To the legion of Jews that Weiss has enraged, this will sound perverse. It’s certainly self-aggrandizing. But it also gets at the way that Weiss has abandoned a deeply assimilated life for a profound—if idiosyncratic and tortured—engagement with Jewish questions. As the founder of Mondoweiss, a blog that has become a nucleus of anti-Zionist writing, and a co-editor of a new book about Richard Goldstone’s report on Israel’s 2008 invasion of Gaza, Weiss says that he now thinks about Jewishness all the time. In his fierce critique of tribal identity, he’s found his tribe—one he believes is growing.

“I think I was alienated from a lot of Jewish communal life in my 20s, 30s, 40s,” Weiss says. “One symptom of that is the fact that I’d never been to Israel until 2006. I was 50 before I got to Israel.” Now that he is 55, Israel has become the center of his life. He goes to rabbinical conventions and corresponds with left-wing Israelis. “I love what I’ve undergone in the last few years,” he says. “And I love my engagement with Jewish communal life now.”

Of course, much of that engagement comes in the form of relentless criticism. Weiss’ blog is fulsomely, intensely anti-Israel—it’s a universe in which even Noam Chomsky, hero of anti-imperialists worldwide, is criticized for his residual attachment to the Jewish state. His obsessive focus on Israel has come at the expense of a successful career as a magazine journalist. Harvard-educated, he got his start writing for the New Republic and later contributed features to New York, and the New York Times Magazine and wrote a column for the New York Observer. Initially he launched Mondoweiss as a general-interest blog on the New York Observer website. When he started to focus on Israel, his editor warned him that he was becoming a crank.

He didn’t listen, and in 2007 he left the Observer, taking the blog with him. Today it operates under the umbrella of the nonprofit Nation Institute, which allows Weiss to solicit tax-deductable contributions. But its budget comes entirely from donations, and Weiss has to rely on his wife, the writer and editor Cynthia Kling, to help support him.

It’s a little hard to figure out why Weiss threw so much away for a cause that was so new to him. Naturally, he sees a linear moral logic to his journey. He looks at contemporary Israel and is appalled. Because he came to Middle Eastern issues late in life, he has no fond memories of labor Zionism, or maddening recollections of the times Palestinians spurned opportunities for peace, to complicate his anger. As one long alienated from Jewish life, he hasn’t developed the habit, common to many American Jews, of reflexively giving Israel the benefit of the doubt. For him—as it is for many younger Jews—Israel is defined by Avigdor Lieberman and Operation Cast Lead, by Shas and settlements.

Weiss first became interested in Israel in the run-up to the Iraq war. “I felt there was some element of Jewish organizational life that was behind this war because it was good for Israel,” he says. The notion that the neoconservatives spoke for American Jews horrified him, and it imbued him with a sense of responsibility to speak out as a Jew. As he dove into books about Jewish and Middle Eastern history, he came up against what he saw as the essential conflict between Zionism and American liberalism—which, after all, defines itself precisely by its refusal to privilege any race or religion. Liberal Zionists are used to holding these ideas in uneasy tension. Weiss could see nothing but stark dissonance. “I don’t believe in the necessity of a Jewish state,” he says. “Most Jews disagree with me, and that is sort of the heart of my crisis.”

The idea that American Jews might someday find themselves persecuted and in need of refuge strikes him as paranoia. “Temperamentally, I lack a paranoid gene,” he says. He grew up, he adds, hearing that Jews would always and everywhere be in danger. “And my whole experience has been the opposite.”

That still doesn’t quite explain why he jettisoned so much to devote himself to anti-Zionism. But there’s something in Weiss that reacts intensely to disillusionment. Once he rejects conventional wisdom, he’s willing to swing wildly, even heedlessly, in the other direction. In the 1990s, he was a staunch Bill Clinton defender. But when Clinton disappointed him, he began a long flirtation with all sorts of anti-Clinton conspiracy theories. His New York Observer columns painted an image of a menacing cabal of thugs sitting in the White House and snuffing out their enemies. As he wrote in 1998, “Everywhere Bill Clinton goes, he makes Chinatowns.” He was particularly fixated on Vince Foster’s suicide, which he was convinced was part of something larger and more sinister. He has more of a paranoid gene than he realizes.

He regrets some of this now. “I have problems with loyalty in life, and I felt little loyalty to the Democrats when I sensed the small-town corruption that hung around Clinton,” he wrote in 2009. “I wanted to expose it. It was the wrong impulse because as John Homans, my friend/editor, used to berate me, You’re arming people who disagree with you on policy matters. Did I help elevate W? … And would Gore have kept us out of Iraq? Maybe. That’s why I feel bad about what I did.”

Friends have suggested that the same impulse that sent him after Clinton may drive some of his writing about Israel. Though his voice can be reflective, he seems to enjoy pulling wild ideas from the fever swamps and giving them a respectful airing. He’s particularly interested in Jewish power, manifestations of which he diligently catalogs.

“Over and over, American presidents have said they oppose the colonization program; over and over these instincts have been nullified politically because of the Jewish presence in the power structure,” he wrote in 2009. “The Senate is dominated by Democrats, and 1/5 of them are Jews, even though Jews are just 2 percent of the population. The Washington Post has said that over half the money given to the Democratic Party comes from Jews. Obama’s top two political advisers are Jewish, Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod. The news lately has been dominated by Obama aides Kenneth Feinberg and Larry Summers. And what does it mean that the Treasury Sec’y gets off the phone with Obama to confer immediately with Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman and Jamie Dimon of Morgan (Dimon’s Jewish; Blankfein would seem to be)?” He didn’t say what exactly this did mean, particularly regarding Israel—it was just an invitation to conspiratorial speculation. From there, Weiss went on to list Jewish journalists including Ezra Klein, Andrew Ross Sorkin, Terry Gross, and Nina Totenberg.

Now, it’s fair for Weiss to argue that Jews, owing to their success, are far more secure in the United States than they realize, and that their politics should reflect that, just as it’s more than fair to criticize the pro-Israel establishment for its destructive impact on American foreign policy. What’s outrageous is the imputation of a unified Jewish agenda to all these disparate figures, most of whom have nothing to do with Barack Obama’s Middle Eastern policy, and some of whom are far to the left of virtually all non-Jewish Republicans on Israel issues. Netanyahu has reportedly slurred Emanuel and Axelrod as self-hating Jews; there’s certainly no evidence that they’ve urged softness on settlements.

Not surprisingly, some Jew-haters see Weiss as a native informer, telling the plain truth about the Zionist octopus. “Philip Weiss is a unique American Jewish voice—a Jew without all the usual rationalizations and blind spots–at least most of them,” Kevin MacDonald, a leading anti-Semitic theorist, wrote last May. MacDonald has bandied the idea of taxes on Jews and quotas against them in order to “achieve parity between Jews and other ethnic groups.”

Weiss isn’t responsible for his fans, of course. But when he wrote about McDonald’s embrace, there was something notably equivocal in his rejection of a figure who most American journalists and thinkers would find beneath contempt. “I find a lot of what MacDonald has said elsewhere bracing and bold,” he wrote. “He is alive to important sociological trends that few people are talking about out loud.” Only then did he call him out for his open racism and disdain for Jewish suffering.

Yet Weiss can’t simply be written off as a victim of self-loathing. His ambivalence toward the Jewish world is too complicated, suffused with attraction as well as lacerating anger. When he first went to Israel, he says, he was surprised by his satisfaction at seeing Jews with guns. He was moved by the silence in West Jerusalem on the Sabbath, and by the struggles of young Israeli leftists like those who’ve clustered around the +972 blog. “I am ethnocentric,” he says. “And as much as I’m involved in Palestinian solidarity, I emotionally look to other Jews.”

“I find his writing about Israel to be infused with a real Jewish concern,” says J.J. Goldberg, former editor of The Forward and a friendly acquaintance of Weiss’. “Some people who are associated with him write about Israeli wrongdoing with what seems like glee. He seems to have regret.”

Lately, Weiss is particularly gratified to see a growing number of Jews moving in his direction. “I think there’s going to be a big anti-Zionist moment in American Jewish life,” says Weiss. “I just think it’s inevitable.”

He may be right. Take Lizzy Ratner, for example. One of Weiss’ co-editors on the Goldstone book, Ratner is a former New York Observer writer who was born into New York’s elite Jewish establishment—her father is millionaire real-estate developer Bruce Ratner. Lizzy was 4 years old the first time she went to Israel; during college she spent a semester there and was at the rally when Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated. Her horror led her to get involved in pro-Palestinian work.

“The moment I crossed a checkpoint, 15 minutes from Jerusalem, the world changed,” she told me. “My worldview shattered. You grow up being told ‘they’ want to push us into the sea and we have to do everything we can to stop this evil enemy that wants to kill us and is going to kill us, and then you meet the terrible evil enemy, and not only are they nice, and decent, but they’re actually oppressed.”

Returning from Israel in the 1990s, Ratner looked for a community of people who shared her concerns with the Middle East, and she couldn’t find it. She’d go to Palestinian solidarity meetings, and only three others would show up. Gradually, she drifted away from the issue altogether, until outrage over Gaza inspired her to get involved again. She found a movement to plug into. “Now I look at Phil and Adam’s website”—Adam Horowitz has been Weiss’ partner at Mondoweiss since 2008—“and I look at Jewish Voice for Peace—something undeniable is welling up,” she says.

Meanwhile, as Weiss has become more enmeshed in the world of left-wing anti-Zionist Jews, he’s become at least a little more sensitive to Jewish concerns. “I know I’ve made a lot of mistakes on my site over the years,” he says. “I think in my alienation from the Jewish community, I said stuff that I regret on a number of occasions.” He even has second thoughts about some of more strident attacks on neoconservatives. “The neoconservative thing is a very confusing thing to me,” he says. “I think it’s appropriate to talk about Jewish neoconservatives, but there’s an element of red-baiting. I haven’t come down fully on that issue. I know I’ve hurt people.”

And so his alienation from the Jewish community has been transformed into a new sense of mission within it. “There’s a crisis! There is truly a crisis in the two-state solution,” he says. “That de-marginalizes me.” He’s right, whether that fills you with hope or with dread.

The song was composed by Issachar Miron (born Mirchovsky) in 1941. Yehiel Haggiz, who was then serving in Jewish Company Number 22 of the British Buffs Regiment in Palestine, had written the lyrics when he brought them to Miron. The song is short, and it encourages young girls to go out and meet the young, virtuous soldiers in the settlement—the title translates literally to “Go Out, Go Out.” One of the instructors in the company wanted a song to celebrate the completion of their training, so Miron responded by quickly writing a melody. Miron’s version had two parts that could be sung as a round, and its upbeat dance tempo made it both easy to learn and—like all hits—hard to forget. Miron taught the song to his own company and soon, by his recollection, “almost instantly, the whole camp was singing it.”

By the time the Weavers recorded the song, it had been reprinted in a 1949 collection called “Songs of Israel,” and it had been recorded at least twice: first by Paolo Gorin for Israeli radio, and then later by Sara Jaaray, in a deal with a fledgling American record company, Zamir Art Co. The Jaaray recording was included on an album titled Haganah Sings, of which about 1,000 copies were pressed for sale in the United States. According to one contemporary account, “Many of the songs in the ‘Haganah’ album were of [questionable] provenance; others were Tin Pan Alley arrangements of popular tunes.”

Whether through sheet-music reprints or its inclusion on the Haganah album, the original Hebrew version of “Tzena Tzena” then landed in the hands of Pete Seeger of the Weavers. Seeger, the son of Harvard musicologist Charles Seeger, already had a notable folk-singing career playing duets with blues legend Leadbelly and later teaming up with Woody Guthrie to form the politically progressive Almanac Singers. Unlike Guthrie and Leadbelly, Seeger was not much of a writer, but he committed himself to developing a vision and canon of American folk music, which he later expanded to include a world unified by folk music. He explained that he would craft performances so they included “a few songs from other countries, hinting at the different types of people in this big world.”

The young State of Israel was still largely an abstraction for American Jews in the 1950s. Few American Jews had visited Palestine or Israel, and even fewer had chosen to make the new Jewish homeland their home. Photos and newsreels captured the sights of the young country, but American Jews still had little sense of what this country sounded like. American Jews of a certain age still tuned in to Yiddish radio, while their children and grandchildren found their aural culture somewhere between Broadway show tunes and rock ‘n’ roll. A handful of collections of Israeli folk songs had been published and provided part of the soundtrack to Jewish schools and summer camps, but for the most part recordings from Israel were few and far between.

In fact, as Israeli musicologists Motti Regev and Edwin Seroussi point out in Popular Music and National Culture in Israel, by 1952, the entire catalog of Hed Arzi, the largest Israeli record label at the time, consisted of a total of 22 songs, “a mixture of Shirei Eretz Yisrael, original songs in trendy pop styles (rhumba, swing, tango, and so on) and translations of foreign songs in the same vein,” in addition to a few cantorial numbers. The state of Israeli music in the United States drew the explicit ire of at least one critic, Peter Gradenwitz, who explained in a 1949 article in Commentary, “With the quick dollar the ruling motivation, it is hardly surprising that the worst sentimentalism and cheapest nationalism prevail in the ‘Palestinian’ music turned out for American consumption.”

Along with “Hava Nagila,” “Tzena Tzena” became one of the first Hebrew songs to be embraced widely by American Jewish audiences. But unlike “Hava Nagila,” which rang with overtones of religion and hasidism, “Tzena Tzena” lyrically evoked the sounds, sights, and soldiers of the new State of Israel, with its pastoral yet vigorous lyrics about girls going out to meet soldiers in the new settlements. In the early 1950s, Israel in the minds of Americans was some combination of the Garden of Eden and the little engine that could. It was dreamily socialist and seemed to hum with the vigor and romance of manual labor, filled with Jewish men and women who could fight and plant and love. The image of Israel in the minds of American Jews happily excluded the realities of malarial swamps and massive, hastily erected tent settlements to house the tens of thousands of Mizrahi Jews.

The aural framework that the Weavers provided fit snugly alongside Israel’s emerging sonic sense of itself, where the emerging tradition of folk songs tried to establish, in the words of Regev and Seroussi, “a means of tonal organization that would reflect both the people’s attachment to the land and the ingathering of the exiles.” This strategy not only fueled American Jews’ romance with the new Jewish State, but it was also part of a semi-explicit state strategy for cultivating a national musical culture.

In the following few decades, the song was covered by everyone from Vic Damone and Mantovanni to Richard Tucker, Chubby Checker, Judy Garland, and Dusty Springfield, among countless lesser-known artists like the Temple Israel Senior Youth Group Choir and the performers of Songs NFTY Sings II. In truth, it is probably one of the most recorded and best-known Jewish songs in the world.

“Tzena Tzena” is important not only for its popularity, but for how it became so popular in the first place. With its romantic depiction of young women lusting after righteous male soldiers, the song fulfilled the expectations of Israel held by many American Jews in 1951. Yet, this image needed a Harvard-educated American folk singer to reach an American audience. Despite the song’s pedigree, it took Seeger’s “hechsher” to make Israel audible to American Jews.

Ari Y. Kelman is a professor of American studies at the University of California, Davis and the author of Station Identification: A Cultural History of Yiddish Radio in the United States.

But presidencies are not judged on legislation alone. Obama’s status as the first African-American president will surely help shape his legacy. But an equally powerful, if less talked-about, aspect of what will be the historical judgment of the Obama presidency is his relationship with various American constituent groups—including American Jews. As a candidate, Barack Obama successfully courted much of the American Jewish community, in which concerns about the appearance of racism may have served to keep many American Jews in Obama’s camp. But upon becoming president—notwithstanding his success in garnering Jewish support—Obama undertook actions and implemented policies that run the risk of losing him significant Jewish support.

As a longtime resident of the Chicago area, and as a Jew, I have had the opportunity to see how Obama relates to the Jewish community here. My synagogue is right across the street from the Obamas’ house, which helps in perceiving the nature of the president’s connection with the Jewish community. The president seems to feel close to our synagogue—or at the very least, he puts on a good show of feeling close to us. When my beloved rabbi—and a strong Obama backer—Arnold Jacob Wolf died, Obama sent a letter of condolence to the synagogue. He did the same after the death of Leon Despres, the longtime dissident Chicago alderman during the reign of the first Richard Daley. During High Holiday services, our rabbi mentioned that she was recently on a conference call with the president, and with other Jewish religious leaders, in which the president spoke fondly of our congregation and of hearing the shofar emanating from our services while at his home. “Nice shout-out,” another conference call participant remarked to our rabbi, she told us.

Obama sought to win Jewish support for his political campaigns by joking that his name could have been “Baruch Obama,” a clever, if obvious, way to try to identify with the Jewish people. During the 2008 campaign, I saw any number of people with lapel buttons and yarmulkes with Barack Obama’s name spelled out in Hebrew. Rabbi Wolf’s enthusiastic support for Obama, and his strong standing in Chicago’s Jewish community, helped protect Obama from suspicion about his politics and policies in general and about his support for Israel in particular. All of this was essential in helping cement good and productive ties between Obama and American Jews.

Absent this political cover, there certainly was plenty in Obama’s record that might have caused American Jews to view him and his candidacy skeptically. There are, of course, various claims that Obama has been uncomfortably close (from a Jewish, pro-Zionist perspective) with figures like Edward Said and Rashid Khalidi, and that his closeness to such figures said something negative about the level of Obama’s support for Israel. Whether these charges are fair or not is almost beside the point when contemplating the amount of damage that they might do to a political candidate in a city with a substantial and politically active Jewish population.

In addition to getting significant Jewish religious and political figures to vouch for him, Obama also sought, while plotting his political ascent, to back away from past positions and statements that would not be well-received by the Jewish community. Ali Abunimah, the Chicago-based founder of the Electronic Intifada, a website dedicated to advancing the political rights of Palestinians and detailing what it perceives to be Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people, detailed how Obama initially expressed strong sympathy for the plight of the Palestinian people and deep aversion to Israeli policies toward the Palestinians but began to backtrack from his statements in 2004, when he ran for the U.S. Senate seat in Illinois. “Hey, I’m sorry I haven’t said more about Palestine right now, but we are in a tough primary race,” Abunimah says Obama told him when they saw each other while Obama was trying to capture the Democratic nomination for the Senate seat. Obama assured Abunimah that “when things calm down I can be more up front.” As Abunimah describes it, Obama was only doing what was necessary to ensure that he wouldn’t face electoral problems at the hands of a politically active American Jewish community.

Other actions on the part of the Obama campaign served to keep American Jews on board. Throughout the 2008 campaign, and indeed throughout the Obama presidency, there has been the not-so-subtle implication on the part of Obama supporters that a significant number of those who oppose the administration do so because they cannot stand the presence of an African-American president. We have seen the charge of racism regularly issued against members of the Tea Party movement, and while some in that movement have certainly expressed objectionable statements on the issue of race, it is unfair to ascribe those objectionable statements to the entire group, which seems to be mainly exercised by a more generalized anger about the failing economy. Nevertheless, supporters of the Obama Administration have shown little hesitation to accuse detractors of racism, which causes constituent groups in American politics to carefully calibrate their actions in response. Since no one wants to be tarred as racist by a charismatic president who is a gifted orator, it makes sense to assume that opposition to the president and his administration might have been chilled in certain quarters, including among segments of the American Jewish community.

Having secured the support of American Jews in his quest for the White House—support that has traditionally been given to politicians from the Democratic party—the president went about implementing policies that seemed designed to lose that support as quickly as possible. Snubs great and small were dished out against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which served to needlessly alienate the United States’ chief ally in the Middle East and damage America’s role as an honest broker in the Middle East peace process. While American and Israeli interests certainly diverge at times, and while friends must be prepared to speak fully and frankly with one another, the Obama Administration allowed its disputes with Israel to take on a public, melodramatic, soap-operaesque quality that did nothing to advance the cause of peace. While slamming Israel, the United States engaged in a renewal of diplomatic ties with Syria—without any concessions on the part of the Syrian government, which is brutal toward its citizens and a consistent destabilizing force in the region.

It comes as no surprise that Democrats like Sen. Charles E. Schumer, a likely contender to lead the Senate Democrats if Harry Reid loses his re-election bid, has taken the White House to task for its treatment of Israel, calling Obama’s Israel policy “counter-productive.” Schumer’s stance on this issue likely reflects the stance and beliefs of a great many American Jews in assessing the Obama Administration’s Mideast policy. While a significant case can be made that the administration’s policy concerning Israel and the Mideast peace process does not fundamentally differ from policies undertaken by past American administrations, the atmospherics of the administration’s actions appear to be causing a significant rift with the American Jewish community.

The Obama Administration’s Iran policy does little to inspire confidence either. The administration does not appear to be willing or eager to use military force to put a halt to Iran’s nuclear weapons program. To be sure, the Iranians have learned much from Israel’s 1982 attack on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear power plant and have taken measures to prevent any military strike from halting, or even significantly slowing, their drive toward nuclear weapons, but the administration’s bark on the issue of Iran appears to be worse than its bite, which does little to reassure either Israel or American Jews with deep connections to Israel that an existential threat against the Jewish state is being effectively dealt with. Obama lauds as “unprecedented” the sanctions that his administration has sought to impose on Iran, but the Iranians are used to sanctions, and there is no evidence that economic pressure applied by America and its allies is doing anything to halt Iran’s effort to make itself a nuclear power.

The administration might have used the popular uprising against the Iranian government’s acts of electoral fraud in the country’s 2009 presidential elections, and the Iranian government’s subsequent and bloody violations of human rights, to push for the Iranian government’s ostracism in the international community, to pressure the Iranian government to reform and liberalize, to support the Iranian opposition movement, as many young Iranians called for, and to force significant concessions from the Iranian government as a price for helping Iran to once again be a member in good standing of the international community. Instead, Obama gave, at most, pro forma support to the Iranian opposition movement; issued, at most, pro forma condemnations of the actions of the Iranian government; and did nothing to isolate the Iranian regime or wring concessions from it in return for helping end the regime’s isolation.

The inability or unwillingness of the Obama Administration to forcefully speak out against instances of anti-Semitism in the Democratic Party should also be a cause for concern. The demagoguery of Democrats like Rep. James Moran, who has stated that an “extraordinarily powerful” pro-Israel lobby—with “the strong support of the Jewish community”—was responsible for causing the United States to go to war with Iraq, is well known, but the Obama Administration has not decided to challenge him, or other Democrats like him, for seeking to profit politically from the popularization of anti-Semitic tropes. Nor has the administration taken on members of the liberal blogosphere for engaging in reflexive anti-Israel hatred and general anti-Semitism and for potentially causing a serious rift between liberals and American Jews, a rift that would harm the president’s political prospects and the Democratic Party’s electoral future.

Some might say that a lone Congressman or a handful of lefty bloggers are beneath the attention of the president of the United States. But while no American president wants to engage in rhetorical overkill, there are disturbing trends developing within the base of the Democratic Party that ought to concern the president and certainly concern the American Jewish community. A shocking 2009 poll revealed that 18.4 percent of Republicans blamed Jews for the recent financial crisis. That’s appalling enough, but even worse, the poll revealed that nearly a third of Democrats also blamed Jews for the near-collapse of the American economy. As the administrators of the poll wrote, this statistically significant difference was surprising “given the presumed higher degree of racial tolerance among liberals and the fact that Jews are a central part of the Democratic Party’s electoral coalition.” It would be in the president’s interests to fight against anti-Semitism in the liberal community, if only to prevent the defection of American Jews from the Democratic Party. But he seems to be unwilling to do so. If American Jews are not alarmed by this lack of action on the president’s part, they should be.

Many Jews still support the president despite his recent actions and those of his administration. Part of the reason likely has to do with the fact that whatever the shortcomings of the president and his administration on issues important to the American Jewish community, the longstanding ties between American Jews and the Democratic Party make it difficult for an abrupt break between the two to take place. The longstanding view of many Jewish Democrats is that the political philosophy of the Democratic Party is close to the philosophical teachings espoused by Jewish religious laws, and as a consequence, it would come as no surprise to find out that many American Jews believe that being Democrats is equivalent to being on the side of right and good, as right and good are defined by Jewish laws, customs, and teachings. But despite the longstanding ties between the American Jewish community and the Democratic Party the Obama Administration, through its policies, runs the risk of putting the relationship asunder.

As the midterm election approaches, Obama’s relationship with American Jews stands at a crossroads. It is entirely possible that the relationship may improve as the president and his political team prepare for his re-election effort in 2012 and seek to increase support and enthusiasm in the American Jewish community. But American Jews now have had time to take the measure of the 44th president and are now well-suited to make an informed decision as to whether he cares about issues that are of special concern to our community. Chances are that the American Jewish community will remain largely loyal to the Democratic Party. But no one should be surprised if, as a result of the Obama Administration’s policies and practices, the Democrats’ hold on the American Jewish component of its base is permanently damaged by an approach that evokes precious little of the enthusiasm that the community showed for him in 2008.

Pejman Yousefzadeh is an attorney and writer in Illinois. He blogs at A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days.

As Marissa Brostoff predicted yesterday, Goldberg both sat and positioned himself to Ben-Ami’s right. It was Ben-Ami’s home court: his “pro-Israel, pro-peace” group organized the event under the rhetorical title, “Who speaks for me?” But Goldberg was the agitating gadfly, prodding his interlocutor with questions on a broad range of topics, from J Street’s overall role to the sanctity of the Temple Mount. Ben-Ami revealed his experience as a communications pro, crafting his responses clearly and carefully.

The two departed significantly on the tactics and pragmatism of America’s Middle East policy, which Goldberg promptly put down in his blog this morning. But I found another point of contention in their dialogue far more interesting. Early in the discussion, Ben-Ami voiced his adamant concern that Israel was increasingly becoming “illiberal,” a shift he saw as a fundamental affront to “Jewish values.” Goldberg countered with a sharp critique that, essentially, called into question much of J Street’s work. “What if you, as an American Jew,” he asked, “don’t have a stake in Israel?” The reality, Goldberg asserted, is that critics here, thousands of miles away, would not directly “suffer the policy consequences” of certain proposals as viscerally as Israelis would. “I’m still not sure,” Goldberg said, “that it is the right of American Jews to lecture Israel.”

Later, Goldberg questioned Ben-Ami on the validity of Jewish claims to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The J Street founder responded firmly that the Israeli Jews should concede the religious symbol to neutral control. The “concept of ownership and sovereignty,” he asserted, is the kernel of the problem, and has led to unnecessary bloodshed. His claim that, in order to achieve peace, he would give up a “little bit of land” was met with thick applause. As it subsided, Goldberg demurred: “Unlike you, I defer to the Israelis.” A more scattered but still strong applause followed.

But Ben-Ami stood his ground, insisting on a “Zionist imperative to tell Israel the truth,” to “hold up a mirror” to the nation. And the men agreed that the reflection is not pretty. Ben-Ami stated, repeatedly, that Israel was swiftly becoming a “pariah state.” Their discussion about Israel’s further isolation in the region invariably turned to Peter Beinart’s recent claim of a serious departure of American Jews from Zionism. Contra Beinart’s narrative, Ben-Ami suggested that the true rift was “ideological and religious” and not national or generational.

The hour-plus dialogue veered in a host of interesting directions, including a spirited debate on the successes of and threats to Israeli’s hard-fought civil liberties. (One of my favorite moments was Goldberg’s description of his discomfort with living as a foreigner in Israel: He shortly learned the nation was not simply “Great Neck with sand.”) .

Unfortunately, most of the audience questions did not elicit fascinating commentary. Curated by a J Street board member, they were primarily sweeping, near impossible inquiries on the peace process (i.e. “What is the greatest single obstacle to peace?” “The settlement enterprise,” Ben-Ami responded.) One audience member asked about the best book on the Israel-Palestine conflict. The hosts listed a few but both agreed that there was, as Goldberg put it, a “striking lack of books” that include the sincerity and depth of their conversation. He just might write one, he offered. We’ll take you up on that, Jeff.

Me and Jeremy Ben-Ami Down By The Schoolyard [Atlantic]
Earlier: Boycotting Hits the Mainstream

It was a classic illustration of the liberal Zionist predicament. In recent weeks this predicament has received an increased amount of attention, due in large part to a bracing and much-discussed essay by Peter Beinart—a former editor of The New Republic, the very citadel of American pro-Israel orthodoxy—in which he sounded the alarm on the plummeting levels of support for Israel among younger American Jews. “For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door,” Beinart wrote, “and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.” Similar concerns led to the formation in 2008 of J Street, a lobby group that aims to represent the views of liberal Jews and serve as a counterweight to traditionally right-leaning groups like AIPAC. If current trends continue, American Jewish attitudes toward Israel may ultimately be transformed in a way unseen since the bulk of the community first got on board with Zionism, in the wake of the 1967 Six-Day War.

How can liberal Zionism be saved? For those aiming to revive the form of American liberal Zionism that marked the generation that came of age after the 1967 war, it is tempting to blame its decline on a betrayal by outside forces. On this logic the collapse of support has been caused by Israel’s own shift to the right in recent years—epitomized by the rise of Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman—a shift aided and abetted by a right-leaning institutional leadership of the American Jewish community that refuses to criticize Israel under any circumstances. Resuscitating liberal Zionism, this argument goes, will thereby involve siding with Israeli moderates while speaking out against settlers abroad and neoconservatives at home.

But can liberal Zionism, at least in the form that has dominated American Jewish life for decades, be saved at all? And should it be? These are harder questions but may ultimately be more important ones. It may be emotionally satisfying to posit a blameless liberal Zionism betrayed by outside forces, or to suppose that younger Jews are reacting only against the right and not liberal Zionism itself, but it is not clear that either claim is true. For one thing, Benjamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman undoubtedly make good villains, but the aspects of Israeli politics that have alienated U.S. liberals go deeper than the current right-wing government. (To take only the most recent example, it was not the nefarious Netanyahu or the loathsome Lieberman who brought us the attack on Gaza, but rather the supposed “good guys”: Ehud Olmert, Ehud Barak, and Tzipi Livni.)

More generally, the apparently impending collapse of mainstream liberal Zionism in the United States is no accident. Some of the phenomenon may be attributed to the simple passage of time—to a generation growing up farther removed from the looming presence of the Holocaust and without memories of the 1967 and 1973 wars. But we cannot adequately understand this collapse without understanding the compromises and contradictions that liberal Zionism became involved in over a period of decades.

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Let me drop the pretense of disinterestedness for a moment. I am a member of the “younger generation” whose attitudes have become the subject of so much discussion, and in many ways I am typical of it. When the last decade began I considered myself to be, broadly speaking, a fairly standard young liberal Zionist—at least insofar as I thought about these things, which was not often. In the years since, my views have shifted to the point that I would not consider myself a Zionist at all. I make no claim to “speak for my generation,” whatever that would mean, and one should never trust anyone who claims that they can. But I have reason to think that my experience was far from atypical, and it might therefore be worthwhile to examine it more closely.

It’s always tempting, when writing a conversion narrative, to exaggerate the magnitude of the shift for dramatic effect. But I can’t honestly claim that I was ever a neoconservative or a hardliner (aside from a brief Likudnik episode in my childhood). Rather, I held a set of views fairly typical of American liberal Zionism. I was largely uninformed about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but I was against the occupation and the settlements, and I considered myself sympathetic to Palestinian suffering. Still, I did not really question the basic Israeli narrative of the conflict (“we want peace, but they only want to annihilate us”); I believed that everything would be better if only the Palestinians could find their King or Gandhi; I was convinced that the shrill-sounding activists who constantly harped on Israel’s sins were hysterical at best and anti-Semitic at worst. I was a “serious” and “responsible” liberal, I told myself, and much of this identity hinged on differentiating myself from them.

These are just a few findings of the Survey of American Jewish Language and Identity, the results of which were published online late last month by linguist Sarah Bunin Benor and sociologist Steven M. Cohen. (The researchers will be giving a webinar on their study tonight; they’re also publishing a more academic version of their report in a linguistics journal later this year.) Dozens of surveys about American Jews have come out the past few decades—most famously, perhaps, the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey that caused alarm in some quarters with its claim that 52 percent of Jews were intermarried—but this is a rare one that shows rather than tells. Instead of asking respondents how religious they are or whether their grandchildren will be Jewish, Benor and Cohen asked questions like, “When you say ‘Mary’ and ‘merry’ in regular speech, do they sound the same or different?” and “How do you refer to the Jewish skullcap?” By hitting the question of Jewish identity at a slant rather than head-on, the researchers have come up with an unusually nuanced portrait of contemporary American Jews.

“Patterns of language use can tell us things about identities and communities that might not even be known to the actors themselves,” said Cohen, who has been conducting Jewish identity surveys of the more direct variety for some four decades. “There are things we can see through the side door that we can’t see through the front door.”

Benor and Cohen’s survey technique, like the questions they asked, was untraditional. Instead of using a random survey sample, they employed a “snowball technique,” emailing the survey to 600 friends in July 2008 and asking respondents to forward it in turn. They make clear in the introduction to their report that this approach has both its advantages and its drawbacks. On the one hand, 41,696 people completed the survey just in the first few weeks of its life on the internet. (You can still take the survey online, though only data from those first 41,696 respondents has already been analyzed.) By contrast, the National Jewish Population Survey, conducted every 10 years by United Jewish Communities (the umbrella group of local Jewish Federations), has a sample size of about 5,000. On the other hand, Benor and Cohen acknowledge, “we know it over-represents Jews with strong Jewish engagement and social ties”—the kind of people most likely to take such a survey of their own volition.

As Benor expected from her previous scholarship (like Cohen, she teaches at Hebrew Union College, the Reform movement’s seminary, which sponsored the survey), the data suggests that for the most part, American Jews across the religious spectrum draw from the same “repertoire” of distinctive speech elements—that is, they are English speakers who use varying amounts of Yiddish or Hebrew phrasing and grammar to distinguish themselves both from non-Jews and from Jews elsewhere on the spectrum. With the exception of those ultra-Orthodox Jews who use Yiddish as their primary language, Benor said, American Jews fall somewhere on this “continuum of distinctiveness” rather than being separable into different dialect groups.

“My favorite example is ‘gmar cha-tee-MAH to-VAH,’” she said, enunciating each syllable of the traditional Yom Kippur greeting: in English, “may you be inscribed in the book of life.” “That’s the most modern Hebrew pronunciation you can get. Then there’s ‘gmar cha-TEE-mah TO-vah,’ ‘gmar cha-SEE-mah TO-vah,’ and then ‘gmar ch’SEE-mah TOY-vah.” For those in the know, each pronunciation signifies a different spot on the religious continuum: a non-Orthodox Jew would probably use the modern Hebrew pronunciation; as you move along the spectrum of observance, the greeting becomes more Yiddish-inflected.

One of the key findings of the survey was what Benor and Cohen call “the growth of linguistic distinctiveness among the Orthodox.” Distinctive strains of Yiddish-inflected English are not only still in everyday use among younger generations of Orthodox American Jews, their prevalence is growing. Take the phrase, “She’s staying by us,” which borrows a Yiddish grammatical construction to mean, “She’s staying at our place.” Fifty-three percent of Orthodox Jews who took the survey use the phrase (versus 21 percent of non-Orthodox Jews). But a full three quarters of Orthodox Jews between the ages of 18 and 24 use it, compared to 12 percent of Orthodox respondents 75 or older. According to the report, “such words and phrases are so important for Orthodox identity that many baalei teshuva (newly Orthodox Jews) make a conscious effort to incorporate them into their speech, even when some people consider them to be incorrect English.” Observant Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews—whose ancestors never spoke Yiddish in the first place—have adopted Yiddish religious terminology as well.

Benor attributes this to the fact that Orthodox communities have in general become more conservative, politically and culturally, in recent years. “Part of that shift to the right is a linguistic shift: some Jews who used to use less distinct English are now incorporating more Yiddishisms into their English,” she said.

In non-Orthodox Jewish communities, two trends are happening concurrently, the survey found: as members of an older generation die and takes certain language patterns with them, younger Jews are using more Yiddish and Hebrew than before (and certainly more than their more assimilationist parents’ generation did). But the words disappearing and those reappearing aren’t necessarily the same words. Though Jews (and non-Jews) of all ages still say “shmutz” and “mazel tov,” seniors are more likely than their grandchildren to use Yiddishisms like “haimish” (homey), “macher” (big shot), “nu?” (so?), “naches” (pride), and “bashert” (predestined). Where the younger generation is overtaking their grandparents is with religious terminology—Yiddish words like “shul,” “daven,” and “bentch” (for the blessing after meals).

“You see more Jews now identifying as a religious rather than as an ethnic group,” Benor said. “Those Yiddish words that are increasing [in use] have to do with religious life.” Thus, the phenomenon one survey respondent reported: “When I was growing up, I called it Temple. When my children went to Day School, I called it synagogue. I now call it shul. I am not sure why.”

Though Jews across the religious spectrum said they would be likely to consider Hebrew names for their children, baby names are “an important resource for Jews to indicate intra-Jewish differences.” Less observant Jews, they found, are most likely to prefer anglicized biblical names, like Jacob, Ethan, Hannah, or Abigail. Modern Orthodox Jews were most likely to choose modern Hebrew names, like Ezra, Ari, Talia, or Eliana, often substituting them for the equivalent Yiddish names of deceased relatives (so, for example, they might name a daughter Tova, meaning “good” in Hebrew, after a grandmother named Gittel). For the most part, only ultra-Orthodox Jews said they would consider giving a child a Yiddish name like Moyshe, Mendy, or Basya. In one of the survey’s least surprising findings, only two percent of Jews said they’d consider naming their baby Christopher.