Devaluing the Diaspora

I didn’t need the experience of the last 36 years to be convinced that Hillel Halkin’s analysis in his 1977 book, Letters to an American Jewish Friend, was correct. I read the book almost immediately after it appeared and have been in substantial agreement with Halkin ever since, even though (for reasons he would apparently consider legitimate, if also lamentable), I didn’t follow him in emigrating from the United States to Israel. But that doesn’t prevent me from being a little irked when, prompted by his new essay in Mosaic, I turned back to re-read what he had to say then about the slowly vanishing Jewry of the Diaspora.

I can’t complain about his stinging descriptions of American Jewry, about which he was prescient. Although in his new essay he passes up an easy opportunity to underscore the point, the much-publicized statistics of declining Jewish identification on offer in the latest Pew Research Center’s Portrait of Jewish Americans are in line with his decades-old prognostications, or at least close enough for discomfort. Back in 1977, Halkin also wrote dismissively of the then-current “fashion of the ‘new ethnicity,’” which allegedly would replace the old melting-pot model of inevitable assimilation into American society. He was right about that, too; as he said then and as time has told, “the melting pot remains a melting pot even when the fire beneath it is temporarily turned down.”

But if his depiction of us American Jews was and remains accurate enough, what bothers me is his reluctance to acknowledge that we might serve some useful purpose. To be sure, he did foresee in 1977 that American policymakers’ increasing tendency to “appease Arab appetites at the expense of Israeli interests” would lead to a battle for American public opinion, and that “this [would] involve the mobilization of American Jews, both as a pressure group in their own right and as an agent for influencing American opinion at large.” But instead of contemplating what good might thereby be done for Israel, he reflected at length on the ways in which Jewish involvement in a battle for American public opinion was likely to compromise and weaken the position of American Jews themselves. Halkin’s 1977 apprehensions thus anticipated the 2007 dream of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, who would like to see “the Lobby” cornered and the battle for American opinion take a different turn. If that hasn’t happened in the past three-and-a-half decades, it is at least partly due to the strenuous efforts of the kinds of Diaspora Jews whom Halkin continues to belittle for thinking that the adventure of Zionism is a project entirely for others.