September 9, 2010
SouthAmerica: Reply to Optimal
The New York Times article said: "The philanthropists wanted to know what Jewish students thought about Israel. Luntz found that they mostly didnât. âSix times we have brought Jewish youth together as a group to talk about their Jewishness and connection to Israel,â he reported. âSix times the topic of Israel did not come up until it was prompted. Six times these Jewish youth used the word âtheyâ rather than âusâ to describe the situation.
That Luntz encountered indifference was not surprising. In recent years, several studies have revealed, in the words of Steven Cohen of Hebrew Union College and Ari Kelman of the University of California at Davis, that ânon-Orthodox younger Jews, on the whole, feel much less attached to Israel than their elders,â with many professing âa near-total absence of positive feelings."
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The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment
By: Peter Beinart
The New York Times â June 10, 2010
In 2003, several prominent Jewish philanthropists hired Republican pollster Frank Luntz to explain why American Jewish college students were not more vigorously rebutting campus criticism of Israel. In response, he unwittingly produced the most damning indictment of the organized American Jewish community that I have ever seen.
The philanthropists wanted to know what Jewish students thought about Israel. Luntz found that they mostly didnât. âSix times we have brought Jewish youth together as a group to talk about their Jewishness and connection to Israel,â he reported. âSix times the topic of Israel did not come up until it was prompted. Six times these Jewish youth used the word âtheyâ rather than âusâ to describe the situation.â
That Luntz encountered indifference was not surprising. In recent years, several studies have revealed, in the words of Steven Cohen of Hebrew Union College and Ari Kelman of the University of California at Davis, that ânon-Orthodox younger Jews, on the whole, feel much less attached to Israel than their elders,â with many professing âa near-total absence of positive feelings.â In 2008, the student senate at Brandeis, the only nonsectarian Jewish-sponsored university in America, rejected a resolution commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the Jewish state.
Luntzâs task was to figure out what had gone wrong. When he probed the studentsâ views of Israel, he hit up against some firm beliefs. First, âthey reserve the right to question the Israeli position.â These young Jews, Luntz explained, âresist anything they see as âgroup think.ââ They want an âopen and frankâ discussion of Israel and its flaws. Second, âyoung Jews desperately want peace.â When Luntz showed them a series of ads, one of the most popular was entitled âProof that Israel Wants Peace,â and listed offers by various Israeli governments to withdraw from conquered land. Third, âsome empathize with the plight of the Palestinians.â When Luntz displayed ads depicting Palestinians as violent and hateful, several focus group participants criticized them as stereotypical and unfair, citing their own Muslim friends.
Most of the students, in other words, were liberals, broadly defined. They had imbibed some of the defining values of American Jewish political culture: a belief in open debate, a skepticism about military force, a commitment to human rights. And in their innocence, they did not realize that they were supposed to shed those values when it came to Israel. The only kind of Zionism they found attractive was a Zionism that recognized Palestinians as deserving of dignity and capable of peace, and they were quite willing to condemn an Israeli government that did not share those beliefs. Luntz did not grasp the irony. The only kind of Zionism they found attractive was the kind that the American Jewish establishment has been working against for most of their lives.
...Since the 1990s, journalists and scholars have been describing a bifurcation in Israeli society. In the words of Hebrew University political scientist Yaron Ezrahi, âAfter decades of what came to be called a national consensus, the Zionist narrative of liberation [has] dissolved into openly contesting versions.â One version, âfounded on a long memory of persecution, genocide, and a bitter struggle for survival, is pessimistic, distrustful of non-Jews, and believing only in Jewish power and solidarity.â Another, ânourished by secularized versions of messianism as well as the Enlightenment idea of progress,â articulates âa deep sense of the limits of military force, and a commitment to liberal-democratic values.â Every country manifests some kind of ideological divide. But in contemporary Israel, the gulf is among the widest on earth.
...But these secular Zionists arenât reproducing themselves. Their children have no memory of Arab armies massed on Israelâs border and of Israel surviving in part thanks to urgent military assistance from the United States. Instead, they have grown up viewing Israel as a regional hegemon and an occupying power. As a result, they are more conscious than their parents of the degree to which Israeli behavior violates liberal ideals, and less willing to grant Israel an exemption because its survival seems in peril. Because they have inherited their parentsâ liberalism, they cannot embrace their uncritical Zionism. Because their liberalism is real, they can see that the liberalism of the American Jewish establishment is fake.
...As former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg writes in his remarkable 2008 book, The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise From Its Ashes, âVictimhood sets you free.â This obsession with victimhood lies at the heart of why Zionism is dying among Americaâs secular Jewish young. It simply bears no relationship to their lived experience, or what they have seen of Israelâs.
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Peter Beinart is Associate Professor of Journalism and Political Science at the City University of New York, a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, and Senior Political Writer for The Daily Beast. His new book, The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris, will be published in June.

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