What Has Zionism Wrought?

I thank Allan Arkush, Micah Goodman, Ruth Wisse, and Ran Baratz for their responses to my essay. All were made in a spirit of comradeship and all will be answered in it.

Allan and Ruth certainly must know that I don’t belittle American Jews like themselves. I admire them and wish there were more of them, and nothing I wrote in Letters to an American Jewish Friend, or in my Mosaic essay introducing its republished edition, belies that. They are indeed on the front line in an intellectual and political war that neither Israel nor the Jewish people can afford to lose, and I am grateful to them for being there. A world without Israel would be as empty for them as it would be for me; the fact that I live there and they don’t is my good fortune, not something I hold against them. If all of American Jewry—if a half or a quarter of it—shared their views, no one would have to call for putting aliyah on the American Jewish agenda, because it would already be there. There would then be a steady flow of American Jewish immigrants to Israel, because American Jews would be living in a different atmosphere, with a far stronger attachment to Israel, from the one they live in now. Would it were so.

Once, in a spirit of foolish jest, I answered a letter from a prominent American rabbi inquiring what I thought a Zionist strategy for America should be by writing back: the immediate evacuation of all American Jews to Israel. But I am not really that foolish. There are, give or take a Pew more or a Pew less, some six million Jews living in the United States. If one in every 500 were to settle in Israel each year—12,000 annually, which is more than four times the present number—I, like most Israelis, would be overjoyed. To the remaining 499, I would say: keep up the good work!