Only religious Zionists, whose nationality is inextricably tied to their religion, have a firm ideological grip on the Land of Israel. They consider residence in Israel a commandment of the Torah. Their narrative does not depend on the misfortunes of the Jews throughout history, or on the dangers of assimilation today. Their story begins, rather, with the covenant of Abraham, and they believe that the Land of Israel was promised to the Jewish people by God himself. Unlike most Orthodox Jews, they do not consider redemption the exclusive domain of the messiah. They make aliya with the aim of redeeming and being redeemed through the land, without waiting for the savior to deliver them at the end of days.

National-religious Jews, however, do not constitute a majority of Orthodox Jewry. The silent majority of Orthodox or Haredi Jews prefer living in Brooklyn to Meah Shearim. They would rather live in Babylon or on the banks of the Hudson and wait for the messiah. This kind of Judaism does not need the Zionist narrative, which fundamentally disagrees with its view of history. It rejects auto-emancipation, Jewish self-rule, or any “state” that discards help from above. The verses from Bialik’s poem “The Dead of the Desert,” “Since God denies us, / his ark refused us, / we will ascend alone,” are a complete heresy in the eyes of those who consider Jewish destiny to be wholly dependent on the mercy of God.¹⁰ Thus did the Lubavitcher Rebbe and his followers advocate the idea of Greater Israel while residing in their Babylon, postponing their aliya until the coming of the messiah—or, for some, to that time when their messiah, the Rebbe himself, would be resurrected and lead them to their Promised Land.

For the American Jew who is not Orthodox, the situation is far more complex, because all that remains of his heritage are vestiges of a religious tradition. This kind of Jew needs an autonomous space in order to preserve his culture, and there are American Jews who attempt to provide him with one. The American writer and essayist Cynthia Ozick, for example, once declared that English was the new Yiddish of American Jews.¹¹ However, the English of this Dubnovian autonomy that American Jews are trying to create is becoming far more anglicized than Jewish. Their Yiddish cannot replace the need to preserve their heritage in secular form. The non-Orthodox movements (Conservative and Reform), which have changed the language of ritual from Hebrew to English, are attempting something similar: These movements are trying to save the remnants of Jewish religious ritual through English, interspersed here and there with a few Hebrew verses (more so in Conservative than in Reform Judaism). They also teach the majority of Jewish texts, from the Talmud to modern Hebrew literature, in English translation.

American Jewish community leaders believe, often correctly, that it is better to pray in English and study Jewish culture in English translation than to be bereft of Judaism and fall prey to utter assimilation. Yet while these leaders and rabbis believe they are the heirs of the legendary Babylonian yeshivas of Sura and Pombedita, and imagine that they have established a utopian Arcady for Jewish culture, what they have done is merely add another spice to the multicultural stew that is America. The culture of Jewish Americans, and with them the Israeli immigrants who seek to integrate into their new surroundings, is as far from the Zionist narrative as New York is from the Galilee. Indeed, in a way, Ozick’s remarks are the cultural battle cry of this new type of Judaism. “It seems to me we are ready to rethink ourselves in America now,” she wrote, “to preserve ourselves by a new culture-making.”¹²