By now it’s accepted that the American Jewish community and Israel are in crisis mode. Once bound by the tightest of familial bonds, the two communities have grown ever apart, leading to much hand-wringing. The cause of the crisis is generally chalked up to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies – his embrace of the…
TEL AVIV (JTA) — On Sunday, a day before thousands of American Jews descended on this Israeli city to air their differences with the nation’s government, Israeli President Reuven Rivlin had a listening session. Rivlin invited a select group of about 100 American Jews to his official residence in Jerusalem. While he sat in the…
In the fall of 1996, while in Israel as part of a small US team trying to negotiate an end to a particularly serious and violent crisis between Israelis and Palestinians, I learned that my mother’s cancer had progressed, and I returned home to be with her for those last precious days. Although neither religious…
The word is out that American liberal Jews, especially the young ones, are distancing themselves from Israel. As an Israeli liberal Jew, I’d love to know how you do that. There are days I want to distance myself from Israel too. But every morning I wake up and there it is, like Woody Allen’s mother…
Rachel Cowan first came to Israel in the mid-1960’s with her then-new husband, the journalist Paul Cowan. She was not Jewish at the time. She and Paul were freshly acquainted with the harsh reality of the American South, where they were volunteering then. And as they toured and volunteered in Israel, they witnessed the poverty…
The Jewish world is in an uproar over Julia Salazar, a candidate for state senate. Salazar portrayed herself in multiple interviews as a Jew of Color, claims that a recent exposé called into doubt. The article split the Jewish community in two. Salazar’s detractors called her a Jewish Rachel Dolezal, a reference to the woman…
In their response to my recent piece, “The Loneliness of the Liberal Zionist,” Harry Reis and Yoav Schaefer have argued that Israel bears responsibility for the decline (if not death) of liberal Zionism as a viable future path for the Jewish state. Because of five decades of occupation, unremitting settlement expansion beyond the Green Line,…
The American Jewish Committee’s recent survey has already sparked considerable debate over the future of the Jewish people — indeed, whether there even is a single Jewish people. Most concerning to many is the finding that American Jews and Israeli Jews have diverged to the point that while a majority of both groups see the…
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