Two ways of seeing Israel—and one unfinished conversation.

A few weeks ago, a friend told me about a conversation he had with his twenty-something daughter. She was wrestling with a question that, increasingly, young Jews are being asked to confront:

What does Israel have to do with Judaism?

The comment stayed with me because I knew it was not hers alone. And there was an important truth embedded in the question. Judaism is not the Israeli government, and Jews everywhere are not responsible for its actions. But her words echoed an argument gaining currency on the progressive left: that Israel is simply another country, separate from Judaism and not central to what it means to be Jewish.

My first impulse was to answer the question myself. Israel is embedded in Jewish prayer, ritual and memory. We pray facing Jerusalem. At the Passover Seder, Jews who have never set foot in Israel say, “Next year in Jerusalem.”

I thought about all the other daughters and sons, a generation of young Jews facing difficult questions from friends while wrestling with questions of their own. Rather than write a lecture aimed at them, I decided to write an essay for them and, at the end, offer a short guide to the difficult conversations they are already having.

The Israel We Knew, the Israel They See

Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan and the commandos at Entebbe became larger than life. They embodied the promise of a country founded only three years after Auschwitz: Jews would no longer wait for someone else to save them. That was the Israel my generation inherited—not merely a country, but an answer to Jewish powerlessness.

Young Jews of her generation grew up with a different Israel.

The Israel they see is not David but Goliath: a presumed nuclear power with an advanced military, a booming technology sector and the support of the United States. They see Israeli jets above Gaza, checkpoints in the West Bank and Palestinian families living under Israeli power. They did not watch Egyptian armies mass at Israel’s borders. They watch Palestinian buildings collapse on their phones.

Then there is the Bibi factor. For most of their politically conscious lives, Benjamin Netanyahu has been the face of Israel—arrogant, divisive and perpetually embattled. To many younger Jews, he can seem less like one chapter in Israel’s history than the whole book.

The growing estrangement from Israel is no longer confined to campuses or social-media feeds. It is acquiring political power. Primary victories by progressive figures with strong appeal among younger voters, including Zohran Mamdani and Abdul El-Sayed, show that opposition to Israel is no longer a barrier to winning Democratic primaries. And the position is hardening—from criticizing Netanyahu and conditioning offensive weapons to, in some quarters, opposing even support for defensive systems such as Iron Dome.

Young Jews are........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)