Last weekend I bought Where Are We? The Inner Life of America’s Jews, written in 1988 by longtime liberal Zionist Leonard Fein. The passage below explains a lot about the construction of American Jewish identity: we are “ushers” for Israel. The passage explains the centrality of the Israel lobby inside American Jewish consciousness and is revealing about the triumphalism of the Israelis, and the inferiority that many American Jews feel when they look on the Jews with guns who fight wars in the Middle East.
The part of the Zionist argument we [American Jews] generally accept was expressed by the Israeli novelist Amos Oz in 1984, during a lecture tour in America. Oz told his audiences that Israel is the living theater of Jewish life today, that we in America are at best a museum, where a smattering of the old is preserved and nothing new is created. The three great creative achievements of the Jewish people in our time, he argued, are the rebuilding of Jerusalem, the resurrection of the Hebrew language, and the development of the kibbutz. What, he asked, have we that can compare to any of these?
The fact is that in each of his audiences, there were those who took sharp issue with him. They acknowledged, in effect, that Israel is indisputably the standing-room-only Broadway hit show of this Jewish time, but they insisted as well that American Jews are busy mounting modest productions of their own. Many are painfully amateurish, but now and again there is one that offers promise, that might even be regarded as, say, solid Off-Broadway material.
Still, very many American Jews are content to perceive themselves as living out their Jewish lives in the role of ticket takers, ushers, stagehands, angels [i.e., the financial backers], or audience to Israel’s drama. Here are roles we can comprehend, here is a definition of what it means to be a Jew that is straightforward…. we are pleased and relieved to acknowledge that Israel is the main stage of Jewish life in our day. That takes the pressure for definition–and for performance–off us.
