American Jews often forget that the First Amendment is not a foreign policy or a global eruv.

One of the stranger habits of American Jewish life is the assumption that the United States Constitution follows American Jews wherever they go — even into Israel, even into Orthodox communal disputes, even into beis din, and even into conversations about another person’s name, family, Jewish status, or reputation.

There is a familiar kind of American Jewish bewilderment in Israel. The seminary girl who is shocked that a tiny falafel shop in Petah Tikva does not take American Express. The elderly tourist who cannot understand why the bus driver does not speak English. The visiting relative who discovers, with visible irritation, that Israeli bureaucracy was not designed around American expectations.

Most of this is harmless. Sometimes it is even funny. Americans arrive with assumptions, Israel corrects them, and everyone moves on. The problem begins when that same provincial confidence enters Jewish public discourse, and some American Jews seem to believe that American legal culture travels with them everywhere: into Israel, into Orthodox communal disputes, into beis din, and into the lives of people whose names, families, marriages, status, or reputations they discuss online.

The First Amendment is an American constitutional protection. It is not a passport, a diplomatic immunity card, or a universal license to defame people across borders. It does not govern Israel. It does not govern Jewish law — halacha. It does not magically convert loshon hora and motzi shem ra into brave public discourse because the words were typed in English from somewhere in America.

This is one of the more provincial features of American Jewish public culture. Many American Jews are so used to treating American assumptions as universal that they forget other societies have their own laws, values, and moral priorities. Israel has its own legal system. Halacha has its own categories. Europe, too, has never treated........

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