MOMENT MAG
by Naomi Ragen
2014 September/October

The 19-year-old who joined the IDF after Birthright represents the best of American Jewry.  

Not so long ago, American Jewish children learned from their parents to love the State of Israel. Even secular, assimilated American Jews gave their kids charity boxes to collect nickels and dimes to plant trees there, as the parents do in Woody Allen’s 1987 film Radio Days. But that was a time when Jews remembered the tragedy of the ship St. Louis, with its hundreds of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazis and not a single country willing to take them in. Only a generation or two later, so low is the interest in the miracle of Israel that warm-hearted Jewish philanthropists have had to create Birthright, a program that actually pays for young Jews to visit their homeland.

For us in Israel, this fact has not gone unnoticed.  The growing distance between American Jewry and the Jews of Israel had its most profound expression in the election of the current American administration, arguably the most hostile to Israel in American history. Despite what I believe were numerous clear signals that this president would be hostile to the Jewish state, from his association with a church that honored Louis Farrakhan to his use of advisors such as Zbigniew Brzezinski, 70 percent of American Jews voted for him.  My attempts to deter those registered on my pro-Israel mailing list from doing so were met with hostility and an unsubscribe notice. But what stuck in my mind most were those who responded that they were Americans first and had to do what was best for America.

That American Jews had come to the conclusion that American interests and Israeli interests no longer coincided was—to say the least—frightening, an extreme and telling indication of the ignorance and naiveté eating away at a once proud and united  American Jewry……

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