Last June, writer and political scientist Peter Beinart launched a broadside at the American Jewish community, accusing it of forsaking its own liberal democratic values in blind support of Israel’s rightward lurch, and in the process creating a generation of young Jews who feel no attachment to the Jewish state.
“The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment,” published in the New York Review of Books, made a lot of waves and fueled a wider argument about when, and whether, American Jews should speak out against Israel’s policies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The discussion will continue 7 p.m. Thursday [in the Pittsburgh area]…His topic: “Is the love affair over? Young American Jews and Israel.”
It would be interesting to see a recent poll that identifies religious attitudes (i.e. various versions of traditional Judiasm, various versions of revisionist Judiasm, non-religious, etc.) taken of American Jews regarding Israel.
My relatively uninformed sense of the situation discussed in this article is that Judiasm is suffering from the same secular incursions of the left-wing of liberalism that the main-line Christian churches have been afflicted with.
Definition of Terms: I use the term left-wing liberalism to make a distinction between its lines of secular thought and those of right-wing of liberalism. I do this because the term “liberal” become so over used that it seems to have lost its historic and original meaning in public discourse.
For example, both Communism (international socialism) and National Socialism are products of left-wing liberal thinking, but today one is associated with the ‘left’ side and the other is incorrectly associated with the ‘right’ side of classical liberalism by many making political distinctions.