Time to Stop Negating the Diaspora

Israelis often hold deeply prejudiced views about American Jews. I might have seen it as racism if we were not all Jews, bound to each other as family and tribe. And I know this prejudice from the inside, because it was once my own unconscious bias.

I remember going to a synagogue on the Upper West Side shortly after arriving in New York for graduate school. Everything felt slightly off. The kippot were not the “right” kind. The chazan had the “wrong” accent. I missed my home, Jerusalem, where I believed Jewish life was authentic, sophisticated and fluent in Hebrew. 

I have now lived in the United States for almost 30 years. Over time, I have come to appreciate and to love the reflective, messy, pluralistic reality of Jewish life in New York, along with the promise and the challenges of diaspora existence.

I have been thinking about this tension for years. But two recent articles, by Moran Sharir in Ha’aretz and Hagai Segal in Makor Rishon, pushed me to write about it more directly. Even though they come from opposite ends of Israel’s political and religious spectrum, they both display a striking lack of understanding of American Jewry. More than that, both fail to recognize the legitimacy of Jewish life in the diaspora and the genuine moral anguish many Jews feel as they watch the actions of the Israeli state.

To even begin this conversation, we need a few grounding facts. There are roughly 7.2 million Jews in Israel (alongside about 2 million Arab citizens of Israel). In the United States, there are a similar number of Jews – between 6.5 and 7.5 million. Approximately 1.5 million Jews live elsewhere around the world. The Jewish people today are, in a very real sense, divided between two major centers.

In response to emancipation, antisemitism, and the promise of modernity, two primary Jewish paths emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 

Zionism argued that Jews, like other peoples, require sovereignty in a national homeland in order to thrive as a people. From a small and fragile state in 1948, Israel has become a regional military power, a hub of technological innovation, and the site of an extraordinary cultural revival: the Hebrew language, literature, music, and Jewish thought. It has served as a refuge for Jews in danger and as a source of pride and inspiration. 

And yet, Israel is also marked by deep and unresolved problems: most notably, its ongoing inability to reach a just and lasting agreement with the roughly five million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Still, Israelis consistently rank relatively high in global happiness indices, a testament to the complexity of life there.

The second path, which was by far the more popular before the Shoah, was to build Jewish life in the diaspora, particularly in the United States. There, Jews developed a different model of security which was built not on sovereignty, but on political structures that protect minority rights within a liberal democracy.

American Jews did not merely benefit from existing protections; they helped shape them. Jews were central to the civil rights movement, the struggles for women’s equality, LGBTQ rights, freedom of speech, and religious liberty. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, they advocated for refugee protections, not only for Jews, but for anyone fleeing persecution.

They arrived at a different conclusion than the Zionists: that the best way to protect Jews is to help build a society that protects everyone.

We are accustomed to hearing about Israeli success from both Israelis and from Jews around the world. But perhaps it is time for diaspora Jews to speak, without embarrassment, about the success of Jewish life outside Israel.

How do we measure success? 

It is not simple, but perhaps even imperfect metrics can help us tell a story of these two centers of Jewish life. 

Israelis have received roughly 14 Nobel Prizes while Jews worldwide have received around 200. Israelis have won about 20 Olympic medals while Jews globally have earned around 450. And in cultural life – from literature to music to film – the impact of diaspora Jews is vast and dramatically exceeds their relative numbers. Even in areas of Jewish and rabbinic thought one can list great minds in the diaspora such as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Levinas, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein and Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik.  

There is another measure, one that diaspora Jews are often reluctant to emphasize: safety.

Antisemitism is real and rising, in the United States and globally. And yet, between 2000 and 2026, there have been 38 documented cases of Jews murdered in antisemitic attacks in the U.S. Compare this to Israel, where thousands of Jews (3500-4500) have been killed in war and terror attacks over the same period.

This does not settle the argument. Some claim that Jews are safer in the diaspora because Israel exists. Others argue that Jews are sometimes targeted abroad because of Israel’s actions. Neither claim can be definitively proven. But the numbers complicate a long-standing assumption that sovereignty is the only path to safety.

For decades, many American Jews have tolerated Israeli voices such as Sharir and Segal’s that dismiss or delegitimize diaspora life. Sharir, unable to grapple with the genuine horror that many Jews feel when watching the destruction of Gaza and the systemic violence and discrimination in the West Bank, suggests that anti-Zionist Jews are merely seeking approval from non-Jewish progressives. He harshly suggests that the debate between European Bundists and Zionists was settled in Auschwitz, failing to understand that there are competing answers to the questions of what it means to demand “Never Again”. 

Segal casts himself as a type of prophet, warning complacent American Jews who sit, in his view, comfortably along the banks of the Hudson. He offers an ultimatum: come to Israel in the next five years or we shall no longer count you as part of our Jewish community, casting you as irrelevant. 

This too, feels uninformed in light of enormous financial support world Jewry offers after 10/7, and the political capital they spent to buttress US support for Israel. Segal is also blind to the gap between his wish to populate settlements in the West Bank and even Gaza and most US Jews who see these as violations of international law and Jewish ethics often involving acts of ethnic cleansing.

But it is not only Israelis who make this mistake. At a fundraiser I attended, the featured video included a student who made aliyah and volunteered for the IDF. In Israel, the student said, he was the main character in Jewish history, while in the U.S. he was a spectator. Jewish history, according to this graduate, and endorsed by the organization that featured him, takes place in Israel. The 8.5 million Jews around the world were mere spectators, not even supporting actors.

It is time for a different posture, one of mutual respect and support. 

Just as diaspora Jews have long supported Israel, emotionally, politically, and financially, Israelis must learn to respect and understand the choice to live a Jewish life beyond its borders. Writers like Sharir and Segal might begin by visiting, listening and reading.

It took me years to unlearn my own Israeli assumptions. I have realized that Jews prayed for thousands of years in a wide variety of Hebrew accents matching the languages they spoke, none of which were more correct than others. I have grown to appreciate the quirky earnestness of American colorful and shiny bar mitzvah kippot. I am grateful that my husband never had to serve in any military. I am very proud that my daughters can spot and reject racism even when it comes from their own relatives.  And I deeply respect the commitment of many in the Jewish world to support their schools, synagogues, JCCs and federations in order to create the communities they want to live in.

On this Yom Ha’atzmaut, alongside my deep connection and love for  Israel, I find myself holding a broader gratitude for the multiple ways Jews have learned to live, to build, and to thrive.

Perhaps the time has come to reject the idea of “shlilat ha’gola,” the negation of the diaspora, and to celebrate the multiplicity of expressions of Jewish life.