The Blogs: Brisket and the Israel Day Parade

Wednesday morning was bitter. Democrats took both houses of Congress, the voices hostile to the US-Israel relationship are going to get louder and carry further, and Michigan sent a man who calls Israel’s war a genocide to the Senate. Jews who love Israel and live their Judaism are wondering what tomorrow will bring.

The day after the election, Dan Diker posted two short messages on X. Diker is president of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs and a former secretary-general of the World Jewish Congress, and he is one of the more prominent voices in Israel’s public diplomacy. In the first post he called the vote for El-Sayed suicidal. In the second, about an hour later, he explained why. Leveling genocide libels against the Jewish state and denying Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people, he wrote, is not a policy but perfidy. He closed with a warning aimed at his own people: the Jews who voted for El-Sayed “will soon feel that.”

I share his disgust at the libel. There is nothing lower in my eyes than a Jew who says our glorious sons are cold-blooded mass murderers who set out to kill innocent women and children to exterminate them. But I have no patience left for the shock. Perfidy is the betrayal of something you hold, and most of the Jews he is warning were never given anything to hold. They grew up without Judaism, in communities that taught them being Jewish is a flexible, godless world-fixing programme with a few cherry-picked rituals, watered down just enough for their leaders to keep playing the Jew card.

This week, while Mehdi Hasan jeered Jewish lawmakers, the ADL and AIPAC to “cry more,” some of the Jews who voted for El-Sayed were celebrating with him. The result did not even hurt them. For generations, they were never given an authentic Jewish education, and nobody grieves for something they never had. This is exactly what we should have expected.

I replied that we should stop being shocked when Jews with no connection to Judaism vote for the most progressive candidate, even when that progress tramples the values at the core of our people. Fewer than one in twenty-five non-Orthodox American Jewish children attend a Jewish school. The vote is what that number looks like at the ballot box.

Diker’s answer was that Judaism is the civilization and the nation of our ancestors, carried by witness testimony from generation to generation, and that it requires no faith, only the freedom to choose wisely and continue Jewish nationhood.

It sounds noble, and it rests on nothing. Name the Jewish community that kept the nation, dropped the faith and is still Jewish three generations later. The Hellenizers are gone, and so are the Yiddishists and Bundists who built a Jewish nationhood without God, with its own newspapers, schools and literature. Many of the secular Zionists who dreamt of Altneuland have no Jewish descendants today, and Herzl’s own family line ended within two generations. Among the families who built the state, the descendants largely either moved closer to their faith or drifted into the post-Zionism that votes for El-Sayed. There is Brad Lander, I suppose, and we know how much he supports the Jewish state.

For most of Jewish history the question never arose, because Jewish identity and Jewish observance were the same thing. Emancipation separated them, and the experiment did not end well. The Jews who stayed observant came through as Jews. Most of the family lines that kept the nation and let go of the practice soon left the nation too. The testimony Diker invokes never travelled by itself. It was carried by people who believed it and taught it to their children, and every family line that stopped teaching it stopped arriving.

The American numbers are the most dramatic. Pew’s 2020 survey found that among non-Orthodox Jews who married since 2010, 72% married someone who is not Jewish. Among married Orthodox Jews the figure is 2%. Belonging has never required observance, but lasting has. Seventy-eight years of a Jewish state have not bent that curve. A flag can inspire pride, but it has not shown that it can produce Jewish grandchildren.

The schools tell the same story. More than 1.3 million American Jewish children receive no Jewish education.

I am the grandson of four Holocaust survivors. My mother grew up in Regensburg, near the DP camp where her parents were taken after liberation. My father is the only surviving child of two Auschwitz survivors. My paternal great-grandparents had left Europe in the 1930s and settled near Pittsburgh. They were traditional, religious Jews, and they reached safety years before the war. My father’s grandmother wrote to him from America. Their descendants are cousins I have never met.

As I grew older and contemplated the magnitude of the loss, I often wept for my European family, destroyed in the Holocaust. Only recently did I realise it is my American family I should be mourning. Some of those who went through Auschwitz survived and built beautiful Jewish families. Of the branch that reached safety, no one survived assimilation.

I wish Diker were right. If nationhood alone could keep Jews from walking away, I would make that case myself, because watching people drift from the nation of their ancestors hurts. But I would be lying if I told a man that because he eats brisket and marches in the Israel Day Parade, his grandchildren will too.

Our leaders should know better than to sugar-coat the facts to stay agreeable. Jewish education outside Orthodoxy is practically non-existent. More than a million American Jewish children receive none at all, and without an introduction to passionate Judaism we are severing them from their roots. Telling Jews that nationhood will carry them without it is a comfortable story told at the bedside. The vote Diker condemns did not come from nowhere. It is the bill for an education American Jewry chose not to pay for, and it will keep arriving until we do.

We need to tell the truth: only an authentic Jewish education and a true connection with the Eternal ensure our survival.