ISRAEL AT 40 A New Religion? Two thinkers disagree on Israel's meaning to American Jews DAVID HOLZEL Staff Writer I srael's existence has changed and challenged American Jews, but in ways no one dreamed of 40 years ago when the state was founded. Ask two American Jewish thinkers what impact Israel has made on Jews in this country and you will get — to borrow from the old joke — a minimum of two answers. Has Israel become the religion of American Jews? Has the Jewish state replaced God and Torah as the focal point of Jewish consciousness? Have the 613 mitzvot boiled down to a single prime directive — support Israel, preferably with cash? Arthur Hertzberg says yes; Jacob Neusner says no. The American-Jewish identity is wholly home grown, argues Neusner, a Conservative rabbi and professor of Judaic studies at Brown University. "There's nothing that we've done that isn't particular to America. We have figured out how to be Jewish in a free society. It's an enormous achievement and it's particular to our community." All without the influence of Israel. In fact, says Neusner, American Jews are not particularly interested in Israel — the real Israel. "Israel is the Jewish equivalent of Disneyland. We go there to buy fan- tasies, not to buy mundane realities. "We're not engaged with very much of their culture. We may read a few of their novelists, but that's about it." Many early Zionists had hoped that Israel would become the spiritual and cultural center of the Jewish world. Israel has failed on that score, Neusner argues. "They're not giving us scholarship. They're not writing the history of the Jews for us. They're not giving us Jewish philosophy. They're not giving us Jewish theology. They're not con- tributing to the development of our in- ner life in any important way." Neusner triggered an uproar last year by declaring in a Washington Post op-ed piece that there is no reason to feel guilty about not living in Israel. The fury he encountered obviously still rankles and he grows heated when he - discusses the affair. -"All I said was that it is great to be a Jew in America. If you think I'm wrong, go live in Israel. "I was criticized by people who, by their actions, agreed with every word I said. I said you can yell and scream at me and you're still living in Southfield. And you haven't got the slightest inten- tion of living in Israel." Israel became what Neusner calls the "centerpiece of people's imaginative lives" after the Six-Day War. Israel's lightning victory prompted a "mes- sianic realization" for many. The 1982 invasion of Lebanon removed much of the luster from Israel's image. After Lebanon, Israel was no longer the be-all and end-all of Jewish life, Neusner says. Meanwhile, "the interests of American Jews are becoming more varied." The Palestinian uprising of recent NEUSNER: Made in USA. American Jews and Israelis, Neusner says. But "American Jews are not ter- ribly engaged with Israeli life." Arthur Hertzberg concurs. The "Israel is the Jewish equivalent of Disneyland. We go there to buy fantasies." critical difference between Israelis and American Jews is language, Hertzberg asserts. "The American Jewish com- munity lives in English. Israel lives in Hebrew. And you do not understand Israel if you don't speak Hebrew." American Jewish identification with Israel. And while- the attitudes of U.S. Jews toward Israel have shifted, Neusner believes that the community's behavor will remain unchanged. "People will still give money and there will be plenty of political support. So on the whole, things will go on as before." There is mutual concern between According to Hertzberg, a professor of religion at Dartmouth College, Israel is so central to the "faith" of American Jews that a heretical position on the Jewish state is the only thing for which one can be threatened with excom- munication. "Henry Kissinger is a perfect exam- ple," he says. The former secretary of state married a non-Jew in a civil ceremony on a Shabbat morning. "For days has only deepened the ambivalent none of that did they say, 'Let's throw him out of the Jewish community.' "But when as secretary of state he began to be suspected of not being as totally devoted to the cause of Israel as the president of Hadassah — then he began to be attacked as traitorous. "You can't be excommunicated in the American Jewish community for religious deviations, but you can be ex- communicated if the majority opinion is that you are insufficiently devoted to Israel:' This, he says, is what is happening to New Jewish Agenda, which calls for Israel to negotiate with the Palestine Liberation Organization and is being ostracized in many Jewish com- munities. And it is what happened to Jacob Neusner. Hertzberg, who also is a Conser- vative rabbi, edited the seminal an- thology of Zionist thought, The Zionist Idea. He says American Jews were not always in love with the idea of Israel. "Forty years ago there were fights between the Zionists and the anti- Zionists who didn't want the State of Israel to be declared because, they feared, it would bring into question their status as Americans." It was the "old-line Reform crowd" who held this position. They were allied with the Bundists, "the internationalist (Jewish) left who were against any na- tional state — especially a Jewish one. "The Federation types in those days were not Zionists," Hertzberg adds. "They were dominated by a non-Zionist American Jewish Committee and the Joint Distribution Committee." What turned American Jewish opi- nion around to support for a Jewish state, he says, was the Holoclust, and one legacy of the Holocaust in par- ticular: the Jewish refugees. "The very people who were not ter- ribly happy about the creation of a Zionist state were not ready to do bat- tle to open the doors of America to the THE THIRD DECADE THIRD PRESIDENT: Zalman Shazar, 1963-1973. MAN IN THE GLASS BOOTH: Adolf Eichmann, a major Nazi leader, was kidnapped in South America by Israel and brought to trial in Jerusalem in 1961. He was found guilty of war crimes and executed. FRIDAY, APRIL 22, 1988 SIX-DAY WAR: After the Arab states, led by Egypt, formed a war pact, Israel struck out on June 5, 1967 and destroyed the armies that had massed along its borders, taking over new territory in Sinai, Gaza and Judea and Samaria (West Bank), and re-unifying Jerusalem.