“Why provide fodder for Israel’s critics,” they inquired, as though that thriving constituency needed a new Israeli law to fuel its abiding loathing for the Jewish state. Amid the “rising tide of anti-Semitism in the world,” they noted, European Jews already feel threatened. Could it be that fair-weather American Jewish admirers of Israel are alarmed lest they, too, might be held guilty by association with the Jewish state?
To be sure, Israel has long been a problem for American Reform Jews, who persistently insisted that Judaism was solely a religion that had nothing to do with nationality.
Back in the 1920s Reform rabbi Judah Magnes, the first chancellor of Hebrew University, actively supported Brit Shalom (the Peace Now equivalent of its time). Abandoning Zionism just when it had achieved international legitimacy from the League of Nations, their shared solution was a bi-national (non-Jewish) state, the better to rescue diaspora Jews from allegations of dual loyalty should a “Jewish” state emerge in Palestine.
During World War II, reports of the Holocaust notwithstanding, a group of prominent American Reform rabbis formed the American Council for Judaism. It achieved notoriety as the only American Jewish organization established solely to oppose Zionism. In 1948 the council opposed the establishment of a Jewish state and, once that battle was lost, it relentlessly criticized “the Israel-Zionist domination of American Jewish life.” (The council was vigorously supported, financially and editorially, by New York Times publisher and committed Reform Jew Arthur Hays Sulzberger.)
If Chancellor Ellenson is representative of the contemporary Reform movement, little has changed among Jews for whom liberalism, not Zionism, defines their assimilationist faith.
“Behind Israel’s Jewish ‘State’ Uproar” over the Israeli Cabinet proposal, Joel H. Golovensky wrote two weeks later in the Wall Street Journal (December 16), is the misguided apprehension – and incessant allegation – that Israel cannot be a Jewish state that simultaneously protects the individual rights of all its citizens. But Israel, as Golovensky (one of the proposal’s originators) noted, is among dozens of democratic nations that are “built on the ethnic identity of a predominant group…while affording minorities full civil and religious rights.”
Indeed, one-third of the world’s 196 countries (according to the Pew Research Center) have national flags that include religious symbols. Among them, nearly half display Christian symbols and about a third – self-identifying as uniquely Muslim states –flaunt Islamic symbols. Democratic Britain and Denmark have state religions. Where is the outrage from critics who reflexively lacerate Israel for its own self-definition as “the Jewish State…to be called Israel”?
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Disapproval of Israel’s proposed self-definition as “The Nation State of the Jewish People” agitates Jews whether they live in London, Los Angeles – or Tel Aviv. Their response expresses the desperate yearning for assimilation and acceptance that has tormented Jews for at least two centuries, ever since they embraced the emancipation bargain offered by France in 1789.
Amid debate in the French National Assembly Comte de Clermont-Tonnerre, an advocate of emancipation, explicitly stated: “The Jews should be denied everything as a nation, but granted everything as individuals.” (As he warned: “The existence of a nation within a nation is unacceptable.”) The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen signified the first act of full emancipation by a Christian state. Jews were ecstatic: “France…is our Palestine, its mountains are our Zion, its rivers our Jordan,” wrote a French Jew.
Fast forward nearly a century to the Jewish (but not too Jewish) state proposed by Theodor Herzl. He wondered: “Who among us has a sufficient acquaintance with Hebrew to ask for a railway ticket in that language!… Every man can preserve the language in which his thoughts are at home.” As for religion: “We shall keep our priests within the confines of their temples.” But Herzl grasped its essential component: “We shall live at last as free men on our own soil” in the “old-new land” (Altneuland) of his dreams.
