If you are a normative leftist, you do not believe in the importance of race and religion. Hence Israel as the Jewish state is going to offend you. If you are Jewish before you are left, then you’ll find ways to be fine with the Jewish state, though you likely will be against similar ethno-nationalism for gentiles.
Left-wing Jews uninterested in Israel are not necessarily self-hating Jews. They’re just living out their left-wing values.
Whether secular (I am) or observant, a growing number of younger American Jews lack the historical fondness for Israel that moved our parents and grandparents. Ironically, it is in part the tepid project of American Jewish identity that is to blame. The journalist and writer Rokhl Kafrissen observed a few years ago: “It’s no coincidence that the most lavishly funded communal project of our generation has not been universal comprehensive Jewish education, but rather, an identity making vacation whose goals are no more controversial than encouraging passive Zionism and getting young Jews near each other.”
I never took that Birthright vacation, personally, although I did plant plenty of trees in Israel by dropping my parents’ money at Hebrew School. These projects, meant to tie young American Jews to the Israeli state with bonds of nostalgic affection, had the opposite effect: in making Israel just one more destination, they made Israel just another ordinary country, not the mystical homeland we appeal to in prayer, but a real, grotty, compromised place, a country whose frankly disastrous politics and shameful treatment of the Palestinians has made it increasingly unsupportable.
The two-state solution, which seems more and more like a temporizing exercise for the endless inaction of bad faith negotiations, feels to many American Jews of my generation more like an excuse than a solution, and though no major American politician, including Sanders, has broached the topic of a binational state, we are already beginning to wonder if that is the only possibility, beside some unthinkable dissolution of the entire state. It is no accident that the BDS movement on American college campuses is often led by Jews. It is no coincidence that many of these same activists, Jew and gentile, support Bernie Sanders, who seems at least interested in something beyond the status quo.
For younger people, the compromises and failures of Clintonian centrism are familiar and deeply frightening. Burdened by debt, uncertain of decent employment, and rightly skeptical of the value of an entrepreneurial venture economy that delivers a few celebrated billionaires at the cost of yawning inequalities of both opportunity and outcome, they see Bernie Sanders as a spokesman for an ethical politics that at very least admits some notion of a commons. Distrustful of America’s failed militarism, they see Sanders’ relative disinterest in foreign affairs as a hopeful sign that adventurism would take a secondary role in his administration.
This is a fascinating development, because Sanders, the only Jewish candidate, calls back to an earlier era of Jewish politics, before the almost complete integration of Jews into white, affluent America and before the notion that the most important thing for Jews in America was support for a foreign county thousands of miles away.
This return to a leftist, communal, and urban politics represents a real shift, though given the long rightward drift of America, it may better be interpreted as a sort of reversion to the mean. In this regard, the Democratic primaries’ ultimate result is almost incidental. While the Republican crack-up, much-commented on already, represents the institutional failure of a flawed organization, on the Democratic side a much more interesting and enduring realignment is afoot.
