An Exaggerated Romance

...issue in Israeli politics in 1988...

...In the 1950s and '60s, moreover, those who remained in their ranks were repeatedly being reminded by Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion that they were not real Zionists—indeed, that they were less than good Jews—because they lived outside the Promised Land...

...This accomplishment made American Jews proud of themselves, too, as they vicariously identified with the warriors who beat back the Egyptians, Syrians and Jordanians, and reunited Jerusalem under Israeli rule...

...Reviewed by Lawrence Grossman Co-editor, "American Jewish Year Book...

...Yet he oversimplifies...

...It appears numerous times in several variations throughout Biblical literature—the Israelites faithfully following their beloved God through the trackless desert for 40 years...

...If it fails to do so and just stands aside apathetically, he warns, the two old partners will simply drift apart, to the detriment of the Jewish people as a whole...

...nor were their members interested...

...Rosenthal avoids an outright prediction of a breakup, placing a question mark at the end of his title, Irreconcilable Differences...

...But by the late '70s, once the Yom Kippur War was over, the peace treaty with Egypt was signed and Israel's physical survival clearly was ensured, the overwhelming majority of American Jews, while continuing to wish Israel well, went back to tending their domestic priorities...

...The revelation that Israel had an American Jewish spy, and that when he was apprehended his handlers disavowed all responsibility, made many American Jews feel personally used and betrayed...

...For Rosenthal, however, the most serious threat to the love affair was the reemergence of the "Who Is a Jew...

...They emptied their pockets and exerted all their political muscle to prevent it...

...Rosenthal provides a convenient record of the stages in the process...

...Despite their constituting only some 10 per cent of American Jewry, they have managed to fashion institutions and develop ideological positions that so far have withstood the corrosive effects of the dominant culture...

...The overall thesis of Irreconcilable Differences?—that new strains have developed in American Jewish-Israeli relations—is clearly true, almost banal...

...the messianic vision of a climactic reunification of the reconciled couple...

...If, besides pursuing questionable policies toward the Palestinians, Israel was evolving into an officially "Orthodox" nation, many American Jews were ready to end their affair with it...

...The author traces the waning of the affair to the 1977 election of Menachem Begin as Prime Minister of Israel and the disastrous invasion of Lebanon that followed in 1982...

...did little programming about Israel...

...and Jews constituting an isolated bulwark of democratic Western values in a Middle East of petty tyrannies and Soviet-inspired regimes...

...Now, he urges, is the time for American Jewry to make demands on Israel, for example, about the country's true security needs and about the establishment of religious pluralism in the Jewish state...

...Some love affair...

...The American Jewish infatuation with Israel reached its peak with the 1967 Six-Day War when Israel, about to be attacked by its hostile Arab neighbors and possibly driven into the sea, won an apparently miraculous victory...

...The metaphor has survived through the ages, especially in Jewish mystical writings...

...In baseball, unlike affairs of the heart, the relationship is competitive: There can be only one winner and one loser...

...Furthermore, the American Jewish community has, in the main, not transmitted meaningful Jewish identity to the next generation...

...Emotions did not start to churn until 1967, when the prospect of the destruction of Israel a generation after the Holocaust was something American Jews could not bear...

...Ironically, it is Rosenthal's bête noire, the Orthodox...

...Rosenthal charges that the American Jewish Establishment "transformed Israel into an object of secular veneration" and enforced a "ban" on criticizing it publicly that marginalized such groups as Breira in the 1970s and New Jewish Agenda in the 1980s for having the effrontery to raise troubling concerns about Israeli policies...

...For one thing, the real romance was of considerably shorter duration than is suggested...

...the jealous God accusing his people Israel of unfaithfulness for running after other deities...

...For him, though, the other party to the relationship is American Jewry, whose ardor is "waning...

...It is therefore hardly in the position to make demands on the Jewish state either about security issues or about religious pluralism...

...WITHIN American Jewry there is one exception to the current trends...

...But the ominous cover illustration shows the scoreboard midway through a baseball game between "USA" and "ISR...

...Although the actual number of such cases was minuscule, much of American Jewry—90 per cent of whom are not Orthodox—saw the initiative (which, in fact, never became law) as an insult to the forms of Judaism they practiced...

...This tarnished Israel's peace-loving image because it was the first Israeli war fought not for the sake of national survival but in pursuit of a political end—the destruction of the Palestinian national movement...

...It is no accident that on every measure of closeness to Israel—visits, children studying there, number of relatives living in Israel, philanthropy for Israeli causes, and the like—the Orthodox score far higher than other American Jews...

...Jews creating a unified people out of immigrants from around the world...

...American Orthodox Jews are also an exception to Rosenthal's love affair gone bad...

...By dint of twomillennium-old religious convictions, their relationship to Israel is a marriage, not an affair...

...As Rosenthal sees it, American Jews fell passionately in love with the Jewish state because it made them feel good aboutthemselves...

...Today its families increasingly include non-Jewish spouses and children raised in two religions or none...

...As the Orthodox gradually assume a more influential position in a demographically declining American Jewish community over the next several decades, there may be reason to expect improvement in American Jewish-Israeli relations...

...Rosenthal's call for them to enter a brave new world of self-assertion vis-àvis Israel comes at exactly the wrong time for another reason: American Jewry has reached zero population growth and will soon fall behind Israel as the largest Jewish community in the world, a change that is bound to have a profoundly negative impact on American Jewish self-confidence...

...After the euphoria surrounding Israel's creation in 1948, the Jewish state quickly slipped into the outer reaches of the American Jewish consciousness...

...It was also used to stunning effect a half-century ago when the halachist and theologian Joseph B. Soloveitchik asserted that the re-establishment of the State of Israel after two millenniums of Jewish exile was a knock on the door by the lover who, after years of absence, was seeking to reunite with His beloved...

...Rosenthal is aware of the demographics, but does not understand that they undermine his argument...

...Three years later Jonathan Pollard, an American Jew, was caught spying for Israel...

...Then came the Palestinian intifada, which Israel sought to put down clumsily and even brutally, but still seemed unable to contain...

...When spouses are committed for the long run, despite all the gripes and grievances Rosenthal documents, differences are never "irreconcilable...

...Steven T. Rosenthal, a historian at the University of Hartford, speaks of a "love affair" as well in his new book on the State of Israel...

...Even American Zionist organizations (except for Hadassah) suffered drastic drops in membership...

...At this point, in the late 1980s, a growing number of American Jews became openly critical, urging a more conciliatory stance toward the Palestinians, including the creation of a Palestinian state...

...manipulated by Israeli governments...

...Caught up in the largely successful struggle to put an end to anti-Semitism and guarantee equality for all Americans, Jewish organizations in the U.S...

...Jews steeped in the humane values of peace and social justice yet ready to fight courageously to defend their land...

...With neither Labor nor Likud able to form a government, both major parties competed for the support of the Orthodox parties by offering to amend the Israeli Law of Retarn to specify that for a foreign convert to Judaism to be accepted as Jewish upon arrival in Israel, the conversion had to be Orthodox...

...Itpresented to the world Jews draining swamps and making the desert bloom...

...associate director of research, the American Jewish Committee In Jewish tradition, love between man and woman is the predominant metaphor for the relationship between God and the Jewish people...

...In the light of everything that has happened over the last quarter-century, says Rosenthal, recent American Jewish assertions of "independent judgment" are healthy signs...

...The problem, from Rosenthal's standpoint, can be summarized by the old cliché that love is blind: American Jews continued to back every Israeli action unquestioningly even after its survival was secured in 1967...

...American Jews are no longer "an inert, well-meaning mass...