America and Israel: Plural Loyalties and the Patriotism of Shame

The recent passing of Carlo Ginzburg, the great Italian Jewish scholar who survived the war in hiding as a child, is an occasion for reflection. As a historian, I have long taken inspiration from Ginzburg’s historical method and his classic text, The Cheese and the Worms. Ginzburg was a master of “microhistory”—the art of taking a seemingly isolated, forgotten fragment of human experience and using it to uncover the hidden mental universe of an entire era. He famously reconstructed the worldview of a sixteenth-century northern Italian miller named Menocchio who defied the Roman Inquisition, looking at the cosmos and seeing God hidden in the rot of cheese.

Ginzburg’s historical philosophy hinged on the belief that the grand, sweeping vectors of statecraft and political power are encoded within highly specific, intensely localized anomalies. The macro-historical truths of an age, as his groundbreaking work illustrated, can thus be understood by interrogating micro-historical fragments. Drawing on Aristotle, Ginzburg also posited that the country or community one belongs to is often defined not by the easy rhetoric of blind love, but by a “bond of shame”—the visceral passion that hits us when we realize our collective culture has fallen short of its own standards.

For me, the micro-historical fragment that unlocks today’s painful intersection of history and identity is a vivid memory from nearly fifty years ago. Every Fourth of July, I am pulled back to a circle of tree stumps at a socialist Zionist summer camp in Idyllwild, California, where, as a fourteen-year-old, I spent the holiday locked in a fierce, binary debate with my peers. The provocative question before us was heavy. The daring rescue of hijacked Israeli hostages in Uganda had taken place one year earlier, on July 4, 1976. Which milestone demanded our primary allegiance—the democratic promise of the United States, or the raw, sovereign necessity of Israel? To our idealistic, teenage minds, choosing which event to elevate felt like a declaration of primary identity. Were we Americans first, or Jews first?

Reflecting today on the monumental collision of the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of American independence and the fiftieth anniversary of the Entebbe rescue, the romantic heroism we celebrated as teenagers feels like an artifact from a distant era. In fact, we did not really choose; we embraced our plural loyalties. When we gathered in the mornings and evenings to raise and lower the American and Israeli flags, we sang a mix of patriotic songs by Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Phil Ochs, followed by Israel’s national anthem, “Hatikvah” (The Hope), and Israeli folk songs like “Shir Hashomer” (The Song of the Guard) and the Peace Now declaration, “Shir Lashalom” (Song of Peace). I realize now that our young voices were not just debating politics and expressing our idealism in song; we were communing with the ghosts of the two distinct heroic projects that anchor modern Jewish history: America and Israel.

To this day, my humanity remains fundamentally shaped by the triple chord plucked at Habonim camp: I am a Jew, an American, and a Zionist. These are not separate compartments of my soul, but a singular, unified worldview through which I understand justice, human dignity, and being in the world. I do not believe this is a naïve hangover from my youth, but rather a core truth about Jewish peoplehood past, present, and future. It is through this lens that I also view the sickness at the center of our current political moment, where a profound polarization has turned questions of identity and values into an existential vise.

In the shadow of the horrific October 7, 2023 attacks—the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust—and the devastating regional wars that have followed, American Jews are being forced into rigid, artificial ideological lanes. We are told by progressives and conservatives alike that we must choose between our universal liberal values and our affinity for Israel. On the far left, Israel is routinely vilified as an unredeemable colonial project and American Jewish attachments to Zionism are derided as parochial and obscurantist. On the far right, conservative forces openly flirt with antisemitic canards and conjure fantasies of Jewish conspiracies. Donald Trump himself repeatedly weaponizes these forces, asserting that “any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat” show “great disloyalty” and “hates their religion.” This political squeeze is compounded by a tangible, frightening surge of antisemitism—what the historian Robert S. Wistrich termed “the longest hatred”—at home and abroad. According to data from the Pew Research Center, nearly 90 percent of American Jews report seeing a rise in anti-Jewish hostility since October 7.

Paradoxically, the menacing climate fuels a vocal minority of American Jewish critics who view Zionism and Israel as the animating source of an array of deep-seated problems. Rather than a manifestation of Jewish national self-determination and an antidote to antisemitism, detractors frame Zionism as illegitimate and Israel as an oppressive structure—one that actively erases diasporic histories, languages, and traditions to serve a monolithic, white supremacist agenda.

Though framed by the today’s landscape, this backlash carries a tragic historical echo. In the interwar decades of the twentieth century, a loose coalition of Jewish assimilationists craving social acceptance, Orthodox Jewish traditionalists who rejected Zionism as heretical, the Jewish socialist Bund seeking a classless society, and the Soviet Communist Yevsektsia bent on world revolution all insisted that the answer to Jewish suffering and powerlessness lay in the disavowal of Jewish particularism and one or another form of self-abnegation. Driven by their acute precarity, they sought safety by appeasing the ideological currents of their day. In the final analysis, history was unyielding; these movements did not outlast the catastrophic crises of the twentieth century, ultimately swallowed up by the very totalitarian forces they sought to placate.

Contemporary American Jewish anti-Zionism, fueled by the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict, is built on that same fragile foundation as its predecessors, but now inverted by a distinctively modern twist of privilege. Today’s ahistorical illusion is anchored by unprecedented diasporic affluence and integration into American society. The leading lights of anti-Zionism declaim that if only it were possible to dismantle Israel and restore Jewish peoplehood to its contingent, pre-Zionist status, modern society would reward the Jews with safety, security, and acceptance. In the best of times, such benevolence, it can be reasonably argued, produced the likes of Maimonides, Spinoza, and Freud. But the historical record also demonstrates the cost of sufferance was high, and the price, in the worst of times, was measured not in crowning human achievements but in expulsions, Crusades, pogroms, and the Holocaust.

American Jews who have grown up since the 1990s are the beneficiaries of unprecedented opportunities to learn about and experience Israel—from childhood to college and through immersive experiences like synagogue-sponsored missions, local Jewish Federation programs, and the Taglit-Birthright Israel program, a framework that alone, according to the Pew Research Center, has sent nearly one in five of all American Jews (roughly 20 percent) between ages 18-46 on an organized Israel trip. At the same time, these are also the generations who, since Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination in 1995 and the derailing of the Oslo Accords, have never known a time when Israel didn’t seem to be careening in the direction of becoming a theocratic apartheid state. Raised in an American environment that valorized a romantic portrait of Israel, their encounter with political reality has been nothing short of whiplash. Against this backdrop, contemporary anti-Zionism offers disaffected young Americans an intellectual and psychological escape hatch and seemingly a reprieve from anti-Jewish hostility. However, the notion of dismantling or dissolving the Jewish national home is itself a chimera; it’s essentially an evasion of the grueling reality and messy moral responsibilities of Jewish peoplehood in the modern era.

It would be easy to dismiss American Jewish anti-Zionism as the product of an unrequited love affair, or simply as ignorance, but the truth is far more compelling. These young American Jews haven’t turned their backs on their Jewish identity; and, if anything, their fierce dissent is proof of how deeply focused they remain on Israel’s trajectory. They are actually operating within a venerable Jewish tradition where passionate, soul-searching debate is a mark of keen engagement—a living embodiment of the Talmudic dictum that “iron sharpens iron.” Dismissing them misses the point. Instead, we need to meet them with genuine respect and engage them earnestly, honoring the serious Jewish identity that drives their questions even while having tough, honest conversations about the implications of anti-Zionist activism.

To understand why this political whiplash feels so acute for younger generations, consider the constructive shared history of American and Israeli Jews that modern anti-Zionism minimizes. The seeds of commonality and collective responsibility were planted early in the campaign for Jewish statehood. The center-left Zionist political coalition of the 1930s and 1940s, which ultimately built the Jewish state, relied in significant measure on American Jewish support, forging an early bond of mutual obligation. Recognizing the dangers of assimilationist forces without and extremist right-wing factions within, advocates for Jewish sovereignty from across the social, religious, and political spectrum—many motivated by a social democratic impulse that infused the New Deal era and the Labor Zionist movement—placed paramount importance on the state-in-the-making as a liberal Jewish democracy.

Indeed, though a dismissive attitude toward the diaspora has been a constant in Zionist philosophical discourse since the movement’s inception, an equally significant factor was the wider appreciation for and active engagement with American Jewry—not as a compromised diasporic existence, but as an equal partner with a shared commitment to egalitarian values and a common destiny. Golda Meir, who championed this inclusive outlook and described America as “a land full of opportunities and freedom,” recognized that Jews worldwide were merely shaped by geography and history, and ultimately bound by kinship. Speaking to a Chicago Jewish audience in 1948 on the eve of Israel’s independence, she explained: “We are not a better breed… It so happened that we are there and you are here. I am certain that if you were in Palestine and we were in the United States, you would be doing what we are doing there.” In short, Golda was articulating a pragmatic ethos of shared responsibility—one that demands a willingness to engage with the ethical burden of Jewish power rather than abandoning it.

Decades later, the Israeli author Amos Oz similarly defended the necessity of a Jewish state while setting clear limits, comparing the Zionist enterprise to the right of a “drowning man who clings to the only plank he can,” while adding that he has no right to push others into the sea. In the wake of the Israel-Egypt peace treaty of 1979 and the return of the Sinai peninsula to Egyptian control, Oz unflinchingly warned that a prolonged occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip would corrupt the moral fabric of the state. He taught us that confronting this dynamic and dark reality is not an act of betrayal; it is an act of love. True Jewish patriotism operates at this painful intersection; the bond of shame can be tighter and far more honest than either blind uncritical pride or the hollow finality of rejection.

Today, roughly 86 percent of the world’s Jewish population lives in America and Israel. The destiny of the Jewish people remains fundamentally bound to the survival of the liberal framework in both places, with the true centers of power in modern Jewish life anchored in Washington and Jerusalem. It is precisely the parallel decay of our foundational institutions that transforms our plural loyalties into an agonizing burden, activating the very bond of shame described by Carlo Ginzburg. The vital civic architecture of both American and Israeli society is threatened by internal rot—in each case, straining to maintain its integrity and pushed to the limit, though not yet buckling. The structural crisis of our day is driven by the reality that the foundational compacts of the West, exemplified by America and Israel, are corroding from within, propelled by leaders who treat constitutional norms and cultural pluralism as mere obstacles to authoritarian proclivities and partisan agendas.

The heavy weight of this bond of shame is laid bare in Israel, where Benjamin Netanyahu’s successive far-right coalition governments have relentlessly undermined the nation’s commitment to representative democracy. Netanyahu has systematically hollowed out the possibilities of a peaceful two-state framework, vilified domestic political dissent, and normalized right-wing extremism. By prioritizing an aggressive judicial overhaul designed to strip the Supreme Court of its review powers, his administration fractured the country’s internal cohesion—ignoring explicit warnings from the defense establishment that this deep structural instability would invite regional adversaries, a warning tragically validated on October 7. The subsequent multi-front war has resulted in Gaza’s staggering devastation, massive Palestinian civilian casualties, and deep humanitarian suffering in Israel and Palestine. Under the guise of achieving “total victory,” Netanyahu deploys perpetual conflict as a permanent strategy for holding onto power—a zero-sum logic that isolates Israel from its closest allies and threatens its democratic soul.

An equal, parallel shame weighs on the American side of the ledger, where the democratic experiment faces a degradation driven by an unbridled, transactional populism. Donald Trump has built a political dynasty—anchored in relentless self-aggrandizement and the monetization of the presidency—on the systematic fracturing of constitutional safeguards and global norms alike, replacing a shared civic fabric with a xenophobic, cultist tribalism. At home, this manifests as an assault on the independent judiciary, the weaponization of state levers against political opponents, and the routine demonization of marginalized and vulnerable minorities. Abroad, this brand of politics exploits long-standing international alliances as mere protection rackets—denigrating historical security pacts, cozying up to foreign autocrats, and treating the rules-based international order with open contempt. Seeking to transform a constitutional republic into an instrument of raw, unchecked executive will, Trump’s MAGA ecosystem threatens to hollow out the democratic promise of America from within.

The parallel crises facing America and Israel weigh agonizingly on the hearts of American Jews. Clearly, the answer cannot be to abandon our heritage or the Jewish people writ large. Ultimately, we must explicitly reject the false binaries advocated by ideologues who claim that to be a loyal American means abandoning liberal values, or that to defend human rights means abandoning the Jewish national home. Rather than succumbing to despair, this very reckoning demands looking toward creative frameworks that refuse binary traps—such as the Holy Land Confederation model championed by former Israeli Justice Minister Yossi Beilin and Palestinian attorney Hiba Husseini, which envisions a cooperative, two-state configuration built to withstand today’s messy political realities.

We grow up learning to love America precisely because we are taught to look its historic sins—slavery, the displacement of Native Americans, and its ongoing struggles with inequality—squarely in the eye. We do not demand the dismantling of the United States because its reality falls short of its founding ideals; instead, we protest, we organize, and we vote. Why, then, should Israel be held to a standard of perfection that no other nation on earth could meet? And conversely, why should its current political leadership be granted a blank check to burn down its democratic inheritance while American Jews stand silently on the sidelines?

Looking back, the microhistory of that July 4th camp debate missed the broader, macro-historical truth that bound those two milestones together. Entebbe mattered because it proved the sovereign Jewish state’s capacity to protect the Jewish people; American Independence mattered because it built the liberal, rules-based order that allows both the American Jewish diaspora and Israel to live in freedom.

This is a synthesis with which, as the Jewish public intellectual Hayim Greenberg explained in 1948, Jewish modernity must grapple. Rejecting the anti-Zionist trap of “dual loyalty,” Greenberg championed “patriotism and plural loyalties”—that is, plural attachments as a creative extension of democratic pluralism—proving one can be deeply rooted in the liberal promise of America and simultaneously devoted to a democratic Jewish homeland. Of equal importance, these loyalties are inextricably tied to the future of the entire Jewish people. “If we should ever see a bestialized America,” Greenberg darkly warned, “how long could the State of Israel exist in a world capable of producing such a monster… There is no room for redemption in a monstrous world, amidst universal wickedness.”

A quarter-millennium after the declaration of American independence and half a century after Entebbe, the debate over the future of the Jewish people continues. The only meaningful path forward is to hold fast to the American, Jewish, and Israeli legacies at once—to love deeply, feel shame honestly, criticize constructively, and refuse to let retrograde forces and nihilistic leaders squander the democratic victories of our past and rob the Jewish people of its future.