Jewish American Families Confront a Generational Divide Over Israel
Gen Z and young Millennials often see Israel as an occupying power oppressing Palestinians — a shock to their parents and grandparents, who tend to see it as an essential haven fighting for survival.
Jewish American Families Confront a Generational Divide Over Israel
Gen Z and young Millennials often see Israel as an occupying power oppressing Palestinians — a shock to their parents and grandparents, who tend to see it as an essential haven fighting for survival.
Marc and Judith Kornblatt sit on a bench in Tel Aviv, surrounded by their son, Jake Kornblatt, his wife, Tamar Asnko, and their daughter Louisa Kornblatt. Credit...Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times
By Emma Goldberg and Marc Tracy
Emma Goldberg and Marc Tracy talked to more than two dozen Jewish Americans, including those within the same families, about their views on Israel.
Dec. 5, 2023 Updated 1:57 p.m. ET
Marc Kornblatt prepared uneasily last month for his daughter, Louisa, to arrive for 10 days with the family. Her homecomings once brought the comfort of movie nights and card games, but this year was different.
Mr. Kornblatt sang under his breath some lyrics from “West Side Story”: “Get cool, boy.” He and his wife discussed: How would they greet their child? Would they acknowledge the emotional distance, the slights that had piled up from afar?
He and his wife, Judith, had moved away from Madison, Wis., to live in Tel Aviv, where they felt a real sense of belonging as Jews. Around the same time, their daughter, attending graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, came to oppose the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.
The political divide between two generations within the family has grown into a painful chasm during the war between Israel and Hamas. Until late November, it was addressed mostly in tense exchanges on WhatsApp. “Really sad that you seem out of touch with where our heads are at,” Mr. Kornblatt had messaged his daughter after she told her parents about a friend speaking out in support of people in Gaza.
As she packed her bags to go to Tel Aviv, his daughter questioned how her parents could argue about a political solution that felt morally urgent to her: a permanent cease-fire.
“It feels so simple — just don’t murder people. Don’t kill people. Just stop it,” said Louisa Kornblatt, 31, who now lives in Brooklyn. “It feels so simple, and a lot of my mom’s responses are like, ‘It’s so complex.’”
Credit...Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times
“It feels so simple — just don’t murder people. Don’t kill people. Just stop it. It feels so simple and a lot of my mom's responses are like, ‘It’s so complex.’”
Louisa Kornblatt
The ideological rift between the Kornblatt parents and their daughter is a clash between an older generation of American Jews, who believe Israel has a right to defend itself and that its very survival is at stake, and a younger generation more likely to view Israel as a great military power and an occupying force.
That’s not the case in every family, of course. Many Jewish college students have been vocal and firm in defending Israel; plenty of Jewish Americans in the Boomer generation have criticized Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. Many American Jews are united in a fear of rising antisemitism, and last month, tens of thousands of them attended the March for Israel in Washington, D.C.Yet some Jewish families are grappling with internal divisions, in the heart of a holiday season that is forcing difficult conversations.
“This is an acute, painful moment for many Jewish American families,” said Jackson Schwartz, a Columbia University senior who has found himself pulled to the left even of his liberal parents on the subject of Israel.
For at least a half-century, American Jews — the substantial majority of whom tend to be liberal and vote Democratic — have largely supported the Jewish state across the spectrum of age, partisanship and religious denomination. Recent polling suggests that that is changing.
Even before the war, younger American Jews were generally less attached to Israel than their elders, according to a 2021 Pew Research survey. (Most of the people interviewed for this article did not identify as Orthodox, a small segment of the American Jewish population who tend to have a stronger attachment to Israel than others do.)
A survey that the Democratic pollster GBAO Strategies conducted in November, a few weeks after the start of the war, for the nonpartisan Jewish Electorate Institute, found a striking generation gap in American Jews’ attitudes toward President Biden’s strong support for Israel: Eighty-two percent of those 36 or older supported the president, but only 53 percent of those 18 to 35 felt that way.
Jim Gerstein, who conducted the survey, said that younger American Jews have little or no memory of an underdog Israel surrounded by enemy states or terrorized by suicide bombings. Instead, they grew up when Israel had developed into a thriving economic and regional military power, backed by the United States and largely insulated from its neighbors — a perspective that inclined them to judge Israel more harshly, especially under the conservative leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu.
“Jewish voters are very liberal, and younger Jews even more so, and hold a different perspective of Israel than older generations,” he said.
‘How do I bridge this?’
The parents of Mr. Schwartz, the Columbia student, said they listen to him with open minds when he tells them about documentaries he has seen or things he has learned from professors like Rashid Khalidi, a prominent Palestinian intellectual who is a professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia. Dan Schwartz said his son helped him understand the Palestinian perspective on Israel’s founding, which was accompanied by a huge displacement of population that Palestinians call the Nakba, using the Arabic word for catastrophe.“It wasn’t until Jackson went to Columbia and took classes that I ever heard the word Nakba,” Dan Schwartz said.
Still, he said he felt that his son’s education downplayed “the fact that Israel is and has been surrounded by terrorists who do want to destroy them.”
Jonathan Taubes, who grew up in a right-leaning modern Orthodox community in New Jersey, understands that his own perception of Israel is starkly different from that of his parents, who remember the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 and the Yom Kippur War of 1973. His mother is the daughter of Holocaust survivors. Recently, she went to visit Mr. Taubes in Brooklyn, and began discussing her fears of anti-Jewish hatred as soon as she walked into his apartment.
Mr. Taubes, 30, felt torn between wanting to comfort his mother and feeling uneasy with her exclusive focus on Jewish pain.
“I was sort of trying to hold both sides — a progressive left one, and a defensive Jewish one,” he explained. “It’s a feeling of discomfort, like, how do I manage this, how do I bridge this?”
“There’s this feeling of being alienated from the world, but then the added layer of strife and division within our own family,” Mr. Taubes added. “It’s an extra layer of pain.”
In interviews with more than a dozen young people, many of them described feeling estranged from the version of Jewish identity they were raised with, which was often anchored in pro-Israel education. Many young Jews said they believed in Israel’s right to exist and condemned the Hamas attacks, but they believed at least as passionately in Palestinian rights, and condemned Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, its settlements and its treatment of Palestinians broadly.
Mica Maltzman, a junior at Brown University, grew up ensconced in her Reform synagogue in Washington D.C., surrounded by Jews who were pro-Israel and politically liberal.
“My parents were supportive of Israel, but not the government,” she said. “In Hebrew School, it was, ‘This is the Jewish state that we need as a homeland.’”
Ms. Maltzman grew more critical of Israel throughout high school. Since Oct. 7, she has been active with a group called BrownU Jews for Ceasefire Now, which organized a sit-in at a university building in November. Ms. Maltzman said that during conversations with her parents, who declined to be interviewed, she had sensed them returning to their earlier brand of support for Israel after years of growing more critical.
“I’m so terrified and horrified by what Israel is doing,” she said. “Fighting with my parents, who will defend various aspects of Zionist ideology, it’s been a constant back and forth.”
Congress and white house should just declare itself a foreign agency at this point
No one wants a rotten omelette
