For decades now, the Jewish communities in Israel and the U.S. have been drifting apart. While almost three-quarters of American Jews continue to vote Democratic and a majority identify as liberal, the center in Israel has shifted to the right—in part organically, thanks to immigration and the experience of living in a state surrounded by hostile neighbors, and in part driven by a disciplined right-wing campaign to increase religiosity and nationalism.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies seem unconcerned about losing support from large swaths of American Jewry, content to rely on politically conservative Orthodox Jews and evangelical Christians. In enacting a law that chips away at Israel’s democratic foundations, and in embracing President Donald Trump, Netanyahu has further alienated American Jews. As the Israeli journalist Ben Caspit observed, Netanyahu views this cohort, with its predilection for assimilation, as being on the verge of extinction: “Soon they will be at the threshold of the abyss and will simply collapse from within and disappear,” Caspit writes. “They will not remain Jews. So it is a shame to waste our time. They are no longer part of us.”

The obvious question then for non-Orthodox, liberal Jewish Americans is why engage at all with an Israel led by people who are disowning us? Why not simply wash our hands of the state and walk away? Is the struggle to secure a liberal, Jewish, and democratic Israel really worth the heartache and frustration?



To the latter, my answer is a resounding “yes.” The fight over Israel’s future is a battle over what it means to be Jewish—a struggle for the very soul of the Jewish community globally. Opting out of that struggle, as many Jewish Americans exasperated with Israeli illiberalism seem inclined to do, means forfeiting that soul. The better response is to engage, countering the right-wing Israeli-American alliance with an equally strong alliance of American and Israeli liberals, fighting both in the United States and in the Middle East for states that accurately reflect deeply held Jewish values of tolerance.

In Israel’s Declaration of Independence, the state’s founders wrote that the new country “will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture …”