra: as long as the Zionist side of their lives did not contradict but rather contribute to American cultural ideals, American Jewry embraced the cause of Zionism and eventually the establishment of the Jewish state. A “Concordant” of understanding was struck early on in the establishment of the Jewish State between American Jewish leadership and the government of Israel. Named after its key architects, the 1950 Ben Gurion-Blaustein 9 This concept is best exemplified through Zionism’s ethno-centered mythologies and story-lines that included Jewish “heroes, stories, poems, songs and dance.” (Rappaport, 2005, 191) American Jews recast themselves in to the image of iconic American mythological ideals, with Israel serving as the source of refraction. Thus, the image – and consequently the values - of an emasculated, weak and subservient Eastern European Jew were replaced with that of a newly empowered and masculinized Americanized Jew: (Rappaport, 2005, 191; Whitfield, 2002, 1133-4) Exchange set-out the rules for what was and continues to be a complex relationship between American and Israeli Jews. Jacob Blaustein was the President of the American Jewish Committee, a close friend of President Truman, and the founder of Amoco, at the time the world’s leading oil company. Ben Gurion had agreed to repress any public expression of Hertlian Zionism’s negation of the Diaspora in favor of an exclusivist nationalistic identity. In return, Blaustein assured Ben Gurion of American Jewry’s unconditional financial and political support for the struggling nascent State. Despite Brandeis’s efforts (and influence), there were critical times when the issue of dual loyalty arose thus challenging this status quo of understanding. For example, there exists a litany of literature – and even more conjecture – of the influence of American Jewry’s political efforts to influence the American war efforts during the Second World War (i.e. from the Pacific where Pearl Harbor originated, to bombing Europe’s concentration camps). The upshot is American Jews remained on the sidelines of the national debate over intervention or isolationism out of concern that a focus on a European front might be perceived as a “Jewish war.” (Gartner, 2005, 56) Another example was the Sinai Campaign of 1956. At this time, the nascent Jewish state joined the British and French governments in response to Egyptian President Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal. Israel’s part of deal was to act as a cover for British and French intervention in to the Sinai, under the guise of rooting-out Palestinian terrorists who had been wreaking havoc on Israel’s southern civilian population from their bases in Gaza. At the behest of a very irate President Eisenhower, both France and Britain immediately withdrew from the Sinai. Meanwhile, American Jewry sided with Eisenhower and put pressure on the Israeli government, however to no avail. Israel, whose economic and military relationship with the American government was at the time negligible, only withdrew once the Soviet Union threatened to up-the-ante by intervening on behalf of the Egyptians in 1957. In 1985, Jonathan Jay Pollard, an American Jewish civilian employee of the United States Navy, was arrested on charges of spying for Israel. (Rosenthal, 2005, 215) American Jews were livid at the Israeli government for challenging what was by then a three-quarter of a century effort to bridge their ethnicity with their American authenticity. The shackles of an insecure (and self-hating) Jewish American self-image were thus lifted through the vicarious mirroring of the idealized Israeli. An idealization of the mythic American ideal could now be projected on to the American Jew through the guise of the uber-like Israeli Jew. “Exodus contributed mightily to the visibility of Israel on the American Jewish communal agenda and helped many of Uris’s and Preminger’s coreligionists to live vicariously in Israel, without the inconvenience of actually having to move there and have such heroes as neighbors.” (Whitield, 2002, 1135) David Rubinger’s iconic picture of the Israeli paratroopers at the Western Wall, taken immediately upon conquest of Jerusalem during the Six Day War in 1967, fully captures this myth of the “new Jew”: “It is, instead, the image of the “new Jew” that Israel had created, the Jew who could shape his or her own destiny rather than waiting for it to be shaped by others. This notion of Jews as the masters of their own destiny, as defenders of their own lives, is the deepest core of the Jewish state.” (Gordis, 2010) Israel also served as the emotionally and culturally safe mirror upon which American Jewry could reflect their dilemma concerning the amorphous concept of what it means to be Jewish in the secular world. Leon Uris’ book Exodus depicts this reductionist trend: In response to his Presbyterian lover’s insistence on embracing an idealized universal human condition predicated on pluralism and diversity , the book’s protagonist Ari ben Canaan responds with “I am a Jew” without any specific criteria or elaboration of what that statement entails. (Whitfield, 2002, 1135) “If Zionism had not tempted American Jews with a physical refuge, it at least provided a psychological one…The State of Israel had redeemed them from being perpetual victims of persecution and destruction.” (Kaplan, 2005, 66) With the 1951 publication of Leon Uris’s book “Exodus” (and later blockbuster movie by the same title) American Jews were provided with the perfect foil to this emasculated image of themselves through the ”virtuous, courageous tough and triumphant” super-hero-like character and physical traits of protagonist-hero Ari ben Canaan. (Whitfield, 2002, 1134).

Civil Judaism and The Godless Synagogue
Post-Second World War American society confidently straddled a secular identity steeped both in the fundamentals of a pluralistic democratic republic alongside a strong religious identification. (Sherwin, 2005, 118) Americans immigrants vigorously abandoned their tribal and particular identities. A “melting pot leveling” (Kaplan, 65) resulted where the expectation was the projection of the immigrants’ hopes and dreams as part of a national community through an Americanized system of beliefs, values and rituals: (Woocher, 1986, vii) “The newcomer is expected to change many things about him as he becomes an American – nationality, language, culture. One thing, however, he is not expected to change – and that is his religion. And so it is religion that…has become the differentiating element and the context of self-identification and social location.” (Will Herberg quoted in Kaplan, 2005, 61) American Jewry embraced the pursuit of an authentic “American way of life.” The narrative of Judaic beliefs and theologies had morphed in to an integral component of American identity rooted in the mythology of what was assumed to be a “Judeo-Christian heritage”. (Kaplan, 2005, 62) This included the shared values and aspiration for political democracy, economic free enterprise, and social egalitarianism. (Kaplan, 2005, 61) The Cold War was in full swing where the arch enemy was the totalitarian and atheist ideology of the Soviet Union. Religion in America took on the mantel of armor as determinant for good citizenship. Part and parcel of an authentic American became a religious identity. President Eisenhower famously stated that “…our government makes no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith – and I don’t care what it is.” (Kaplan, 2005, 62) At the same time, an American Jewish identity was increasingly becoming lost in the homogeneous, vacuous, and specifically Christian-dominated suburban landscape. Far removed from the high-density, intensely ethnic genus loci inherent to the urban environment, (Kaplan, 2005, 62), American Jews sought to replicate the ethno-centered tribalism of their ‘old neighborhoods’: “Jewishness in the United States is now center in the large suburban synagogue. The alternative and competitive forms that once existed have virtually disappeared. The various forms of secular Jewishness that flourished in the inner city have been lost, as well as the Jewishness that came of itself, as a matter of course, from living in such dense Jewish neighborhoods.” (Glazer, 2005, 279) Despite a concerted effort, American Jews were not able to exculpate themselves from an engrained self-identity enmeshed in ethnicity and particularism. Simply put, American Jews wanted the opportunity to socialize with other Jews: “As individuals, Jews identify themselves as belonging to a religious community. As a group, they acted like and ethnic minority.” (Kaplan quoting Arthur Goren, 2005, 75) Religious identity offered an elegant respite from this dilemma, through an assumed rite of passage towards an authentic American identity. Thus, ethnicity could be reinforced, albeit through the façade of religion, and the synagogue its form. (Waxman, 2005, 103-4) Dana Evan Kaplan argues that suburbanization and the resultant close contact with Christians that Jews and other minority groups experienced for their first time resulted in the creation of a “new form of Jewish identity that emphasized to them what they were not – Christian.” (Kaplan, 2005, 63) Between 1930 and 1960 there was a threefold increase in synagogue affiliation with a massive synagogue-building campaign to meet this demand. Synagogue membership in 1930 hovered around 20 percent of the American Jewish population. By 1960, this figure had risen to 60 percent. (Kaplan, 2005, 64) “…the temple was the center of most of the (Jewish suburban) community’s activities, not because of its sacred status and the centrality of religiosity in the members’ lives. On the contrary, it was the focal point because of ideological and institutional diffusion…” (Waxman, 2005, 104) However, high synagogue affiliation levels served less an indicator of theological piety (and less to do with the construct of mitzvoth, commandments from the Divine - Waxman, 2005, 104), but rather the manifestation of a theology of devout secularism that had more to do with the “goals and values of American society” that an American ethos rooted in activism, pragmatism and atheology (i.e. intolerance for the discourse about God, not necessarily about belief in God): “American Jews have tended to understand Judaism as a religion primarily concerned with doing things rather than thinking things, as a religion of action rather than doctrine, as an ethic commitment rather than adherence to a transcendent faith.” (Sherwin, 2005, 117) 8 Starting with the earliest waves of mass immigration of first settlement Jewish immigrants, Orthodoxy was for the most part socially adhered to rather than religiously. (Grossman, 2005, 86) Furthermore, while they built their suburban synagogues and temples towards acculturating as authentic American citizens, American Jews struggled with the vision and content to fill them with. The caveat became how to apply a uniquely Jewish experience to these new edifices beyond “life-cycle celebrations and an annual pilgrimage of public reaffirmation of the faith at the High Holidays.” (Woocher, 2005, 287) Ultimately, American Jewish identity became fully enmeshed in a predication of ethnicity and tribalism to the exclusion of religiosity. The institutional infrastructures of American Jews functioned as symbolic manifestations of a consumer-driven identity to meet the “need and desire of Jewish parents to provide clearly visible institutions and symbols with which to maintain and reinforce the ethnic identification of the next generation.” (Waxman, 2005, 104) American Jewry was left with a theological vacuum which challenged the very basis of their American and Jewish identities: “…faced with a double emptiness of cultural identity, doubly deprived of traditional modes of defining their Jewishness, resulting in feelings of hollowness, inadequacy, and betrayal as inauthentic Jews.” (Cheng, 2004,111) Throughout much of the mid-to-late Twentieth Century, American Jewish leadership took on the mission to create mythologies and theologies to fill not only the pew of these new edifies,  but the psycho-spiritual vacuum experienced by their constituency. The dual icon of an ethno-centered survivability motif alongside the advocacy of universalism and pluralism provided an answer to American Jewry’s existential insecurity as to how to define their Jewish identity in America’s open society: (Hertzberg, 1989, 375; Woocher, 1986, 20) “Civil Judaism clearly responded to a desire on the part of many American Jews to give their Jewishness a larger significance, and to do so in terms that allowed for, but did not require elaborate theological affirmations or religious observances. (Woocher, 2005, 287) The challenge was further exacerbated by a strongly secular American Jewish identity whose belief in God far more “tenuous” as compared to other American ethnic groups. According to sociologist Steven Cohen, “American Jews (have traditionally been)…among the most religiously inactive, the most theologically skeptical” group in America. (Sherwin, 2005, 117): “What is most striking…is the thoroughly insignificant role which any God-concept plays in the civil religion (of American Jews)…For the civil religion, Judaism is very much a matter of concern; God is not.” (Woocher, Sacred, 91) Towards this goal, they replaced what “religious doctrine, family, and Jewish neighborhoods” (Rapaport, 2005, 190) had previously provided for with an “inspiring collective action to foster Jewish survival and efforts to improve the world…” (Woocher, 2005, 293) A new theological construct developed based on the affirmation of the unity of the Jewish people; the requirement for mutual responsibility among Jews; Jewish survival in a threatening world, and; the centrality of the State of Israel. (Woocher, 1986, 67) American Jews unified around this collectivist identity, termed by Jonathan Woocher as “civil Judaism. ” According to Woocher, they shared a ‘civil religion’ of “common…fundamental beliefs, values, holidays and rituals.” (Woocher, 1986, 20) which crossed denominational, organizational, as well as delineations of levels-of-affiliation: “Jewish civil religion both provided a content, a religion of support for Israel, for social justice, and for preservation of the faith (however ill defined), and a set of alternative 16 venues, for some more compelling than the synagogue, from which to practice this religion.” (Woocher, 2005, 287)

A Theology of Survival
At the core of Civil Judaism was the evolution of an American-specific Jewish collective theology which was fixated on a tenuous identity-formulating narrative of Jewish suffering, alienation and victimhood. (Cheng, 2004, 121) The historical drama of the Jewish people’s destruction followed by rebirth, in particular with regards to the Holocaust and its integral relationship to the modern State of Israel, soon became the narrative which informed the very identity of American Jews and played a critical role in shaping American Jewry’s consciousness: (Sherwin, 2004, 118) “A prominent dogma of American civil religion, closely connected to Jewish survivalism, became the Holocaust-Israel, death-rebirth idea. This exceedingly Christian-sounding motif of death and resurrection demonstrated how awareness of a certain understanding of the nexus between the Holocaust and the existence of the State of Israel had become a fundamental feature of American Jewish identity. Awareness of the Holocaust was used as a rationale for why Jewish biological survival had now become a fundamental feature of American Jewish identity.” (Sherwyn, 2005, 118) American Judaism was no longer understood, or assumed, through the Rabbinic prism of an allegiance to both oral and written Torah law, traditional ritual practice, and act of righteousness: Torah, Avodah v’Gimilut Chasadim. This pattern was very much in keeping with the resurgence of ethnic identity as drawn to the fore with the social upheavals of 1960 America. The Black Power Movement, Native American revisionist historians and in the case of the Jewish community, the 1961 Eichmann Trial, all contributed to the normalization of overt ethnic identity and particularism among American minority ethnic groups. (Rosenthal, 2005, 213) Through the “generative myth” of the rebirth of the Jewish people through the State of Israel from the very ashes of European Jewry, the Holocaust was repositioned to the forefront of American Jewry’s collective psyche. This radically transforming American Jewry’s relationship with Zionism which assumed the mythological narrative of “… a haven for survivors, (to) help assuage American Jews’ guilt at their failure to save European Jewry, and (to) provide a powerful counterweight to the image of Jewish passivity.” (Rosenthal, 2005, 211) Zionism thus became the “substitute Jewish faith…making Jewish survival the ultimate goal of Jewish existence rather than the service of God.” (Sherwin, 2005, 127) American Jewry radically shifted to a vigorous and very public embrace of Zionism and to the rapid establishment of a Jewish state: “… the focus for our sense of peoplehood, a fountainhead to nourish our Jewish pride and a place of refuge for Jews in crisis anywhere in the world.” (Woocher, 1986, 77) A new sacred covenant, a brit, was formed between American Jewry and Israel. The very act of supporting the survival as well as the eventual thriving of the Israeli people (i.e. Jews) in turn ensured a historical role and thus an existential significance for American Jewry. (Woocher, 1986, 78) The centrality of the State of Israel served as the primary cauldron for American Jewry’s struggle with the theology of survival. Israel became the prime motivator for the American Jewish polity for which the other tenants of their civil religion intersected. Israel became the “spiritual homeland” for all Jews: “Israel became not only the foundation for the Jewish identity of American Jews, but also a foundation of their faith. Commitment to the dogmas of the civil religion of American Jews replaced classical Jewish theological beliefs for many American Jews, both secular and religious.” (Sherwin, 2005, 119) Continuing with Woocher’s civil Judaism’s “commitment to Jewish group survival as a sacred value,” Israel further provided an ideal foil to the social and psychological needs of American Jews. (Kaplan, 2005, 68) by taking on the role of the culmination of Jewish history. Israel became the symbol for a narrative depicting a new era, a culmination of Jewish history where Jews were no longer the impotent victims at the hands of their enemies: “If one strips away the external trappings of traditional sentimentality found in many Zionists’ appreciation of Jewish customs, one discovers the belief that concern for the survival of the Jewish people and commitment to the State of Israel are the new substitutes for traditional Judaism. The mainstream of Zionist thought rejected the traditional view that the covenant with God at Sinai was constitutive of Jewish self-understanding. For many Zionists, identification with the historical destiny of the nation was not only necessary for being a Jew, it was also sufficient. Judaism during the exile had instrumental value in preserving this nation from disintegration, but the new nationalistic spirit provided a more effective instrument with which to make possible the continued existence of the Jewish people.” (Hartman, David, April 2008) The theology of survival came to dominate the mission of American Jewish leadership to the extent that it became “the focal point for Jewish identification”, not only with regards to Israel, but “in every sphere of Jewish activity.” (Woocher, 1986, 66) Support for the nascent and 19 struggling state played a critical role in the evolution of American Jewry’s consciousness for the following four decades. (Woocher, 1986, 57).

The Six Day War Watershed
The theology of survival reached its apex with the rapid and unexpected Israeli military victory of the Six Day War in 1967. Leading up to the war, American Jewry related both deeply and profoundly to what was then understood as the pending existential threat to the Jewish state. Fears of a second Holocaust was commonly assumed in but a mere thirty years after the fact, as well as when survivors and their children were prevalent throughout the American Jewish community. American Jews felt more vulnerable than ever before and responded by opening their pocket-books at unprecedented levels. (Rosenthal, 2005, 213, 231; Hertzberg, 1989, 372) In the midst of, and following the war, Israel became the absolute center of American Jewish identity. Israel became the sin quo non for American Jewish leadership - the “unifying element for Jewish organizational life, whether religious or nonreligious.” (Glazer, 2005, 278) - to the exclusion of all other aspects of Jewish culture, history, education and theology. American Jewish leadership took on the Israeli cause with zealotry in pursuit of a “symbolic avatar” to cradle what had become a precarious American Jewish identity. (Cheng, 2004, 121) Israel served as the perfect foil to American Jewry’s existential and vacuous self-identity, albeit through the essentialist narrative of “ever-persecuted, always a David fighting multiple Goliaths.” (Cheng, 2004, 123) This narrative served (and in many-a-boardroom of Jewish institutional leadership continues to serve) to “soothe their (American Jewry’s) anxiety over the loss of a specific Jewish identity and living culture.” (Cheng, 2004, 123) Israel provided an ideal narrative to embrace both their American identity as well as to remain “…deeply committed to perpetuating Jewishness not only as an ethnicity but also as a compelling religion.” (Kaplan, 2005, 68) The theology of Judaism steeped in the deification of Israel offered the possibility of fully interacting with contemporary society within the context of an ethnic-appreciative Jewish life: (Woocher, 1986, 97) “The Jews indeed remain a people, but the basis for their self-perception as a people lies in the unity of their concern for Zion, their devotion to rebuilding the land and establishing Jewish sovereignty in it.” (Neusner, 1985, 34) Thus, the resurrection myth, which had defined American Jewry’s ethnic identity since 1948, could now be fully-integrated in to a completed dual identity as both American and as Jews. The parallel narrative thus became one of self-empowerment and control of one’s destiny: “The extermination of European Jewry could become the Holocaust only on 9 June when, in the aftermath of a remarkable victory, the State of Israel celebrated the return of the people of Israel to the ancient wall of the Temple of Jerusalem. On that day, the extermination of European Jewry attained the – if not happy, at least visible – ending that served to transform events into a myth, and to endow a symbol with a single ineluctable meaning.” (Neusner quoted in Rappaport, 2004, 197) Furthermore, the war had unveiled a critical mass of American Jews, both active and removed from the Jewish community, with deep sentiments for and commitment to the continuity of Jewish peoplehood: “The war also converted American Jewry to Zionism. Whereas American Jews had demonstrated sympathy in the past, Israel now was incorporated into the very structure of American Jewish identity.” (Werthhimer, 1993, 30) However, at its core of this new identity-construct, was a fixation of an age-old narrative of Jewish suffering, alienation and victimhood. American Jewry firmed its attachment to what Salo Baron termed a “lachrymose” historical self-image of perpetual victim. (Cheng, 2004, 112) “…(American Jewry is) always looking back at a sad past that both defines and imprisons the Jewish future, turning a history of suffering into a sentimentalized nostalgia for a dead past.” (Cheng, 2004, 112-13). This newly adopted ‘golden calf’ took the form of an Israel which could do no wrong. Contemporary anti-Zionism thus became equated with the threat that historical anti-Semitism posed to Jewish integration and hence survivability. (Woocher, 1986, 100) Criticism of this new god construct/faith system was akin to the depths of sin. There remained little room for nuance in this relationship. Dogma and absolutism prevailed: “For millions of American Jews, criticism of Israel was a worse sin than marrying out of the faith. They generally accepted the notion that diasporatic criticism of Israel was immoral or dangerous and further supported world anti-Semitism.” (Rosenthal, 2005, 214) It is important to note here that the majority of American Jews fell in to the category what Charles Liebman termed the “ambivalent American Jew.” (Kaplan, 2005, 68) This group was comprised of third and fourth generation Jews for whom Judaism served no particular purpose or benefit to their daily lives let alone their existential identity. These Jews self-identified with the hyphenated title of “Jewish-Americans” for whom their Jewish identity played a vanishing secondary role to their embrace of an American way of life. For them, “commitment to Judaism became a matter of personal faith rather than a question of fate.” (Kaplan, 2005, 68) The 1973 Yom Kippur War further strengthened American Jewry’s relationship with Israel through the prism of the regenerative myth of Holocaust to Israel. For the first few weeks of the war, Israel stood at the brink of utter annihilation by the nine Arab states whose armies were bashing down her border doors. Israel was eventually successful in but the stain of the country’s vulnerability and precariousness became embedded in the American Jewish psyche: “While the Six Day War helped create a triumphant salvation myth, the Yom Kippur War shattered the illusion of Israeli military invincibility and signaled that Jews were still vulnerable to mass murder. The Yom Kippur War heightened Israel’s feelings of abandonment in the international community, and it inspired similar feelings of abandonment among American Jews.”(Rappaport, 2005, 198) In the war’s aftermath, new Jewish umbrella organizations emerged, such as the Jewish Federation and the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations whose primary mandate was the financial and political support for Israel. (Rosenthal, 2005, 212). Synagogues, temples and federations, which dominated American Jewry’s suburbanized physical and cultural landscapes, “discovered” that the cause of Israel’s survival within the rubric of a “sacred survival” narrative, was proving to be a most-effective identity-branding tool. (Rosenthal, 2005, 212). For example, up until 1967, a critical fundraising strategy for institutional Judaism (federation/UJA campaign) was the “mission. This entailed an extremely controlled – and effective – guided trip to Israel for potential as well as current donors to both local and national campaigns. The intention was to increase the “knowledge, concern, and commitment,” and the pledge amounts of trip alumni. (Woocher, 1986, 149) This contradicted what was happening on the ground in Israel immediately following the Six Day War. With regards to the treatment of the newly acquired Arab territories in the West Bank and Gaza Strip: “Israelis fierce internal debate over the establishment of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza after the Six Day War found little reflection among American Jews. (Rosenthal, 2005, 214) Following the victory of the Six Day War, and the increased involvement of young Jews in federation/UJA, the “mission” began to incorporate the Holocaust-Israel re-generative narrative in to its schedule. (Woocher, 1986, 149) With different “mission” themes and titles such as “Walk of the Living” to “From Holocaust to Rebirth”, a standard itinerary guided young Jews along the “mythic journey of the Jewish people,” through the hopelessness and victimhood exuded from a visit to Auschwitz, to the glory and promise a praying of the recently rededicated Kotel, the Western Wall in Jerusalem. (Woocher, 1986, 149) By the 1980s, the “mission” expanded to include thousands of young American Jews and added visits to poor Jewish communities throughout the world for which the federations and UJA provided relief. Regardless of their size, length of time, or targeted participant demographic group, the regenerative theme remained consistent, albeit with an additional component expressing the physical precariousness of Israel in a hostile world. (Woocher, 1986, 150) “Jewish organization and Israel have held steadfast to…in creating a crisis-centered relationship (Israel is necessary as a safe haven in the event of a new Holocaust; the survival of the State of Israel is in danger; and Israel is a central ally in the West’s was against the ‘Axis of Evil’).” (Hartman, Donniel. 2010) While the historical, theological and political accuracy of these “missions” can be debated, what is clear is that they were extremely effective in garnering the unconditional commitment and support of their alumni: “They (American Jews who go on a mission) are enveloped in the story of a nation built on the ashes of six million dead, rising like the phoenix, struggling at once just to stay alive and to be a beacon of hope for the world. And they are told what they must do once they return to their “real world” to maintain the unity they have come to fell and to continue to share in the destiny they have glimpsed unfolding. It is a ritual of unique power, a rite of passage which leaves few untransformed.” (Woocher, 1986, 150)

From Hadassah to Sheila: The Sovereign Self
With the publication of the 1990 National Jewish Population Study came a complete rethinking of the foundational paradigm under which communal American Jewry functioned. Young American Jews questioned assumptions of identity such as: Why continue to identify as Jewish altogether? Why maintain the tribal vestiges of their forefathers rather than embrace the acculturation opportunities of America’s ethnic melting pot narrative? (Woocher, 1986, 19) Generally speaking, most American Jews identified with a pragmatic, utilitarian and rational construct of Judaism. The Judaism of ideology, theology and the mystical, while certainly becoming ever more present, remained relegated to a minority of Jews for whom Judaism informed their everyday lives. (Kaplan, 2005,1-2) Despite having fully acculturated as authentic Americans, American Jewry’s reliance on a Jewishness based on the projection of their essence on a mythological Israel aesthetic proved to be far from a fail-safe construct. By the 1990s, American Jewry’s focus had shifted from a collective and historical peoplehood narrative to that of exclusive individualism: “…American Jewish identity appears to have undergone a decisive shift in the 1990s away from a focus on the collective, historical experience of the Jewish people and toward a highly individualized appropriation of Jewish symbols, beliefs, and practices as part of the search for personal meaning.” (Woocher, 2005, 287) Robert Bellah’s 1985 book Habits of the Heart, laments the loss of a sense of the collective identity among young American adults. He quotes a woman named Sheila Larson who came to represent a newly formed Americanized religious identity predicated on a personalization, privatization, and volunteerism: (Kaplan, 2005, 70) “I believe in God. I am not a religious fanatic. I can’t remember the last time I went to church. (Yet) my faith has carried me a long way. It’s Sheilasim. Just my own little voice.” (Bella, 1986, 4) Steven Cohen and Arnold Eisen’s book The Jew Within mines the motivations and needs of the Sheila generation’s “religious pluralism” to understand its application to American Jewry. They point out that while the Jews within this demographic rejected their parents’ and grandparents’ narrative of Jewish identity as determined by institutional affiliation, all the same, they remained committed to a deeply serious and personal embrace of Jewish history, values, culture and the future: “They care little for Jewish organizations, but are far from indifferent to Judaism and things Jewish…They take their Jewish journeys very seriously and regard Judaism as an intrinsic part of their identity.” (Cohen, 2000, 183) Cohen and Eisen refer to this demographic of Jews as the “sovereign self.” Previously held Jewish norms (including support for Israel) no longer held sway, let alone authority. This demographic resented any attempt, either direct or indirect, to impose or codify determinants for their Jewish identity, religious or not: “For these Jews in the late 1990s, being Jewish was a personal project of meaning making, with self and family as the primary reference points. Institutions play a secondary role and contemporary Jewish history even less.” (Woocher, 2005, 288) Israel, which up until this time, had functioned as the unchallenged primary “bulwark” of American Jewish identity, now assumed at best a secondary role. American Jews increasingly felt alienated from the Jewish State, albeit not as much due to political or religious events, but rather due to redirected cultural focus on the individual. Large-scale Jewish philanthropies, whose funding basis remained entrenched in the survivalist myth, noticed huge gaps in this demographic on their funder rosters. Support for Israel, in particular did not serve their core personal, spiritual and familial needs. (Cohen, 2000, 189) “Once again, the priority for American Jews is individual Jewish meaning, and the question is whether Israel enhances or detracts from the meaning.” (Cohen, 2000, 143) 

The Sacred Self
In their June 2006 Commentary Magazine article, Whatever Happened to the Jewish People, Steven Cohen and Jack Wertheimer cite the 2000/2001 National Jewish Population Study which found that young Jewish Americans have at best a weak commitment, and appreciation for a collectivist Jewish identity. Jewish peoplehood has become anachronistic over the past two decades: “…younger adults are significantly less likely than their elders to agree strongly that “Jews in the United States and Jews around the world share a common destiny” or that “when people are in distress, American Jews have a greater responsibility to rescue Jews than non-Jews.” Responses to the simple statement, “I have a strong sense of belonging to the Jewish people,” are especially telling. The proportions strongly agreeing drop steadily from a high of 75 percent among those aged sixty-five or over to a low of 47 percent for adults under thirty-five.” (Cohen, 2006) For over two thousand years, since the Roman expulsion of the Jews from the Land of Israel, Jewish lineage had been exclusively defined through matrilineal descent. In 1983, this assumption was firmly rejected with the North American Reform Movement’s adoption of patrilineal descent as legem terrae. Accordingly, the children of a Jewish father, and not necessarily a Jewish mother, could be included into the fold of the Jewish people. This position, as articulated by the Reform Movement’s Committee on Patrilineal Descent, points to a historical precedent for adapting Jewish law, halacha, to the social realities of the times. The Committee cited the contemporary reality of large intermarriage rates among North American Jewry, and as such, a drastic response was required. The Orthodox response was emphatic. For them, there was absolutely no room to compromise Halacha, Jewish Law, as understood to be divinely derived and inspired, halacha m’moshe m’sinai, literally, directly descended from Moses’ tete-a-tete with God at Sinai. Gone are the days where a collective sense of responsibility prevailed among North American Jewry. Federation fundraising slogans of the 1970s and 1980 such as “We Are One” or “Keep the Promise” hold little currency among contemporary young Jews.  Both the Rabbinical Council of America (representing modern responded with promotional branding campaigns that are more personalized and personalistic, such as Federation’s 1998 National fundraising slogan: For ourselves. For our children. For Israel. Forever. (Cohen, 2000, 126) “Old ghetto assumptions that Judaism has an ethnic or national dimension was dropped or subordinated.” (Grossman, 2005, 82) The study also found that young American Jews derive their religious and ethnic identities from a variety of cultures and experiences which seamlessly mix with one another. The study asked “What does it mean to be Jewish in America?” The response received indicate that religious and ethnicity have melded into a hybrid where: 70 percent answered a cultural group; 57 percent an ethnic group; and 49 percent an exclusive a religious group. (Kaufman, 2005, 174) Paradoxically, while religious authority has all but diminished for the vast majority of American Jews, there has been a parallel increase in the demand and quest for portals to spiritualism. Byron Sherwin understands this as the actualization of American Jewry’s existential quest for a theological mandate beyond the myopic canon of the Holocaust and Israel: “As the dogmas of the civil religion of American Jews began to lose their grip, and as source of wisdom, personal meaning, and Jewish identity, the long-standing marginalization of Jewish theology promised to come to an end.” (Sherwin, 2005, 120) Jews began to look to the intellectual and spiritual resources of their tradition as an orthodoxy in North America) and the Va’ad Ha’Rabbanut (representing official Jewish theological position of the Government of Israel), offered little room for even a dialogue on this issue. They accused those who challenge established Halachic norms of compromising the very fabric of Jewish identity, and in particular the fundamental value of Jewish unity. Their concern was that the Reform Movement was actively undermining the narrative bedrock that had sustained the Jewish community through the millennia of the Exile. This narrative was predicated on an assumption of Jewish unity, a value held sacrosanct by generations of Jewish communities. Woocher quotes Barry Shrage to describe the transition from a civil religious ethos to the sacred self as moving from a fixation on the concern for sacred survival to one seeking to create “sacred communities.” (Woocher, 2005, 291) Our society is predicated on personal autonomy, individual choice, and volunteerism. The notion of a community which requires the limitation of choice is thus anathema to contemporary American Jews. Steven Cohen describes individualism as having a comprehensive control over the American Jewish narrative: “American Jewish individualism, with its emphasis on autonomy, or control of one's Jewish life; voluntarism, or freedom to make Jewish choices; ‘personalism,' or the emphasis on the authority of personal meaning; antijudgmentalism, or an inclusive, welcoming attitude; and ‘journeyism,' or the idea that we are all on Jewish journeys that deserve to be respected and supported." (Cohen, 2010) Ethnic identifiers such as the Holocaust and Israel have thus become at best secondary to the make-up of their Jewish identity. No longer does ethnicity, to the exclusion of religion, have a transcendent currency. Tribalism and ethnic sentiment not only have little cachet with this generation, but are in fact obstacles their personal paths towards authenticity In fact, the very notion of a narrative or ideology serving as a sine quo non for identity or meaning is athematic. (Sherwin, 2005, 128) Instead, they seek from Judaism (and for that matter a multitude of religions and cultures) answers “for stages of life, for calendar events, for personal crisis, and for a need to celebrate aspects of life”: “This emphasis on the self and its realization, which have been interpreted as spiritual quests rather than obligations transcending the individual person, entails a turning away from the kids of commonplace commitments that lack the special cachet of personal authenticity or inner growth. Responsibilities toward abstract collectivities such as the Jewish people, therefore, decline in significance. From the perspectives of one searching for the spiritual experience far outweighs it…experience-based religiosity has no intrinsic justification for exclusion or boundaries; it necessarily includes all who are partner to the inspirational moment.” (Liebman, 2005, 141) Eliyahu Stern, in his article Realigning Jewish Peoplehood, writes about this transition from a collective Jewish identity, to one that focuses on personal meaning: “Peoplehood functioned… as a placeholder and a worldview that upheld and solidified the core movements, institutions, and practices of twentieth century American Jewry…Jewish identity appears to be slowly but steadily moving away from a paradigm of Jewish peoplehood toward one of Jewish meaning. In this new paradigm, texts, ideas,  values, and practices that answer the question “Why be Jewish?” become the primary portals for Jewish identity.” (Stern, 2008) Liebman points out that the focus on a post-ethnicity is not actually the full story. Note the ethno-centered response to the Palestinian Intifada in the late-1990s. Jews rallied together - through their pocket book – around Israel. Even the plethoric use of spiritual nomenclature had an ethnic undertone, albeit with a distinctively Americanized tone:  “Perhaps one reason Jews increasingly utilizes the language of spirituality to explain their Jewishness is because it is consistent with dominant trends in American culture, trends that American Jews generally absorb unthinkingly. Terms such as love, feeling, God, healing, inclusivity, soul, inner self, and journeys have become part of the jargon of American religious life, and Jews have adopted this language. (Liebman, 2005, 142) While many Jewish leaders and thinkers might understand this trend as fodder for the plethora of despondent predictions for American Judaism, Stern continued that this transition is not necessarily a rejection of a commitment to Jewish peoplehood, but rather a “realignment’ of the role it plays in defining Jewish identity: “Despite this apparent shift, a more dialectical appraisal of contemporary Judaism suggests not the destruction of peoplehood but a realignment of its position in Jewish life. Whereas peoplehood was the bedrock of Jewish identity in the twentieth century, the concept today is being defined by means of the religious-existential question…” (Stern, 2008)

Towards a Post-Zionist Renaissance?
Demographers, sociologists, historians and educations (both lay and professional) remain in a perpetual limbo as to making final conclusions about patterns of ethnic and religious identities among American Jews. “Critics are suggestion that studies framed to gauge more or less and better or worse, cannot, for the most part, capture the many complex, sometimes contradictory, if not ambivalent, expressions of religious identity among American Jews today.” (Kaufman, 2005, 170) Steven Cohen and Ari Kelman’s study The Continuity of Discontinuity: How young Jews are connecting, creating and organizing their own Jewish lives explores the generation of American Jews born since 1970. Drawing on the 2000/1 National Jewish Population Study, they point out that this generation’s unmarried Jews are disenfranchised from institutional Jewry, eliciting concerns of crisis among American Jewish leaders and funders: “22% belong to congregations; 5% pay dues to Jewish Community Centers; 7% are members of other Jewish organizations; 5% contributed $100 or more to their local Jewish federation campaign; and 47% of them, if they marry, will marry non-Jews, if past behavior is any guide to the future.” (Cohen, N.D., 16) Cohen and Kelman point out that high un-affiliation rates have little to do with expressions of radical departure from, or defiance of their parents’ values and ethos. The main reason for their being “demographically disenfranchised” , they argue, is due to feelings of alienation from an institutional obsession with fundraising, Israel, and with Jewish continuity: “Young adults maintain some very critical views of established Jewish institutions. They see them, at times, as overly bounded, socially exclusionary, normatively coercive, culturally bland, and institutionally focused in their governance, ethos, and programs.” (Cohen, N.D., 44) Young Jews live completely integrated lives with the surrounding majority culture. This is particularly so with the younger generation born after 1970 (see Generation X/Y below). For them there is no longer the construct of an “us versus them.” Most of their friends – and at 33 least half of their romantic relationships - are not Jewish. Institutional Judaism has not (or perhaps, cannot) caught-up: “For people whose lives and worldview value freedom of association and fluidity of identity, the world of synagogues, JCCs, and other Jewish organizations seems to run in the contrary direction.” (Cohen, N.D., 20) Cohen and Kelman observe that although this generation remains steadfastly unaffiliated and nonresponsive to the Jewish establishment’s outreach efforts, they are very much engaged Jewishly. (Cohen, N.D., 17) The authors argue that the habits of young American Jews in fact contradict an au current assumption among sociologists that “weaker institutions also mean weaker community” (eg. Robert Putnam in his book Bowling Alone). Woocher, upon reflection of the role of a civil Judaism in the new millennia laments its loss in a sea of individual narcissism and self-gratification. “In fact, we have seen, the real danger facing American Jewish religion over the past decade is…that the central thrust of the civil religion – inspiring collective action to foster Jewish survival and efforts to improve the world – will be eclipsed by an inward-looking, laissez faire Jewish sensibility that places pursuit of personal meaning and good feeling at the apex of its value system.” (Woocher, 2005, 293) The NJPS 2000-01 survey incorrectly assumes that religious identity among American Jews (Judaism) can simply be measured based on the criteria of how one’s behavior, beliefs, and communal affiliations stack-up against a predetermined notion of “authentic Judaism.” What is missing is a fundamental appreciation for the unique nuances of religious identity, and that the “yardstick from which we measure authenticity” is in constant flux, and therefore not a valid basis for determining religiosity: “…whose ‘Judaism’ serves as the yardstick from which we measure authenticity, decline, intensity, or strength of contemporary…Jewish identity?” (Kaufman, 2005, 170) Cohen and Kelman, in contrast argue that in fact, Woocher and Bella’s communal identity construct has taken on new – and somewhat unrecognizable - forms which fully integrate the full array of available portals to communal connections. This is accomplished through off-the grid, incubator initiatives which are able to respond to their won cultural and aesthetic diversity. This includes a seemingly endless array of possibilities within the realm of ritual, culture, music, theatre, fine arts, film, salons, and social action: “…the emergence of new types of connections and identities (provide) more fluid, episodic, and highly personalized opportunities for experiencing community…culture (for example) is critical to communities, and provides communities and organizations a broader vocabulary with which to engage, enact, and expand communal connections.” (Cohen, N.D., 17) They quote Aaron Bisman, the founder of JDub Records (of the singer Mattiyahu fame) to exemplify the entrepreneurial spirit of young Jews disenchanted with available Jewish resources. Bisman points top his generation’s intolerance for a codified, “cookie-cutter” approaches to Jewish identity. Instead, he and his friends have delineated personalized “desire lines” for communal connections, often treading over extant institutional assumptions: “There wasn’t much that was fully meeting my own personal – or my friends’ – interest Jewishly… Nothing. No synagogue, no Hillel building was enough for what we wanted. We could go to those places and pull out of them what we wanted, but in the end we always ended up doing it ourselves because we could create exactly the environment we wanted and the experience we wanted.” (Cohen, N.D., 18) Nowhere is this active removal from traditional and extant determinants for Jewish identity more apparent than in young American Jews’ relationship with Israel. A 2007 study by The Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies found that only 48% of Jews under the age of 35 agreed that “Israel’s destruction would be a personal tragedy,” and; 54% were “comfortable with the idea of a Jewish State.” (Fishkoff, 2007). The study parallels Cohen and Kelman’s findings that young American Jews are at the helm of a renaissance of cultural and religious Jewish expression. Israel is simply not as prevalent for them as with previous generations.

Conclusion I: Towards a new theology
Yoseph Hayim Yerushalmi refers to American Jewry’s post-Holocaust/post- 1948 “bifurcated life” which straddles myth and reality. The former, more often than not, serves as the dominant narrative. (Yerushalmi, 1996, 99) The implications of this paradigm has been, and continues to be critical for determining their priorities and directions. After all, in Yerushalmi’s words: “myth and memory condition action.” (Yerushalmi, 1996, 99). Post-Second World War American Jewry fastened to an exclusivist ethno-centered identity fixated on a narrative of biological survival. Little thought was given to the formation of identities rooted in inspiration or cultural depth : 18 A 2010 study out of Brandeis University concludes that age differences account for similar low Jewish connection percentages. As young Jews cycle in to subsequent life stages, connection rates self-correct. (Kadushin, 2010, 1-2) Aside from conflicting perceptions as to the water-level in American Jewry’s glass of the future (Fishkoff, 2007), what is consistently agreed upon is the irrelevance of political machinations and opinions in determining this relationship. 36 “So, we build Holocaust memorials and send our youth on pilgrimages to Auschwitz in the hope of reviving the psychological power of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism as organizing memories of Jewish identity.” (Hartman, From survival, 2008) Following Yerushalmi’s criticism, American Jewry’s guiding narratives have as much to do with the inherent power of myth as the actual events. A “predict and provide” construct evolved based on the assumptions of: external threats (anti-Semetism); Israel as protector; and American Jewry’s fundamental obligation to assure Israel’s survival. (Woocher, 1986, 132-3) Jacob Nuesner describes this pattern as both self-defeating as well as inauthentic: “…the myth of “Holocaust to rebirth” is a veil which American Jews place between themselves and the daily reality of their lives, at once profoundly functional in sustaining Jewish group commitment and activism (primarily in defense of Jewish survival).” (Neusner in Woocher, 1986, 132-3) Neusner criticizes American Jewry for falling sway to cure-all claims to redemption, a vice that has proven historically destructive to the Jewish people. He points to Bar Kokba as shortsighted refusal to accept reality let alone consider the future: “If the experience of the centuries has taught us anything, it has taught us a certain skepticism about pronouncements of salvation and a certain hopefulness in the face of setback…We have had our Holocaust, and, to speak bluntly, we have also had our Bar Kokba. The messianic response to catastrophe – the claim that, in a little while, we shall find solace in the denouement of history.” (Neusner, 1981, 70) Rabbinic Judaism, according to Neusner, remained fully rooted in reality and drew-upon Judaism’s historically contiguous narrative of evolution and adaptation: “…he (Bar Kokba) meant to recover what was lost – the cult – instead of turning towards the future. The rabbis of the times, by contrast, were determined, not to reconstruct what could not be authentically regained, but to ask what, out of the past, might be used to reshape the people, and their answer…was to rebuild the Temple through the society of the people…they made the Jewish people into the sanctuary…” (Neusner, 1981, 72) When applied to contemporary America Jewry, Neusner concludes that its leadership has fallen in to the very same ‘trap’ as Bar Kokba and his followers. Such over-reliance on fantasy and the denial of reality has resulted in deflecting the collective energy from forming viable and authentic alternative narratives: “…deeply dysfunctional in deflecting American Jews from the task of creating a mode and myth of Jewish religious existence faithful to their own chosen condition.... ” (Neusner in Woocher, 1986, 132-3) As far back as 1949, Eli Ginzberg forewarned of the limitation and dangers of an identity bereft of a positivistic message: 19 Further food for thought is, had Shabtai Tzvi not convert to Islam in 1786, those of us who are descendents of European Jewry (his followers constituted between 60-75 percent of European Jewry at the time) would probably be worshipping the cult of Ztvi, piytim and all! 38 “Today at least among large number of American Jews, the ‘defense activities’ have usurped a position of priority. This was more or less inevitable since many of these Jews have lost all interest in positive Jewish values; their entire adjustment is externally oriented.” (Hertzberg, 1989, 331) Arthur Hertzberg argues that an American Jewry whose identity is rooted in an ethno-centered theology is simply not sustainable: “After nearly four centuries, the momentum of Jewish experience in America is essentially spent. Ethnicity will no doubt last for several more generations, but it is well on the way to becoming memory. But a community cannot survive on what it remembers; it will persist only because of what it affirms and believes.” (Hertzberg,1989, 374) There remains an inherent futility in the reliance on a collectivist, ethnic ethos to maintain, let alone to strengthen American Jewry’s sense of peoplehood and community: “The strategy of Jewish survivalism clearly had failed in helping to ensure the survival of Jews as Jews, especially the survival of Jews as adherents to Judaism.” (Sherwin, 2005, 119) Judaism is a tradition of continual evolution and transformation which demands challenging even the most sacrosanct myths and assumptions. This approach is particularly important in our post-Halachic, post-modern world: 39 “Why should thinking Jews consider giving up their self-determination to follow the ruling of decisions who have Jewish learning but otherwise no greater access to God’s present will than the rest of us possess? (Borowitz, 1991, 287). What remains lacking, however, is a radically-honest public discourse, and hence a collective value for questioning what we assume to be absolute “fact”, or “best” for the Jewish community. There is a desperate need for a collective meaning as essential for the very future that the advocates of the ‘survival’ narrative sought: “The fact is, however, that the trauma of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism are no longer sufficient for creating personal identification with the story of the Jewish people. The real problem is how to build a sense of community out of shared meaning, not shared suffering. Stories of persecution will not inspire our grandchildren to be Jews. We have to offer them a dream, a vision that is morally and spiritually compelling.” (Hartman, From survival, 2008)

ConclusionI I: A theology of relationships
Richard Address’ understanding of human nature is a good starting point for determining (or better, allowing for) the evolution of a sustainable American Jewish identity. He prescribes a community-focused identity based on what he names a “theology of relationships,” based on humanity’s innate need for social interaction:  “That is a belief that basic to every one of us is the desire and need for community and the desire and need to be in a relationship.” (Address, 2005, 14) Americans, in general, are in a desperate search for communities of meaning where their primary motivation is the fostering of deeply committed relationships with others: “Community…refers to a group of people who share their lives and communicate honestly with one another…who have developed some significant commitment to ‘rejoice together, mourn together, and to delight each other.’” (Wade Clark Root, 1993, 250) Applied to American Jewry, its current relationship with Israel is myopically focused on the perpetuation of outdated constructs of Jewish peoplehood. Jewish professionals are bombarded with a seemingly endless array of studies, conferences, and discussions around the Kiddush table, lamenting the dire predictions for Jewish communal continuity. Huge assumptions are made of a shared set of concerns, perspectives and nomenclature for framing the discourse. A correction-process requires that American Jews challenge even those most sacrosanct assumptions for the meanings of ethnic and cultural nomenclature: How to define “community”? “Continuity” of what kind of Judaism? What are, and who determines the criteria for Jewish identity? How can the Jewish value of a unified people or community sustain itself in an environment which is at first appears to be hostile to the very notion of collective 41 responsibility? What if the focus (for the purposes of this paper) on Israel was redirected so as to provide a depth of experiences that goes beyond American Jewry’s reactionary response to the identity-challenges it confronts? Address asks: “The challenge is what happens after the service experience.” (Address, 2005, 15) Ultimately, American Jewry would do well to heed those concerned with the perverse and codependent relationship between their identity as Jews and a survivalist theology. Emancipation had long-ago unraveled this knot, making the typology of Judaism simply not sustainable. Ahad Haam argued against the political Zionists’ belief that a Jewish State could serve as a panacea for ills of Jewish existence in the exile: “The material problem (i.e. anti-Semitism) will not be ended by the establishment of a Jewish State, and it is, indeed, beyond our power to solve it once and for all.” (Hertzberg, 1997, 264) Ha-Am’s insights and predictions proved to be brilliantly prescient. Political Zionism’s fixation on the establishment of a Jewish homeland, was far-too eager in its dismissal of the spiritual origins of Judaism’s historical foundation. Ha-Am predicted that a failed political Zionism would leave in its wake both a national and religious void. From him we learn that Judaism needs to move beyond this construct, to the creation of forums for rediscovery and reinvention. 20 As with BirthRight which needed BirthRight Next to fill the psych-spiritual vacuum experienced by its participants upon returning to their relatively mundane every-day lives after ten-days of staged euphoria (and free to boot) in Israel. There was/is a need to actively foster the depth of a committed and consistent community-construct. Ha-Am understood that at the core of Judaism’s survivability is a ‘national culture’ of reverence for, and aspiration to something higher than that of the individual self. 21 This is manifested in a strong sense of self, and of self-respect which is ingrained in the Jewish psyche and hence allowed for overcoming the endless onslaught and domination of surrounding majority cultures: “As long as we remain faithful to this principle (spirituality versus materialism), our existence has a secure basis, and we shall not lose out self-respect, for we are not spiritually inferior to any nation.” (Hertzberg, 1997, 268) In their book The Jew Within: Self, Family and Community in America, Steven Cohen and Arnold Eisen describe the uniqueness of Judaism – and specifically within the American context - as a hybrid grouping of religion and ethnicity: “Jews are the one American collectivity which sees itself, and qualifies, as both a bona fide religious group and as a full-fledged ethnic group…there can be no Judaism without a Jewish people – and vice versa.” (Cohen, 2000,101) American Jews, regardless of their locale, affiliation or even family make-up, are ethnically joined in a profound and core way with one another. This manifests itself in the assumption of comfort one experience when among family members. (That annual family holiday get-togethers see spikes in suicide rates among all religious groups is another matter): “One expects and finds a common sensibility among Jews wherever they live, born of common historical experience.” (Cohen, 2000, 103) Ahad Ha-Am argues that for the sake of a viable Jewish future, the leaders of modern Zionism must abandon what he characterized as a myopic obsession with politics and secularism. Ha-Am advocates for a movement based on historically contiguous and spiritually-focused ideals and motivations of Jewish peoplehood. In another paper by Steven Cohen, he refers to Martin Buber’s reflection of this duality: “Israel is a people like no other, for it is the only people in the world which, from its earliest beginning, has been both a nation and a religious community.” (Cohen, June 2006) Cohen and Eisen continue that along with this most fundamental expression of tribalism comes the companion construct of mutual responsibility: “The sense of familism expressed in this special concern for other Jews has also meant that Jews have thought it fitting and proper to extend special preference to one another in business dealings, politics, philanthropy, and other areas beyond the private sphere of kin and friends.” (Cohen, 2000, 104) And herein lies the rub! Rabbi Solomon Schechter argued for this same sense of collective responsibility, albeit with an appreciation for and allegiance to the historical Jewish experience. Schechter coined the term “catholic Israel” to describe a Jewish peoplehood weaved together through their collective history, present and future: “Schechter's idea of catholic Israel was in part a rejection of the Reform position that Jews are only devotees of a religion and not members of a people as well. Schechter claimed that Jews must regard themselves as members of a people which include not only the Jews of the present, but those of the past and future as well.” (Dorff, N.D.) Rabbi Elliot Dorff offers a concrete image to apply the value of peoplehood to the every-day. He uses the term “vertical democracy’ along which the individual Jew can and should imagine him or herself as a node within the context of a dynamic time-line: “… the Jewish community of the present must see itself in the line of Jewish communities of the past and future and must make its decisions with those communities in mind. This idea is often called ‘vertical democracy’. To understand that term, imagine a vertical time-line, extending from the beginnings of the Jewish People at the bottom and extending upward to the future. The concept of "vertical democracy," then, means that Jews are members of a people consisting not only of the Jews living in many places at this time (that is looking at Jewish peoplehood "horizontally" on the time-line), but also of Jews living at many points in the past and future, up and down the time-line.” (Dorff, N.D.) Ultimately, according to Shechter, it is only through a commitment to Jewish peoplehood that the American Jewish community find sustainable meaning and hence continuity: “This should give a Jew pride and a sense of rootedness, and it also has implications for the way in which a Jew identifies as a Jew. To do that authentically, he must see himself as part of the ongoing Jewish people and must express that in action by observing the laws and customs of the Jewish People. Otherwise Jewish identity is only a matter of the mind and emotions and not a way of life, as it always has been.” (Dorff, N.D.) This pursuit for “communities of meaning” becomes an opportunity with regards to the integration of Israel within their core identity construct. David Hartman argues for the resurrection of the original covenant between Israel and God based on the tenant of “and you shall live through them.” (Leviticus, 18:5) Hartman defines this covenant as a social contract to actively pursue human enlightenment: “The rebirth of Israel can be viewed as a return to the fullness of the Sinai covenant – to Judaism as a way of life……Sinai calls us to action, to moral awakening, to living constantly with challenges of building a moral and just society which mirrors the kingdom of God in history.” ” (Hartman, 1982) There is a need to produce experiences and opportunities for American Jews who want to enrich their Jewish lives, who are interested in a meaningful Jewish learning experience, and who want to expand their connection to the Jewish community. Ultimately, such programs must foster the integration of Judaism’s ritual, heritage, values and experiences everyday life: “Positively put, do the radically changed Jewish social status and cultural ethos that resulted from modernization prompt us to devise a more appropriate way of framing Jewish existence?” (Borowitz, 1991, 281) Israel’s purpose and role can serve as an inspiration. American Jews should no longer cling to Israel as a panacea to solve their fundamental existential ills. Rather, Israel can serve as a light along their pathway towards authenticity as both Jews and as Americans:  “The spirit of Judaism will radiate (from Israel) to the great circumference, to all the communities of the Diaspora, to inspire them with new life.” (Ha-am in: Hertzberg, 1997, 207)

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