An American Jew to the People of Israel: An Open Letter

I was born an American. My Mother was Jewish; by Jewish law, so am I. So was my father. My family never considered ourselves anything but Jewish, though neither parent went to temple.

I was not brought up Jewish. My family celebrated Christmas. I was never Bar Mitzvah. I can’t recall ever going to temple as a child.

I came to “my people” only well into adulthood, purely of my own free choice. I began to attend temple and learned to read (but little to understand) Hebrew because my fiancée at the time so admired Judaism that she wanted to convert from Christianity. I “converted” with her.

But there was more. I “converted” also because I had long admired and respected our Jewish culture and, most of all, our love of learning and practical achievement. It was for those things—education, learning, hard work, egalitarianism, and, yes, a relentless quest for wisdom—that I came to embrace Judaism fully.

In these respects I think I’m like many American Jews, perhaps a majority. Wherever our ancestors came from—whether we are Ashkenazi or Sephardic—we are unwitting products of the Western Enlightenment. We see modern Judaism, especially Reform Judaism, as reflecting Enlightenment values.

So our basic life’s beliefs push us toward belonging to our “tribal” community. Imagine, then, how we feel when we see the State of Israel and its people seeming to abandon all that we hold dear.

Let’s start with a characteristic of Americans so deeply engrained that it has become a cliché: rooting for the underdog.

I was born three years before Israel became a nation. Long before I “converted” to my inherited religion, I admired the settlers and sabras who had built Israel out of the ashes of the Holocaust. When I read Leon Uris’ Exodus, my heart filled with pride and my eyes with tears. It was as if the ancient Greek Phoenix had come to life and blessed my people.

Most, if not all, American Jews share similar stories of rising from ashes. During the pandemic, a group of my and my wife’s Jewish friends met on Zoom regularly for discussions. While discussing Russia’s atrocities in Ukraine, I once asked how many discussants had ancestors who had fled pogroms there. Astonishingly, over half raised their hands.

These were Jews from all over America, who had eventually settled in the San Francisco Bay Area. And many of them were there because their ancestors had fled anti-Jewish pogroms in Ukraine. How do you think they feel on seeing Jewish West-Bank settlers perpetrating pogroms against Israeli Arabs?

Next, let’s look at equality. If there’s any “prime directive” in America, it’s not profit (although today that comes close). It’s not even the First Amendment, whose anti-establishment clause lets Jews live here in peace among Christians, Muslims, Buddhists and others. It’s Jefferson’s credo that “all . . . are created equal.”

I know, I know. Jefferson was a world-class hypocrite who kept slaves and lived so lavishly above his means that they had to be sold to pay his debts after he died. Yet his words have long outlived him and his hypocrisy. They helped motivate our greatest war—the one against ourselves. Still they drive our long, slow, arduous trek toward a goal that no human society has fully achieved: the demise of tribalism.

When I think of that arduous journey, of MLK’s as-yet-unrealized Dream, of how hard we Americans are working to bring it closer and closer, my eyes fill with the same kind of tears that they shed on reading Exodus. How do you think I and my fellow American Jews feel when we see Israel abandoning that dream for an Apartheid society with Israeli Arabs as second-class citizens?

There’s yet another prime directive for Americans, which gets less press than equality. It’s hard work.

Except for Native Americans, slaves and their descendants, we Americans descended from immigrants. We or our ancestors had to work hard and struggle to survive, assimilate, become educated and achieve whatever measures of wealth or comfort in this country we have attained. How do you think we American Jews react when we see Israeli Haredim subsidized by their government and freed from obligations to work or to protect their nation, so they can spend their days poring over ancient scriptures that have been studied for millennia?

It’s hard for me to imagine greater apostasy against faith in the value of hard work. And the apostasy grows with every new concession and subsidy to the Haredim.

As for law, we can’t forget that the United States is founded on the “rule of law, not men.” That’s a key tenet of the Western Enlightenment. It’s why we Americans have a written Constitution and a Supreme Court to tell us what it means.

There are many paths to the rule of law. The Brits don’t have a written Constitution, but they are doing just fine. Their democracy may no longer be the mightiest, but it’s undoubtedly the longest-lived in human history. From Magna Carta in 1215 to today, it has lasted over eight centuries. Its secret elixir of longevity is deep faith in the rule of law.

Until days ago, the Israelis had their own path toward the rule of law. Their Supreme Court could countermand acts of the Israeli executive that it decided were not “reasonable.” That’s a pretty broad standard, but its breadth doesn’t really matter. What matters is that wise and learned men and women, trained in law and legal order, have some way to curb the worst excesses of unrestrained power on the part of demagogues like Netanyahu.

How do you think we American Jews view Bibi as he throws out that healthy restraint? Do you think it makes us admire Israel more, when the prosecutorial departments of our federal and several state governments have been working overtime for two years to see that nothing similar happens here?

Finally, there’s the canard that might makes right. All over Arlington and Normandy lie the graves of Americans who fought the consequences of that canard. In two of them lie my uncle and aunt—head-to-head in Arlington Cemetery. How do you think I, and millions of American Jews like me, view Israeli Jews attacking Palestinian communities and encroaching step-by-step on lands internationally recognized as Arabs’, just because they can? Where has the inveterate Jewish quest for justice and legitimacy gone?

As I’ve written elsewhere, I believe that South Africa’s once-ruling white minority made the right decision to abandon its quest (jointly with Israel!) for nuclear weapons. Instead, it opted for democracy and equality. The reasons were practical, not religious or theoretical. The white minority could never have used those weapons against the Black majority without poisoning its own land and destroying all that it had built. So it had no rational choice but to dump nukes and permit, encourage and even nurture democracy and equality.

Israel’s religious extremists may think that Israel has a choice. But does it really? It’s a tiny nation surrounded by enemies far and near: Russia, Iran, Assad’s brutal Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas, the warring Libyan tribes, and hundreds of millions of Arabs balanced on a knife edge between sympathy for Palestinians and lust for Israel’s wealth and technology. (I won’t even mention the ever-ambivalent Turks.) Can Israel really buy and/or scare them all off forever? Wouldn’t it be better to build durable cooperation on a solid foundation of justice and law?

If this is what one American Jew thinks, you can bet that there are millions more like me. And you can bet that there are tens of millions of Americans who, having no connection with Israel or Judaism, think far worse of Israel and its current degeneration into theocracy.

The Old Testament depicts a lot of “smiting.” Yet Bibi and the extremists he coddles speak of the West Bank today as being part of “Judea and Samaria,” as if nothing had changed in more than two millennia.

Unfortunately, things have changed. While all that smiting was going on, our species was in its infancy. The loss of one tribe, or even its utter extinction, would have been unlikely to have affected our species.

Not so today. We have nuclear weapons and a dramatically changing global climate, possibly tipping in a self-sustaining and irreversible way. So we have the power to extinguish ourselves as a species, both in anger and by negligence. By backing itself into a corner where it sees only a nuclear way out, Israel could strike a spark that destroys our entire species. At very least, a conflict-beset Israel would devote less of its wealth and high technology to the existential threat of global warming. Therefore every human, let alone every American Jew, has a stake in Israel coming to its senses.

That’s why my heart and mind are entirely with the Israelis protesting Bibi’s power grab. That’s why I hope protestors in the Israeli military will do what they have to do to drive their good points home. That’s why I hope that Bibi Netanyahu and Itamar ben Gvir end up in an Israeli prison, where they belong, much as our own traitorous Demagogue merits imprisonment here.

This is crunch time for democracy and for our human species. A corrupt and brutal theocracy is not the answer, whether in Israel or in America. If one of our oldest cultures cannot govern all its people wisely and humanely after pursuing wisdom for 5783 years, what chances of long-term survival does our species have?

Endnote on Haredim. Haredim (singular, Haredi) are members “of any of various Orthodox Jewish sects characterized by strict adherence to the traditional form of Jewish law and rejection of modern secular culture, many of whom do not recognize the modern state of Israel as a spiritual authority.” Male Haredim often spend entire days in religious study and observance. Many have large families, which the State of Israel subsidizes as part of its devotion to Judaism.


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