There Is a Widening Gulf Within American Jewry

There is a widening gulf within the Jewish community as a gathering storm is forming on the horizon of our republic, one that threatens the future of the American Jewish community. The growing divide among Jewish voters is no longer merely a political disagreement—it is a profound fracture in Jewish identity. That widening gulf stems, in large measure, from three corrosive forces: propaganda, assimilation, and indoctrination.

The first is propaganda. Today’s Jewish youth have been raised in a world far removed from that of their parents and grandparents. Earlier generations either survived the Holocaust or learned of its horrors directly from those who did. For many young Jews, however, the Holocaust has become a distant historical lesson rather than a living memory.

Taking advantage of this ignorance, Holocaust deniers and diminishers—radical Islamists, neo-Nazis, and their ideological fellow travelers—have poisoned the well of historical truth from which many naïve and impressionable young people draw their worldview. While most young Jews rightly reject outright Holocaust denial, too many have embraced equally pernicious falsehoods about Israel, accepting the libel that the Jewish state is committing a Holocaust against the Palestinian Arabs. They have been taught to believe that Israel practices apartheid and is perpetrating genocide—accusations that invert history, trivialize the Holocaust, and demonize the world’s only Jewish state.

The apartheid charge collapses under even the most cursory examination of the facts. Unlike apartheid South Africa, where racial segregation was codified in law and political rights were denied to the Black majority, Israel grants full citizenship and equal legal rights to its Arab citizens, who comprise one-fifth of the country’s population. They vote in national elections, form political parties, serve in the Knesset, sit on Israel’s highest courts, and hold senior positions throughout every sector of Israeli society.

Arab Israelis have served as cabinet ministers, ambassadors, senior military officers, university presidents, physicians, entrepreneurs, diplomats, and leaders in academia, business, and the arts. Arab doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and emergency medical personnel work alongside their Jewish colleagues in Israel’s hospitals, treating patients without regard to religion or ethnicity. Israeli universities educate Jewish and Arab students together in the same classrooms. Israel’s Supreme Court has included Arab justices, among them Salim Joubran and George Karra, who participated in some of the nation’s most consequential legal decisions. Arab political parties regularly criticize the government from the floor of the Knesset—an impossibility under a genuine apartheid regime.

These realities stand in stark contrast to apartheid South Africa, where the law explicitly barred political participation, segregated every aspect of public life, and denied fundamental civil rights based solely on race.

Israel’s Declaration of Independence could not be clearer. It pledges that the State of Israel “will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex” and guarantees freedom of religion, conscience, language, education, and culture. Like every democracy, Israel struggles to live up perfectly to its ideals, but the existence of social challenges or discrimination does not transform a democratic state into an apartheid regime. To apply that label to Israel is not a serious legal or historical judgment; it is a political slogan designed to delegitimize the Jewish state by stripping the word “apartheid” of its historical meaning.

The genocide accusation is equally indefensible. In 1948, approximately 900,000 Palestinian Arabs lived in Gaza, Judea, and Samaria. Today that population exceeds six million. Whatever criticisms one may level at Israeli policy, sustained population growth is fundamentally inconsistent with the charge that Israel has pursued a decades-long campaign of extermination.

The second force is assimilation. Decades of secularization have steadily weakened Jewish attachment to Judaism, Torah, and Jewish practice. In many communities, social justice has been preserved while the Jewish foundation upon which it rests has been discarded.

Tikkun olam—repairing the world—is not a modern political slogan but an ancient Jewish ideal rooted in thousands of years of Torah. Judaism calls upon Jews to improve the world by remaining faithful to Jewish law, ethics, tradition, and covenant. As Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks taught, preserving the family, strengthening Jewish education, honoring human dignity, and remaining loyal to Jewish identity are themselves acts of tikkun olam. “Only by being true to ourselves,” he wrote, “can we be true to other people.”

Rabbi Sacks repeatedly warned that assimilation erodes Jewish continuity. His observation remains as relevant today as ever: “Whenever Jews abandoned the life of commands, within a few generations they lost their identity.”

The third force is indoctrination. For years, schools, universities, the media, Hollywood, and social media have saturated young minds with a narrative portraying Israel as a colonial, racist oppressor. Through relentless repetition, that narrative has become accepted as fact by many who have never seriously examined the history of the conflict.

The result has been devastating. Jews are branded as “White oppressors,” despite the extraordinary ethnic diversity of the Jewish people. Yet the very same Jews are condemned by neo-Nazis for not being white enough. The contradiction is obvious. Antisemitism simply adapts itself to whatever ideology is currently fashionable.

Together, propaganda, assimilation, and indoctrination are steadily unraveling the cohesion of the American Jewish community. At the same time, the political distance between many American Jews and Israel continues to widen. Progressive calls for more “daylight” between Washington and Jerusalem were never merely about diplomacy. Their inevitable effect is to weaken Israel’s security in one of the world’s most hostile regions while encouraging those who seek her destruction.

The consequences now reach far beyond foreign policy. Some Jews have become willing—sometimes unknowingly, sometimes deliberately—to subordinate Jewish security and the Jewish people’s ancestral claim to the Land of Israel in favor of movements that deny Israel’s legitimacy. In the most disturbing cases, some have even expressed sympathy for Hamas, a terrorist organization whose founding charter openly called for Israel’s destruction and the elimination of the world’s only Jewish state.

The warning signs could not be clearer. The greater the “daylight” allowed to grow between America and Israel, the darker the storm clouds become for Jews everywhere. Unless these destructive trends are reversed, today’s political divisions are the first warnings of an approaching storm—one that threatens a far more dangerous future for American Jewry.