There are Israelis who believe that their Israeliness is asserted through secular reincarnations of Jewish tradition, along with new traditions created within the parameters of Israeli culture. They imbue religious rituals with secular-Zionist meanings, for example by turning Hanukka into a national holiday, Tu Bishvat into an agricultural celebration, and Passover into a day of family togetherness. Some Israelis express their identity through the highbrow culture of literature, music, painting, and dance, or, conversely, through popular songs, folklore, folk dancing, and local theater. They read the works of Haim Nahman Bialik, S.Y. Agnon, Yehuda Amichai, Haim Gouri, A.B. Yehoshua, Aharon Appelfeld, and Amos Oz; watch the plays of Nissim Aloni and Hanoch Levin; and listen to the songs of Naomi Shemer and the sketches of Hagashash Hahiver (“The Pale Tracker,” a legendary Israeli comedy troupe). Through these cultural markers, they consider themselves authentic Israelis, saturated in Israeli culture—a culture that, up until a few years ago, was intimately linked to the Bible. These elements of Israeli existence have become, in their view, a cultural passport, which many bring along with them when emigrating from Israel.

Some consider Israeli culture in America a kind of fulfillment of Ahad Ha’am’s vision, emphasizing the spiritual connection between the “center” and its orbiting moons. But while the parents back home preserve their Hebrew, their children try to forget it, and to integrate into their new linguistic and spiritual homeland as quickly as possible. Some remnants of Hebrew, a few folk songs, and a love of soccer are all that remain of the cultural roots of these emigrants—of the taxi drivers, the movers, the clothing-store owners on Manhattan’s 14th Street.

The expectation that the immigrant Israeli intelligentsia—the doctors, engineers, scientists, and artists—would choose a different path has also been proven false: Their spiritual life is quite detached from highbrow Jewish or Israeli culture as well. The majority of them prefer the works of James Joyce, William Faulkner, Franz Kafka, and even Jewish American authors such as Henry Roth, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth; they adore the music of Mozart, Beethoven, George Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein, and The Beatles. In the visual arts, they profess admiration for Picasso, Modigliani, Munch, and Kandinsky over Nahum Gutman and Reuven Rubin, Yaakov Agam, and Mordechai Ardon. And they certainly choose American cinema and television over that of their homeland, which, for the most part, is already heavily influenced by American trends. Thus, even when Israelis in the United States try to maintain a connection to secular Israeli culture, which they have brought with them into the diaspora, they are deceiving themselves. They get carried away by Western cultural plenitude, and as the years go by, the Jewish-Israeli aspect of their identity gets weaker and weaker. When Israelis dissociate themselves from their place of origin, they lose the vitality derived from national roots. Indeed, after a few years, they are stripped bare of their Israeliness.