Shortly after the war began, a European journalist wrote to Daniel Gordis. She wanted to interview the leaders of Israel's 2023 protest movement about the war, and she couldn't reach any of them. He wrote back that they were in cockpits and in tanks, and he says that wasn't a metaphor. That, he argues, is the difference between the two lefts. Israel's left "at the end of the day serves in the army," and almost none of it still talks about a two-state solution.
For most of the last century and a half, American Jews worked from a quiet bargain: the Jews are a faith, not a people, and America is the promised land. In a Hebrew essay this summer, Gordis says the bargain is over. He traces it from the rise of Reform Judaism, through Will Herberg's Protestant-Catholic-Jew and Woodrow Wilson's warnings about "hyphenated" Americans, to Jacob Blaustein telling David Ben-Gurion that America was American Jews' Zion. His conclusion: "We are a people, and America is not Zion."
Then the personal side. His son is called up for reserve duty, and his daughter-in-law and three grandchildren move into the Gordises' Jerusalem home. He describes families who leave the front door open so no one will knock, the October 7th night his son made him buy a lock for the safe room, and why he thinks these have been such lonely years for Israelis. He also says what distance can give American Jews that Israelis don't have.
Gordis is candid about his own book. We Stand Divided, published in 2019, held up for two-thirds of its length, he says, and the last third, about building bridges, was wrong. He says he never believed it. The core still stands: "No American Jew ever went to war because she or he was an American Jew… Israelis go to war because we're Jews." He rejects the easy line that classical Zionism was simply right. He also says Israel "invested exactly zero effort in trying to tell its story to the wider world," and he describes the question Israelis now ask each other at their own Shabbat tables.
On what an American Jew owes Israel, his first answer is understanding: "the depth of the brokenness here, the depth of the exhaustion, the depth of the fear." He suggests starting with Israeli novels and television. He draws a hard line at Jewish anti-Zionism and says why he will no longer debate Peter Beinart. And he closes with hope, borrowing a distinction from the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: you don't have to be optimistic, but "hopeful is a command."
Also in this episode: Rabbi David Ingber's Rosh Hashanah sermon and the image of the watchman asleep at his post; the Jewish professionals who paid for boats from Haifa to Cyprus; the matching tents at Columbia; Howard Zinn's America and Israel's own left-wing historians; why tikkun olam isn't what the Jews are for; why Gordis says to skip the King David Hotel pool; David Grossman's To the End of the Land and Fauda's fifth season; an afternoon with Rabbi Yitz Greenberg; and Kol Nidre on the playground where his neighbors once sat and wept over judicial reform.
DANIEL GORDIS Israel from the Inside (Substack): https://danielgordis.substack.com/ Daniel Gordis at Shalem College: https://shalem.ac.il/en/personnel/daniel-gordis/ We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2019): https://www.harpercollins.com/products/we-stand-divided-daniel-gordis
REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE Daniel Gordis, "The Jews Are a Nation, and America Is Not Zion," HaShiloach (in Hebrew), June 28, 2026: https://hashiloach.org.il/usa-judaisam/ "The Alarm We Must Not Ignore," Rabbi David Ingber's Rosh Hashanah sermon, shared on Israel from the Inside, Sept. 18, 2026: https://danielgordis.substack.com/p/the-alarm-we-must-not-ignore
MORE FROM THE HONEST TAKE Ben M. Freeman, "The Broken Mirror": https://podcast.honestreporting.com/episodes/the-broken-mirror-internalized-antisemitism-the-non-jewish-gaze-and-why-jews-are-the-only-ones-who-get-to-define-what-jewish-means-ben-m-freeman
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