Peter Beinart has a great piece in the New York Review of Books about the growing estrangement of the liberal majority of younger American Jews from Israel and Zionism. The piece is really well-written and thus worth reading for yourself rather than having me summarize. I’ll just quote a paragraph:
But these secular Zionists aren’t reproducing themselves. Their children have no memory of Arab armies massed on Israel’s border and of Israel surviving in part thanks to urgent military assistance from the United States. Instead, they have grown up viewing Israel as a regional hegemon and an occupying power. As a result, they are more conscious than their parents of the degree to which Israeli behavior violates liberal ideals, and less willing to grant Israel an exemption because its survival seems in peril. Because they have inherited their parents’ liberalism, they cannot embrace their uncritical Zionism. Because their liberalism is real, they can see that the liberalism of the American Jewish establishment is fake.
Read the whole thing.