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The effect of the October 7 atrocity and its aftermath upon Jews in the United States is the ostensible topic of Peter Beinart’s recent op-ed in the New York Times, “The Great Rupture in American Jewish Life.” Actually, Mr. Beinart demonstrates a rupture in the lives of Jewish leftists such as he, who discover that they can no longer be one with their non-Jewish comrades unless they denounce Zionism (i.e., the cause of Israel).
Beinart tells American Jews (those calling themselves themselves liberals, at any rate) to oppose the continued existence of a Jewish nation and homeland in the Mideast. Beinart depicts Zionism as some kind of fetish that American Jews acquired after the 1967 Six-Day War. “[I]t came to dominate communal life only after Israel’s dramatic victory in the 1967 war exhilarated American Jews eager for an antidote to Jewish powerlessness during the Holocaust.” Israel apparently never served that function at its founding or in the ensuing 19 years.
Quoting a leftist defender of the intifada, Beinart tells us that “American Jews…’have made of Israel an icon — a surrogate faith, surrogate synagogue, surrogate God.’” No, the Torah places Israel at the center of the Jewish faith. It is there that Moses leads the Israelites after they are chosen to receive the Ten Commandments.
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