Beside what the media tells them, American Jewish youth know little about Israel

Judy Maltz, a journalist for Haaretz, has just returned from a project involving American Jewish college kids; the object was to find out what October 7, 2023, means to them, has it changed their regard for Israel, etc. It’s a vast topic if done correctly, and here’s what I have to say.

Whether it’s Judy Maltz’s article or any of the new birth of religious groups and divisions in America we find no differences among them: American sympathies go for the underdog in every case; once he is ascertained there’s no going back and, in the case of Gaza, constant repetition in sound and picture (for years, much longer than the coverage of October 7, 2023) trained spectators to view Israel as the bad guy: we were all anxious to stop the war and to end misery. But we, I, balanced it with how bad Hamas was: their lack of pity for their own, their refusal to make terms and return the hostages, etc. That is, irrespective of TV commentators, Israelis retreat into their Left or Right historical position about the Arabs and stay there.

For Judy Maltz’s students their identity as Jews is their identity in politics; not only where Israel is concerned but their morality, e.g., their connection to Judaism is expressed through their Americanism: Woodrow Wilson, US president in World War I, determined that every people is entitled to self-determination (we got Balfour in 1917) and that means Jews and Palestinians; racism is part of the evil policy of exploitation, economic and social, that the Prophets say must be destroyed. Certainly, Democratic America is against the Settlements and has been since 1967. This makes ‘The Coalition’ and Israel under the Likud,  Ben Gvir and Smotrich unsupportable, and they’re ashamed of Israel. I’ve been saying for years that the press doesn’t cover our Left, that Bibi won by 4 votes, which is a mere technicality, not a majority. Did you see how surprised Witkoff and Jared Kushner were when the Israelis booed Bibi at Hostages Square? What do they really know about us?

In the 60’s, American Jews for the first time became active in American politics and it was then that they organized themselves into what we see today. They also divide into Left and Right: into the West Bank, Gaza, and the Republican Party, or the two-state solution and normalization. The Orthodox, with exceptions – Rav Chaim Seidler, Smol Emuni. US Hartman, etc., – support the Likud while their opposition, Judy’s students, have a long history of attachment to Liberalism, Civil Rights and the Democratic Party that stems from Roosevelt (World War II) when the Jews of New York began their odyssey from a laboring class upward. The split became not only religious but also political when Orthodox Jews backed Republican Nixon in his Vietnam War; starting, I believe at Columbia University, ‘The New Left’ came into being together with the Jewish descendants of ‘depression-equality era’….all youth were in University together formulating what you saw on TV. I myself was in “Women’s Strike For Peace” when the Yom Kippur War tore the entire women’s movement into pro and anti-Israel factions, and into fertile ground for BDS, Palestine Action and the rest we’ve seen on the Columbia campus.

When I came to Jerusalem in 1975, communication between Israel and America was very different. It appears the successive Likud governments have failed in the education of Zionist principles, in Israeli history, as well as in goodwill relations with the Diaspora. After all, the Brooklyn aliyah descending over the green line need not trouble about equality and legal political democratic rights. And they certainly don’t need to encourage an aliyah from the Left and seculars like me. But both Lefts have all the basic principles in common, and so it will be that in time we’ll get together.