JCC Palo Alto
We are at the Jewish Community Center in Palo Alto, California. Facebook is to our right, Google to our left, Apple straight ahead and Microsoft behind us.
And Jews everywhere. Lots of Jews. American, Israeli, Reform, Orthodox, religious, secular, converts and born Jews. Each one has a story on how they got to Silicon Valley. Each one has a place on the spectrum of Jewish continuity. Each one maintains a love-hate-indifference relationship with the State of Israel.
Countless words have been said and millions of dollars have been spent in recent years on the relations between Israel and U.S. Jewry. The Diaspora Affairs Ministry and private funds have launched delegation after delegation – of senior officials, of youngsters, of journalists, of celebrities – across the ocean in both directions in an effort to familiarize and deepen the relationship. These delegations produced countless articles, relationships, insights and ideas. But in the midst of these great efforts, a massive, unprecedented crisis erupted.
The crisis was the result of a number of factors – challenges in establishing an egalitarian prayer plaza at the Western Wall, the rabbinate's refusal to recognize conversions performed by U.S. rabbis and the close relationship between U.S. President Trump and the Israeli government, to name a few – that infuriate the liberal-Democrat-leftwing demographic comprising the majority of American Jews.
This tension was palpable at the Z3 conference in Palo Alto last week. The Z is for Zionism and the 3 is for third generation. More than 1,000 people paid good money to devote a long day to discussions of topics that Israelis take for granted.
But in the San Francisco Bay Area, these issues are emotionally charged and quite volatile. In this part of the world, the rage has built up so much that the mere mention of the term "Zionism," not to mention actually supporting Israel, is enough to sever relationships. Therefore, the Palo Alto Jewish Federation's willingness to collaborate with the Tel Aviv think tank Reut Institute and pay to bring over dozens of speakers from Israel (including yours truly) is very admirable.
"All of Israel is responsible for one another" and "despite everything, we're still family" were phrases that came up time and again in various addresses. But new ideas were also introduced: "There are two Zions. Once upon a time, I thought that it is blasphemy to say that, but now I understand that it's true," said former Israeli minister Yossi Beilin. Much to Beilin's chagrin, and this was also the fundamental assumption of the conference organizers, Zionism doesn't just mean the cultivation of Jewish life in Israel. It also means the cultivation of Jewish life in America: "Babylon and Jerusalem" not as a compromise resulting from a bitter reality, but as a desired ideal.
Another strongly worded declaration was made by my fellow panelist, Haaretz columnist Chemi Shalev: "In light of the current Israeli government's conduct, I would advise American Jews to keep their relationship with Israel to an absolute minimum. Not to sever ties entirely, but not much more than that."
It was actually the third panelist, the New York Times' David Brooks, who came out against Shalev's assertions, telling the audience how despite his strong criticism of Israel, his own son decided to serve in the IDF.
"People just don't want to hear about Israel anymore," one of the conference organizers told me.
A Stanford student who is also an activist added that "I organize events on campus, but the turnout is very low. It's not easy defending Israel."
A third woman said that "the word most commonly associated with Israel is 'apartheid.'"
UC Berkeley
"Another challenge facing the Jewish community in the U.S. is 'intersectionality,'" explained Eran Shayshon of the Reut Institute.
"It is a social phenomenon in which minority groups and populations that feel discriminated against – like African Americans and the LGBTQ community – increasingly cooperate with one another against what they perceive as white, imperialist, institutional oppression. Ever since the riots in Ferguson in 2014, these groups have adopted a severely anti-Israel stance, supporting boycott movements and pro-Palestinian organizations. To them, Israel is seen as a white, colonialist, oppressive enterprise.
"Most young Jewish Americans are liberals who identify with these groups' agendas. That's why when Jewish community institutions in the U.S. support Israel it serves not only to distance young liberal Jews, but it also threatens the unity of the Jewish community as a whole."
This "intersectionality" was first conceived on college campuses in California. One of those campuses is the University of California, Berkeley, on the other side of the San Francisco Bay. Berkeley is considered particularly hostile toward Israel. Jewish students there often complain that the climate is very anti-Semitic. Anti-Israel boycotts are often promoted on this campus. Ultra-radical Jewish and Palestinian groups crop up around campus like weeds.
At first glance, the Berkeley campus looks picturesque and serene. Considering how common mass shootings have become at American schools, it is a little surprising that there is not much security around. Nor is there a fence separating the campus from the surrounding town; they just blend into each other.
On the side of a hill lies the university's law school. There, next to the Martin Luther King Jr. student union building, demonstrators stage regular protests. One of these protests is against Israel, obviously. Every year, the demonstrators erect an installation there depicting an IDF soldier supposedly murdering a pregnant Palestinian woman at a military checkpoint.
But this week, no one on campus has any time or desire for politics. In the libraries, the cafes, even at Hillel House, everyone's heads are buried in their books. "Midterms are next week, so you won't see too much action," Jared Sonreich, a young electrical engineering student from New Jersey tells me.
Sonreich is active in a group called Tikvah: Students for Israel, which occasionally invites pro-Israel speakers to campus. I ask him about the general sentiments toward Israel over the three years that he's been a student, and his reply is that the atmosphere has slightly improved. There is a constant struggle between Israel supporters and opponents, including on social media, but lately, he feels, it has become easier.
"Recently, we even brought over a rabbi who spoke in favor of the settlements and against a Palestinian state, and said things that could never have been said in the past," he says.
Los Angeles
About 350 miles (560 kilometers) south, in Los Angeles, I find the second largest Jewish community in all of the U.S., about 600,000 people. The city's Orthodox Union stretches along Pico Boulevard, featuring schools, synagogues, restaurants and mikvehs. At the western end of the street, one can find the Museum of Tolerance, also known as the Simon Wiesenthal Center, headed by Rabbi Marvin Hier.
In Israel, Hier is known mainly as Trump's rabbi, because two years ago, it was nearly impossible to miss him whispering "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem" at Trump's inauguration.
But Hier is much more than that. His office is lined with books and photos of him with renowned dignitaries such as former U.S. President Barack Obama or gracing the covers of American and international magazines. There is even a framed letter from Frank Sinatra, in which the singer describes his displeasure after an anti-Semitic tirade by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.
Hier may be 80, but he is as energetic as a 30-year-old. He tells me a story about when he brought his students to Sde Boker to meet with Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, in the early 1970s.
"Ben-Gurion told them that it was thanks to their parents in the Diaspora that the State of Israel was established, and he thanked them for it. But he added that 'one day, the fate of the Diaspora will be in the hands of the State of Israel,'" Hier says.
"I think that day has come. Because the renaissance of Jewish life, including here in America, would not have happened if it weren't for the State of Israel."
Hier is convinced that there is nothing much to the threats issued by Reform and Conservative Jews to sever ties with Israel.
"There won't be a divorce," he says. "I don't know any serious Reform or Conservative rabbi who actually intends to cut Israel off. After the Holocaust, no Jew has the kishkes [guts] to divorce Israel. True, there are disagreements, but that's just exaggeration and rhetoric – a negotiation tactic. They just want recognition."
Hier himself believes that "it is important to bring people together through love, and in my congregation, I had people read from the Torah even though I knew their mothers weren't Jewish."
But he also believes that Israel should not let American Jewry pressure it into changing the religious status quo.
"If I were a Reform rabbi, and I wanted Israel to recognize my conversions, I would encourage a mass immigration to Israel so that there would be enough people there to vote for the right parties and change the character of the [Israeli] Chief Rabbinate," he says. His remark is tinged with cynicism, as he knows very well that such a mass immigration would never happen.
"You can't have it both ways. You can't live in America and demand policy change in Israel."
Rabbi Stanley Davis, among the top Reform rabbis in the U.S., also believes that U.S. Jews can't have it both ways, but for him, the ways are reversed.
"I don't have another country," he says of Israel, "and don't tell me that I will get my rights when I wield a majority in the Knesset. Because the minority has rights too. The State of Israel has to give the minority that wants to marry and divorce in their own way the legal opportunity to do it their own way. As a Jew, I don't want to be a second-class citizen in my homeland. Even the prime minister says that Israel is the home of the Jews everywhere. If that is so, even though I live in Santa Monica, I'm allowed to say that there is a problem in my home. If Israel is the home of all Jews, don't tell me that I can speak only if come to Israel."
After having lived in Israel for a decade, Davis was forced to return to the U.S. for medical reasons. He now resides in Santa Monica, California, near the ocean. One of the major causes that he worked to promote during his very full life was encouraging immigration to Israel as a mitzvah for Reform Jews. He doesn't rule out the idea of "two Zions." And it is precisely because of this view that he refuses to remain indifferent to everything that is happening in the one and only Zion.
"I dedicated much of my life to protests," he says, mentioning that he protested against the Vietnam War and for civil rights in the U.S. and the liberation of Soviet Jews, knowing that he was risking his freedom and his life.
"I will do everything I possibly can to influence the results of elections," he says. "As Jews who live here and talk about Israel in the first-person plural, we have a right to do that. Just as right-wing Jews are allowed to pour money and use their influence to alter the public discourse in Israel, liberal Jews are allowed to do it too."
He dismisses the forecasts predicting the demise of non-Orthodox Jewry in the United States. According to him, the younger generation is far less institutional in the way it lives its Judaism than in the past.
But he says there are "more and more students in our rabbinical courses, because there are more and more people who want to be committed to Judaism and not necessarily to a congregation or a community. The Reform Movement is alive and kicking and so is its support of Israel."
