Ask Not What Israel Can Do For The Diaspora Jew …

So now we, for the most part liberal Jews of North America, can’t understand why Israel doesn’t change its policies on egalitarian attendance at the Kotel, their strict rules on conversion, marriage and divorce, to say nothing of the call to “make peace compromises” with their Palestinian neighbours. We don’t agree with them and when they fail to heed our voices, it comes back to “They are not like us”.

This harkens back to America in the pre-war years. When the first major wave of Jewish immigration came to America from 1840 to 1900, they were predominantly German Jews. They were the Gimbels, Seligmans, Loebs, Goldmans, Sachs, Strauss, Frankfurter, Brandeis and Sulzberger who founded the New York Times. They carved a new life in America and they  prospered.  It was after WW1 that thousands of East European Jews began fleeing the pogroms of their homeland seeking shelter in the new world. But to the established liberal Jews of America, they were troublesome. They spoke differently, dressed differently, and were more religiously observant, in short, they, “were not like us”.

So when the U.S. government passed their draconian immigration laws in 1924, which virtually banned the Jews of Poland, Russia, Romania, and the rest of the Jewish pale, few in the established American Jewish community objected, if not indeed supported such laws. Tragic, uncomfortable and troublesome as it may now seem, during the holocaust again, few American Jews raised their voices.  True, there were some exceptions, but for the most part, the establishment remained silent, not to jeopardize their perceived acceptance into American society. The New York Times of Sulzberger printed details of the Shoah’s horrific atrocities on page 4 of his newspaper. After all the victims “were not like us”.