JTA — When Samuel Freedman published “Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry” in August 2000, he described a community torn between Orthodoxy and liberalism, between tradition and adaptation, between continuity and assimilation.

Through vivid vignettes — a Zionist camp turned over to Satmar Hasidim, rabbis squabbling in Denver over an interfaith marriage panel, feminists reshaping synagogue liturgy, Orthodox newcomers clashing with established neighbors in Ohio — Freedman painted a family portrait in which every sibling seemed locked in combat.

The phrase “Jew vs. Jew” quickly entered the communal lexicon. Writers and rabbis invoked it to describe battles over denominational legitimacy, gender roles, liturgy, philanthropy and above all, Israel. “‘Jew vs. Jew’ shattered the comfortable assumptions that ‘we are one’ by underscoring the tremendous internal disagreements and conflicts between various Jewish groups in the United States,” Noam Pianko, director of the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Washington, wrote in the 2020 anthology “The New Jewish Canon.”

Exactly 25 years later, those conflicts are starker than ever, with a nasty internal discourse dividing Jews who are all-in with the Israeli government’s stated aims for the war on Hamas and Jews who see the destruction and humanitarian crisis in Gaza as a stain on Israel and Judaism. What at first united engaged Jews — horror over the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, and anguish over the hostages — is overshadowed by what divides them.

The Gaza war has created “an unprecedented divide within American Jewry” over Zionism itself, Freedman told me this week, discussing the book’s 25th anniversary.

For decades, he notes, three pillars sustained Jewish identity outside of religious observance: Holocaust memory, fighting antisemitism and attachment to Israel.

Now, he argues, one of those legs has been shattered, and the others are under stress. Holocaust memory is fading and, with antisemitism on the rise, even the definition of antisemitism is a matter of dispute, dividing those who think the real threat is right-wing extremism and those who point to anti-Israel protesters on college campuses and beyond.

That’s a direct challenge to one of the central theses of “Jew vs. Jew”: that in an America unusually welcoming to Jews, the old external enemies had receded, leaving Jews to fight among themselves over how to live with one another when they are no longer vulnerable.

“I wrote the book in what felt like the pretty solid knowledge that American Jews were part of the American mix, and that our story was one of American exceptionalism and being truly embraced in the country, and that antisemitism was a fringy kind of activity,” said Freedman. “And that’s clearly been reversed from, to........

© The Times of Israel