There’s a thought-game I sometimes play with current events which for lack of a more creative name I’ll simply call “Connect the Dots.”  It involves looking at events occurring in the same general timeframe and trying to find the linkages between them. The series of news stories relating to Israel this past fortnight provides a perfect sample to illustrate how it’s played.

Barack Obama just endured what should by any objective measure qualify as a “terrible horrible no good very bad” two weeks with respect to Israel and by extension American Jews. The president who has effectively disabled the option of military strikes to halt the Iranian nuclear bomb regularly talks about how we can achieve the same result through “crippling sanctions ” and similar tough talk. But two weeks ago precisely such crippling sanctions or at least something potentially close to them came up for a vote in the Senate: legislation making it illegal for any American company to patronize any foreign entity that does business with Iran’s central bank. Halting business in this manner would cut off the oil revenues that are Iran’s funding source for its nuclear program. Britain has already banned all transactions with Iran’s central bank and France is also leaning towards doing so.

But the Obama administration forcefully opposed the Senate measure. First it got the bill’s sponsors to include in it a waiver provision that allows the president to simply refuse to enforce it even once passed. Not content with effectively rendering the bill irrelevant Mr. Obama sent officials from both State and Treasury first to plead with the bill’s sponsors to withdraw it and then to the Senate to testify against the bill based on fears of its impact on the economy here and elsewhere.  Nevertheless on December 1 the Senate defied Mr. Obama and passed the bill into law by a 100-0 vote which in the current highly partisan atmosphere of Washington is astonishing.

But something seemingly even more astonishing had occurred just 24 hours earlier: At a private Jewish fundraiser where the thirty attendees each contributed between ten and thirty thousand dollars to his reelection campaign the president said this: “Obviously no ally is more important than the state of Israel.…This administration – I try not to pat myself too much on the back – but this administration has done more in terms of the security of the state of Israel than any previous administration.” The question here isn’t how the president can possibly believe what he says but how he can possibly believe that his Jewish audience would believe him given that his administration was attempting to derail sanctions on Iran at that very moment.

What gives? How indeed is it that President Obama seems insouciant even confident about American Jews’ allegiance to him at the very same time that he is refusing to do anything of consequence to stop the approaching Iranian bomb and despite top officials in his administration – Secretaries Clinton and Panetta ambassador to Belgium Howard Gutman -- having launched a multi-pronged verbal assault on Israel?

Here’s where we get to connect some dots. To my mind the explanation might lie in yet another current news story regarding the ad campaign launched by Israel’s Ministry of Immigrant Absorption and intended to awaken Israeli yordim to the fact their children will not have Israeli identities if they stay in the rapidly assimilating Diaspora. The $800000 campaign used billboards and ads in newspapers and on Internet to feature scenes like that of the young American-born child of Israeli parents who answers her grandparents’ question of “What holiday is coming up?” by mentioning the non-Jewish one at the end of December much to their chagrin. 

Well the reaction from the secular American Jewish establishment was to borrow the name of another current scandal fast and furious causing Prime Minister Netanyahu himself to step in and cancel the campaign.  The Jewish federations group called the ads “outrageous and insulting”; the ADL called them “demeaning”; and the writer Jeffrey Goldberg labeled them a “demonstration of Israeli contempt for American Jews.”

The common element in these responses? They are all couched in the language of emotion rather than attempting to reason and explain how the ads are factually mistaken if in fact they are. Israeli ambassador to the US Michael Oren recognized as much with his statement that the “campaign clearly did not take into account American Jewish sensibilities and we regret any offense it caused. The campaign…was a laudable one and it was not meant to cause insult.”

This episode reveals an open secret about secular American Jews: that this most sophisticated of groups approaches Jewish issues based mostly on raw emotion rather than on the logic for which it is justly renowned. Its members respond to rational challenges relating to Judaism and Israel not with counter-argument but with cries of perceived umbrage.

The reaction to these ads is the same genre one often gets in discussions of religion with non-Orthodox co-religionists: sound and fury and claims of delegitimization but precious little in the way of logical response. Indeed one writer drew the conclusion from these ads that many Israelis “believe assimilated American Jews are not Jews at all” an uncanny parallel to the oft-heard canard that Orthodox Jews who point out the intellectual bankruptcy of the heterodox movements also do not regard their non-Orthodox brethren as Jews. 

There is also of course a great irony in the fact that  as David Hazony observed   the very “American Jews who justify saying the most outrageous things about Israel on the grounds that ‘self-criticism’ among Jews is good cannot handle criticism of them coming from Israel — even if that criticism is implicit and made in Hebrew.”

Is it any wonder then that Barack Obama would believe that almost nothing he does or doesn’t do regarding Israel will significantly harm his standing with non-Orthodox American Jews? Astute politician that he is he surely understands that their decisions on whom to vote for in 2012 --like their decades-long fierce attachment to liberal Democratic politics -- owe much more to visceral emotions than to logic and facts. To reach them on the emotional level he may believe that all he needs to do is to mount another “charm offensive ” and he may be right.

Back in the spring of 2010 after Mr. Obama had a major falling-out with Israel the secular Jewish media was replete with reports of his first “charm offensive” to regain favor with American Jews. What was astounding was that the very term is a cynical reference to the idea that Jews could be charmed into supporting someone whose policies vis a vis Israel are objectively harmful. And yet these media outlets reported on this “charm offensive” with almost no trace of cynicism or critique as if it was an entirely reasonable notion. 

American Jewry doesn’t need more conferences or fact-finding missions; what it could use is some good group therapy. 

AN ILLUSORY COMPARISON  Reflecting in the Jerusalem Post on the 100000-person-strong kavod acharon given to Rav Nosson Tzvi Finkel ztz”l Daniel Gordis observes that although this was “considered the loss of a once-in-a-generation leader …[a]mazingly though outside that community almost no one noticed. Most Israelis could not name him and were unaware that he had died ” reflecting the reality that we’re “living increasingly in a world of parallel but non-intersecting Jewish universes each with its own ideals and heroes neighborhoods and values each too readily dismissive of the other.” 

He writes that “it’s worth comparing this moment in our history to another Jewish funeral also attended by some 100000 people…the funeral of the brilliant Yiddish writer Y.L. Peretz who died in Warsaw just shy of a century ago.…” at which according to published reports at the time “each of the splintering political religious social and cultural groups [in Warsaw] was officially represented.” I don’t know enough to confirm or deny that frum Jews were at Peretz’ s funeral but I doubt there very many at all other than those who perhaps needed to put in an official appearance for community relations purposes. Of this I am certain: the Gerrer batei medrash and Rav Nosson Shpiegelglass’s yeshiva didn’t empty out that day.

And however many frum Jews were indeed there their presence surely owed nothing to someone who as Harvard Yiddish professor Ruth Wisse has written “never ceased to criticize the Hasidim for their fundamentalist beliefs and their resistance to change.”  Not quite the model of someone who sought to bridge “parallel but non-intersecting Jewish universes.”

One last observation: After describing Peretz’s funeral Gordis exclaims “What a striking difference! How many secular Jews could be found at Rabbi Finkel’s funeral? How many observant Jews not in black? None of the former I would imagine. And very very few of the latter.” But I wonder: Why does he have to “imagine”? Could it be he wasn’t there either?