Preventing the Destruction of Jewish Peoplehood

Something has shifted in how Israel relates to Jews around the world, and in how Jews around the world relate to Israel. The shift is not simply a matter of disagreement about policy, though policy disagreements are real and serious. It stems from a growing ideological resistance, particularly from within Israel, to the very idea that the Jewish communities of the Diaspora belong – fully, legitimately – to the same People as we do. The term Jewish Peoplehood, with all its clumsiness, was always an attempt to name that belonging. What concerns me is that the concept is being quietly abandoned, both by those who see it as irrelevant and by those who oppose what it represents.

The critiques of Jewish Peoplehood are not new. Scholars like Shaul Magid have argued that in a post-ethnic America, where Jewish identity is increasingly voluntary and fluid, the old frameworks no longer hold. Noam Pianko has warned that the discourse of Peoplehood has drifted toward thin connection for its own sake, disconnected from the ritual, practice, and belief that once gave Jewish life its backbone. These are serious arguments, and I take them as such.

What troubles me more is the ideological opposition to Peoplehood that has taken root in certain quarters here in Israel. This is not simply shlilat ha’golah (the classic Zionist negation of exile), the argument that Jewish life outside Israel is diminished or unsustainable. That position, whatever one thinks of it, at least still locates Diaspora Jews inside the Am, the People, even if on the wrong side of the ocean. This is different: an active rejection of the legitimacy of Jewish identities that do not conform to the religious and political definitions being increasingly codified by Israel’s current governing coalition. It is, in some ways, not the negation of exile at all. It is the negation of the Jews.

The legislation being pushed through the current Knesset led by Benjamin Netanyahu regarding conversion, the ongoing exclusion of non-Orthodox prayer from the national spaces of Jewish life, the treatment of any figure whose Jewish identity complicates the prevailing religious consensus as a threat rather than an expression of Jewish complexity; these are not isolated political moves. They reflect a worldview in which the Jewish communities of North America and Europe, predominantly liberal and non-Orthodox, are being reclassified. They are becoming Them. And once they become Them, the architecture of mutual responsibility – Kol Yisrael arevim ze bazeh, all Israel are responsible for one another – is lost. It will not hold what it was built to hold if half of world Jewry has been quietly removed from its embrace.

We are, as human beings, always going to have an Us and a Them. I don’t think we can solve that problem. What we do need to solve for is who gets placed on which side of the line, and who draws it. Jewish Peoplehood has always insisted, at its best, that the line runs between the Jewish people and the rest of the world. Not through the Jewish people themselves. The tragedy forming in front of us is the redrawing of that line. And the tragedy is accelerating because we have been sucked so deeply into our own separate narratives that we can no longer clearly see what we are doing to one another.

What does the destruction of Jewish Peoplehood actually look like? At some point, not far into the future, if current trends continue, the American Jewish community will stop experiencing Israel as their home. Not their physical home, of course, many of them never expected that, but their ideological and spiritual home, the place where the Jewish story is being written in the most urgent present tense. Once that connection is severed, what will remain is the practical and political consequence of indifference. The lobbying infrastructure that has tied American Jewish life to the security of Israel will disappear. The political will in Washington to stand by Israel in moments of genuine existential risk will be greatly reduced. And this war has made it undeniable how much Israel depends on that relationship. We have seen it clearly. To pretend otherwise – to imagine that Christian Zionist support, or a new alliance with an authoritarian power, can substitute for the deep and historically grounded solidarity of world Jewry – is a dangerous fantasy.

But beyond the geopolitical calculation, there is something that strikes closer to home. We have always been one people. Not a people without argument, not a people without fracture: the rifts among Jewish communities, within Israel and between Israel and the Diaspora, have always been real. Mordecai Kaplan, quoting the sociologist E.W. Burgess, called Jewish life “an experiment in antagonistic cooperation.” And still, even through the arguments, even through the schisms, we have remained, recognizably, one Am. My children – Liam, Amit, and Noam – all carry the Hebrew root Am in their names, a reflection of my personal attempt to pass it on and how deeply I believe in the idea of shared Jewish belonging. To look through the eyes of my father, a Rabbi and Holocaust scholar, and my mother, who comes from a long line of Rabbis, both from families that fled the pogroms of Eastern Europe, and to say that our generation could not hold it together, that our Sinat Hinam, our political short-sightedness, our ideological rigidity, finally split us at the seams, that is the doomsday scenario I lose sleep over. Not because of what it would mean abstractly for Jewish civilization, but because we would be the generation that let it happen.

My teacher and Rabbi, Michael Marmur, writes that “every strong cultural grounding, every prism through which reality is perceived, necessarily includes barriers and blind spots. Both our capacity for insight and our myopia often have a common origin.” Because of this we need to recognize the aspaklaria, the reflective surface through which we both see outward and encounter ourselves. I believe that one of the most important functions that Jewish Peoplehood serves is precisely this: it enables one community to hold a mirror up to another.

Israel needs the progressive Jewish communities of America and Europe to show it what its current path lookslike from outside the “super-sparta” narrative that has defined it over the past few years. And those communities need Israel to hold a mirror up to their own blind spots as well, to the ways that the progressive left in America often avoids genuine engagement with the complexity of Jewish survival and sovereignty, to the tendency to make security dilemmas that define daily life here invisible or irrelevant. Neither community can see itself clearly on its own. Both need the other.

To hold that mirror up to one another, we have to be in genuine relationship. And genuine relationship requires mifgash, encounter, person to person, not only through screens and position papers and social media arguments. Real exchanges, joint immersive experiences, deep dialogue. There are organizations – Hillel among them, and several others – that understand this and have built their work around it. But mifgash remains marginal to the central agenda of Jewish education, particularly in Israel. Israeli students learn about the Holocaust and about Zionism. They learn very little about who the Jews of New York or London or São Paulo actually are, what their relationship to Israel feels like from inside their own lives, and why it matters that they remain connected to us. The gap that grows due to a lack of mifgash is not neutral. It prepares the ground for the contempt that ideological separation requires. It is this gap growing between our People that is redrawing the line between Them and Us.

This divergence is not inevitable. It is a choice made, every day, about who to be in relationship with, what to amplify, and what to ignore. Closing that gap – through educational exchange, shared platforms, intentional cross-community reading and listening – is unglamorous, slow work. But it is the work that prevents two separate peoples from forming where one people used to be.

Trends are moving in a dangerous direction, and I know that they are not being moved by accident. There are those who benefit, politically and religiously, from the narrowing of the Jewish Us, who draw energy and authority from the exclusion of communities they do not recognize as fully legitimate. We cannot let them.

The mirror enabling us to see each other has not completely clouded over. The Jewish People have stayed together, imperfectly, stubbornly, through worse ruptures than this one. The question now is whether enough of us in Israel and in Jewish communities around the world, across denominations and political orientations recognize what is actually at stake before the fracture becomes irreversible. Not because we all agree. We will not all agree. But because we still want to be one Us. One People. One Am.