Israelis often hold deeply prejudiced views about American Jews. I might have seen it as racism if we were not all Jews, bound to each other as family and tribe. And I know this prejudice from the inside, because it was once my own unconscious bias.

I remember going to a synagogue on the Upper West Side shortly after arriving in New York for graduate school. Everything felt slightly off. The kippot were not the “right” kind. The chazan had the “wrong” accent. I missed my home, Jerusalem, where I believed Jewish life was authentic, sophisticated and fluent in Hebrew. 

I have now lived in the United States for almost 30 years. Over time, I have come to appreciate and to love the reflective, messy, pluralistic reality of Jewish life in New York, along with the promise and the challenges of diaspora existence.

I have been thinking about this tension for years. But two recent articles, by Moran Sharir in Ha’aretz and Hagai Segal in Makor Rishon, pushed  me to write about it more directly. Even though they come from opposite ends of Israel’s political and religious spectrum, they both display a striking lack of understanding of American Jewry. More than that, both fail to recognize the legitimacy of Jewish life in the diaspora, and the genuine moral anguish many Jews feel as they watch the actions of the Israeli state.

To even begin this conversation, we need a few grounding facts. There are roughly 7.2 million Jews in Israel (alongside about 2 million Arab citizens of Israel). In the United States, there are a similar number of Jews – between 6.5 and 7.5 million. Approximately 1.5 Millions Jews live elsewhere around the world. The Jewish people today are, in a very real sense, divided between two major centers.

In response to emancipation, antisemitism, and the promise of modernity, two primary Jewish paths emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 

Zionism argued that Jews, like other peoples, require sovereignty in a national homeland in order to thrive as a people. From a small and fragile state in 1948, Israel has........

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