Can Jews in Israel and Jews in America Agree to Disagree?

The first time I went to Israel was in 1967, and when I walked along the boardwalk in Tel Aviv, I thought I was in Miami Beach. The people on the boardwalk overlooking the Mediterranean were mostly Jewish, ditto the population on Collins Avenue which runs alongside the Atlantic Ocean in what was then South Miami Beach but is now the trendy vacation-spot known as South Beach.

The food was basically the same — pizza being the main sustenance, along with hot dogs always referred to as ‘kosher franks.’

The language was obviously different except that most Israelis could switch easily back and forth between Hebrew and English, the latter spoken with an interesting British inflection reflecting the colonial roots of the country prior to 1948.

Politically speaking, at least in the 1970’s, the Jewish communities in Israel and the United States were largely the same, which is to say overwhelmingly tied to the Democrat(ic) Party in America, overwhelmingly tied to the Labor Party in Israel, the latter in many respects being an off-shore farm team for the former, thanks to the 1948 decision by an American President, a Democrat, to recognize the Zionist state.

It should be pointed out, incidentally, that if someone had run a poll in Israel in the 1990’s to name the most popular U.S…