By Howie Silbiger
The Associated Press/NORC survey of American Jews is being reported as evidence that Israel is losing American Jewish support. Thirty per cent of those surveyed said they believe Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, 45 per cent said they feel little or no emotional attachment to Israel, and only 36 per cent considered supporting Israel an important part of their Jewish identity. Those numbers are appalling, but Israel is not where the collapse began. American Jews did not abandon Israel first. They abandoned Judaism, Jewish history and any real belief that being Jewish came with obligations.
The most revealing number in the survey has almost nothing to do with Israel. Seventy-three per cent said remembering the Holocaust was important to their Jewish identity. Only 23 per cent said observing Shabbos was important, while just 19 per cent said following Jewish law mattered. Celebrating Jewish holidays reached 43 per cent, although in much of American Jewish life that can mean attending a family seder, lighting Chanukah candles and eating before driving home. Supporting Israel came in at 36 per cent. Eating Jewish foods was important to 17 per cent, which may be the most honest answer in the poll.
That is what Judaism has become for a large part of American Jewry. The Holocaust, bagels, Chanukah candles, a few Yiddish expressions, an occasional trip to shul and a political worldview presented as “Jewish values.” Belief in G-d, Torah, Jewish law, Shabbos, Jewish history, Hebrew, the shul and the responsibility Jews have toward one another were slowly pushed aside. Culture remained, but the Judaism that created that culture was treated as outdated, inconvenient and, in some circles, embarrassing.
For decades, Jewish organizations worried that asking Jews to do anything Jewish would drive them away. Judaism had to be made easier, shorter and less demanding. Services were shortened, expectations were lowered and Hebrew became optional. Jewish education became something children endured until their bar or bat mitzvah, after which many families disappeared until the next wedding, funeral or High Holiday service. Shabbos became a Friday night dinner when nobody had anything else planned, and holidays were reduced to food, family photographs and a vague reminder that someone’s grandparents once took this seriously.
Nobody wanted to sound judgmental. Nobody wanted to tell people that Judaism requires something. Jewish leaders became terrified of offending Jews who had no intention of attending shul, learning anything or raising Jewishly committed children. Instead of challenging them, they kept lowering the bar and congratulating anyone who still identified as Jewish, regardless of whether that identity contained any Judaism.
We can now see how well that worked.
The AP survey counted people as Jewish even when they did not believe in Judaism. About three in ten respondents were atheists, agnostics or religiously unaffiliated people who identified as Jewish through ancestry, culture or family background. Judaism is a monotheistic religion built around belief in one G-d, yet the poll treated rejection of that belief as irrelevant when deciding who would speak for American Jews. A person can be born Jewish, remain halachically Jewish and still abandon Judaism completely, but that does not make his opinions representative of Jewish belief, Jewish practice or Jewish communal life. When nearly one-third of a survey’s “Jewish” sample consists of people who do not identify with the Jewish religion, headlines claiming to tell us what Jews believe are already misleading.
The differences inside the survey were enormous. Among Jews who identified religiously, 40 per cent said they felt strongly attached to Israel. Among secular Jews, it was 11 per cent. Nearly half of religious Jews considered supporting Israel important to their Jewish identity. Among secular Jews, only 12 per cent did. Fifty-two per cent of religious Jews believed Israel’s continuing military operation in Gaza was justified, compared with only 21 per cent of secular Jews.
The same pattern appeared in the genocide question. Sixty per cent of religious Jews rejected the accusation that Israel was committing genocide. Among secular Jews, only 27 per cent rejected it. The poll did not uncover some sudden Jewish rebellion against Benjamin Netanyahu. It exposed the predictable result of generations of assimilation.
For millions of American Jews, being Jewish no longer means believing in Judaism, practising Judaism or knowing much about Judaism. It has become an ethnic memory. Their grandparents were Jewish, their parents belonged to a synagogue for a few years, they enjoy Jewish food and they feel uncomfortable when someone makes a crude joke about Jews. That may be enough to create a cultural identity, but it is not enough to sustain a people.
Culture can survive for a generation or two after the religion and communal life behind it have disappeared. The first generation remembers the old neighbourhood, the shul, the family customs and the language spoken at home. The next generation remembers watching its parents. The third generation remembers hearing stories. By the fourth generation, there may be a menorah in a cupboard, a family recipe and a vague understanding that the family is Jewish.
American Jewish leaders spent years describing this as a new, open and modern form of Jewish identity. It was assimilation moving slowly enough that nobody wanted to call it by its name.
A Judaism without belief, learning, practice or obligation eventually becomes a story about someone’s grandparents. It may survive as a line on a census form or an ancestry test, but it does not create Jews who feel responsible for Jewish continuity. It certainly does not create Jews capable of understanding why Israel exists or why the return of the Jewish people to their homeland carries any meaning beyond modern politics.
American Jews were taught a great deal about how Jews died, but very little about how Jews lived. The Holocaust became the centre of Jewish identity because it was easier to teach than Judaism. It required no belief in G-d, no observance and no acceptance of Jewish law. It also fit neatly into a universal lesson about prejudice and tolerance. The Jewish parts could be softened until the Holocaust became a general warning about hatred, detached from the people who were murdered and the civilization the Nazis tried to destroy.
Holocaust education is essential, but a people cannot define itself mainly by what others did to it. Jews need to know what existed before Auschwitz and what continued after it. They need to know Jewish history as the history of the Jewish people, rather than a collection of persecutions ending with a visit to a museum.
Jewish secular day schools were supposed to fill that gap. Too many of them did not. Instead of teaching Judaism as a religion and a way of life, they replaced it with Israel. In schools connected to more traditional or establishment Jewish movements, Zionism became the Judaism. The children learned Israeli songs, marked Yom Ha’atzmaut, raised money for Israel and were taught to feel pride in the Jewish state, but often received very little serious exposure to G-d, Torah, Jewish law or religious obligation.
In schools attached to more progressive movements, the same substitution took place in the opposite direction. Judaism was replaced with criticism of Israel, Palestinian advocacy and endless conversations about occupation, equality and social justice. The school still called itself Jewish, the students still celebrated a few holidays, but the actual religious content was thin enough that Zionism or anti-Zionism could take over the space where Judaism should have been.
Both models failed for the same reason. Zionism is not Judaism, and anti-Zionism is certainly not Judaism. Israel is central to Jewish history, Jewish prayer and Jewish peoplehood, but it cannot replace belief, observance, Torah and the daily experience of living as a Jew. A school that teaches children to wave an Israeli flag without teaching them why Jerusalem appears throughout Jewish prayer has given them a political attachment that can disappear as soon as the politics become uncomfortable. A school that teaches children to judge Israel through whatever ideology is popular on campus has done even worse. It has used Jewish tuition dollars to prepare Jewish children to stand against the Jewish people.
Many parents were satisfied as long as the school had Hebrew on the timetable, served kosher food and held some kind of Chanukah presentation. They wanted their children to feel Jewish, but not necessarily to know much about Judaism. The schools responded to the market. They offered Jewish atmosphere without too many Jewish demands, then filled the empty space with Israel programming, Holocaust education and social-action projects.
Once Jewish history is stripped away, Israel becomes easy to misrepresent. A Jew who knows almost nothing about the Jewish connection to the land can be convinced that Israel suddenly appeared in 1948 when Europeans decided to take someone else’s country. The centuries of Jewish life in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed and Tiberias disappear. The expulsions, massacres and restrictions imposed on Jews throughout the Middle East disappear. The repeated Arab rejection of partition and the wars launched to destroy Israel disappear. The Jews driven from Arab countries disappear as well.
What remains is a simple story about powerful Israelis and powerless Palestinians. That story fits perfectly into the ideology being taught on university campuses, where almost every conflict is reduced to oppressors and victims, colonizers and the colonized. Israel is placed in one category, the Palestinians in the other, and no further knowledge is required.
A Jewish student who arrives on campus with almost no Jewish education does not have much to resist that story. He may have attended Hebrew school twice a week, memorized enough sounds to get through his bar mitzvah and then never opened a Jewish book again. He may know the phrase tikkun olam but have no idea where it comes from. He may know more about social-justice slogans than Jewish history, more about Gaza than the destruction of the Temples and more about colonialism than the thousands of years of Jewish connection to Israel.
Then someone tells him that Israel is committing genocide. He has no historical foundation, no religious connection and no confidence in his own Jewish identity. He does, however, have a powerful desire to be accepted by his political and social circle. Condemning Israel becomes easy. In some cases, it becomes another way to advertise himself as one of the good Jews.
If someone has been taught that Judaism is mainly about supporting whichever group is currently described as oppressed, and Israel is presented as the oppressor, denouncing Israel can feel like an expression of Judaism. He may sincerely believe that joining people who chant for the end of the Jewish state is the most Jewish thing he can do.
Jewish institutions helped create that Jew. They told him Judaism could mean anything he wanted it to mean. They told him there were no expectations, no boundaries and no particular responsibilities. They replaced Torah with political activism, Jewish history with Holocaust remembrance and communal obligation with personal choice. They then acted shocked when he chose a political movement that had no use for Jewish history, Jewish peoplehood or Israel.
Support for Israel should never require blind support for every Israeli politician, military decision or government policy. Jews are entitled to criticize Israel, and Israel has earned criticism at different points in its history. There is still a difference between criticizing a government and accusing the Jewish state of deliberately trying to destroy an entire people.
Genocide is not a word for a war someone dislikes. It is not a synonym for civilian casualties, military mistakes or even alleged war crimes. It is an accusation of an intentional effort to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. When 30 per cent of American Jews are willing to make that accusation against Israel, while another 21 per cent are unsure, we are looking at Jews who have accepted the language used by Israel’s enemies and no longer know enough to recognize it.
The safety findings make the whole situation even more pathetic. Sixty-two per cent of American Jews said they feel less safe than they did before October 7, 2023. Forty per cent are less likely to wear, carry or display something that identifies them as Jewish. Jews are frightened, hiding visible signs of Jewishness and watching Jewish institutions come under attack, yet a large number still believe that separating themselves from Israel will make them more acceptable.
Some remove the Magen David, take off the kippah or rush to announce that they are anti-Zionist. They hope the people intimidating Jewish students, vandalizing shuls and targeting Jewish neighbourhoods will recognize that they are different. Jewish history offers no reason to believe that strategy will work. Those who hate Jews have never shown much respect for the distinctions Jews make among themselves.
Another public-relations campaign for Israel will not repair this. A better slogan, another carefully produced campus video or a new committee created by one of the same organizations that watched this happen will accomplish very little. The damage began long before the current war.
Jews need Judaism. They need Jewish schools that teach more than Holocaust history, Israeli geography and fashionable politics. They need shuls that expect people to attend more than three times a year. They need rabbis and communal leaders willing to offend people occasionally. They need Shabbos tables, Jewish books, Hebrew, history, prayer and a sense that being part of the Jewish people involves more than ancestry and personal feelings.
Judaism cannot survive when almost every serious part of it is discarded. A Judaism that asks nothing eventually means nothing. A Jewish identity based mainly on ancestry weakens with every generation of assimilation and intermarriage. A Jewish identity based on Holocaust memory weakens as the survivors and their children disappear. A Jewish identity based on fashionable politics disappears the moment Jews are no longer considered fashionable victims.
The AP survey is being presented as proof that American Jews are turning away from Israel. Much of American Jewry turned away from Judaism years ago, and Israel is simply where the consequences have become impossible to hide.
They abandoned belief, then observance, then Jewish education and Jewish history. They replaced all of it with culture, food, memory and politics. In some schools the politics were Zionist, in others they were anti-Zionist, but neither could replace Judaism. By the time Israel became socially inconvenient, very little remained to connect these Jews to Israel, or to anything else Jewish.
Culture may remind someone that his grandparents were Jewish. It may give him a holiday meal, a joke or a family story. It will not sustain the Jewish people, and it will not give his grandchildren much reason to remain Jewish.
