Podcast: Daniel Gordis on the Rift between American and Israeli Jews

This Week’s Guest: Daniel Gordis

The occupation; the Western Wall; the Nation-State law; the relationship between President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu. All of these issues and more have upset relations between American and Israeli Jews, and the upset seems to grow daily. How did this happen? Wasn’t Israel a point of consensus in the American Jewish community until just recently, the cause that united Jews across the political and denominational spectrum?

Daniel Gordis of Shalem College believes that the growing divide is not over what Israel does, but is, rather, over what Israel is. In a series of insightful articles as well as in a forthcoming book, Gordis argues that the two largest Jewish communities in the world are animated by different attitudes toward the purpose of Jewish life and what it takes for Jews to prosper. It is these more fundamental differences, and not, say, the policies of the Netanyahu government or the rulings of the Chief Rabbinate, that are the true cause of the widening rift between the Jews of Israel and the Jews of the United States.