conflating Judaism and Israel
by
doodahman
09/20/2007, 10:56 AM #
is myopic. One might conclude that Israel is rather contrary to Judaism as it fosters a form of idolatry-- the worship of every rock and twig in Eretz Israel over the Law-- especially the spirit of the Law which is clearly universal justice and the the elevation of humanity over both fear and power.
I don't think this is lost on most folks, especially the Jews. It is rather patronizing for anyone to assert that whatever is good for Israel is good for Jews. This is especially problematic in America, where American Jews suffer same as the rest of us from our insane support of apartheid Israel.
This is not lost on most American Jews, either, I suspect. Polls consistently show that American Jews support the Iraq War in far smaller numbers than Americans generally, and certainly not close to the 90% support we saw among the allegedly "Christian" Right.
Likewise, recent polls studies demonstrate a growing rift among younger Jews and the Israeli state. So dissing Israel is anti-Semitic? I doubt it.
SAN FRANCISCO (JTA) -- Young American Jews are increasingly alienated from Israel, according to a new report.
The report released Thursday -- titled "Beyond Distancing: Young Adult American Jews and their Alienation from Israel" and commissioned by The Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies -- generally substantiates current suspicions rather than revealing new surprises.
The major findings are that successively younger American Jews feel increasingly distant from Israel, and that the trend has been increasing steadily for decades.
For example, fewer than half (48 percent) of respondents younger than 35 agreed that "Israel's destruction would be a personal tragedy," compared to 78 percent of those 65 and older. And just 54 percent of the younger group is "comfortable with the idea of a Jewish State," compared to 81 percent of those 65 or older, 74 percent of those in the 50-64 age group and 64 percent in the 35-49 group.
The report is based on data from the 2007 National Survey of American Jews, a mail- and Web-administered survey conducted in December 2006 and January 2007 by Synovate, Inc. It only considers the attitudes of non-Orthodox Jews.
Of 1,828 respondents, 124 Orthodox were removed from the sample on the assumption that their relationship to Israel is markedly closer than that of their non-Orthodox peers.
According to one of the report's co-authors, Steven Cohen, a sociologist and research professor at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York, the generational differences are more a function of the decade people were born than where they are on the life-cycle continuum.
That means the American Jewish detachment from Israel will increase as younger Jews age and replace their parents and grandparents' generations.
"There is growing discomfort with the drawing of hard group boundaries of all sorts," Cohen said of the so-called "millennials," those born after 1980. "The idea of a Jewish state reflects hard group boundaries, that there is a distinction between Jews and everybody else. That does not sit well with young Jews."
Overall, the picture of detachment from Israel is not as dismal as those figures might suggest, Cohen argued. More than 60 percent of Jews younger than 35 in the study show "some level" of attachment to or caring about Israel.
