What American Jewry Got Wrong

For decades, American Jewish leaders have sought ways to combat rising rates of intermarriage and declining rates of synagogue membership, and then lamented the apparent failures of their efforts. Daniel Gordis, an American Conservative rabbi who eventually settled in Israel to become an educator and writer, traces these problems to the hollowness of Jewish education in the U.S. since World War II:

American Jewish leaders never made the claim publicly, nor in all likelihood did they ever articulate it to themselves. Yet in retrospect, the wager they made has become clear: American Jewish leadership believed that it could fashion a variety of Judaism that would be both meaningful and sustainable with virtually no content at its core.

We, [members of the older generation]. see the result of Jewish “education” sans content most painfully when it comes to Israel. Many of us are distraught at the antipathy [many members of the] younger generation feel toward what we see as a national liberation movement, but to no small degree, it’s our fault. What have we done to show them that Zionism is not a simple and uniform ideology, but a profound and ongoing conversation? What have we done to usher them into the [vibrant exchange] that was once (and in certain circles, still is) Zionist discourse? What have we taught them about the differing worldviews of the great Zionist thinkers—the [cultural nationalism of] Ahad Ha’am; Leon Pinsker, the diagnostician of the illness of European Jewry; A.D. Gordon and his belief that redemption would come from having the earth of the Land of Israel under their fingernails; Vladimir Jabotinsky, the classical liberal who opposed mainstream Zionism’s naïveté about Arabs; or Abraham Isaac Kook and his unique theological stance that allowed his Orthodoxy to embrace the revolution?

The most basic truths about Judaism are utterly unfamiliar to the Jews we claim to have educated. By the time we send them off to freshman orientation, have we ever taken their intelligence seriously? . . .

How did this play out in American Jewish life? American non-Orthodox religious leaders, increasingly shaped by academic scholarship, found themselves unable to embrace theological principles that had long been a bedrock of Jewish life. If God’s authorship of the Torah was suddenly called into question because of various formulations of the documentary hypothesis, how could one speak of the authority of the laws that emerged from the Bible, or the Talmud, or the Shulḥan Arukh?

Read more at Sapir

More about: American Judaism, Israel and the Diaspora, Jewish education

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF