A Reckoning

Being an American Jew in 2026

The history of Judaism has seen multiple cataclysms — the Inquisition, exclusion, expulsion, pogroms, genocide — but what is happening now is something different.

Israel is upending what it means to be Jewish in the United States, where the majority of the diaspora has lived and thrived. At issue is not Jewish identity. It is about how American Jews relate to the State of Israel.

The era that began after the devastation of the Holocaust, with the establishment of the State of Israel, is ending because the Jewish state has evolved into a land that many (probably a majority) of American Jews cannot fathom, given the scale of violence and vengeance that the government has chosen as policy.

This is not the place to argue who is most responsible for the Israeli-Palestinian enmity that is so pervasive and destructive, because that avoids what the inescapable consequence seems to be in the United States.

Biases toward and against Israelis and Palestinians are genuine, but they obscure the point: Israel is no longer, for many American Jews, the answer to Jewish hopes and aspirations. It has become instead the major source of angst, family disputes, and renewed broad-based antisemitism.

Every measure of the American Jewish population shows deep divisions by generation, by adherence to religious rituals, and by political principles from left to right.

The schism has been developing for decades, but the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, and Israel’s responses in Gaza, the West Bank, and southern Lebanon are what have created an unprecedented crisis.

The protests on university campuses on behalf of Palestinians, the surge in harassment of Jewish students, the performative fostering of rage by Donald Trump and his cohort — all have combined to produce a deep divide between those who see Israel as a pariah led by a brutal despot and those who consider it a warrior state determined to protect itself and its interests.

The cause of Zionism has fostered disagreement for as long as anyone can remember or document. But Israel is an established and immutable reality, and that will not change. So what, actually, does Israel now represent to Jews who do not live there?

For the last half century, being Jewish in America reached an apogee of influence, prosperity, and acceptance in every sphere of life that in the past might have been restricted. Bigotry never fully disappears, but discrimination on religious grounds — quotas, enforced segregation in business and social circles — had become minimal.

For many American Jews, being Jewish did not have to be their primary identifier. How they were perceived in the whys and wherefores of politics was not tied tightly to their opinions about Israel. For decades, the percentage of Jews and non-Jews marrying and in every respect sharing their lives has increased dramatically.

The underlying issues have been simmering all along. Human Rights Watch, the largest and most important organization of its kind, was founded and strongly supported with money from Jewish philanthropists, and it has stumbled repeatedly on how to best monitor human rights in an Israeli democracy that avowedly discriminates against its Palestinian citizens and neighbors.

As foreign editor of the Washington Post in the late 1970s, a time when it appeared that there could be progress on an Arab-Israeli détente, I was assailed with complaints by readers about bias of one kind or another on this issue, more than every other matter combined.

The situation now is incomparably more contentious.

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I have just finished reading Nicholas Lemann’s soulful (meant as a compliment) new book, Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries. The book portrays in breadth and detail the story of his family, who emigrated from Germany in the 1830s, settled in Louisiana, and prospered in many ways.

As time went on, the family moved away from its Jewish origins in pursuit of a social acceptance that being outwardly or observantly Jewish would make unlikely.

The Lemann family’s story is aligned with and recognizable to what I have seen and personally experienced in my lifetime among friends and family. “How Jewish do you want to be?” was the question.

I was born in a time when being Jewish was existentially threatened by Nazism and fascism. The threats now are of other kinds: values, respect, shame, obloquy, misapplied pride. Israel has been lost as a unifying feature, which it never completely was anyway, and has become corrosive to a dangerous degree.

Lemann’s personal response has been to embrace Judaism completely, which, as he describes it, is about religious ritual and association. His joy in doing so has shifted his life away from melancholy.

Adopting this as a solution is not applicable, from my perspective, for many American Jews, whose observances goes from rare to casual to regular, as a part of life but not its core, which is how Lemann now sees it.

And it does not answer the fundamental conundrum: What about Israel, the Jewish homeland, the refuge from centuries of persecution and isolation?

That is why this is a different Jewish crisis from those of the past.

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My good friend Steven Weisman, the author of The Chosen Wars: How Judaism Became an American Religion, is writing another book that addresses this theme. He summarized his thoughts for me:

“Judaism under Roman subjugation was rife with internal conflicts over how much Jews should assimilate, whether religious or civil authority should govern them, governance infighting among priestly class and heirs to the overthrown royal family of Hasmoneans (the ones that had ruled for a hundred years after Judah Maccabee kicked out the Seleucids).

“There were also class conflicts over objection to heavy tax burdens. These conflicts weakened Jewish society and allowed Romans to exploit their divisions and take over after the Jewish War of 67-70 CE.”

The challenge today is not from the Romans, the Arabs, or the Iranians. It comes from the Jews themselves, who find it so very hard to resolve what Israel means to them anymore.