“… the primary concern is the growing disharmony, mutual disinterest and even sometimes alienation between American Jewry and the State of Israel”

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Many of the characteristics that have ensured the continued survival, resilience, recurring prosperity and leadership of the Jewish people have been compromised in recent decades. Primarily, both in Israel and the U.S., the architecture of the Jewish people as a network of communities organized around powerful community institutions is disintegrating, atomizing our people into households and individuals. Further, we are no longer unique in being worldwide, universally literate and possessing a global legal system. And a global wave of anti-Semitism and the rise of a potentially nuclear Iran cast a dark cloud on the future of many Jews around the world.

Nonetheless, the primary concern is the growing disharmony, mutual disinterest and even sometimes alienation between American Jewry and the State of Israel. This worry goes deeper than the sentiments of Israel-fatigue that one encounters across communities and around the USA, which is caused by the permanent fight against the relentless anti-Semitic attacks on Israel’s legitimacy, as well as by the need to deal with Israel’s idiosyncrasies. In fact, the hard reality is that American Jewry and the State of Israel may actually be evolving in different directions, away from each other.

Gidi Grinstein, “Drifting Apart, Coming Together”, Israel Now: A Special Supplement to the Jewish Week (29 May 2015), 20.

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