The buzzword of the moment is decentre. Everyone’s decentring everything all the time these days. Or maybe there are just two main contexts in which this comes up, at least on the beats I cover. Some women are decentring men, or trying. And Jews? We are, or are not, decentring Israel. Whatever that means. (I am getting to what it means.) 

Exactly how central Israel ought to be to Jewish life elsewhere is a completely new topic I’m sure you’ve never come across before. Kidding! It’s everywhere, and it’s not new. It is, however, much in the news these days, with various diaspora Jews announcing that they’ve had it with being associated with Israel, whether by non-Jews or Jewish institutions, and requesting that they be excluded, as it were, from the narrative.

The question of how much to centre Israel is not quite the same as whether to be a full-throated supporter. There are Jewish anti-Zionists who give other countries little thought, as well as Jewish nominal Zionists who are aware there’s a Jewish state and aren’t seeking to destroy or redefine it but wouldn’t be able to distinguish Hebrew script from kanji.

Some of the decenter-Israel moment? movement? is not so much advocacy for a change to occur, but an acknowledgment of a longstanding reality: there are diaspora Jews, particularly ones in the United States whose families arrived in the early 20th century or earlier, who simply feel no connection to Israel, and experience Israeli flags at Jewish community centres or whatever as confusing. They don’t have Israeli family and friends, and their Jewish culture is multigenerationally local. Theirs is a Jewishness of Woody Allen and delis, maybe of synagogues or temples, maybe not. What’s the modern-day nation-state of Israel to them?

This sort of decentring isn’t strictly speaking decentring, though, because these are Jews who had never centred Israel to begin with. It’s like when someone describes a Jew whose first solid food was pureed ham as being an assimilated Jew, as if there were some primal distinctly-Jewish state from which they assimilated, some self they’re being disloyal to, simply in being exactly who they are.

On the whole, decentring Israel goes together with criticizing its behaviour or existence. It lines up with a sense that it is a liability to be associated with the Jewish state, and with a hope (naïve, as I see it) that if one could simply unlink anti-Zionism and antisemitism, once and for all, the latter would vanish.

A recent open letter from some Jewish writers to the Jewish Book Council “apparent bias toward centering Israeli and Zionist voices.” (Yes,........

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