Home-Land

There is a particular audacity to the statistics being waved around right now. J Street commissions a poll. Haaretz runs the headline. Peter Beinart writes the bestseller. The conclusion is always the same: young American Jews are detaching from Israel, and Israel has nobody to blame but itself.

It is a remarkable argument. And it is exactly backwards.

The answer tells you nothing about Israel. It tells you everything about what was already lost before the question was asked.

Show me a Jew who feels genuinely Jewish in their gut, with the weight of something irreplaceable, who doesn’t care about Israel. Show me a Jew in love with his Judaism whose heart doesn’t beat for our homeland. They do not exist.

Because the emotional connection to Jewish peoplehood and the emotional connection to the land of Israel are not two separate things, they are the same bond. A bond older than the Torah itself. The land was promised before the commandments were given, woven into the very identity of a people still being formed. You cannot love what you are and be indifferent to the one place on earth that exists because of what you are.

And before the objection arrives, yes, some will produce their ideologues. Jews whose resentment has become a religion of its own. They will say they love Judaism, they care about Israel, just not this Israel. What they practice is not Judaism. It is Post-Judaism. A movement that wears our vocabulary while gutting our substance.

The Jews showing up in J Street’s polls as “detached from Israel” are not making a sophisticated geopolitical judgment, or rather, they are, and that is precisely the point. Stripped of faith, stripped of ancestral connection, a purely rational calculation about Israel makes perfect sense: it is costly, complicated, and someone else’s problem. The only reason to stay invested, to absorb the complexity, to carry the burden, is because it is yours. Because something in you knows it was promised to you before the Torah was given. Without that, walking away is not betrayal. It is logic.

For many, Israel was the last barrier before total assimilation, the final thread that survived even after everything else faded. What we are witnessing now is not drift. It is free fall.

This is the question the pollsters never ask. Is your spouse Jewish? Do you want your grandchildren to be as Jewish as your grandparents were? Are you committed to handing forward what was handed to you, not as a cultural memory, not as an ethnic footnote, but as a living inheritance? That question and the Israel question have the same answer. Always. The Jews who are fighting for that chain to hold support Israel. The Jews who have quietly made peace with it snapping on their watch do not. It is not a coincidence. It is the same disconnection measured twice.

So when J Street, whose president declared himself “persuaded” on Tisha B’Av 2025 that Israel is committing genocide, stands before a microphone with polling data and announces that young American Jews are drifting, they are not delivering a verdict on Israel.

They are describing the results of their own work. Of the institutional choices that made Jewish identity optional, then universal, then weightless. That replaced the particular with the abstract and called it progress.

They hollowed the soul and do not understand why the eyes don’t sparkle.

The tragedy is not what the polls show about Israel. The tragedy is that no Israel means the end of their Judaism.

Israel is the litmus test of Jewish resilience.

We need not worry about Judaism or about Israel. Both have stood the test of time and will continue to do so. What we must worry about are our brothers and sisters in the clutches of movements that feed them outrage instead of nourishing them. This is a wake-up call, not to argue with the pollsters, not to fight the headlines, but to reach those who were polled and, through their detachment from Israel, are telling us something far more urgent: we are losing them.

Their soul is crying for help. They want to be freed from this blindfold.

Let us bring them back to the faith of their ancestors. The polls will improve either way, but we want them to improve because our brothers and sisters have come home. Not because they are too far gone to be counted.