Typically, the education minister of Israel gets little attention outside of Israel. But the current occupant of that job, Rafi Peretz of the far-right United Right faction, set off a major international controversy on Wednesday. That’s when news broke that, during a briefing on American Jewry by a prominent American Jew, Peretz labeled intermarriage between American Jews and non-Jews as being “like a second Holocaust.”
Zack Beauchamp is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers ideology and challenges to democracy, both at home and abroad. His book on democracy, The Reactionary Spirit, was published 0n July 16. You can purchase it here.
To label this comment “offensive” is a severe understatement. Fifty-eight percent of American Jews have non-Jewish spouses, per a 2013 Pew survey. Telling the majority of American Jews that they are perpetrating genocide on their own people is about as inflammatory as it gets.
“It’s inconceivable to use the term ‘Holocaust’ to describe Jews choosing to marry non-Jews,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, wrote in a tweet. “It trivializes the Shoah. It alienates so many members of our community. This kind of baseless comparison does little other than inflame and offend.”
But Peretz’s comment, in addition to being profoundly insulting, is profoundly revealing. Barak Ravid, the Israeli reporter who broke the story in a piece for Axios, suggests that it highlights a “growing rift” between Israel’s Orthodox Jews and America’s “much more liberal” Jewish majority. But the rift is even bigger than that. Peretz’s comment and its reception indicate competing visions for what it means to be “Jewish,” which threaten to undermine the historically close ties between the world’s two largest Jewish communities.
The divides separating Israeli and American Jewry
On a political level, the divide between Israeli and American Jews is simple: Israeli Jews are, on the whole, more conservative than their American peers. Forty-nine percent of American Jews identify as liberal, per Pew data; only 8 percent of Israeli Jews say the same. Nearly twice as many Israeli Jews (37 percent) as American Jews (19 percent) described themselves as politically conservative in Pew’s survey.
This is the result of profoundly different historical experiences. American Jewish identity comes from “a sense of exclusion from American society,” Steven M. Cohen, a research professor at Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion, told me in 2015. Israel has a long and robust socialist political tradition but has tilted sharply rightward after the 1990s peace process collapsed into the violence of the second intifada and a 2005 military withdrawal from the Gaza Strip ended up with a takeover of the territory by the Islamist group Hamas.
In every presidential election in recent memory, a majority of American Jews have voted for the Democratic candidate. Israel’s center-left Labour Party has not won an election since 1999, while the far right has grown in strength over time. The result is that American Jews are growing slowly but steadily alienated from the Israeli political system: A growing number of liberal American Jews, especially young ones, see Israel through the lens of its right-wing politics and occupation of Palestinian land rather than through the lens of shared Jewishness.
Peretz, the head of a pro-settlement political party, is about as far from American Jews as mainstream Israeli politicians get. But his comments touch less on the political divides between the communities than the related but separate theological divides between them.
In the United States, there are, broadly speaking, three major denominations of Judaism. Reform Judaism, my own branch, does not require strict observance and gives individual Jews a tremendous amount of latitude in defining what it means to live a Jewish life. Orthodox Jews (and the even stricter ultra-Orthodox) are much more traditional, adhering to rules like keeping kosher and not working on Saturdays. The confusingly named Conservative branch is somewhere in the middle.
American Jews’ theological views tend to be as liberal as their political ones: 35 percent identify as Reform, 17 percent as Conservative, and 30 percent as “no denomination” (which typically means they’re even less traditionally observant than Reform Jews). Only 10 percent of American Jews are Orthodox.
In Israel, the situation is quite different — so different, in fact, that there are entirely different conceptual categories for describing Israeli Judaism.
More than a fifth of Israel’s Jewish population is some kind of Orthodox — 9 percent are Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) and another 13 percent are Dati (modern Orthodox). Another 29 percent are Masorti, a group with no neat international parallel but who are relatively observant by American standards. The plurality, 49 percent, are Hiloni — a secular group more like American Jews of no denomination than Reform Jews.
So in Israel, there are more than twice as many Orthodox Jews as there are in the US — and almost no Reform Jews. The Chief Rabbinate, the Israeli legal authority that controls areas like family law for Israeli Jews, is not merely Orthodox but outright hostile to the diaspora’s non-Orthodox denominations.
Israel’s legal system does not consider Jews who converted under Reform or Conservative rules as being legally Jewish; nor are individuals raised Jewish whose father is Jewish but mother is not (Judaism is passed down matrilineally). The result is that many American Jews would not be considered legally Jewish in Israel, and thus are excluded from core social rights. A Reform convert would not qualify under the Israeli laws that give all Jews a right to immigrate to Israel if they choose; an American with a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother could immigrate, but would not be permitted to be legally marry a Jew once there.
Israel’s Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox populations are growing as a percentage of the Israeli population, and the Chief Rabbinate shows no signs of moderation. In an official 2016 statement, the Chief Rabbinate blasted the Reform and Conservative movements as having “no connection to original Judaism,” blaming them for “the assimilation that has spread throughout the Jews of the world ... the uprooting of everything of holiness.”
Why Peretz’s comments matter so much
Peretz’s comments about intermarriage reflect this deeper, fundamental divide between two religious communities that share a Jewish identity but have radically different views of what that identity means.
The majority of American Jews, influenced by their experience as a victimized minority group, have a religio-political worldview that values openness and inclusion. Israel’s Orthodox religious establishment, by contrast, sits at the top of dominantly Jewish society — seeing its task as preserving Israel’s Jewish traditions against the lure of secularism.
When Peretz says intermarriage is producing something like a “second Holocaust,” he is not (as far as I can tell) merely being hyperbolic. Children of intermarriage are less likely to see themselves as Jewish, and those who do tend to be less religious — and thus, in Peretz’s eyes, not Jewish at all. By choosing to marry non-Jews, he thinks, American Jews are literally participating in the destruction of their own community.
Most American Jews — especially Reform Jews like me — cannot adequately express how insulting we find that. We see in our synagogues and communities a thriving Jewish life, one proud of the fact that it doesn’t adhere to the cruel and exclusive ideals of Jewishness that emanate from the Chief Rabbinate. Intermarriage can be fraught, to be sure, but a significant and growing percentage of children of intermarriage identify as Jewish. Diversity in Judaism is, in our view, to be celebrated rather than denigrated.
And when American Jews like me look at Israel, we identify far more with its secular Jews than the right-wing Orthodox Jews who control its religious institutions and have an increasingly dominant influence on its politics.
The longer this state of affairs continues, the more Israel doubles down on right-wing political and theological orthodoxy, the more likely its government is to cut itself off from those who have historically been its biggest supporters.
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