Do American Jews share the philosophical or cultural values of Israelis?
Less and less, I would say, quite simply because Israel’s most astonishing achievement has been the creation of a completely new nation, language, and culture. A hundred years ago most Jews who went to America and Palestine were Yiddish-speaking. Now two communities exist — the American Jews who speak English and the Israeli Jews who speak Hebrew — and remarkably few Jewish-Americans know Hebrew. There are now, funnily enough, more Arabs than Jewish-Americans who speak Hebrew. Another profound difference between American Jews and Israelis is the founding philosophies of their respective nations. The United States is in its essence an absolute rejection of ethnic nationalism. To be an American you do not have to be something by your origin. You can become an American, as all Americans at some stage in their family history have done, almost by a political act of will. Israel is not like that. Israel is an outgrowth, or Zionism is an outgrowth, of the European nationalism that America r
