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mburnamfink 's review for:
Gordis explores the relationship between American and Israeli Jews through the metaphor of a marriage on the brink of divorce, arguing that both sides need each other. The evidence is primarily historical, based on a reading of pro and anti-Zionist statements from the 1880s through the 1930s.
Some parts of the thesis are fairly incontrovertible. Zionism was a major and fraught question in the Jewish community before the foundation of Israel in 1948. And while American Jews have chosen to primarily assimilate, with the notable exception of Haredi communities, Israel is a proudly, even defiantly Jewish ethnostate, where Hebrew is spoken and Jewish supremacy is enshrined in special law.
I believe the origins of the divide, and I don't expect any one person to have the answer to ending it in a short book. Israel may be a vibrant Jewish community, but unless I learn Hebrew it's a foreign land and a foreign people. Israelis may be thoroughly sick of being hectored by American Jews, but the refusal of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel to treat Conservative and Reform Judaism as worthwhile contributions to the faith rankles. The ongoing war crimes and genocide of the Palestinian occupation rankles, and the idea that because I am Jewish I am supposed to stay silent in defense of Israeli security is deeply personally offensive.
Where it is reasonable to expect a short book to have insight is on some more recent events. Gordis talks a lot about long-dead pre-independence Zionists and the triumph of the Six Day War, but he has almost nothing to say about the politics of the Israeli War for Independence, and the choices in state-building made thereafter. Events since 1982 and the occupation of Lebanon seem to have passed in a gray blur, for all that the book mentions them. Americans are unwilling to live with their own counter-insurgencies. Is it any surprise that we decline to live another country's?
Gordis' criticism that contemporary American Judaism is practically moribund is spot on, at least in my personal assessment of too many years of Hebrew school leading to a Bar Mitzvah. And while Israel may be more vigorously alive, it is increasingly isolated diplomatically. Both sides can point to history for examples of disaster. The First and Second Temple were sacked and destroyed. The European country with the most assimilated Jews lead their mass murder.
This book is interesting as a history, offer true, if trite insights into contemporary politics, and has no solutions. The marriage metaphor is often invoked, but it's also wrong on a basic level, because a marriage is a choice of consenting adults. A better metaphor is one of brothers. American and Israeli Jews, as a group, are descendants of a European Jewish tradition which was destroyed in the Holocaust. Orphaned, the two brothers grew up, and they grew in different directions. So what binds them, except for blood?
Some parts of the thesis are fairly incontrovertible. Zionism was a major and fraught question in the Jewish community before the foundation of Israel in 1948. And while American Jews have chosen to primarily assimilate, with the notable exception of Haredi communities, Israel is a proudly, even defiantly Jewish ethnostate, where Hebrew is spoken and Jewish supremacy is enshrined in special law.
I believe the origins of the divide, and I don't expect any one person to have the answer to ending it in a short book. Israel may be a vibrant Jewish community, but unless I learn Hebrew it's a foreign land and a foreign people. Israelis may be thoroughly sick of being hectored by American Jews, but the refusal of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel to treat Conservative and Reform Judaism as worthwhile contributions to the faith rankles. The ongoing war crimes and genocide of the Palestinian occupation rankles, and the idea that because I am Jewish I am supposed to stay silent in defense of Israeli security is deeply personally offensive.
Where it is reasonable to expect a short book to have insight is on some more recent events. Gordis talks a lot about long-dead pre-independence Zionists and the triumph of the Six Day War, but he has almost nothing to say about the politics of the Israeli War for Independence, and the choices in state-building made thereafter. Events since 1982 and the occupation of Lebanon seem to have passed in a gray blur, for all that the book mentions them. Americans are unwilling to live with their own counter-insurgencies. Is it any surprise that we decline to live another country's?
Gordis' criticism that contemporary American Judaism is practically moribund is spot on, at least in my personal assessment of too many years of Hebrew school leading to a Bar Mitzvah. And while Israel may be more vigorously alive, it is increasingly isolated diplomatically. Both sides can point to history for examples of disaster. The First and Second Temple were sacked and destroyed. The European country with the most assimilated Jews lead their mass murder.
This book is interesting as a history, offer true, if trite insights into contemporary politics, and has no solutions. The marriage metaphor is often invoked, but it's also wrong on a basic level, because a marriage is a choice of consenting adults. A better metaphor is one of brothers. American and Israeli Jews, as a group, are descendants of a European Jewish tradition which was destroyed in the Holocaust. Orphaned, the two brothers grew up, and they grew in different directions. So what binds them, except for blood?