We Stand Divided Quotes

“It was a time when having a Jewish state was a source of pride, not conflict, for American Jews.”
― Daniel Gordis, We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel – Understanding Two Communities, Their History, and the Path Forward

“In 1880, the combined Jewish population of the United States and Palestine totaled 275,000 people. As the world’s Jewish population at that point was approximately 7.8 million, these two communities represented a mere 3 percent of the world’s Jews. Today the United States and Israel account for 85 percent of the world’s Jews. In other words, almost the entire Jewish world today lives in two communities that for all intents and purposes did not exist 135 years ago. The Jewish people have existed for some 3,500 years; in the last century and a quarter, however, they have essentially had to reinvent themselves.”
― Daniel Gordis, We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel – Understanding Two Communities, Their History, and the Path Forward

“THERE IS YET ANOTHER factor that both communities must recall. Even in the moments during which the relationship is most strained, they need to remember one of the central lessons of Jewish history: the unpredictability of survival. Most national traditions celebrate great victories, and monuments are created to commemorate triumphs. They range from the glorious (Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, for example) to the grand (the Arch of Titus in Rome) to the foolish (such as Cairo’s October War Panorama, which portrays the Yom Kippur War as a great Egyptian victory). Jews have long had a different take on history. The Jewish calendar is replete with dates that mark near-catastrophe or actual destruction. The holiday of Purim marks the close call of the Jews’ narrow escape when Haman tried to convince the king to kill all the Jews in his kingdom. There is a fast day to commemorate the beginning of the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem. Another marks the breaching of the city’s walls. And a more major fast (the aforementioned Ninth of Av) mourns the destruction of both Temples. In a similar vein, Israel is dotted with thousands of monuments, almost all of them to fallen soldiers in one war or another. Tellingly, there is hardly a single monument to an Israeli victory, of which there have been many.”
― Daniel Gordis, We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel – Understanding Two Communities, Their History, and the Path Forward

“Even with a much easier question, “Can you identify the name of the Israeli parliament from among the following: (a) The Bet Din (b) The Kotel (c) The Knesset or (d) The Schwarma,” only 60 percent of respondents got the answer right. American Jewish illiteracy touches all dimensions of Jewish life—religion, culture, history, Israel, and more. “Measuring ourselves by the standard of our tradition,” one keen observer commented, “we should note immediately one distinction of the American Jewish community; . . . The distinction that I have in mind is the illiteracy of American Jewry. I mean, its Jewish illiteracy.”
― Daniel Gordis, We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel – Understanding Two Communities, Their History, and the Path Forward

“If American Jews are to effect change in Israel to make room for their brand of pluralism, they need numbers. No political change is ever possible without numbers. And there are no numbers in Israel for the kind of Judaism that Americans have in America. To get the big numbers, liberal American Jews have to decide who their actual potential allies are. If they seek Israeli Jews who will have a positive attitude towards religion, then they are likely to be non-liberal Orthodox Jews who reject their form of practice completely. If they seek Israeli Jews who will share their values of pluralism, equality, tolerance, feminism and liberalism, they are, by and large, likely to be the shrimp-eating-Shabbat-driving Jews, whose attitudes to religion range from revulsion to apathy. If Conservative, Reform and generally liberal American Jews seek partners in Israel who share both their liberal values and positive attitude towards religion, they will limit themselves to a pool of citizens that is barely likely to get one seat in the Knesset.”
― Daniel Gordis, We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel – Understanding Two Communities, Their History, and the Path Forward

“Supreme Court ruled in Lynch v. Donnelly (1984) that the creche was not objectionable if it was in the context of other “secular” Christian symbols, many mainstream Jews were distressed. They worried that Christianity was creeping back into the public square. Although Chabad, like some other Orthodox groups, had no objection to the ruling—after all, they wanted to display Menorahs in public spaces, and if Lynch opened the door to Christian displays, it would do the same for Jews—most American Jews instinctively embraced what Richard John Neuhaus, a Roman Catholic priest and American public intellectual, called “the naked public square.” Ironically, in Israel, even secular Israelis implicitly agreed with American Chabad. They instinctively felt that for civic life to be meaningful, the public square should not be overly naked. Neuhaus agreed. He argued that a meaningful public moral discourse had to be based on tradition of some sort. Otherwise, he said, “politics becomes civil war carried on by other means.” Either we have some shared, essentially agreed-upon tradition that sets the tone and content of our society, or internecine cultural warfare becomes virtually unavoidable.”
― Daniel Gordis, We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel – Understanding Two Communities, Their History, and the Path Forward

“Not speaking Hebrew is not a moral flaw, and today’s American Jews have no access to Hebrew because of decisions that other people made. Nor can their lack of knowledge of Hebrew be fairly seen as an indication that American Jews are not wise or do not care. Their lack of facility with Hebrew, however, even on the most rudimentary level, limits them to encountering Israel through the lens of what the English-language press decides they should read, without direct access to Israel’s press, literature, music, television, or culture. How passionate could any human relationship be if almost every interaction was lived through a filter someone else had constructed? WHETHER JUDAISM IS A religion or a people is no mere academic matter. It is also not a matter of right or wrong. American Judaism had good reason to be attracted by Judaism-as-religion. Zionists had equally good reason for opting for peoplehood over religion. What is critical for us to understand is that the divide that Jews now confront reflects the roots of each of these communities and how Jews in each place define what it means to be a Jew.”
― Daniel Gordis, We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel – Understanding Two Communities, Their History, and the Path Forward

“Given the centrality of Hebrew to the Zionists’ sense of accomplishment, the abandonment of Hebrew in the United States was bound to create a rift, a sense of otherness. And on a much more utilitarian level, American Jews’ decision not to learn Hebrew means that they have access to a very thin slice of Israeli culture. Everything that they know or feel about Israeli society is fed by a cultural trickle mediated by others who decide what should and should not be translated. If a citizen of France or Germany spoke no English, how deep an understanding could they possibly have of the United States, its culture, its struggles, and its nuances? Very little. No Frenchman or German who did not speak English could be said to understand America in any meaningful way, and any advice they offered would be ignored, swatted away like a pesky fly that, while annoying, was of no import at all.”
― Daniel Gordis, We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel – Understanding Two Communities, Their History, and the Path Forward

“ANOTHER RELATED FACTOR DEEPENING the divide between American and Israeli Jews is also derived from the tension between Judaism-as-nation and Judaism-as-religion. That factor is the Hebrew language. Hebrew, obviously, is the language of discourse in Israel, and American Jews, for the most part, have decided not to speak or to understand it. This blunt formulation is intentional: it’s not just that American Jews do not speak Hebrew, but that over the years Jewish educators consciously chose to remove significant Hebrew-language education from their curricula. To be sure, learning a language takes time and effort, so they faced a significant pedagogical challenge given the limited number of hours with which they had to work. Yet, there are some schools (both Orthodox and non-Orthodox) that do teach Hebrew rigorously and give their students at least a good grounding. Most do not try; the decision not to teach Hebrew, say some scholars, was also a conscious decision not to highlight the peoplehood dimension of Judaism. Doing so would have made American Jews feel like outsiders in America.”
― Daniel Gordis, We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel – Understanding Two Communities, Their History, and the Path Forward

“the very same day that the American embassy in Jerusalem officially opened), some sixty Palestinians were killed trying to approach the fence. It was a grim day for Israelis, who were saddened by the loss of life. Nonetheless, even among Israel’s left, there were no mass demonstrations, no widespread calls for investigations of the army’s policy or its execution, and no calls for a change in government as a result of what had happened. Israel’s left understood what was at stake. When Hamas’s leader, Ismail Haniyeh, had said in March, a few months prior, that the protests along the Gaza border were the beginning of the Palestinian return to “all of Palestine,” Israeli leftists believed him. They similarly understood that if Haniyeh was cynically going to send dozens of young Palestinians to trample a border that Israel has always defended with lethal force (while he sat comfortably many kilometers away), he was knowingly sending his own citizens directly into harm’s way. The Israeli left remained saddened and frustrated but, for the most part, quiet.”
― Daniel Gordis, We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel – Understanding Two Communities, Their History, and the Path Forward

“HOW DOES THIS RADICAL conceptual divide over whether Judaism is a religion or an ethnicity play out in relations between the two communities? One manifestation is the lack of political cooperation between Israeli and American Jewish progressives. Though right-of-center American Jews are often active in supporting Israel’s right-leaning parties and offer financial support through American Friends of Likud and other organizations, there has been surprisingly little alignment between liberal American Jews and the Israeli political left.* There is, of course, some American organizational support for Israel’s left-leaning parties, but the relationship on the left is not nearly as vigorous as it is on the right. Why is that? Once again, the answer lies largely in the Judaism-as-religion issue, which makes it difficult for the two communities to understand each other. Einat Wilf—a secular and unabashedly nationalist former Knesset member and outspoken voice for liberal causes—is a compelling example of how Judaism-as-religion versus Judaism-as-nation creates a disconnect between the two communities. In 2018, she published a book titled The War over the Right of Return, in which she argues that the fundamental reason the Israeli-Arab conflict has never been settled has been Israel’s refusal to reject outright the Palestinian demand for a “right of return” of 1948 refugees and their descendants.* The fact that millions of Palestinians still harbor a hope of returning to “Palestine,” argues Wilf, leaves open in their minds the possibility that Israel as a Jewish nation-state can still be ended. End that charade, she argues, and one major obstacle on the road to settling the conflict will have been removed. What matters for us is not whether Wilf’s analysis is right or wrong. What we need to note is that there is scarcely an American Jewish liberal who would dare speak aloud about denying the Palestinian right of return once and for all. How does Wilf straddle the fence, some might ask? How can she be both a liberal and such a committed nationalist? To Wilf, as to many Israelis, there is simply no fence to straddle. For many Israeli progressives like her, there is no tension at all between liberal values and Judaism-as-nation. But for American Jews who see themselves primarily as a religion and not a nation, Wilf’s value set is a much more difficult position to adopt. The disconnect is between Judaism-as-justice and Judaism-as-survival. Those are obviously not always incompatible, but they are profoundly different instincts.”
― Daniel Gordis, We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel – Understanding Two Communities, Their History, and the Path Forward

“The transformation of Judaism into a religion served American Jews’ interests in yet another way. America, after all, is corrosive of ethnic identity. Four generations after Italian immigrants arrived on America’s shores, how Italian are their descendants? Do they speak Italian? Are their homes distinctively Italian in any meaningful way decades later? When a descendant of an Italian immigrant who came to the United States in 1910 marries a descendant of a German immigrant from the same period, is any cultural adjustment required? Rarely. Aside from ethnic identities related to physical appearance (African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, and the too often ignored Native Americans, among others), most other ethnicities have long since disappeared. Even the ethnic dimension of Jewish life has mostly dissolved. Few American Jews speak Hebrew, Yiddish, or other Jewish languages. For the most part, cuisine in Jewish homes is scarcely different from that of other American homes. American progressives are culturally almost indistinguishable from progressives of other backgrounds. Jews were perhaps the last to give up the ethnic ghost, but even among American Jews, ethnicity is finally disappearing. If anything has survived, it has been a sense of Judaism as a faith tradition, Judaism as religion, no matter how profound or casual a person’s faith and no matter what particular form religious participation takes.”
― Daniel Gordis, We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel – Understanding Two Communities, Their History, and the Path Forward

“THIS NOTION OF A “new Jew” would become one of Zionism’s most defining ideas. In 1942, some three decades after Bialik wrote “In the City of Slaughter,” a writer in the Yishuv named Hayim Hazaz wrote a short story—“The Sermon”—that has become an Israeli classic. The narrator of the “sermon” is Yudke, one of the founders of the kibbutz on which he lives. Yudke is trying to explain to his fellow kibbutzniks why he believes that they should not teach Jewish history to their children. His main reason is that “we really don’t have a history at all. . . . You see, we never made our own history, the gentiles always made it for us . . . it wasn’t ours, it wasn’t ours at all!” Yudke’s view of Jewish history is classic Zionist fare. “Persecutions, massacres, martyrdoms and pogroms. And more persecutions, massacres, martyrdoms and pogroms. And more, and more, and more of them without end.” The Jews have been so weak and pathetic (and here Hazaz is almost identical to Bialik) that Jewish children find nothing of interest in Jewish history. “Children love to read historical novels. Everywhere else, as you know, such books are full of heroes and conquerors and brave warriors and glorious adventures. In short, they’re exciting.” The problem is that these children “read novels, but ones about gentiles, not about Jews. Why? You can be sure it’s no accident. Jewish history is simply boring . . . it has no adventures, no conquering heroes, no great rulers or potentates.” Jews in history are not potentates. They are “a mob of beaten, groaning, weeping, begging Jews”—the opposite of inspiring. That is why, says Yudke, “if it were up to me, I wouldn’t allow our children to be taught Jewish history at all. Why on earth should we teach them about the shameful life led by their ancestors? I’d simply say to them ‘look boys and girls, we don’t have any history. We haven’t had one since the day we were driven into exile. Class dismissed, you can go outside and play.”
― Daniel Gordis, We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel – Understanding Two Communities, Their History, and the Path Forward

“FOR AS LONG AS the Hebrew and Christian Bibles have defined Western civilization, humanity has been engaged in a debate over whether life is better lived through devotion to a particular people, ethnicity, or even clan or, alternatively, to humanity at large. Both, of course, are worthy commitments, and the Jewish tradition rejects neither. That said, Zionism chose to focus on the former, while American society is dedicated to the latter. That is the root of the rift between American Jews and Israel, and it is from there that any future mutual understanding will have to begin.”
― Daniel Gordis, We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel – Understanding Two Communities, Their History, and the Path Forward

“Israelis, obviously, find the notion that the conflict may not be solvable distressing. They dream of a world in which their children, or their grandchildren, will not have to go to war, but at the same time, with any progress on a peace settlement increasingly distant, it is their sense of purpose that leads the vast majority to stay in Israel and to soldier on. Though peace is nowhere in sight, Israelis rank among the happiest populations on earth. Israel was rated the eleventh happiest country by the World Economic Forum in 2018, while the United States was eighteenth. Israelis are overwhelmingly comfortable with a Law of Return that guarantees Jews, but no one else, an automatic right to citizenship. Infused with a deep sense of purpose, Israeli Jews have more children than almost any other first-world country. And that is not only because of the ultra-Orthodox community. In fact, “since the beginning of the twenty-first century, fertility has actually declined by about 10 percent among Haredim, risen slightly (5 percent) among religiously observant women, and risen significantly, by 15–20 percent, among all other sectors of Israeli Jewish society.”
― Daniel Gordis, We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel – Understanding Two Communities, Their History, and the Path Forward

“Scholem, however, hurried to explain his objection to the universalism with which Arendt seemed infatuated (and which would later color much of the worldview of American Jews). He had come to believe, he said, that the Jewish embrace of universalism was naive, even dangerous. He admitted that it had once drawn him, too, but the harsh lessons of Jewish history, he said, had pushed him back into the particularist camp. Jews, he said, adopt universalist, anti-peoplehood positions with an enthusiasm matched by no other people, while ignoring the fact that the rest of the world does not allow them to erase their ethnic differences and will always pursue them, simply because they are Jews.”
― Daniel Gordis, We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel – Understanding Two Communities, Their History, and the Path Forward

“key to that international movement, which would eventually create the State of Israel, was an explicit rejection of Jefferson’s and Lincoln’s universalism: It might further be said that we ought not to create new distinctions between people; we ought not to raise fresh barriers, we should rather make the old disappear. But men who think this way are amiable visionaries; and the idea of a native land will still flourish when the dust of their bones will have vanished tracelessly in the winds. Universal brotherhood is not even a beautiful dream.”
― Daniel Gordis, We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel – Understanding Two Communities, Their History, and the Path Forward

“modern secular Israeli novelists like Amos Oz and David Grossman)”
― Daniel Gordis, We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel – Understanding Two Communities, Their History, and the Path Forward

“Yet Silver’s Zionist passion was but one facet of a much more complicated picture. American Jews remained fundamentally uncomfortable with Jewish sovereignty. The very same year Abba Hillel Silver delivered his oration, Houston’s Reform congregation, Beth Israel synagogue, declared that Zionists could not be members of the congregation. Even in 1943, with the Holocaust raging and the argument for the need for a Jewish state more compelling than ever before, the congregation specifically referred to the Pittsburgh Platform’s statement that “we consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community,” and agreed that an oath of loyalty to America would be required for membership. It further ruled that those supporting Zionism could not be full members of the congregation or hold office. Beth Israel did not begin accepting Zionists as members again until 1967, almost two decades after Israel’s creation.”
― Daniel Gordis, We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel – Understanding Two Communities, Their History, and the Path Forward

“In March 1919, almost a year and a half after the Balfour Declaration, almost three hundred Reform rabbis sought to convince President Wilson not to express support for Balfour’s sentiments. Going much further than Brandeis’s tepid endorsement of a “Jewish settlement in Palestine rather than an actual state,” they rejected even Brandeis’s formulation. In a letter to the New York Times, they wrote, “We raise our voice in warning and protest against the demand of the Zionists for the reorganization of the Jews as a national unit, to whom, now or in the future, territorial sovereignty in Palestine shall be committed. . . . We reject the Zionist project of a ‘national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.”
― Daniel Gordis, We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel – Understanding Two Communities, Their History, and the Path Forward

“How deeply did American Jews internalize the notion that America was their new national home? A fascinating indication is a 1904 stained-glass window of Congregation Sherith Israel in San Francisco, which depicts a classic biblical scene: Moses descending from a mountain holding the Ten Commandments. What is remarkable about this artwork, however, is that it shows Moses descending, not from Mount Sinai, as in the Bible’s account, but from Yosemite’s El Capitan.”
― Daniel Gordis, We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel – Understanding Two Communities, Their History, and the Path Forward

“Possibly the deepest and widest split, however, was between Zionists in Europe and Palestine, on the one hand, and American Zionists, on the other. American Jews—even those positively inclined toward Zionism—were living in a setting radically different from that in Europe and could not embrace the statehood-centric version of European Zionism. Even the First Zionist Congress foreshadowed how difficult it was going to be to get American Jews on board; despite the fact that there were some 937,000 Jews in America, of the approximately 200 delegates to the Congress, only four came from the United States.* American Judaism was becoming anti-Zionist even before there was Zionism. In 1885, American Reform rabbis adopted what is now known as the Pittsburgh Platform, the movement’s statement of core beliefs and commitments. In it, these rabbis declared, in part, that the Jews were no longer a people but now constituted a religion. “We recognize, in the modern era of universal culture of heart and intellect, the approaching of the realization of Israel’s great Messianic hope for the establishment of the kingdom of truth, justice, and peace among all men,” they said as they jettisoned Judaism’s long-standing particularism and embraced the universalism then much in vogue in philosophic and cultural circles. “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community,” they said, and since Jews were no longer a national community, they expected “neither a return to Palestine,* nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.”
― Daniel Gordis, We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel – Understanding Two Communities, Their History, and the Path Forward

“In the United States, however, the response to Eichmann’s capture was not celebration but outrage. Joseph Proskauer, a former president of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), urged Prime Minister Ben-Gurion not to try Eichmann in Jerusalem but to turn him over to an international tribunal. Proskauer, who had been at the helm of the AJC’s anti-Zionist wing and had explicitly objected to the creation of a Jewish state, had said years earlier that he viewed Zionist efforts to establish a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine as nothing less than a “Jewish catastrophe.”* He might have softened in the interim, but Proskauer was still appalled by Israel’s move. To try Eichmann in Jerusalem would be to acknowledge that Israel spoke for and acted in the name of world Jewry, and the AJC had long been on record as taking the position that the small Jewish state was anything but the center of the Jewish world. Nor did Proskauer, a member of a generation of American Jews deeply conscious of how they were seen by “ordinary” Americans, seem comfortable having the spotlight on Jews alone. Eichmann, he reminded Ben-Gurion, had committed “unspeakable crimes against humanity, not only against Jews.” Proskauer actually clipped a Washington Post editorial that insisted, “Although there are a great many Jews in Israel, the Israeli government has no authority . . . to act in the name of some imaginary Jewish ethnic entity,” and sent it to Ben Gurion.”
― Daniel Gordis, We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel – Understanding Two Communities, Their History, and the Path Forward