Are American Jews and Israeli Jews growing apart?

When my sister calls from Giv’at Shmuel, she tells me about the 400 red alerts and accidentally sleeping through the sirens and her fear for her Nahal Brigade boyfriend. Sometimes she can’t talk much at all, or she cracks jokes and evades questions. 

She’s in her second year as an oleh (immigrant to Israel). You wouldn’t know it — her hair is big and curly, her skin brown from the sun, her Hebrew smoothly accented, her clothes loose and baggy, her feet in beat-up Naot. I’m absurdly proud of how well she acclimated (like maybe it says something about how well I could, just because we share the same olive complexion and dark eyes).

It’s absurd, because I live on the Upper East Side of New York, the part of the city captured in TV shows like Gossip Girl, which show some of the glitz, but not the reality. It’s absurd, because she tells me about bomb shelters in the same phone call as I talk about Thanksgiving plans. It’s absurd because she has visited the shiva of more than one soldier friend this past year who died in combat, an experience I can’t envision. It’s absurd, because the past year has taught me I really don’t understand her like I did when we lived in the same country.

What I have noted with concern these past months isn’t that our realities have simply drifted further and further apart; it’s that our lives’ biggest moments — of celebration, distress, and grief — are so different as to be incongruent. The common ground of our lives is becoming smaller and less stable. 

One of the things to come of this war, I think, is the trivialization of issues such as these; addressing incomprehension between two peoples is low on the priority list, amid the other louder concerns affecting both.

Where we diverge most significantly is in the perception of the threats we face: American Jews are primarily fighting for our identity, while Israeli Jews fight for their security. Neither is wrong, and neither struggle should be dismissed. Both are historic Jewish concerns.

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A 2023 AJC survey of American Jews’ experience of antisemitism revealed that 97 percent of American Jews had not been a victim of a physically threatening antisemitic incident, but that “a plurality of American Jews reported feeling unsafe wearing Jewish symbols in public since October 7.” American Jews are overwhelmed with navigating the American-Jewish identity, as it is threatened by other parties that call America home, and this creates a feeling of vulnerability.

The trauma felt these last 14 months is one of betrayal — that the country we love, support, and participate in has shown it is not as hospitable to Jews as it was previously. Derek Penslar, a historian and the director of Harvard University’s Center for Jewish Studies, captured this poignantly in an article about Jewish American life post-October 7: “the sense of betrayal assumes that Jews have been fully engaged and on equal terms within American society.” In other words, American Jews have contributed to the society around us and have built an identity around this civic engagement; now, we are struggling to acclimate to an America that is not the goldene medineh (golden land) to us on an increasingly systemic level.

And, at the same time, we are trying to counter the mischaracterization of our identities, such as the propaganda that Zionism is immoral.

Peter Beinart, whose most recent book has been called “unreliably one-sided” and “inflammatory to the point of offense,” wrote in a March 2024 op-ed for The New York Times that “the emerging rupture between American liberalism and American Zionism constitutes the greatest transformation in American Jewish politics in half a century,” and that this rupture “will redefine American Jewish life for decades to come.” Beinart is wrong on many things, but I believe he is right about this, although it leads me to a conclusion divergent from his. 

The emerging rupture is not inherent; there is no intrinsic contradiction in American liberalism and Zionism. I would argue this, but the brilliant Haviv Rettig Gur argues it better: he defines Zionism as a “rescue project.” Thereby, I would paraphrase, Zionists are people who believe that Jews have the right to live (and be rescued when that right is threatened). Rettig Gur tweeted about American liberalism as tied to the Zionist rescue project back in May: “The American Jewish lesson from the Holocaust is to double down on tolerance and liberalism for all, because American Jews believe they were saved from the 20th century by these features of America.” I believe the rupture is actually rooted in the feelings of betrayal and vulnerability, as the world around us demands we condemn Zionism if we are truly committed to the American dream.

Within the same tweet, Rettig Gur segued into the Israeli Jewish experience, and the reason Israeli Jews are not primarily having a crisis of identity post-October 7: “Israeli Jews… couldn’t avoid the cataclysm by relying on the great kindnesses and strengths of America. No one saved the Jews who would become Israel. No one would even take them in after the genocide. So their lesson was the opposite of the American Jewish one. They became obsessed with self-reliance.”

Israeli Jews are fighting to ensure Israeli national security. The threat to Israeli Jews (and arguably, to all Israelis) is far less ideological. Israel Policy Forum summarizes this threat as triggered by October 7, which “violated Israelis’ sense of security in their own country, undermining a core promise of the state to keep Jews safe.” They conclude that for Israelis, both  “politically and in terms of security, the path forward out of the morass is far from certain.”

New York Times opinion columnist (and three-time Pulitzer Prize winner) Thomas Friedman, whose extensive career involved reporting on Israel and Lebanon, expressed the enormity of this physical threat in a piece written one month after the October 7 attack. “It is crystal clear to me that Israel is in real danger — more danger than at any other time since its War of Independence in 1948,” he wrote. “Israel is facing threats from a set of enemies who combine medieval theocratic worldviews with 21st-century weaponry.” 

The trauma of these months is a physical one: the absence of the hostages, the sons and brothers and fathers numbering among IDF casualties, the burnt and broken remains of homes and cities. Gallup, which ran a series of surveys in the region, documented the truth of the safety threat: “the percentage [of Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem] favoring armed struggle is up from 23% in the prior reading, in 2017, to the highest Gallup has recorded, and the number favoring nonviolence is the lowest.” Gallup found that it was exhibited emotionally too, reviewing the statistics they collected post-October 7 and concluding that, since they had begun tracking different countries’ daily negative experiences nearly two decades ago, Israel’s year-on-year increase was the highest it had ever recorded. 

American and Israeli Jews are not monolithic, and their experiences vary. And the differences between our experiences are more complicated than the way they are characterized here. American Jews do feel increasingly physically vulnerable, but I would argue that the majority of the vulnerability felt is rooted in the dogmatic attacks being made daily that threaten the identity of the proud American Jew who contributes and engages with the society around them. Similarly, Israeli Jews also struggle with concerns of identity, but these are overshadowed by the missiles, the bomb shelters, and the soldiers in active combat. Overall, much of the failure to understand and relate to one another currently is due to the different challenges each group faces. 

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When my sister texted me she was excited about the ceasefire between Lebanon and Israel, I messaged back asking if she was celebrating. 

Not really, she informed me — she was on a bus to Raanana, she had no money in her bank account, and she had hours of homework. But she wished me a happy Thanksgiving and she mentioned she’d made mashed potatoes she was excited to eat.

I’m excited for the mashed potatoes too, I said. 

So maybe our realities are profoundly divergent right now. Maybe we’ll have to fight even harder when this war ends to find common ground. 

But I love her, and she loves me, and that day, almost 6,000 miles apart, two sisters sat down to eat mashed potatoes, and maybe they thought of each other or maybe they just thought about how grateful they were to be eating something warm and home-cooked.

For today, that’s enough.