{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"The Honest Take","title":"America Is Not Zion: Why American Jews and Israelis Are Living Two Different Jewish Lives | With Daniel Gordis","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":4739,"description":"Shortly after the war began, a European journalist wrote to Daniel Gordis. She wanted to interview the leaders of Israel's 2023 protest movement about the war, and she couldn't reach any of them. He wrote back that they were in cockpits and in tanks, and he says that wasn't a metaphor. That, he argues, is the difference between the two lefts. Israel's left \"at the end of the day serves in the army,\" and almost none of it still talks about a two-state solution.\nFor most of the last century and a half, American Jews worked from a quiet bargain: the Jews are a faith, not a people, and America is the promised land. In a Hebrew essay this summer, Gordis says the bargain is over. He traces it from the rise of Reform Judaism, through Will Herberg's Protestant-Catholic-Jew and Woodrow Wilson's warnings about \"hyphenated\" Americans, to Jacob Blaustein telling David Ben-Gurion that America was American Jews' Zion. His conclusion: \"We are a people, and America is not Zion.\"\nThen the personal side. His son is called up for reserve duty, and his daughter-in-law and three grandchildren move into the Gordises' Jerusalem home. He describes families who leave the front door open so no one will knock, the October 7th night his son made him buy a lock for the safe room, and why he thinks these have been such lonely years for Israelis. He also says what distance can give American Jews that Israelis don't have.\nGordis is candid about his own book. We Stand Divided, published in 2019, held up for two-thirds of its length, he says, and the last third, about building bridges, was wrong. He says he never believed it. The core still stands: \"No American Jew ever went to war because she or he was an American Jew… Israelis go to war because we're Jews.\" He rejects the easy line that classical Zionism was simply right. He also says Israel \"invested exactly zero effort in trying to tell its story to the wider world,\" and he describes the question Israelis now ask each other at their own...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/MWvudMeeQbLLprkXao5bQURkY3G_5oMcfe3JeW4xoBg/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS81Nzg1/NjYxZjIyMzBiODU5/OTczZmQzNjUzMmZi/YWIwNC5qcGVn.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}