My one and only homeland is America. I am proud of my belief in the age-old Judaic concept of one God in Heaven and one Humanity here below. But my faith does not pull me into a feeling of narrowly tribal kinship with all others who worship God in this way. Whenever I read of Americans singing the Hatikvah, Israel's national anthem, or see youth groups raising Israel's flag beside the Stars and Stripes. I am outraged. For Israel's flag and anthem are symbols of a foreign state; ,they are not mine.

…

Anyone who tells me those foreign Jews are exclusively my people that I should be closer to them than to Bob McCormick, the kid on the block with whom I used to play ball: or to Nick Galbraith, who roomed next to me at Cornell; or Dave Du Vivier with whom I studied in law school—that man is talking dangerous nonsense. I have also learned, Mother, that when something. goes wrong in my relations with non-Jews. I avoid the habit of thinking that it happened just because I am a Jew. Such self-pity is comforting, but it is usually wrong and therefore dangerous.

Pretty commonsensical stuff, at least to me. What is shocking is this reminder of how it was once possible to have an adult discussion of Jewishness — and in the Reader's Digest, no less.

'As Chaim Weizmann and his colleagues were fighting to have the Balfour Declaration adopted, they were fiercely opposed by other Jews. In London, the only Jew in the Cabinet, Edwin Montagu, fought the Declaration to the end, bitterly asking his colleagues why they wanted to send him off to an ''Oriental ghetto.'' And two leading figures of English Jewry wrote to The Times of London deploring ''the establishment of a Jewish nationality in Palestine,'' which ''must have the effect throughout the world of stamping the Jews as strangers in their native lands, and of undermining their hard won position as citizens and nationals of those lands.''

(See link to query.nytimes.com
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–Lilienthal in 2002