Recently I had an upsetting e-mail exchange with an old friend. A prominent, politically active Jewish conservative, he told me that he had long ago given up trying to convince American Jews on the left to support Israel. “I don’t really see them as family anymore,” he wrote. “I’ve found a new family, the American Right.”
Heavy words — words that many Jews on the left can relate to, as well. Long sensitized to anything that smells of “neocons” and “Likud politics,” they, too, have cut themselves off from their conservative kinsmen, disavowing any sense of common destiny or “family” that once gave the word “Jewish” its most poignant, deepest valences.
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