Are We One?: Jewish Identity in the United States and Israel (review)

Jerold Auerbach is a distinguished historian. An earlier book Rabbis and Lawyers reflects not only impeccable scholarship but very keen observations on American Jewish life. If I'm not mistaken, I reviewed it when it appeared and had nothing but praise for it. I do recall assigning big chunks of it to classes I once taught on American Jewish life. Hence it is with some surprise that I found his present study unsettling.

Auerbach's new book, Are We One?, is an extended historical essay without footnotes but with a scholarly appendix. Like his previous work the argument is clear and well written. I would summarize it as follows. American Jews are driven by fears of being charged with dual loyalty. The only way American Zionist leaders could render Zionism palatable was to reinterpret it and eradicate the contradictions between Zionist and American values, spinning a "seamless web of unity and harmony in which underlying conflicts...are all but eradicated" (p. 24). Zionism and later on the state of Israel itself were interpreted as the realization of American liberalism. But liberalism, so attractive to American Jews, is really "a strategy of assimilation" (p. 207). As long as Israel could be interpreted as the embodiment of American liberal values, American Jews could support Israel. By implication, when Israel strayed so far from these values that American Jews could no longer interpret Israeli behavior as consonant with American liberalism, support waned.

Zionism, that is the real Zionism, despite its particularist elements, is in basic conflict with the Jewish tradition by seeking to "normalize" the lives of the Jewish people. The reality of Israel's security concerns, the threats and attacks by its neighbors rendered normalization impossible until most recently. The turning point was the period following the Six Day and the Yom Kippur Wars. Instead of choosing the path of Jewish tradition and Jewish particularism at a point in time when it seemed most possible, Israeli leaders strove for normalization which includes, in addition to the adoption of western consumerist culture, the unrealistic effort to normalize relations with the Palestinians. Israel, in the 1980s but increasingly in the 1990s has entered a post-Zionist phase in which both the Zionist past and the Jewish tradition are subjects of calumny. Verbal attacks on the religious tradition and on religious Jews are nothing short of antisemitic. Only the religious Zionists, the West Bank settlers in general and the Hebron settlers in particular, emerge as positive figures in Auerbach's essay because only they assert the values of both Judaism and Zionist particularism.

I have qualms about the narrative, but this isn't what troubles me most. Before I turn to that which troubles me, I feel obliged to assert some of my specific caveats. First, while Auerbach is probably right about the inherent tension between Zionism and the Jewish tradition, he leaves no room for the evolution of a tradition (in this respect he is really adopting a post-Zionist position), nor does he acknowledge that given his conception of the tradition there can be no viable Jewish state. Second, unlike Auerbach, I have no sympathy whatsoever for the Hebron settlers. Third, in my opinion, the underlying relationship between American Jews and Israel has relatively little to do with Israeli policy. The problem in American Jewish relations to Israel is not opposition to Israeli policy. Criticism and opposition demonstrate concern whether it comes from the left over the "Who is a Jew?" issue or from the right over opposition to the Oslo Accord. The problem is the growing indifference of American Jews to Israel. Fourth, I don't think that American Jews are driven by fears they will be charged with dual loyalty. That was a palpable fear in the past. Auerbach gives insufficient credit to the confidence that American Jews have in their status as Americans.

Fifth, while I agree that the underlying values of liberalism threaten Jewish survival...