A few weeks ago, over 300 Lakewood-area parents left their homes to attend a 6:30 p.m. Board of Education (BOE) meeting. They showed up at our request, and after what felt like a few hours, left disappointed.

On the agenda that night was busing for the more than 3,000 children living in Jackson Township who attend yeshivos in neighboring Lakewood. Fewer than 200 of them have a bus that takes them to school. Driving a car pool for multiple children who go to different schools, on opposite ends of town, operating on different schedules, can be very aggravating.

A plan was already in motion to provide many more children with transportation. However, there was one caveat: Jackson BOE needed to agree to change their timeline for posting their requests for proposals from vendors bidding on bus routes.

Local askanim had been making this request from the BOE for months, to no avail. So, it was decided to have a large number of parents attend the next BOE meeting to demonstrate how important school transportation was to them.

Hundreds of parents came and sat there for hours. Only a handful spoke, and at the end, they went home thinking it had been a waste of time.

Fast-forward to the next month’s meeting. Right at the beginning, during the superintendent’s report, a PowerPoint presentation was shown, including a slide showing the new timeline for bus route bids.

Notch one victory for doing “nothing”; what advocacy couldn’t accomplish, parents achieved just by showing up.

I take from the busing episode two lessons.

First, the power of grassroots advocacy. Sometimes it means just showing up, just sending one email or making one quick phone call. Don’t underestimate the collective power of individuals.

But something potentially even more transformative in our traditional way of activism happened that night.

In our community, advocacy, askanus, shtadlanus — whatever label you want to use — was something that men traditionally took care of. Here and there, there were women who stood out. There was a Rebbetzin Lubling a”h and tibadel l’chayim aruchim Mrs. Leah Zagelbaum, but generally men dominate the field.

At this BOE meeting, of the 300 parents who showed up, 99 percent were mothers. Not by accident. When the call to engage the tzibbur was sent out, it was specifically a call to mothers.

The superintendent of Jackson Township school district is a mother. Mothers relate to mothers. Aside from the image of 300 black-and-white clad men filling up an auditorium being intimidating, in today’s government, women are in leadership roles in unparalleled numbers.

In New Jersey alone, the state senate majority leader, the chair of the Assembly Budget Committee, and the chair of the Education Committee are all mothers. A mother advocating on behalf of her children to another mother is just more impactful. That’s just the way it is and we need to recognize that.

So, when the need arises for parents to advocate for their children, mothers, please step up. It’s time to recognize the unique role you play and the impact you, specifically, can have.

Rabbi Avi Schnall is director of the New Jersey office of Agudath Israel of America.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 902)

The post Mothers of Jackson, Unite  first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.

If there’s one thing that the last two years have taught us, it’s the dangers of a negative public image.

To insiders, Boro Park is a vibrant community with bustling businesses, loving families, some of whom struggle financially, and yeshivos and schools on every corner.

But many people in New York view our community through darker lenses. Sadly, a man with a long jacket and hat or shtreimel, or a woman dressed in distinctive Orthodox garb, brings negative associations to mind. We are rule-breakers, the public was told repeatedly during Covid — sometimes by elected officials — or we have large families and rely on the dole for support.

This public image is in part a result of the media’s mischaracterization of our community, and has led to anti-Semitic attacks and the passage of laws that harm our way of life. Matters have reached such a dangerous level that in 2020, William Barr, then the US attorney general, visited my office to discuss how to combat the rise in hate. “I will not take my eye off of this,” he promised at the time.

So it’s now time for our community to work proactively to shape our public image. The approach of lying low may have been appropriate at some point, but with our growth attracting a harsher media lens, it is no longer an option.

We need only look a little to the north to see how Boro Park’s story can be told better. For years, Kiryas Joel was depicted in the media as the poorest district in the United States. The phrase was echoed unquestioningly in prestigious outlets such as the New York Times, in local newsrooms, and on fringe websites, which mockingly described the village as moochers who should be tolerated, at best. It became a cliché that askanim resigned themselves to.

Then, a simple study by our friends at the Orthodox Jewish Public Affairs Council exposed how this data had been cherry-picked to fit a narrative. The OJPAC study mined publicly available data from the US Census Bureau and New York state government agencies and found that the “poorest in the nation” designation did not account for the village having the youngest median age of any locality in the country, by a wide margin. So the reason so many KJ residents were not earning incomes was that they were too young to legally do so! This has led to several corrections by media outlets in their reporting on the town.

For the average New Yorker, an Orthodox Jew is defined by his large family and poor education. Perhaps he is associated with an eiruv battle or rezoning conflict. There is so much work that has to be done to change this utterly false perception.

We must blow these fallacies out of the water by shining the light of truth in Boro Park as well. We must highlight the seriousness with which we view a solid education. Nineteen banks line the length of 13th Avenue, not out of a sense of pity for us, but because of the sheer number of successful businessmen who call Boro Park home. For the heads of our households, the hundreds of shuls that dot the neighborhood are typically their first destination in the morning and their last stop before retiring at night, providing the moral compass that guides their business transactions and family interactions.

Media matters, because the narrative that New Yorkers read about us determines how safe our streets are.

After the past two years, playing defense is a luxury we can no longer afford. It’s high time for us to allocate the community resources needed to actively shape that media perception.

Avi Greenstein is the CEO of the Boro Park Jewish Community Council.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 896)

The post We Need to Tell Boro Park’s Story      first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.

There are split-screen moments, and then there’s the January 6 commemoration this week.

A year after the Capitol riots, in which thousands of pro-Trump supporters stormed Congress, Joe Biden will deliver a version of what he said six months ago: “Not even during the Civil War did insurrectionists breach our Capitol, the citadel of our democracy. But six months ago today, insurrectionists did.”

Over in Mar-a-Lago at the same time, Trump will convene a press conference to deny that anything untoward happened. “The insurrection took place on November 3,” he said in an announcement, referring to the supposedly stolen elections.

The distance between the two sides about a historical reality just 12 months ago is head-spinning and disturbing for what it says about America today.

Because the simple truth is that each in their own way, both political parties are living in la-la land, disconnected from reality in a way that wasn’t possible just a few years ago.

Start with the Republicans, now the political home of a majority of our community.

Even though the Capitol invasion was more a deadly riot, and not, as Trump’s foes say, an existential threat to American democracy, the reaction of much of the GOP is hard to comprehend.

In real time, Trump supporters were horrified. Courtesy of the congressional committee investigating the events, we now know that as they watched the events unfolding, important conservative figures attempted to get the president to call his supporters off.

“Hey Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home,” Fox pundit Laura Ingraham texted then White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. “This is hurting all of us… He is destroying his legacy.”

And yet a year on, the dominant narrative in the party is that the Capitol invasion was insignificant, the deaths of protesters and assaults on police a minor matter. Or as a new CBS/YouGov poll reports, 56 percent of Republicans see it as “defending freedom.”

This, from the party that trumpets its support for law and order; that excoriated Democratic tolerance for the BLM riots; and rightly called out last year’s looting for the disgrace it was.

In any normally abnormal situation, the opposing party ought to be an ir miklat for those fleeing the oddities across the aisle. But it’s abundantly obvious that the Democrats live in their own fantasy world.

Start with the magic money tree that grows on Capitol Hill, tended by formerly centrist Joe Biden, now reincarnated as a progressive. If it weren’t for a churlish Democrat (Joe Manchin) shooting down Biden’s colossal $3 trillion spending bill, the American national debt would even now be metastasizing.

Far more destructive of American public life is the woke war on gender identity. It’s now so clear to the left that gender is an outdated concept, that even feminists are bullied for wanting to protect women’s safe spaces. Across vast tracts of the media, academia, and business worlds allied with the Democratic Party, the truth about the fundamental reality of our world is twisted beyond recognition.

So as Joe Biden and Donald Trump both preach to their respective choirs this week, the split screen will reveal the polarization of American politics.

But equally important is an emerging similarity, which is that — dare I whisper it — both parties now suffer from the same pathology.

When it comes to January 6 and rule of law for the Republicans, or basic moral facts of life for Democrats, wishful thinking and virtual reality are taking over.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 893)

The post Hindsight Is 2021 first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.

Dear Matan,

We haven’t met, but since we share an interest in military jets — myself in watching them, yourself in flying them — we’d have lots to talk about over a drink in the Knesset cafeteria in between your duties as religious affairs minister.

Until that happens, let me explain my reason for writing: A few weeks ago, we ran a cover story in which I didn’t mince my words about the revolution you’re driving forward in everything from Israel’s kashrus to the country’s conversion and marriage systems.

“An unholy alliance of secularists such as Lapid and Lieberman, the Reform movement, and the liberal fringe of the national-religious world represented by Bennett and Kahana has taken charge,” I wrote, “that’s bent on destroying the status quo that has guaranteed Israel’s Jewish character since the days of Ben-Gurion.”

You’ll be glad to know that a number of readers took exception to lumping you — a proudly Orthodox Jew — together with the Reform movement and Avigdor Lieberman. One asked why Mishpacha regularly condemned identity politics while engaging in the same in-group / out-group dynamic when it comes to halachic issues.

So here’s an opportunity to clarify both for you, and for our readers, our line of thinking.

Firstly, it gives me no pleasure whatsoever to attack Israel’s first kippah-wearing prime minister or his party over their religious policies. Distasteful jibes about relative frumkeit aren’t my style. And your struggles to maintain halachic observance when serving in the air force — still a very secular branch of the IDF — were admirable.

So this is not about you but about a line of dangerously naive policy that you now spearhead.

In the view of an overwhelming majority of qualified rabbanim, your liberalizations of kashrus, to be followed by conversion and marriage, are deeply problematic for the halachic Jewish future. By “qualified” I mean a broad tent of chareidi, Modern Orthodox, and national-religious rabbanim.

That conclusion came after conversations with community leaders and rabbanim from across the spectrum, as presented in the original article. To put it bluntly, you know there’s something wrong when the religious affairs minister has managed to stitch together a coalition against him ranging from Ponevezh Rosh Yeshivah Rav Gershon Edelstein to Kiryat Arba chief rabbi Rav Dov Lior.

It matters not a whit that you are motivated by sincere thoughts of bridge-building across society, not secularism. To paraphrase Ben Shapiro — halachic facts don’t care about your outreach feelings.

The notion that hundreds of thousands of non-Jewish Israelis — imported by the left to dilute the demographic advantage of the traditional public — are waiting for lenient halachic standards in order to flock to Judaism is laughable. A fire sale of halachic standards to solve a problem that we didn’t create is not our duty as religious Jews.

Yes, there are very real problems with the chief rabbinate’s provision of kashrus and marriage services, but instead of working to make the process more user-friendly, your solution is to throw out the baby with the bathwater by destroying the authority of the chief rabbinate.

So this is not “my” rabbanim versus “yours,” or an instance of intra-Orthodox cancel culture — but an unprecedented, broad coalition who is very worried by your policies and those very same halachic facts.

Given the government’s positions on matters of religion and state, I won’t be able to wish you every success. But allow me to support your reported stance against the Reform takeover of the Kosel.

So long until our meeting,

—Gedalia

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 889)

The post Dear Matan first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.

Ever since Nixon’s dramatic China visit in 1972, American policy on the Communist giant has been a fantasyland. Known as the “One-China policy,” it attempted to reconcile China’s claim to Taiwan with the US commitment to the island nation’s independence.

At heart was a piece of lomdus. Since both China and Taiwan — whose Nationalist leaders escaped to the island after their defeat in the Chinese civil war in 1949 — agreed that there was only one China, the way forward was simple. America would recognize one China, and remain coy over which side they meant. It was part of a policy of ambiguity, to ensure both that Taiwan didn’t declare independence, and that China didn’t attack.

Almost 40 years after Nixon’s visit, that fiction is now history. China’s President Xi made it clear in a speech in July that while he prefers peaceful reunification, a military option is very much on the table. A top US naval officer, Admiral Philip Davidson, recently told the Senate that an attack could come within the next six years.

Two weeks ago, China sent dozens of military jets into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone, in a clear display of muscle. That military power has grown so much that it could exact a high cost from any US force coming to Taiwan’s rescue — unlike in 1996, when President Clinton faced down Chinese belligerence by sending an armada through the Taiwan Straits.

With China ever more convinced that America is in terminal decline — an impression strengthened by the Afghanistan fiasco — the US is now at a crossroads over Taiwan. Does it continue the ambiguity, possibly leading to a Chinese attack, or double down on its commitments to Taiwan by rearming the country, and fast?

It’s a truism of American politics from Obama to Trump and Biden that Americans are tired of playing the global policeman.

But the case for defending Taiwan is not just about helping a fellow democracy from a bullying autocracy. It’s because the fall of Taiwan would arguably be the end of America’s naval supremacy in the Pacific.

Unlike the Middle East, where America’s commitments are about keeping oil prices stable plus preventing terror attacks, the Pacific is America’s backyard. America is a Pacific power, and has ruled the space supreme since the end of World War II.

Bowing to China on Taiwan would serve notice to Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam, and others that the Afghan retreat wasn’t just a case of getting out of the Middle East, but out of exercising power in general.

Imagining a future in which China dominates the world — or at least the Pacific — is difficult, simply because it’s been a given for 70 years that American might reigns supreme. But according to Admiral Davidson, that’s China’s goal.

“I worry that they’re accelerating their ambitions to supplant the United States and our leadership role in the rules-based international order... by 2050,” he told the Senate.

For decades, the single most strategic aspect of Taiwan was the fact that it makes the world’s most advanced computer chips.

No longer. If Taiwan falls because American leaders were otherwise occupied, it will be China 1, US 0.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 881)

The post Time to Arm Taiwan first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.

It started in typical de Blasio fashion, a save-the-world, first-in-the-nation — “transcendent,” to use a word the mayor loved saying at the time — program that would end all traffic fatalities, no less.

It ended, too, in typical de Blasio fashion. Vision Zero, the grandiose program he established in 2014, died on the rocks of some forgotten shore. Cause of death: neglect by manager.

Not, however, if you ask the mayor. Like so many other problems that plague de Blasio’s New York — from soaring homicide rates and plummeting arrest levels to chaos in the jails and falling school attendance — it is Covid’s fault.

“All of that,” de Blasio claimed last week, “is because Covid set a whole series of things in motion.”

There are few worse feelings than having a loved one leave the house and not return — the victim of an errant driver. Vision Zero aimed to cut traffic fatalities down to zero through a mix of targeting deadly roads, placing sidewalks in middle of boulevards, aggressive ticketing, and hoisting speed cameras near intersections. In Sweden, where the parliament introduced a similar program in 1997, traffic deaths went down from 541 that year to 273 in 2019.

Coming in a year that saw 258 people killed in traffic accidents, the introduction of the program to New York City’s streets in 2014 was relatively popular. He made enemies of half of Boro Park by reducing the speed limit to 25 mph, and raised fines for speeding. When he held his sole town hall in Boro Park in 2018, the biggest applause of the evening came when he was asked to raise the speed limit on Ocean Parkway.

But the program appeared to be working. Traffic fatalities dropped, even dipping below 200 for one year. But like so many de Blasio initiatives, it took a back seat to the politics of the day. He simply lost interest. Enforcement levels fell. The number of resources devoted to it dropped. So far this year, 275 people — including 133 pedestrians — were killed in traffic accidents. It’s as if Vision Zero never happened.

Reining in New Yorkers ain’t simple. The people here have the wonderful ability to make split-second decisions on a three-dimensional battlefield. They rapidly assess the length of the crosswalk, the speed of the oncoming car and how far away they were from an accident last time. This strategic talent has trickled down to kids as well. I’ve seen children as young as eight or nine dart across a busy street, spawning an acoustic competition between the brass symphony of car horns and the yells of the men behind the wheel.

It is a sad lesson in governance that such a credible, time-tested plan is a casualty of a politician’s fickleness.

Mr. de Blasio, you fought the fight to lower speed limits, blanket the city in cameras, raise fines. Don’t leave us with the mess but not the meal.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 880)

The post Vision Bla-zero first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.

Never in their wildest fantasies did the Taliban dream of a birthday present like this. As the 20th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, pictures of their Kalashnikov-toting fighters sitting in the Afghan presidential palace while diplomats fled made viewers across the West gasp.

It’s a military and propaganda coup not seen since the group’s surrogate, Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda — whom the Taliban sheltered in Afghanistan as they plotted against America — brought down the World Trade Center; humiliation for the American Great Satan sent packing with forked tail between his legs.

Scrambling to contain the inevitable comparisons to the fall of Saigon in 1975, the White House’s attempts to spin the chaos as a contingency that they’d planned for was met with disbelief even by friendly news networks.

Make no mistake: this is a disaster of generational dimensions, not just embarrassing but dangerous to America — and Biden owns the tragic end.

If two decades of fighting Islamic terror have taught us anything, it’s that when fundamentalists control sovereign territory, the flames of jihadism burn bright.

That, after all, was the very reason for invading Afghanistan to begin with. When terror groups don’t have to worry about survival, they’re free to refine tactics and plot mayhem. So the Taliban’s control of state resources in the 1990s led directly to the 9/11 attacks. The same happened under Islamic State in 2014. Control of vast swathes of Iraq and Syria gave the group the resources to undermine Middle Eastern regimes and plot terror abroad.

Even more than state-level resources, controlling territory is the ultimate recruiting sergeant for the jihadi cause. The Islamist dream is to actualize a religious governing vision. When that happens, radicals flock to the flag. ISIS’s initial victories were a PR coup, bringing thousands of Western radicals to fight under the group’s banner. It was only when American airstrikes shrank Islamic State’s territory to nothing that the romance of the cause dwindled, giving way to a squalid reality that cut off the stream of foreign recruits.

Biden may not have negotiated the deal with the Taliban that led to the pullout — President Trump did — but the disastrous implementation belongs to the current Oval Office occupant. That pullout has resurrected jihad’s recruiting sergeant. Because what matters is not what narrative the West tells itself, but the story that Islamic fundamentalists tell about the West. In the eyes of the jihadists, their RPG-carrying mujahideen have seen off not just the Russians in the ’80s, but now the far more formidable foe of America.

So yes, Biden was right that “one more year wouldn’t have made a difference if the Afghan government can’t hold its own country.” But according to many experts, this was no all-or-nothing choice. Americans were no longer doing the bulk of the fighting in Afghanistan, and for a relatively modest cost, the Taliban were denied a sovereign state.

America’s slow-burn failure in Afghanistan has deep roots in the failure of a corrupt foreign-backed government to win legitimacy against a relentless religious insurgency. That was the case under Presidents Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden. But in the final analysis, it was war-weariness, not strategic logic, that dictated the end to the “Forever War.” By surrendering to that siren-song, President Biden has seriously damaged his vaunted foreign policy credentials.

Because as the Taliban do an incredulous victory lap of their new global stage in Kabul, the president will be reminded that America may not be interested in jihad, but jihad remains very much interested in America.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 874)

The post Jihadis+Territory= Terror      first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.

Good political sound-bites are fated to end their mortal days in the cliché graveyard. But there are times when even a tired and worn attack line is still the most accurate description of what’s going on.

That’s the stage that the Israeli government has reached, less than two months after coming into being. To say that the so-called “healing government” headed by Bennett-Lapid is actually anything but is the stuff of a thousand right-wing tweets — but it’s true nonetheless.

The broad coalition was meant to set aside thorny ideological issues and focus on getting governing back on track after a two-year hiatus caused by endless elections. But its actual record so far reads like a left-liberal wish-list on religious reform, environmental protection, and anti-Netanyahu legislation, rather than a serious attempt to find common ground.

That’s a pity. Because for any Israeli government looking to adopt a nonpartisan manifesto that could win support from all Israelis, there’s one oven-ready, as Boris Johnson might say.

It involves an undertaking that only the most stout-hearted sabra could contemplate; a task before which generations of Israeli politicians, including many battle-hardened military men have quailed. The mission is no less than slaying the fearsome, hydra-headed monster known in Hebrew as birokratiyah (red tape, in English.)

To label the country’s tangle of local and national regulations, ordinances and edicts any other way is to underestimate the ravening ferocity of the beast.

Anyone who’s had to deal with Israeli bureaucracy knows that to get caught in its maw is no joke.

Government departments, local authorities, and hospitals often still demand communication by fax, despite the fact that fax machines are now displayed mostly in the country’s science museums.

Or try getting hold of someone to speak to. A recent call to the Transport Ministry’s emergency helpline promised a response within 24 hours. It eventually came, ten days later.

Then there is the ordeal of departments such as the Interior Ministry. A few weeks ago, I found myself, along with dozens of other English-speakers, outside a department branch applying for visas for relatives who wanted to visit from overseas.

The fact that you couldn’t simply book an appointment by phone or online — instead having to sign up at 7:30 a.m. in person — was one thing. Then it turned out that only if you came around 6 a.m. and quite literally davened vasikin outside could you get on the unofficial list, which was later transcribed (by hand) at 8 a.m. to the official list. At least, I thought to myself, asylum seekers from South Tel Aviv have left-wing NGOs to lobby for them; pity the average citizen who has no such recourse.

Bureaucratic ham-fistedness is part of a Tale of Two Israels. There’s the shiny, advanced, high-tech innovation Israel. And there’s the slothful, Middle Eastern, inept and Soviet-era Israel.

The political opportunity to take the lessons learned in the high-tech sector and whip the country’s bureaucracy into shape is there for the taking. Any government that tackles the Deep State of incompetent administration will have a lot of grateful voters.

But so far, the Bennett-Lapid government prefers to lob grenades in the Knesset, rather than brave the bureaucratic beast in its lair.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 872)

The post To Slay the Beast first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.

One of the most significant funding sources for yeshivos from the federal government, Title I — a government grant for special-needs children in districts where at least 50 percent of families are below the federal poverty line — has long been mired in red tape and a liberal suspicion of private schools. An effort by Agudath Israel a decade ago to free it up has now resulted in a doubling of slots.

New York was getting Title I for about ten years when Agudah decided to go nationwide and lobby for California’s yeshivos as well. They hit their first roadblock when the school board said that the official responsible for this was about to retire and they should wait until his replacement came in. They waited two months, and were then told that the replacement was on vacation.

“It took about two years, but we finally got Title I approved for yeshivos there,” said Agudah veteran Rabbi Leibish Becker. “They just put up one roadblock after the other. We then moved on to Florida. And this is a story you’re not going to believe.”

Eerily, the same exact course of events played out. Florida officials said they were ready to help — but the official responsible was about to retire, and the Agudah should wait for his replacement. They waited a couple of months, and were told that the replacement was on vacation, could they wait for his return?

Nine states now have Title I services, each one with its own set of “sturm und drang,” Rabbi Becker said. While he’s celebrating, he emphasizes that their fight is renewed each year, since the battle must be refought to include funds in local budgets.

“Title I was what made Agudath Israel a national organization,” Rabbi Becker said. “It’s always the first request we get for help.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 871)

The post Agudah’s Title Deed first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.

For those struggling to get into the Tishah B’Av mode this year, an intensely sad poll of American Jews released last week was well timed.

According to a survey by the Jewish Electorate Institute taken after the most recent round of Gaza fighting, 25% of respondents agreed that “Israel is an apartheid state” and 22% said that “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians.”

A more accurate re-enactment of what went on in the destruction of Jerusalem — with Romanized Jewish factions openly siding with the conquerors — is hard to imagine. But such is the advanced stage of American Jewry’s churban that among voters under 40, a full 20% agreed with the statement that “Israel doesn’t have a right to exist.”

The Tishah B’Av metaphor is not one that I use lightly. Precisely the wrong response is triumphalism. Yes, Orthodoxy is booming where others are fading. But there is not a shred of joy in witnessing the relentless assimilation of Galus America, the richest and most successful diaspora community since Golden Age Spain.

Rather, the comparison is a call for clear-eyed analysis of what will and won’t help. To a man holding a hammer, it’s said, everything looks like a nail. So it’s predictable that the responses so far from major Jewish groups have focused on improving performance in what these bodies already exist to do.

American Jewish Committee head David Harris was quoted by JTA as calling for better Israel education. “We need to guarantee that young people understand the realities of Israel’s situation, and to strengthen the connection between Israel and the diaspora,” he said. Others called for better hasbarah in making Israel’s case.

But although the shambles of Israel’s public communications were exposed by the latest fighting — needlessly hamstringing the country in the battle for world opinion — better PR won’t alter the view of too many American Jews.

The truth is that the shocking numbers are the fruits of advanced assimilation. As Jewishness becomes ever more deeply intertwined with the American liberal project, the idea of Jewish nationhood — a nation-state of the Jews — becomes ever less appealing. After two generations of 70% intermarriage in the US, it’s no wonder that Israel, with its conversion laws and determination to preserve a Jewish majority, is viewed by some as irredeemably racist. So better education is unlikely to penetrate the armor of those who think that Israel is an apartheid state.

All of this is a wake-up call to Israel’s current government, desperate to close the growing gap between non-Orthodox American Jews and Israel by promoting the Reform movement in Israel. But the moves simply won’t work. The problem isn’t Israel, which is standing still; it’s that too many American Jews are racing away from Jewish identity.

The tragedy here is that the true answer to the problem — meaningful Jewish education, connecting people to the idea of nationhood that came from Sinai — is not a large-scale solution.

Because the combined efforts of the whole kiruv world — as those involved are the first to say — can touch large numbers of individuals, but the vast majority of unaffiliated Jews are beyond reach.

So as Tishah B’Av gives way to Shabbos Nachamu, the shocking numbers of estranged American Jews should give us no rest. Because for this particular tragedy, so far there’s no comfort.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 870)

The post America’s Jewish Tragedy first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.