Judaism 3.0 : Judaism’s Transformation To Zionism

by Gol Kalev

And yet another factor is just the passing of time.

As European influence recedes in Israel, so is the glorification of secularism.

Through America, the Israeli gets exposed to religiosity. Unlike in Europe, where religiosity is looked down upon,

hence, supporting the transformation to Judaism 3.0.

For a long time, some Jews just wanted to be like everybody else, but they were denied this dream – first by the outside, and then by Zionism which affiliates them with an ethnological nationality – the opposite of universalism.

Israelis on the far-left are turning into defenders of Israel when in Europe or on college campuses in the US.

Quite simply, Israelis reject universalism and embrace particularity – Israeli particularity.

Arriving in America as an insular nation-religion, American Jews denationalized, reducing American Judaism to a religion, and then secularized.

the core of the American Jewish community is on a trajectory towards evaporation.

American Jews initially rejected Zionism. When Israel was founded, Zionism became an important part of the American Jewish ethos, but certainly not its core.

now, as old connectors to Judaism are eroding, Zionism is turning into the most relevant (or the least irrelevant) aspect of Judaism for the American Jew.

This is occurring through both positive and negat...

Israel’s astonishing success on the one hand, and its lightning rod controversies on the other, turns Zionism into the meeting point of the American Jew with his Judaism. Indeed, the Jewish transformation in America to Judaism 3.0 is...

First and foremost, Zionism was needed by the Jews.

It was also a solution to a need of the world.

Zionism offered Europe what Europe had yearned for centuries: To get rid of its Jews.

And so, Zionism only succeeded with audiences for which it was needed:

for American Jews, Zionism was simpl...

Moreover, Zionism presented a problem. It raised issues of dual loyalty and interfered with the t...

Moreover, Zionism was on a collision course with a historic process the Jewish nation-religion was beginning to go through as Jews moved to America. (ii) America – the first widespread experiment of Jewish denationalization

The Eastern European new immigrants came from areas where Zionism was popular, and they were not part of the American Jewish establishment that had long rejected Zionism. Also, they did not enjoy the success and integration into the American elite that the establishment Jews had, and to which Zionism represented a threat. But the reality remained that the Jews “who mattered” were opponents of Zionism. The German Jews rejected Zionism, and being the only voice of Judaism in America that counted, it became evident that American Jewry rejected Zionism. However, this reality changed right on time. In 1915, Zionism recruited a star – Louis Brandeis.

Today’s American Jew is a hybrid of all of those legacy experiences and ancestries. Hence, on the one hand, the early affinity to Zionism that Eastern European immigrants brought to America trickled to today’s American Jewry, yet on the other hand, as Jews abandoned the ghetto, Zionism was pushed to the back burner along with other Jewish aspects of the American Jew.

When Israel was established,

neither Zionism, nor Israel was needed by American Jews.

Concerns of dual loyalty were even more pronounced now that there...

Those two revolutionary processes – disassociating Judaism from the Land of Israel and reduction of Judaism to a mere religion – could have worked, as long as what remained of Judaism – the religious aspect – would stay strong.

But the first two steps of stripping Judea from Judaism and then narrowing Judaism to the “Jewish Church,” was soon followed by a third one: Secularization. American Jews abandoned the “Jewish Church” and in doing so left American Judaism without a substantial anchor.

To address the void, American Jews over the last 80 years connected to their Judaism primarily through two new substitute glues:

Memory of the Holocaust:

Nostalgia for Ashkenazi/Eastern European roots:

While the Israeli Jews rebelled and created a “new Jew,” the American Jews brought the shtetl with them to America.

the memory of the Holocaust and the nostalgia for the Eastern European past successfully replaced the fading glues of religion, insularity and discrimination. Those replacement glues kept American Judaism intact through the early 21st century. The bad news is that these glues are rapidly fading:

one-time fixes.

Either the vacuum will immediately be replaced by something else, or non-Orthodox American Judaism will evaporate within a few decades.

Judaism is important for most American Jews. It plays a role in their life, but this role tends to be subordinate to the role of other elements in their life.

the totality of Jews for whom Judaism is high on the hierarchy of identities and are not at risk of evaporation is somewhere in the range of 15-20% of American Jews.

And yet, most research about Jews is done in the context of this minority.

in reality, most of the Reform and many of the Conservative Jews are under-affiliated to a point that the lines between them and unaffiliated Jews become blurry.

Astonishingly, nostalgia to the old country became nostalgia to values and elements of life which the Jews utterly detested while they were there.

The retroactive glorification of Yiddish and Polish/Russian old country was done since there was no tangible connection to the real old country – to Zion. That, however, dramatically changed once Israel was established. The real old country became real again. Yet American Judaism stayed stuck in the old false narrative; stuck in Judaism 2.0.

The attempt to reduce American Judaism to a community context has also failed. This is primarily since America and global society in general has become less community-driven. The community affiliation is not physical, and non-exclusive, and indeed the Jew is a member of various other communities.

there was a time where Jewish culture was integral to the life of the American Jew, but this is no longer the case. Indeed, today, the culture of the American Jew is American culture.

how many times a month does an American Jew really eat bagel and lox?

The Reform movement was there at the right place at the right time to provide a safety net for those Jews who exited the ghetto en masse:

given the loose relationship of the Reform Jew with his religious expression of Judaism, the retention vehicle set up by Reform Judaism is fading.

it is hard to point to the exact line between a Reform and Unaffiliated Jew.

Tikun Olam,

is a very weak connector, since other groups engage in similar charitable actions.

If anything, it supports the notion of universalism –

Like the case with Reform Jews, the majority of Conservative Jews have a low engagement level with Judaism.