Abstract
This article takes up categories from literature on political and civic engagement to help make sense of data collected from interviews with 40 American Jewish day high school students about what they think and feel about Israel. Viewed through a set of lenses that distinguish between the manifestations and motivations of political and civic engagement, the article helps clarify why young Jews, even when actively and positively engaged with Israel, are uncomfortable labeling themselves as Zionists. The analysis points to an important distinction between the concepts of Israel as “home” and “homeland.” The article also raises important questions about what is presumed to be an increasing distance or alienation from Israel among young American Jews.
Acknowledgments
Funding for the research reported in this article was provided by the AVI CHAI Foundation.
Notes
1A sample of the wide variety of initiatives that all promise Israel engagement includes: The Hartman Institute's “iengage” initiative; MAKOM—the Israel engagement network of the Jewish Agency; Hillel's Centre for Israel Engagement; Legacy Heritage Fund's Israel Engagement Innovation Project; the Steinhart Foundation for Jewish Life exploration of “Israel engagement beyond hasbarah”; Makom ba-Galil's construction of Israel engagement; PEJE's Israel Engagement Community of Practice; Jewish Federation of Dallas's “Israel @ the Center”; the iCenter's “Project InCiTE”; and initiatives in any number of schools and synagogues across North America. http://iengage.org.il/About_Us_View.asp?Cat_Id=1&Cat_Type=About; http://makomisrael.org/; http://www.hillel.org/about/news/2010/nov/16nov10_Hillelicc.htm; http://www.jewishlife.org/pdf/autumn_2011.pdf; http://www.legacyheritage.org/IsraelEngagement/?file=grantees; http://www.peje.org/programs/communities_of_practice/israel_engagement.php; http://www.jewishdallas.org/getfile.asp?id=43958; http://www.theicenter.org/project-incite
2We are aware, also, that by viewing Israel engagement in these terms, we point to a more fundamental question of whether it might be fertile to conceive Israel education in the diaspora as a form of Jewish civic education. That is a question we intend to explore in a further article.
3This assumption is a consistent thread connecting a number of the articles in a special issue on “Israel Engagement Beyond Hasbarah” in the Steinhart Foundation for Jewish Life's journal, Contact: http://www.jewishlife.org/pdf/autumn_2011.pdf
4While we have been collecting and processing the data for this article, two such controversies have included the debate triggered by Peter CitationBeinart's (2010) New York Review of Books essay about the death of Zionist feeling among young liberal American Jews, and subsequent responses to it (http://blogs.jta.org/politics/article/2010/05/24/2739289/responding-to-beinart); and in a more scholarly tone, the debate collected in Contemporary Jewry surrounding CitationCohen and Kelman's (2007) so called “distancing hypothesis” (http://contemporaryjewry.org/24.html).
5School names and student names are all pseudonyms.